Plantinga, Alvin, - Darwin, Mind and Meaning

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Darwin, Mind and Meaning
 Alvin Plantinga John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy University of Notre Dame
  According to the English philosopher John Lucas,
 philosophical naturalism
 is now the orthodoxy of the Western intellectual world. This is plausible; it is at any rate one of the current academic orthodoxies (another, perhaps, is the sort of creative anti-realism and relativism with respect to truth associated with certain brands of post modernism). Perhaps the easiest way to understand naturalism to see it as the view that there no such person as God (no all powerful, all knowing and wholly good person  who has created the world and has created human beings in his image), nor anything at all
like
 God. The naturalist--the contemporary naturalist, at any rate--typically adds a high view of science, seeing it as the only possible source of our salvation. Daniel Dennett's
 Darwin's Dangerous Idea
 is a big (very big), bright exploration and defense of naturalism--or at least of one aspect of it. In several areas it is authoritative; it is written with passion and power; I wouldn't be at all surprised if this book acquires the status of a minor (or maybe major) classic among statements of naturalism. Dennett tries to do at least three things: (1) explain Darwin's dangerous idea and show how the world looks if you take it really seriously, (2)
argue
 for this idea, or perhaps
defend 
 it, or perhaps argue that it is at any rate
 possibly
 true, or perhaps
 persuade
 us that it is true, or possibly true (it is hard to tell which), and (3) buck up and admonish timid, half-hearted naturalists who are unwilling to accept the full implications of their position, thus falling into false consciousness. Dennett doesn't confine himself to matters just of theoretical interest. He sees serious religion as steadily dwindling with the progress of science, but suggests that we should keep a few Baptists and other fundamentalists around in something like cultural zoos (no doubt with sizable moats to protect the rest of us right-thinking nonfundamentalists). We should preserve a few Baptists for the sake of posterity--but not, he says, at just any cost. "Save the Baptists", says he, "but not
by all means
 [Dennett's emphasis]. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world." Save the Baptists, all right, but only if they promise not to misinform their children by teaching them "that 'Man' is not a product of evolution by natural selection" and other blatantly objectionably views. But what if they
do
 insist on teaching these heresies to their children? (Baptists will be Baptists, after all.) Will we be obliged to remove Baptist children from their parents' noxious influence? Should we put  barbed wire around those zoos, and check to see if perhaps there is room for them in northern Siberia? [ 1 ] Dennett doesn't say, but it would be interesting to hear his answer. There is much to be said for Dennett's book. It contains a wealth of enthusiastic information about Darwinian thinking generally, as well as many detailed explanations of particular Darwinian theories. There is an excellent explanation and development of the central notion of Design Space--the space of all possible organic designs--and some of the notions (adaptive topology) in its neighborhood. There is also a wealth of detail on topics only tangentially connected with the main lines of the argument: an excursion into spandrels and medieval architecture, a fair number of etymologies, accounts of things Dennett has thought and said, anecdotes about famous figures in the evolution of evolutionary thought, and much more. The book is well written, if a bit windy. It is fun to read, although some may be put off  by its prolixity (no classical restraint and economy here), by frequent and sometimes inexplicable digressions, and by a certain pervasive tendentiousness, or perhaps a certain list towards demagoguery. [ 2 ] There is also something to be said
against 
 the book. In particular, although Dennett purveys his  wares with religious fervor (and in fact his wares
are
, from an Augustinian point of view, broadly religious), his forays into philosophical theology and philosophy of religion are at best underwhelming. To say that they do not inspire confidence would be colossal understatement.
