Friday, March 03, 2006
God Thinks You're All a Bunch of . . .
The letter, by Harry Dale Huffman, has this to say about the review:
. . . Wieseltier writes, "Dennett’s natural history... portrays reason ... 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."
I submit a plainer statement is needed. As I wrote in my book, The End of the Mystery (2004), "If there is no overriding intelligence, but only mindless physical processes, one cannot even defend one’s ability to think, much less argue with others who have more sense...(for) if one’s most logical thoughts are but the product of meaningless processes, then logic itself is meaningless; literally everything one can say, or think, immediately falls apart, baseless. The primary fact of our existence is that things don’t fall apart, they cohere, and that coherence, or meaning, is both ‘God’ and ‘logic’.... I think this is the natural philosophy of mankind, going beyond Descartes: ‘I think, therefore God exists.’"
It is perhaps unfair to link Mr. Huffman to Mr. Wieseltier but, frankly, on this point, I think Mr. Huffman has fairly characterized the position Mr. Wieseltier expounds. It was the sore thumb of a review that otherwise I had some sympathy for.
Wieseltier’s position is essentialism run riot. If something is not universal and independent of human beings it is not somehow "real" or "trustworthy." In fact, we have confidence in human reason for exactly the same reason we have confidence in science: it works.
Unless Mr. Wieseltier can disprove the content of human reason, pointing at its origins is just as futile as what he claims Daniel Dennett is doing.
