Science & Symbol

In the New York Times' really interesting Stone series on philosophy, Gary Gutting recently responded to Steven Pinker's lament that humanists don't pay enough attention to science.¹ Gutting claims, on the contrary, that “There is good reason . . . to think that the greater problem is scientists' failure to attend to what's going on in the humanities.” Gutting reveals that many philosophers and historians of the scientific disciplines actually have advanced degrees in the science of their study, whereas it's pretty unusual for a scientist to have done significant work in the history or philosophy of her discipline. As Gutting clarifies, “The problem of disciplinary narrowness became critical only with the advent of 'scientists'--a term invented on the 19^th century—whose work became so technical that it was hard to avoid the perils of overspecialization.”

Gutting quotes Pinker on one error that some humanists make that particularly bothers him: “Pinker also claims that science has shown that all traditional religious accounts of 'the origins of life, humans, and societies — are factually mistaken,' since 'we know. . . that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history.'” Gutting, of course, points out that humanists in general, including very many religious people, accept the theory of evolution. But I think that's not the most dangerous mistake Pinker is making here.  Science can be dangerous and certainly arrogant when it accepts without thought that “facts” tell us everything we need to know. What about symbols? What about story? Are they truly irrelevant? It seems to me that while science has been very helpful to the human body, symbol and story are much more nurturing to the human mind. “Facts” alone are not enough for human well being.

Pinker's certainty in rejecting religious stories and subordinating the humanities to the sciences reminds me of an episode in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion², which I have thought to be deeply revealing about the limitations of science ever since I read it years ago. This is the episode of the “Devil Bird”:

One of the cleverer and more mature of my undergraduate contemporaries, who was deeply

religious, went camping in the Scottish isles. In the middle of the night he and his girlfriend

were woken in their tent by the voice of the devil—Satan himself; there could be no possible

doubt: the voice was in every sense diabolical. My friend would never forget this horrifying

experience, and it was one of the factors that later drove him to be ordained. [Dawkins later

hears from some zoologists] . . . “Manx Shearwater!” they shouted in delighted chorus. One of

them added that the diabolical shrieks and cackles of this species have earned it . . . the local

nickname “Devil Bird.”

This passage amazes me. First of all, with friends like Dawkins, . . . right? But of much greater concern is why Dawkins implicitly and explicitly demeans a person he otherwise calls clever, mature, and a friend. A more imaginative, compassionate, and psychologically sophisticated person than Dawkins might very well have paused to consider why a clever, mature friend should have become a priest in part because he heard a scary noise outside in the dark. If Dawkins had any imaginative sympathy and any ability to question his own absolute beliefs, he might have learned more about what it is and can be to be human—in a positive, not a ridiculous sense, as Dawkins presents it here.

But in order to laugh (sneer?) at this “friend,” Dawkins proceeds from an absolutely unquestioning acceptance of the philosophy of materialism—that all that exists is physical matter. Does the man really have no internal world at all? Does he really reject that there can be any psychological or spiritual experiences that cannot be understood and dissected by science? I do not know Dawkin's friend and have not heard his side of this story, but if I were camping in the country in the dark and heard a diabolical voice, I might have been seriously freaked out also, though I certainly don't believe in any external devil.

I would think that most educated people by now understand the devil to be internal--that there is evil, and that it comes from the minds of human beings.³ So, if I heard “diabolical shrieks and cackles” in the dark, I'm pretty sure the sound would become for me an outer placeholder for the experience of potential evil inside, the potential for evil all of us humans carry inside of us. If I were Dawkin's friend I might well have had to confront during that night the awareness of evil inside myself and inside us all. Sounds are very closely associated with emotion, which is why music is a universal language. Just as in Bible stories (most of which are fully allegorical) where an external devil tempts Job or Jesus, we face internal temptations towards evil at times during our lives. To have an external image (visual or aural) to help us to remember and deal with those internal temptations is what literature gives us, what analyzing our dreams can give us, what good teaching of the humanities can give us, what religion has given us in the past.

Dawkins' assumption that there are no psychological or spiritual powers of any value outside the functioning of the physical brain, that all is material and thus literal, is dangerously naïve and demeaning. Metaphorical thought, in which we anchor psychological / spiritual understandings in physical images, gives us a much more sophisticated and honest and holistic view of the world than science alone ever can.

1http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/sciences-humanities-gap/?emc=eta1

2NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, pg 112.

3Tsvetan Todorov has suggested that fantasy has to some extent been undercut by psychology, since psychology has shown that the devil is internal, not stalking us in the external world. See The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975).