The Idea Itself
First, then, what
is
 Darwin's Dangerous Idea and why is it dangerous? As we'd expect, it includes the notion that all of the world's creatures came into being by way of evolution--descent with
 
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modification. All contemporary creatures are linked by genealogical ties, so that any two living creatures  you pick--you and the summer squash in your garden, for example--are really cousins under the skin (rind). But it involves much more than that. Dennett begins the book by recalling the words of one of his favorite childhood camp fire songs, "Tell me Why": Tell me why the stars do shine, Tell me why the ivy twines, Tell my why the sky's so blue. Then I will tell you why I love you. He goes on to quote the last verse "Because God made the stars to shine , . . . Because God made you, that's why I love you." (He even goes so far as to provide the music in an appendix, helpfully adding that "The harmony line is usually sung by the higher voices an octave above the melody"). The image of the  young Dan Dennett singing "Tell Me Why", moistened eyes rapturously closed, is no doubt sweet and touching, but what is his point?  As follows. Darwin's dangerous idea, says Dennett, is really the idea that the living world with all of its beauty and wonder, all of its marvelous and ingenious design, was not created by God or anything at all like God, but produced by blind, unconscious, mechanical, algorithmic processes such as natural selection--a process, he says, which creates "design out of chaos without the aid of Mind." The idea is that mind, intelligence, foresight, planning, design are all latecomers in the universe, themselves created  by the mindless process of natural selection. The idea is that human beings are the outcome of a mindless process; they are not designed or planned for by God or anyone else. And this idea is dangerous, he thinks, because if we accept it, we are forced to reconsider all our childhood and childish ideas about God, morality, value, the meaning of life, and the like. Christians, of course, believe that God has always existed; so mind has always existed, and was involved in the production and planning of  whatever there is. In fact many have thought it
impossible
 that mind should be produced just from unthinking matter; as John Locke puts it, ". . . it is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter." [ 3 ] Darwin's dangerous idea is that this notion is not merely not impossible; it is the sober truth of the matter.  What we have so far is really just an endorsement of perennial naturalism or atheism; Democritus and Lucretius would have agreed. What is new or special about Dennett's version? First, Dennett sees that Darwin's evolutionary ideas (in particular natural selection) give the naturalist a genuine suggestion as to how it could be that all the wonders of the living world should arise without divine creative activity or guidance and orchestration. Prior to the advent and development of Darwinism, the naturalist (Hume, e.g.,) had no answer to the question "Well then, how
did 
 all this enormous variety of flora and fauna, with all its apparent design, get here? Where did all that design and variety come from?" But after Darwin there was an answer to the question--not a satisfactory answer, perhaps, but at least a viable story. According to Richard Dawkins, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." [ 4 ] I doubt that it is possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, but Darwinism does confer upon the naturalist a possible answer to an otherwise embarrassing question. As Dennett puts it, "Here, then, is Darwin's dangerous idea: the algorithmic level [the level of natural selection]
is
 the level that  best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature." He might have added as well: our moral sense, our religious sensibilities, our artistic strivings, and our ability to do science. Much of the  book is an effort to show just how well this algorithmic level of explanation does in fact work, and what a fine answer to the above question Darwin has put into the naturalist's hands.  Well, how does Dennett try to show that this is indeed a fine answer? First he insists that all of life
really has
 been produced by evolution. Indeed, he adds that if you so much as doubt this, you are inexcusably ignorant: "To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant--inexcusably ignorant . . . ." Note that you don't have to
reject 
 evolution in order to qualify as inexcusably ignorant: all you have to do is harbor a doubt or two. You study the evidence with great care, but are finally doubtful that God did it that way: according to Dennett, you are then inexcusably ignorant. Here Dennett is stealing a march on Richard Dawkins, who wrote in a
 New York Times
 book review that, "It is absolutely safe to say that if  you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or  wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)". I say Dennett goes Dawkins one better here, because at least
 
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Dawkins gives us skeptics a
choice
