The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne

People have asked me to comment on the recent spat between Jerry Coyne and Ross Douthat.  As longtime readers of this blog know from bitter experience, there’s little point in engaging with Coyne on matters of philosophy and theology.  He is neither remotely well-informed, nor fair-minded, nor able to make basic distinctions or otherwise to reason with precision.  Nor, when such foibles are pointed out to him, does he show much interest in improving.  (Though on at least one occasion he did promise to try actually to learn something about a subject concerning which he had been bloviating.  But we’re still waiting for that well-informed epic takedown of Aquinas we thought we were going to get from him more than two years ago.)

 
Naturally, his incompetence is coupled with a preposterous degree of compensatory self-confidence.  As I once pointed out about Dawkins, Coyne may by now have put himself in a position that makes it psychologically impossible for him even to perceive serious criticism.  The problem is that his errors are neither minor, nor occasional, nor committed in the shadows, nor expressed meekly.  He commits a howler every time he opens his mouth, and he opens it very frequently, very publicly, and very loudly.  His blunders are of a piece, so that to confess one would be to confess half a decade’s worth -- to acknowledge what everyone outside his combox already knows, viz. that he is exactly the kind of bigot he claims to despise.  That is a level of humiliation few human beings can bear.  Hence the defense mechanism of training oneself to see only ignorance and irrationality even in the most learned and sober of one’s opponents; indeed, to see it even before one sees those opponents.  And so we have the spectacle of Coyne’s article last week on David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God, wherein he launches a 2800 word attack on a book he admits he has not read.  The sequel of self-delusion, it seems, is self-parody.

Still, it is worthwhile responding now and again to people like Coyne, so that bystanders who wouldn’t otherwise know any better can see just how pathetic are the “arguments” of New Atheists.  Consider Coyne’s recent response to Douthat.  As is typical of the New Atheist genre, we are confronted with a blizzard of sweeping and tendentious assertions, straw men, begged questions, missed points, well-poisoning, and other evidence that the writer has read a book about logical fallacies and mistaken it for a “How-To” guide.  It would take a short book to unpack all of Coyne’s errors here.  Indeed, even to see everything that is wrong just with Coyne’s remarks about the self and its purposes would take a mini lecture on the philosophy of mind.  So let’s do something of which Coyne is incapable.  Let’s focus.  Let’s set out -- precisely, calmly, and without all sorts of irrelevant remarks about Douthat’s desire for a cosmic father figure and the Inquisition and what a Martian would think of the Catholic Mass -- one very specific objection to materialism and see why Coyne fails even to perceive it, much less answer it.

Coyne had spoken of human beings forging their own purposes in the absence of God, and Douthat replied that given Coyne’s “eliminative materialist” view that the self might be an illusion, Coyne cannot coherently characterize himself as a “purpose-creating” agent in the first place.  In response Coyne tells us that “apparently [Douthat’s] notion of ‘purpose’ involves something given by Almighty God,” that Douthat “wants there to be a Douthat Soul that has a ‘purpose’ bestowed by a celestial deity,” etc. -- none of which, of course, is to the point.  You don’t need to be a theist or a believer in the soul to wonder how even the illusion of a single, unified self could arise out of inherently loose and separate fragments of either a psychological or neurological kind.  Even Hume acknowledged having failed to account for it.  This is what philosophers call the “unity of consciousness” problem, and even if atheism were demonstrably true that would contribute exactly nothing to the solution of the problem.  If Coyne were at all interested in the objective pursuit of truth -- as opposed to scoring cheap points against someone whose views he viscerally dislikes -- he would have seen that this, rather than some exercise in Freudian wishful thinking, is what Douthat is on about.  Materialism could still be false even if atheism were true, and Douthat’s point was about materialism, not atheism per se.

