Question: How do you make sense of the unknown?
Steven Pinker: I think that using the word God or the attitude of faith toward that which you don’t know is a copout. It’s a way of slapping a label on something rather than trying to understand it. Or since we may not understand everything, just say there are some things we don’t understand. To invent stories that sound as if they were true or could be true, to pretend that they’re true just so that we can have a story I think is unsatisfying, and it could even be immoral because it could lead you to mistaken policies to getting in the way of your best understanding of how the world works, to doing things that lead to more harm than good. A concrete example would be treating a cancer with some cockamamie herbal or homeopathic formula instead of the best medicine that we have. Or justifying invasions, and murders, and sacrifices on the grounds of appeasing some god or carrying out some divine mandate. There’s nothing but mischief that can come from inventing stories for that which we don’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with saying there are some things we don’t understand. There are some questions that may not have answers because they are bad questions. A question like, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It may just be a stupid question. The question of why am I here, why was I put here, what is my greater purpose, might be like that. Given that I am here, I do think that I have an ethical imperative to be good to other people, to put my life to some purpose that I can define like understanding the world better, helping other people, taking the best advantage of the gifts that I find myself with; but some cosmic reason as to “why me” seems to me a kind of arrogance or egotism. Why should the cosmos care about me? That’s seems to be the height of grandiosity to think that it would. One of the things that I think science show us is that the idea that there’s some purpose to the universe is one that we should outgrow. There’s a purpose to each one of our lives, and we can articulate what that purpose is and why we have it; but why humans emerged on earth, why there is a planet earth, why the universe does what it does, we’ve got to outgrow these questions. It is very clear that there is no purpose in that sense. The fact that the sun will expand and consume the entire earth; that the universe might blow apart; that 99 percent of species go extinct and it would be sort of arrogant to say that homosapiens would be the only one that doesn’t; the fact that the earth is one out of presumably thousands, and millions, and billions of planets that could support life – that there’s nothing distinguished about our solar system. All of those realizations say that the idea that we were put here for some purpose is a kind of medieval ignorance and arrogance. That doesn’t mean that we humans, with the brains that we have, with our understanding of what we value and don’t, don’t have a purpose. And in many ways there is a kind of fulfillment of human purposes that has gone on through history owing to the cumulative efforts of humans to make something of their lot to achieve something worth while. We know more. It’s astonishing how much we do know. There’s lots we don’t know, but the fact that we know the genetic code of life; that we know how old the universe is; that we know how the earth was formed; that we know the basic constituents of chemistry, this is mind boggling stuff. People in the 17th century would have given up anything for a glimpse of what we know today. That’s something to be . . . to celebrate. The fact that we’ve gotten less violent over time. We no longer have human sacrifices. We’ve outlawed slavery in most of the world. We no longer have capital punishment for trivial crimes and misdemeanors. We don’t have routine torture, burning at the stake, disemboweling, crucifixion. The number of wars has gone down in the last 50 years. By many measures we’ve become a less violent species; not because there is some force in the universe pushing us in that direction, but I think because we recognize the futility and the undesirability of violence. And we tinker in various ways to reduce them. And in some degree slowly, incrementally we’ve succeeded. It’s hard to know what the obstacles are. There are certain features in human nature. People, I think, are left to their own devices, tribal. People left to their own devices are dogmatic. They’d rather their truth be imposed than challenged. They are, I think, by nature self-deceived. It’s painful to work your way out of those alter human traits, and it’s a constant battle. To live in a modern society is to be criticized; to be refuted; to be hemmed in by rules that you wish wouldn’t apply to you; to have to state your case; to constantly justify what you do. You take a historian of ideas that is wiser than he to diagnose how the west managed to do it in a way that could apply to other cultures. How modernization took place. Part of it might be technological. The spread originally of the printing press and affordable books. But we live in an age today where we have even better media like the Internet, and that isn’t the magic wand that brings the entire world into the enlightenment. How those attitudes change is, I think, an important and unsolved puzzle.
Recorded On: 6/13/07
Discuss
A.J. Smith on January 14, 2008, 9:08 PM
The only problem with the stance taken by Mr Pinker on the subject of faith is that it requires immense strength of character to maintain it; much easier said than done, even in this day and age. Unfortunately, as much as our pool of knowledge has grown over the centuries, I venture that the human character has not grown proportionally to it.
A.J. Smith on January 15, 2008, 2:08 AM
The only problem with the stance taken by Mr Pinker on the subject of faith is that it requires immense strength of character to maintain it; much easier said than done, even in this day and age. Unfortunately, as much as our pool of knowledge has grown over the centuries, I venture that the human character has not grown proportionally to it.
