More silly scientism
Here are the opening five paragraphs of Robert P. Baird’s review of Ross Douthat’s book Believe for The New York Review of Books (emphases mine):
There’s a view of the human situation that goes something like this: 14 billion years ago, give or take, the universe exploded into being. The Big Bang didn’t create everything, but it did provide everything necessary to create everything else: a collection of immutable physical laws, a hot soup of subatomic particles, an unthinkably vast quantity of energy. After 10 billion or so years of expansion and cooling, the universe contained some trillion trillion stars, and at least as many planets. Around that time, on one of those planets orbiting one of those stars, a random series of chemical reactions produced self-replicating molecules. Chemistry made way for biology as four billion years of further chance developments generated a bewildering diversity of living organisms. Eventually one of those organisms, a bipedal primate with small teeth and a prominent chin, developed the capacity for complex language and abstract thought. This species called itself Homo sapiens, the wise man, but this was only puffery, the illusory boast of an apex predator at the extremely temporary peak of its powers.
Allowing for some rather drastic approximations, the understanding of humanity that I’ve just sketched is the mainstream scientific view. It is not a complete view, in that it cannot tell us why or whence the universe leapt into being. It is, nonetheless, persuasive. Part of what makes it persuasive is that it does so much with so little. It doesn’t need gods or djinni or demonic demiurges to explain why the sun shines, or ice floats, or death comes for everyone. All it requires are some basic principles of biology, chemistry, and physics. Mostly what it needs is math.
The scientific view is not necessarily hostile to morality. Nothing about it prevents you from living as though your decisions mattered and your life had meaning. Ours is not a universe, even in the most flagrantly materialist interpretation, in which you cannot believe in justice, or mercy, or patriotism, or friendship. You are welcome to insist that might shouldn’t make right, or to abhor tyranny and climate change. Nothing in the naturalistic view says you can’t assert, as loudly and as often as you choose, that every person has an inalienable basic dignity.
Yet it is also true that this view of things makes it ridiculous—literally laughable—to speak seriously about human significance. It is ridiculous because, in the universe described by science, there is no such thing as human significance. Not just to a first approximation but to a five hundredth, nothing that any one of us does, not even everything all of us have done since the dawn of the species, matters in the slightest. This is not only a question of scale. The same epistemological parsimony that makes science so persuasive also rules out, in principle, any kind of metaphysics that might give our lives durable meaning.
We might feel as though the experience of love offers access to something eternal. We might insist that a genocide must not count for nothing. We might claim that our faith in democracy, or the class struggle, or the human project writ large needs no transcendental grounding. But science keeps the score. It tells us that all of our philosophy, all of our politics, all of our religion, all of our art is no different—except, perhaps, in its tragicomic pretensions—from the flashes of instinct that attract butterflies to horse manure. To the extent that we want to talk about a purpose for our lives, the most that science will allow is that we exist to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics, which is to say, to hasten the heat death of the universe.
To even the most casual reader, it is obvious that the assertion—it isn’t an argument—found in these paragraphs is a petitio principii: one long exercise in begging the question. For that reason, every conclusion the author draws from his premises is a non sequitur. Not only do his confident pronouncements not follow from his claims; they are not even logically connected to them. He simply presumes what he aims to prove and then walks the compass of the circle until he arrives where he began.
It is true that, if science is the measure of significance, then humans are not significant. But there is no reason to accept that premise, and it is not defended here, and it is certainly not analytic in the concept of science. Science does not “allow” anything, nor does it “keep the score” of meaning. The “view of the human situation” outlined in the opening paragraph is perfectly compatible, for instance, with a classical Christian metaphysics of God and creation. To suppose otherwise is, as David Bentley Hart once remarked of Adam Gopnik, to “enjoy[] an understanding of philosophical tradition that is something less than luxuriant.” It may or may not be true that the world as contemporary science describes it points to or demonstrates the truth of this metaphysics. But to suggest that it “rules out, in principle, any kind of metaphysics that might give our lives durable meaning” is absurd.
What is significance, anyway? Is it literal size? Is it scale? So that the nature of significance is … sheer bigness? On this view, I suppose, a piece of wood measuring two-by-four must be more significant than a piece of wood measuring one-by-two. Or perhaps the measure is age, so that a six-year-old dog is twice as significant as a three-year-old dog. (And perhaps if the first dog is larger than the second, then it is four times as significant.)
Are we done with this nonsense yet? This style of scientism was dispensed with long ago. Why does it return with such brio? The silliness is self-evident, yet august publications lay it out with solemn munificence. Are we to be grateful for the enlightenment? Or is the sermon solely for the choir? Surely we have better things to argue about, or rather, better arguments to be hashing out out—including between believers and nonbelievers.
But to return to Baird: How long would an individual human or the species as a whole have to endure, how expansive would its footprint on the universe have to be, for his measures to count humanity as at least a little significant? Is Bairdian significance counted in numbers at all? One to ten? Or is it by color, green and red, white or black? Or maybe a plain binary, thumbs up or down. (Siskel and Ebert review the human race! Turns out this ticket’s not worth punching, sorry to say.)
Contrary to this whole futile exercise, why shouldn’t it be the case, precisely on scientific premises or on any other, that an absolutely unique eventuality—I mean life on earth, a rational animal, all our philosophy and politics and religion and art—alone in all of cosmic time, across the entire universe, from the Big Bang till the heat death of the universe is, as such, the very definition of significance? So that nothing else is significant, if this is not? So that whatever else might be significant is necessarily measured by this, that is to say, by us, homo sapiens, the human species?
Besides that point—which to me is entirely obvious, but part of the point is that it is arguable, whereas Baird presumes it is settled by something called “science”—consider this: Christians confess that a member of the human species, a Jewish stonemason from Galilee who was executed outside Jerusalem by order of a Roman prefect when Tiberius was Caesar, is one and the same as the God and Creator of the world. The word we give to this (likewise unique) phenomenon is incarnation.
Now “science” has and can have nothing to say about the incarnation. It is not a scientific claim at all. One does not test the DNA of Jesus for divine paternity. The claim is theological, which is to say it is metaphysical. About the incarnation “science” stops its mouth. The scientists have nothing to say either way. Their measurements measure nothing here. The claim may not be true, but “science,” for all its epistemic parsimony, cannot and will not be the means by which we discover its truth or falsehood.
The upshot, moreover, is that if it is true, if it were true, it would, all by itself, apart from anything else that might happen or have happened in earthly or cosmic history, establish once and for all the decisive, undeniable, and unsurpassable significance of the human race. On any reasonable ledger, it’s fair to say, God becoming flesh counts as pretty damn significant.