The varieties of “purpose”

But let’s put even that aside for the moment, because the unity of consciousness problem involves too many side issues (concerning qualia, the binding problem, etc.), and we need to try as far as we can to narrow Coyne’s attention on to something very, very specific and see if he can stay on point.  Consider the notion of “purpose.”  Coyne seems to think that all talk of purpose entails a conscious rational agent like us, but that is, conceptually speaking, just sloppy.  Where purpose is concerned -- a better term would be “teleology” or (better still because unassociated with irrelevant pop-theology baggage) the Scholastic’s term “finality” -- there are, as I have pointed out many times (e.g. here), at least five kinds, with each of the last four progressively more unlike the sort we know from introspection.  Hence we can distinguish:

1. The sorts of purposes we know from our own plans and actions.  In this case the end that is pursued is conceptualized.  When you order a steak, you conceptualize it as steak (as opposed, say, to vegetable protein processed to look and taste like steak), you express this concept linguistically by using the word “steak,” and so forth.

2. The sorts of purposes non-rational animals exhibit.  A dog, for example, exhibits a kind of purpose or goal-directedness when it excitedly makes its way over to the steak you’ve dropped on the floor.  Such a purpose is certainly conscious -- the dog will see the meat and imagine the appearance and taste of past bits of meat it has had, and it will also feel an urge to eat the meat -- but it is not conceptualized.  The dog doesn’t think of the meat as meat (as opposed to as textured vegetable protein), it doesn’t describe it using an abstract term like “meat,” etc.

3. The sorts of “purposes” plants exhibit.  A plant will grow “toward” the light, roots will “seek” water, an acorn “points to” the oak into which it will grow, etc.  These “purposes” are not only not conceptualized, but they are totally unconscious.  A plant will not only not think of the water it “seeks” as water (as a human being would), but it will not feel thirst or anything else as it “seeks” it (as an animal would).

4. The “goal-directedness” of complex inorganic processes.  David Oderberg offers the water cycle and the rock cycle as examples of a kind of inorganic “goal-directedness” insofar as there is an objective (rather than merely interest-relative) fact of the matter about whether certain occurrences are parts of these causal processes.  For instance, the formation of magma may both cause certain local birds to migrate and lead to the formation of igneous rock, but causing birds to migrate is no part of the rock cycle while the formation of igneous rock is part of it.  That each stage of the process “points” to certain further stages in a way it does not “point” to other things it may incidentally cause reflects an extremely rudimentary sort of teleology.  It is a kind of teleology or “directedness” that involves neither conceptualization of the end sought (as human purposes do), nor conscious awareness of the end (as animal purposes do), nor the flourishing of a living system (as the “purposes” of plants do). 

5. Finally there is a kind of absolute bare minimum of “directedness” exhibited in even the simplest inorganic causal regularities.  As Aquinas argued, if A regularly generates some specific effect or range of effects B (rather than C, or D, or no effect at all), there is no way to make this intelligible unless we suppose that A is inherently “directed toward” or “points to” the generation of B (rather than to C, or D, or no effect at all).  Suppose all higher level causal regularities -- not only the water and rock cycles, but even simpler phenomena like the way the phosphorus in the head of a match generates flame and heat when the match is truck, or the way ice cools down room-temperature water surrounding it -- were entirely reducible to causation at the micro-structural level.  Still, we would have absolutely basic causal regularities -- the fact that some micro-structural phenomenon A regularly generates a range of outcomes B -- that is intelligible only if we suppose that A inherently points to B.  Or so the traditional Aristotelian view goes, anyway.  Here we lack in A not only conceptualization, consciousness, and life, but also complexity of the sort in view in teleology of Type 4.  There is just the bare “pointing to” or “directedness toward” B which would exist even if the causal transaction were not part of some larger structure. 

Now, let’s notice a couple of things.  First, none of this by itself has anything to do with theism.  The question of whether there is teleology, “directedness,” or finality in nature and the question of whether such teleology requires a divine cause are separate questions, even if they are related.  For as I have also pointed out many times (e.g., once again, here) there are several possible views one could take about purported teleology or finality of any or all of the five sorts just described:

A. One could hold that one or more of the kinds of teleology described above really do exist but that it is in no way inherent in the natural world, but rather imposed on it from outside by God in something like the way the purposes of an artifact are imposed on natural materials by us.  Just as the metal bits that make up a watch in no way have any time-telling function inherent in them but derive it entirely from the watchmaker and users of the watch, so too is the world utterly devoid of teleology except insofar as God imparts purposes to it.  This “extrinsic” view of teleology is essentially the view represented by William Paley’s “design argument.”

