Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Daniel Dennett Undressed

Leon Wieseltier endears himself to millions by taking on the pompous Daniel Dennett in last Sunday's New York Times Review of Books and administering, in the course of a blistering review of Dennett's new book, a sound and condign spanking to the Tufts philosopher's nether parts. Throughout the review Wieseltier mocks Dennett's characteristic arrogance and self-congratulatory poses, observing, for example, that:

In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. "By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse," he declares, "and yet I persist." Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts!

Wieseltier goes on to add that:

[P]eople who share Dennett's view of the world he calls "brights." Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that "brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest"? Dennett's own "sacred values" are "democracy, justice, life, love and truth."

It's deeply ironic, as we've had occasion to remark before, that an atheist would take any pride at all in the values he adopts. Surely someone of Dennett's exalted philosophical reputation recognizes that any values in a godless world are purely arbitrary. His embrace of democracy, justice, etc. are simply matters of his own subjective preference and are completely free of any possible objective or intrinsic moral worth. Dennett's fondness for these is no more laudatory than would his fondness for ice-cream or pizza be. They're all merely matters of personal taste.

Even so, it is in his criticisms of the book's content (The book's title is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) where Wieseltier inflicts the deepest wounds:

Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

It is ironic that so many atheists who pride themselves on their rationality and trust in the deliverances of their reason fail to realize that if reason is simply a product of purposeless processes adapting us for survival there is no basis for trusting it to give us truth about those matters which cannot be somehow independently verified, like, for instance, the existence of God. Reason presumably evolved to equip us to survive in a stone age environment, not to find truth in a modern setting, and no argument that an atheist might offer on behalf of reason can possibly avoid begging the question by employing reason to try to demonstrate the trustworthiness of reason.

In a somewhat related matter, Bill Dembski somehow came into possession of this fascinating e-mail exchange which took place last Sunday between Dennett and atheistic philosopher Michael Ruse. The exchange offers a unique glimpse of the infighting beginning to swell within the Darwinian ranks over the challenge posed by ID. Scroll to the first e-mail from Ruse and work back. It's good fun.