Rajarian Rekhana on January 16, 2008, 3:53 PM
Steven, on faith possibly doing more harm than good, you say: %u201Ca concrete example would be treating cancer with some cockamamie herbal or homeopathic medicine instead of the best medicine we have.%u201D Agreed, some herbal and homeopathic medicine is cockamamie; but so is some, if not most, of the %u201Cbest medicine%u201D you refer to (I assume you mean allopathy). In 1991, The British Medical Journal reported that only 15 percent of all allopathic therapies have a scientific basis or have been demonstrated to be effective. Perhaps that explains a subsequent study published in the April 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which reported that the side effects of routinely prescribed allopathic drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease, cancer and stroke. Using the word science to promote that which you don%u2019t know is not only cockamamie, it%u2019s unconscionable.
Rajarian Rekhana on January 16, 2008, 8:53 PM
Steven, on faith possibly doing more harm than good, you say: %u201Ca concrete example would be treating cancer with some cockamamie herbal or homeopathic medicine instead of the best medicine we have.%u201D Agreed, some herbal and homeopathic medicine is cockamamie; but so is some, if not most, of the %u201Cbest medicine%u201D you refer to (I assume you mean allopathy). In 1991, The British Medical Journal reported that only 15 percent of all allopathic therapies have a scientific basis or have been demonstrated to be effective. Perhaps that explains a subsequent study published in the April 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which reported that the side effects of routinely prescribed allopathic drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease, cancer and stroke. Using the word science to promote that which you don%u2019t know is not only cockamamie, it%u2019s unconscionable.
Rajarian Rekhana on January 17, 2008, 7:10 AM
I would extend the observation to psychology. Though the spirit of scientific inquiry may be as strong among psychologists as it is among researchers in the physical sciences, despite almost one and a half centuries of investigation there is still no consensus about the nature of the human mind nor is there any commonly agreed upon theory of human behavior. The textbooks of psychology are littered with unproven theories and unsubstantiated therapies. Despite the clatter of in-vogue opinions that have always comprised this most adolescent of sciences, psychologists are licensed to practice it on a credulous public. Let psychologists provide us with a unified knowledge foundation as a basis for their applications. Then only should they be licensed to practice.
Rajarian Rekhana on January 17, 2008, 12:10 PM
I would extend the observation to psychology. Though the spirit of scientific inquiry may be as strong among psychologists as it is among researchers in the physical sciences, despite almost one and a half centuries of investigation there is still no consensus about the nature of the human mind nor is there any commonly agreed upon theory of human behavior. The textbooks of psychology are littered with unproven theories and unsubstantiated therapies. Despite the clatter of in-vogue opinions that have always comprised this most adolescent of sciences, psychologists are licensed to practice it on a credulous public. Let psychologists provide us with a unified knowledge foundation as a basis for their applications. Then only should they be licensed to practice.
Robert Ryan on January 18, 2008, 10:55 AM
Psychology does indeed need a unified knowledge foundation, such as that being built by physicists from theories of the Unified Field. For the relevance of physics to psychology, one might examine the work of quantum physicist John Hagelin, who suggests a one-to-one correspondence between the Unified Field and the simplest form of human consciousness experienced during the practice of transcendental meditation. Once mind is understood by psychologists as deeply as physicists understand matter, psychology can come into its own. Until then, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Robert Ryan on January 18, 2008, 3:55 PM
Psychology does indeed need a unified knowledge foundation, such as that being built by physicists from theories of the Unified Field. For the relevance of physics to psychology, one might examine the work of quantum physicist John Hagelin, who suggests a one-to-one correspondence between the Unified Field and the simplest form of human consciousness experienced during the practice of transcendental meditation. Once mind is understood by psychologists as deeply as physicists understand matter, psychology can come into its own. Until then, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Marcia Hogan on January 21, 2008, 3:19 PM
Wasn't able to watch the vid all the way thru because it was taking forever, but just answering on the topics heading…I believe we will learn all that we never knew when alive, and find all the answers to all the questions we ever asked ourselves and those who were unable to answer us when we die. I just believe that that's a rather simple concept. Not saying its true as I've not died yet. I also don't believe as such in GOD or faith. Everyday that I wake up alive I am grateful therefore only then need to start living my life. I have no great plans cemented in concrete for my future but I do have ideas about things that I want to do and achieve. After all, none of us truly know when we are going to die, how it will happen and if we will even be aware. Just a thought.
I love you and thanks for the chocolate!
Marcia Hogan on January 21, 2008, 8:19 PM
Wasn’t able to watch the vid all the way thru because it was taking forever, but just answering on the topics heading…I believe we will learn all that we never knew when alive, and find all the answers to all the questions we ever asked ourselves and those who were unable to answer us when we die. I just believe that that’s a rather simple concept. Not saying its true as I’ve not died yet. I also don’t believe as such in GOD or faith. Everyday that I wake up alive I am grateful therefore only then need to start living my life. I have no great plans cemented in concrete for my future but I do have ideas about things that I want to do and achieve. After all, none of us truly know when we are going to die, how it will happen and if we will even be aware. Just a thought.
I love you and thanks for the chocolate!
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