B. One could hold instead that teleology of one or more of the kinds described above really does exist and is inherent in the natural world rather than in any way imposed from outside.  Someone who takes this view might hold (for example) that an acorn really does have an inherent and irreducible “directedness” toward becoming an oak, or that in general efficient causes really are inherently “directed toward” or “point to” their effects, and that this just follows from their natures rather than from any external, divine directing activity.  Why does an acorn “point toward” becoming an oak?  Not, on this view, because God so directs it, but just because that is part of what it is to be an acorn.  This ”intrinsic” view of teleology is the one usually attributed to Aristotle (who, though he affirmed the existence of a divine Unmoved Mover, did not do so on teleological grounds, as least as usually interpreted). 

C. One could hold that teleology of one or more of the kinds described above really does exist and has its proximal ground in the natures of things but its distal ground in divine directing activity.  On this view (to stick with the acorn example -- an example nothing rides on, by the way, but is just an illustration) the acorn “points to” becoming an oak by its very nature, and this nature is something that can be known whether or not one affirms the existence of God.  To that extent this view agrees with View B.  But a complete explanation of things and their natures would, on this View C, require recourse to a divine sustaining cause.  This is the view represented by Aquinas’s Fifth Way, which (as I have noted many times) has nothing whatsoever to do either with Paley’s feeble “design argument” or with the arguments of recent “Intelligent Design” theorists.  (I have expounded and defended Aquinas’s Fifth Way in several places, such as in my book Aquinas and in greatest detail in a recent Nova et Vetera article.) 

D. One could hold that one or more of the kinds of teleology described above are in some sense real but only insofar as they are entirely reducible to non-teleological phenomena.  To speak of something’s “pointing to” or being “directed toward” some end is on this view “really” just a shorthand for some description that makes no reference whatsoever to teleology or finality.

E. Finally, one could hold that none of the sorts of teleology described above exists in any sense, not even when understood in a reductionist way.  They are entirely illusory. 

Now, Coyne, fixated as all New Atheists are on the easy target of Paley’s “design argument,” evidently thinks that to affirm the existence of “purpose” or teleology in nature commits one to View A and thus directly commits one to theism.  But that is simply not the case.  That would be true only if teleology is regarded as entirely extrinsic to the natural order, as the purpose of a watch is entirely extrinsic to the physical components of the watch.  And one could hold instead that teleology is intrinsic to the natural order.  In that case one could maintain either that the question of teleology has nothing to do with whether there is a God (as View B maintains) or that if it does, it could still get you to God in only an indirect way, via further argumentation (as View C maintains).  Hence there are contemporary philosophers like George Molnar, John Heil, and Paul Hoffman who take a View B approach to teleology of at least Type 5.  (Molnar calls it “physical intentionality” and Heil calls it “natural intentionality.”)  Thomas Nagel appears to take a View B approach to teleology of Types 1 - 3 and perhaps of the other types as well.  Some of these writers -- indeed, perhaps all of them as far as I can tell (though I’m not sure in every case) -- are atheists.  And Thomists like myself, who take a Type C approach, agree that the question of whether there is teleology intrinsic to nature is a separate question from whether such teleology requires a divine cause.

Coyne also evidently thinks that to raise the question of whether materialists can account for “purposes” is to posit an immaterial soul and/or to raise some high-falutin’ “meaning of life” question.  But that isn’t the case either.  Aristotelians maintain that materialism cannot account for teleology of Types 2 - 5, but they would not attribute anything immaterial to the phenomena in question.  (Nor, in the case of Types 4 and 5, a soul.  Aristotle did think plants and animals have “souls” in the sense of an organizational principle by which they are alive, but he did not think of this as something immaterial.)  And someone could hold that human existence has no “meaning” or “purpose” in the sense of being part of some divine plan or preparatory for an afterlife, and still take the view that materialism cannot account for purposes of any or all of Types 1 - 5.  (That seems to be Nagel’s position, for example.) 