. We could be ignorant,
or
 stupid,
or
 insane or maybe even wicked. But Dennett is made of sterner stuff: he gives us no options at all, and in fact plumps for
two
 of Dawkins' possibilities: we evolutionary skeptics are
both
 ignorant
and 
 wicked (inexcusable). Apparently evolution is like the law: ignorance of it is no excuse. Here Dennett and Dawkins remind one of a certain kind of religious personality with which we are all too familiar: if you disagree with them, you are not only  wrong, but wicked, and should be punished, if not in this world then certainly in the next. Of course Dennett's claim is not just that all the marvels of contemporary life have been produced  by descent with modification, but that this has happened without the aid of God or anyone (or anything) at all like God; it all happened just by the grace of mindless natural selection. Life itself originated just  by way of the regularities of physics and chemistry (through a sort of extension of natural selection); and natural selection has produced language and mind, including our artistic, moral, religious and intellectual proclivities. Many have found this claim at least extremely doubtful; is it really so much as possible that language, say, or consciousness should have been produced by processes of this sort? One of the most striking characteristics of thought is intentionality,
aboutness
. We can think about things of all sorts, some very far removed from us. We can think about ancient Sparta, the Big Bang, the angel Gabriel, logical theorems, moral principles, possible states of affairs, God himself and much else: could this ability really have come about (starting from bacteria, say) just by way of mindless natural selection? Dennett doesn't really show, of course, that this
did 
 happen, or even that it is possible that he did. His basic ploy is just to assert (loudly and slowly, as it were) that these things
must have
 happened, providing an accompanying blizzard of scientific hypotheses and speculations (e.g., about what happens in various parts of the brain when you remember, speak, perceive, etc.). This rich brew of contemporary evolutionary thought and hypothesis on these topic is very interesting, and Dennett has a first rate grasp of the vast relevant literature. But (for example) none of his suggestions (drawn from cognitive science and elsewhere) really addresses the question whether it is even
 possible
 that mind and intention should have arisen in this way; they just
assume
 that it is. [ 5 ] These parts of the book contain a good deal of unbridled speculation as well as much very energetic hand waving.  A second project of the book, as I said, is to buck up flagging naturalists. Dennett distinguishes  what he calls
cranes
 from
skyhooks
: Let us understand that a
skyhook
 is a "mind-first" force or power or process, an exception to the principle that all design, and apparent design, is ultimately the result of mindless, motiveless mechanicity. A
crane
, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection,
and 
 that can be demonstrated to be itself the predictable (or retrospectively explicable) product of the  basic process.  An example of a crane would be
sexual reproduction
, by virtue of which, says Dennett, organisms "can move through Design Space at a much greater speed than that achieved by organisms that reproduce asexually." On the other hand, God's specially creating life, or mind, or human beings, or sparrows, or  whatever would be a skyhook, as would be any unspecified or unknown process (
elan vital 
, e.g.) that takes up the slack left by alleged deficiencies in Darwinian evolution. Now Dennett thinks there are many who have quite properly given up childhood religion and reject the idea that there is such a person as God, who endorse the idea that all living things including ourselves have somehow arisen by way of evolution, who pay at least lip service to Darwin's dangerous idea, but who nonetheless don't or can't embrace its full implications. They find themselves doubting that Darwinian evolution can really explain or account for such things as the development of the human  brain, for example, or language, or consciousness. They don't necessarily doubt that we have somehow evolved, but they doubt or deny that Darwinian mechanisms are sufficient; there must have been something else. Such people, Dennett thinks, should be ashamed of themselves. They are soft on religion, or at least lust after skyhooks; and in so doing they display a sort of failure of nerve, a false consciousness. Lusting after skyhooks is a bad thing, and much of the book is devoted to disapproving discussion of those who (he thinks) do--Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose, John Searle, and especially Stephen Gould. [ 6 ] (Of course the ambivalence of these thinkers may be due to something other than  bad faith or faint-heartedness; perhaps they are inclined to accept Darwin's dangerous idea, but also see some of its implications as giving serious occasion for pause, rather than as new discoveries to be enthusiastically embraced.)
 
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 Why Believe it?
