Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. After teaching at MIT for 21 years, he returned to Harvard in 2003, where he is Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Professor of Psychology. Pinker's experimental research on cognition and language won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institute of Great Britan, and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He has also received several honorary doctorates and numerous awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching, general achievement, and his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. Pinker has also appeared in many television documentaries and writes frequently in the popular press, including in The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic.
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Pinker notes in his book The Blank Slate that some biologists argue for a "sophisticated deism" (p. 187). As a religious person, I would agree that Christians need to move to acknowledge the reality that we live in a naturalistic world, which is guided by natural laws and is essentially material in its make-up. Acknowledging this does not threaten my Christianity. My vision of the soul is like that of the ancient Jewish sages--the soul is simply the outward manifestation of the body. My vision of salvation is simply the hope that the truly good parts of my physical experience will not be ultimately lost, but preserved somehow, perhaps in the "mind of God," to be "resurrected" (made physically real again) whenever he/she/it revisits them in eternity. The Bible has a good phrase for such a repository - "the bundle of the living." I fear God's wrath because I suspect that God will not be inclined to revisit very many if any parts of my life, because so much of my life and my decisions are implicated in evil, which I simply define as actions leading to the harming of others who are innocent. My greatest hope is that a few moments enjoying my children's presence might qualify. For me, that would be enough. Finally, I see Christ simply as the ongoing act of God's witnessing of the suffering of beings in a naturalistic world (i.e. a world in which God's presence is so ambiguous that evil can/does occur). I think it is good for such worlds to exist, so it is right for God to make such worlds. However, fulfilling such a moral responsibility would require of God that he/she/it must witness the resulting suffering, and be forced to make judgements about the actions of the imperfect beings in such worlds. In order to legitimately fulfill this role of judge, God would be required to experience the kind of suffering beings in such a world experience, in the way they experience it. That is to say, God's moral obligations to create naturalistic worlds and to be a good judge would require that he/she/it undergo the experience of finite knowledge and doubt about the ultimate meaning of all existence. I think it is possible that God somehow manages to do this through the life of Jesus, whose dying words are "God, God, why have you forsaken me." It is my hope that in this cry, God's moral obligation to understand what it is like to live as finite creatures do is fulfilled. So when Christ is said to state, "No one comes to the Father but by me" he is simply expressing the metaphysical and moral necessity for the Creator to witness suffering, and experience it as we do if a naturalistic world like ours is to be able to come into existence at all. Or in other words, if naturalistic worlds like this one are to be allowed to exist with the possibility of the good in them to be preserved, their existence ethically requires the suffering of a God (the preserver) and all the suffering of innocent creatures in such worlds. This is the terrible price that must be paid for my unique naturalistic existence, whether I believe in the God part or not. So whether, one believes in God or not, one must realize the immense responsibility we all have to minimize the suffering our unique existences cause others, including potentially, God.
At the risk of sounding authoritative by answering the very first comment on the site with a criticism, I will proceed nonetheless for I would prefer to read criticism on my comments rather than a blank space below them.
Jim, you said that "As a religious person, [you] would agree that Christians need to move to acknowledge the reality that we live in a naturalistic world, which is guided by natural laws and is essentially material in its make-up. Acknowledging this does not threaten [your] Christianity."
If one takes the word 'essential' to stand in some relation to the notion of 'most important' or 'actual' or 'core,' then it could be argued that the "world" is not "essentially material" any more than it is essentially spiritual. For what is in fact most important can only be that which the context of a value judgment suggests. I see no need to feel forced to make the ontological a priority, nor the physical the most important aspect of being.
You then said that your "vision of the soul is like that of the ancient Jewish sages--the soul is simply the outward manifestation of the body." This resonated with a certain interpretation that I give to the word "soul" which I will not go into here. But, to say that the soul is "simply an outward manifestation" suggests a causal direction beginning with the material, and that this expression (the soul) is somehow something of a side effect.
It is customary in philosophy to contrast realism with idealism and of course materialism with idealism. While there are many subsets to these 'isms,' the dichotomy need not necessarily be an 'either/or.' Instead, romanticism can offer some relief. That is, one gives up on only looking for the few and the tiny and turns toward the various.
If the hope is to 'discover' the nature of reality, or the 'actual' true fact of what the world is, romanticism can offer no solution but only another story. But if one is open to more than one story, then there will be no need to construct an 'ultimate' ranking of narratives.
Wow! Look mom, I'm blogging!
Seriously, Thank you Aaron for your response. My use of the word "essentially" was inadvertant. Perhaps I should have said "for practical purposes" or something of like that. I would agree that the ontological issue of reality's ultimate constitution is very much up for grabs. Obviously, as you seem to suggest, I really hold some kind of perhaps paradoxical idealist-materialist conception of reality. I take much solace as a Christian from some of the recent findings of quantum mechanics, which seem to reveal that simplistic forms of materialism may be inadequate for describing the nature of reality at its deepest levels. Perhaps, "Romanticism" is a more appropriate term for my outlook, but I know little about this movement and the various outlooks it covers.
I am quite happy to see the soul as a "side effect" of the body. Or more precisely, the two are so integral that to speak of one without the other is incoherent. This is what the ancient Hebrew sages meant, and it is what is also meant by the assertion of the Nicene creed "I believe in the resurrection of the body." I am not a Klingon who believes I can shout my disembodied soul in to Stovokore (nor am I a Gnostic). Our bodies are essential to who we are and to our salvation.
When discussing the material and the spiritual, to say the material is essential is to make it more special than the spiritual. You did say above something to the effect that they are both important. But then at the end you made the argument for materialism based on an alternative which finds its place in idealism; that is, thoughts bring objects into being.
I was trying to offer a way out of this. I think that Emerson's writings exemplify this as do Cornel West's (naming two Christians).
Hilary Putnam once talked about the absurdity of there being a 'single super-thing' for which science is in the business of uncovering. While he has been accused of contradicting some earlier realist assertions (pp.83 in Christopher Norris' book on him), this is a good example of a way out of the realist/idealist dichotomy. If there is no "super-thing" that the universe is, then there is no need to try and rank narratives in the way Plato thought he could judge things based on correspondence to ascending forms of perfection.
I did publish an article in the Caper Times which touches on religion and romanticism. It is available here:
http://magisterludi.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
Aaron, the link you mention in the previous seems to be broken. I would very much like to view your article. Can you repost it or e-mail it to me?
Yeah it was broken for me too, then I tried pasting it again and it worked. Another option is to just go to February 06, 2008 in the posting archive. Let me know what you think.
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