Kass blows up Pinker

From Richard John Neuhaus in First Things-- on Leon Kass taking Steven Pinker to task...

In a Commentary essay a while back, Kass wrote about the limits of scientific explanations of human experience. Pinker wrote a blistering letter in response, to which Kass had this to say:

"While esteeming the findings of these exciting new fields in science, I argued that the knowledge they provide must always be incomplete, owing to ­science’s chosen conceptual limitations. No science of life can do justice to its subject if it does not even inquire into the nature, character, and meaning of our ‘aliveness,’ with its special inwardness, awareness, purposiveness, attachments, and activities of thought, while believing that it has ‘explained’ these richnesses of soul by reducing them to electrochemical events of the brain. Because of these limitations, and because, as I argued, the biblical account of our humanity can be affirmed even in the age of science, I suggested, against the zealots on both sides, that biblical religion has nothing to fear from science, and that, conversely, scientists still in touch with their humanity have nothing to fear from scriptural religion. . . . In the course of my critique of reductionism, I accused Steven Pinker of arrogance and shallowness. I am tempted to say that his letter provides further evidence for the charge, especially as it progresses quickly from science (about which he knows a lot) to philosophy (about which he knows a dangerous little) to the Bible and religion (about which he knows less than the village atheist).”

Pinker had written:

“The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen. Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God.”

To which Kass responds:

“One can hardly be blamed for thinking the man a simple materialist. Someone who boasts, even for rhetorical effect, that ‘the supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife’ simply does not see that thought and awareness, like all powers and activities of living things, are immaterial in their essence and therefore cannot be carved. This is not because they are the work of ‘ghosts in the machine’ or because materials are not involved, but because the empowering organization of materials (the vital form), the powers and activities it makes possible, and the ‘information’ it manifests and appreciates are not themselves material.”

Kass concludes with this:

“Leaving aside the simplemindedness of his moral views, I would remind Mr. Pinker that ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is a ­central teaching of biblical morality, promulgated centuries before his tepid and banal scientistic translation. It did not require the discovery of the human genome, because that ‘Iron Age tribal document’ already understood and proclaimed our common humanity, based on the recognition of our equal god-likeness. Moreover, the Bible, unlike Mr. Pinker, understood that such a teaching had to be commanded, because it went against the grain of native human selfishness. In this respect, as in so many others, the Bible understands human nature in ways much richer than a ­science that sees man only through his genetic homologies and brain events. And it teaches us more wisely than homilies drawn from DNA analysis, embellished by naïve and wishful thinking.”

Steven Pinker, drop that knife.