So, to question whether materialism can account for “purpose” has nothing necessarily to do with whether there is a God, nothing necessarily to do with whether human beings have immaterial souls, and nothing necessarily to do with whether there is, specifically, a “purpose” to human existence in the sense of a cosmic plan, an afterlife, etc.  Those are, contrary to what Coyne evidently supposes, separate issues.  What is the problem, then?

Materialism and “purpose”

To see the problem, consider first the conception of matter to which the materialist is committed.  In his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, materialist philosopher Alex Rosenberg writes:

Ever since physics hit its stride with Newton, it has excluded purposes, goals, ends, or designs in nature.  It firmly bans all explanations that are teleological… (p. 40)

Such characterizations of modern physics are easy to come by.  For example, philosopher of science David Hull writes:

Historically, explanations were designated as mechanistic to indicate that they included no reference to final causes or vital forces.  In this weak sense, all present-day scientific explanations are mechanistic. (“Mechanistic explanation,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy)

Now whether this sort of characterization is correct is in fact a matter of controversy.  Even in physics, teleology has sometimes been claimed to survive in the principle of least action.  And even if the description of the world physics gives us makes no reference to teleology, it wouldn’t follow that matter lacks any teleological features.  To draw that conclusion would require the further premise that physics gives us a description of matter that is, not only correct as far as it goes, but exhaustive.  And Aristotelians, Russellian neutral monists, and others would deny that premise.  But put all that aside.  The point for now is that materialists hold that matter is devoid of teleology or finality, because that is (so they suppose) what science tells them.

Now that means that of the approaches to teleology or finality described above, the materialist is committed to either View D or View E.  But View D really collapses into View E.  For attempts to reduce teleological notions to non-teleological notions are notoriously problematic.  To take a stock example, suppose it is claimed that such-and-such a neural structure in frogs serves the function or purpose of allowing them to catch flies (insofar as it underlies frogs’ behavior of snapping their tongues at flies).  And suppose it is claimed that this teleological description can be translated without remainder into a description that makes use of no teleological notions.  For instance, it might be held that to say that the neural structure in question serves that function is just shorthand for saying that it causes frogs to snap their tongues at flies; or perhaps that it is shorthand for saying that the structure was hardwired into frogs by natural selection because it caused them to snap their tongues at flies.  The trouble is that the same neural structure will cause a frog to snap its tongue at lots of other things too -- at BB’s, black spots projected onto a screen, etc. -- yet it would be false to say that the function of the structure in question is the disjunctive one of getting frogs to eat either flies or BBs or spots on a screen, etc.   Of course, someone might respond: “But that’s because the reason the neural structure gets frogs to snap their tongues, and the reason it was favored by natural selection, was in order to get them to eat flies, not to eat BB’s or spots on a screen!”  But that’s just the point.  To say that “the reason” the structure exists is “in order to” get frogs to do that, specifically, is to bring teleological notions back into the analysis, when the whole point was to get rid of them. 

This sort of problem -- known by philosophers as the “disjunction problem” -- illustrates the impossibility of trying to reduce teleological descriptions to non-teleological ones.  Such purported reductions invariably either simply fail to capture the teleological notions, or they smuggle them in again through the back door and thus don’t really reduce them after all.  Hence, as naturalists as otherwise different as John Searle and Alex Rosenberg have acknowledged, a consistent materialist has at the end of the day to deny that teleology really exists at all.  That is to say, he has to opt for what I have labeled View E.

