Recently Stephen Pinker wrote a something of a
defense of scientism as well as a plea for the humanities to be more embracing of science. The piece has received quite a bit of attention, mostly critical.
Like many scientists, and especially evolutionary biologists, Pinker believes that the best thing that professors in the humanities and historians could do for themselves is embrace all aspects of science. Hard to argue with that, I suppose. Of course, as Pinker notes, there has been something of a strained relationship between science (or at least the hard sciences) and humanities. No doubt there are many aspects to the debate on the merits of embracing scientism.
For me, there is an important piece that's been missing from the debate. Scientists and most philosophers (and perhaps most scholars in the humanities) embrace the consensus on evolution. (Recently there was something of a dustup in the reaction to Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, where he argues that a purely materialistic explanation of evolution might not suffice to explain things like consciousness, morality, and cognition. Nagel was taken to the woodshed by Pinker and his allies. However
Nagel has recently responded somewhat.) So Pinker and others believe everything in our culture can pretty much be explained (more or less) by contemporary theories of evolution.
I'm not exactly a scholar in the humanities, (most of my training has been in engineering and economics) but here is a question I'd like to post to Professor Pinker. Arguably, one of the most important observations about human beings, if not the most important observation, is that over the centuries we have spent the vast majority of our free time (when we were not hunting or warring) reading, singing, and creating the arts. After all, what is it that we value most about our ancestor civilizations? Architecture, poetry, plays, novels, art, myths, and yes, religions. And while the mediums and technologies may have changed, today we enjoy similar activities. I would bet serious money that Pinker enjoys movies, television, or novels like the rest of us. And what does all this mean? Well....it means there are thousands of years of evidence that we (and our ancestors) seek activities where we experience something like a deeper meaning to comprehend our existence. Could it be, perhaps, that we are wired to seek out such meaning creating activities?
If so, how do purely materialistic explanations of evolution account for this? Why would selfish genes or other drivers on the molecular level lead us toward such efforts at transcendence? I realize, I'm not citing data taken out of a laboratory. On the other hand, I claim that thousands of years of ubiquitous human activity is far more important than the data usually bandied about by evolutionary psychologists.
In my view, it's a real puzzle. And it may be just a bit premature to toss aside Nagel's arguments as nonsense.