One question that naturally occurs to a reader of the book: why does Dennett think we should
accept 
 Darwin's dangerous idea? Concede that it is audacious, revolutionary, anti-medieval, quintessentially contemporary, with it, and has that nobly stoical hair shirt quality Bertrand Russell said he liked in his beliefs: still, why should we believe it? I
think
 Dennett means to attempt an answer to this question (and isn't merely preaching to the naturalistic choir). He repeats several times that believing in an "anthropomorphic" God is childish, or irrational, or anyway nowadays out of the question. What he sees as an anthropomorphic God, furthermore, is precisely what traditional Christians believe in--a God  whom we human beings resemble by virtue of being
 persons
, the sorts of beings who are capable of  belief and knowledge, who have aims and ends, and who act on their beliefs in such a way as to try to accomplish those aims.  Well, why is this childish? Dennett's answer, as far as I can make it out, is that the traditional arguments for the existence of God don't work. He mentions only
one
 argument, the so-called argument from design: the universe and many of its parts give the appearance of having been designed by an extraordinarily knowledgeable and powerful designer, so probably there is an Intelligent Designer. Dennett thinks Darwinian considerations suffice to dispose of this argument; they show how it could be that all this apparent design in the living world arises without the aid of an intelligent Designer. Nowadays, however, the most popular version of the argument from design involves the exquisite fine tuning of the laws or regularities of nature. The fundamental constants of physics--the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces--must apparently have values that fall within an extremely narrow range for life to be so much as possible. If these values had been even minutely different (if, for example, the gravitational constant had been different in even the most minuscule degree) habitable planets would not have developed and life (at least life at all like ours)  would not have been possible. This suggests or makes plausible the thought that the world was designed or created by a Designer who intended the existence of living creatures and eventually rational, intelligent, morally significant creatures. Like its 17th and 18th century predecessors, this version of the argument is probabilistic rather than deductive: given the nature of the world, it is likely that it was fashioned by an intelligent Designer. The premises don't
entail 
 the conclusion, but are supposed to give  you some reason to accept it. Dennett's rejoinder to the argument is that
 possibly
, "there has been an evolution of worlds (in the sense of whole universes) and the world we find ourselves in is simply one among countless others that have existed throughout all eternity." And given infinitely many universes, Dennett thinks, all the possible distributions of values over the cosmological constants would have been tried out; [ 7 ] as it happens, we find ourselves in one of those universes where the constants are such as to allow for the development of intelligent life (where else?).  Well, perhaps all this is logically possible (and then again perhaps not). As a response to a probabilistic argument, however, it's pretty anemic. How would this kind of reply play in Tombstone, or Dodge City? "Waal, shore, Tex, I
know
 it's a leetle mite suspicious that every time I deal I git four aces and a wild card, but have you considered the following? Possibly there is an infinite succession of universes, so that for any possible distribution of possible poker hands, there is a universe in which that possibility is realized; we just happen to find ourselves in one where someone like me always deals himself only aces and wild cards without ever cheating. So put up that shootin' arn and set down 'n shet  yore yap, ya dumb galoot." Dennett's reply shows at most ('at most', because that story about infinitely many universes is doubtfully coherent) what was never in question: that the premises of this argument from apparent design do not entail its conclusion. But of course that was conceded from the beginning: it is presented as a
 probabilistic
 argument, not one that is deductive valid. Furthermore, since an argument can be good even if it is not deductively valid, you can't refute it just by pointing out that it isn't deductively valid. You might as well reject the argument for evolution by pointing out that the evidence for evolution doesn't
entail 
 that it ever took place, but only makes that fact likely. You might as  well reject the evidence for the earth's being round by pointing out that there are possible worlds in  which we have all the evidence we
do
 have for the earth's being round, but in fact the earth is flat.  Whatever the worth of this argument from design, Dennett really fails to address it. But there is a more important question here that Dennett completely ignores. As I say, he seems to think one could be a sensible believer in God only on the basis of some
argument 
, something like one of
 
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