Now this is where an insuperable problem for materialism comes in.  If you take View E, then you have to say that teleology, purpose, “directedness” or “pointing toward” of any kind is an illusion.  But illusions are themselves instances of “directedness” or “pointing toward.”  In particular they are instances of intentionality, where intentionality is what the “directedness” or “pointing toward” that is definitive of teleology in general looks like in the case of mental states (thoughts, perceptions, volitions, and the like) in particular.  This is why the intentionality of the mental has notoriously been difficult for the materialist to account for.  For materialism maintains that there is no irreducible “directedness” in the world, yet intentionality just is a kind of “directedness.”  A thought or perception is about or directed at a state of affairs (whether real or illusory), a volition is about or directed at a certain outcome (whether actually realizable or not), and so forth.

As materialists like Alex Rosenberg and Paul Churchland see, this is why a consistent materialist really has to be an eliminativist and deny the reality of intentionality altogether.  The problem is that this simply cannot coherently be done.  To be sure, the eliminativist can avoid saying blatantly self-contradictory things like “I believe there are no beliefs,” but that doesn’t solve the basic problem.  For he will inevitably have to make use of a notion like “illusion,” “error,” “falsehood,” or the like even just to express what it is he is denying the existence of, and these notions are thoroughly intentional (in the sense of being instances of intentionality).  For one to be in thrall to an “illusion” or an “error” just is to be in a state with meaning, with directedness on to a certain content, and so forth.  In short, to dismiss the “directedness” or “pointing toward” characteristic of teleology and intentionality as an illusion is incoherent, since illusions are themselves instances of the very phenomenon whose existence is being denied.  We saw in a recent series of posts how Rosenberg tries to solve this incoherence problem -- in an attempt that is, to his credit, more serious than that of other eliminativists -- but fails utterly.

The basic problem, then, has nothing essentially to do with the existence of God, with the immateriality of the soul, with Douthat’s purported exercises in wish-fulfillment, or any other of the red herrings Coyne tosses out.  It is a problem -- and an insuperable one, I maintain -- that the materialist faces whether or not God exists, whether or not we have immortal souls, whether or not there is some larger cosmic purpose to human existence, etc.  It is also no answer whatsoever to the problem to make hand-waving references (as Coyne does in response to Douthat) to “arrangements of neurons,” to what is “evolutionarily advantageous,” or the like.  If someone says “The square root of four wears aftershave” and you demand that he explain what that even means, it is no answer at all if he says: “Well, there are these arrangements of neurons favored by natural selection that make it true that the square root of four wears aftershave.”  Similarly, if you demand of someone that he explain how he can coherently say both that there is no “directedness” of any sort in the world (which is what he is committing himself to when he says that teleology of any sort is unreal) but that we have an “illusion” of directedness (which is itself an instance of “directedness” since it involves intentionality), it is no answer at all to say “Well, natural selection hardwired into us these neural arrangements that generate this illusion.”  Shouting “Evolution did it!” or “Our neurons do it!” doesn’t magically make an incoherent statement into a coherent one.

Now, this is not exactly the issue Douthat raised against Coyne, but it is related to the one Douthat raises, and I have emphasized it because once the relevant distinctions are made the basic problem can be made very precise and the complete irrelevance to it of the issues raised by Coyne is crystal clear.  If materialism is true, then there can be no “directedness,” “aboutness,” one thing “pointing to” another, etc.  The appearance of such “directedness” must be an illusion or error.  Yet illusions and the like are themselves instances of “directedness,” “aboutness,” etc.  So it cannot coherently be maintained that “directedness” is an illusion.  So, since materialism entails that it is an illusion, materialism cannot coherently be maintained.

Now there are various possible ways a materialist might try to respond to this.  He could decide to accept some irreducible “directedness” or teleology into his picture of nature after all, but then he will essentially be joining Thomas Nagel in rejecting materialism in favor of a neo-Aristotelian position.  Or he could try to give some account of notions like “illusion,” “error,” and the like that doesn’t implicitly commit him to intentionality and thus to the existence of the very “directedness” that he is supposed to be denying.  But no one has come close to showing how this can be done -- Rosenberg gives about the best shot anyone has, but his account is not only tentative but (as I show in the posts referred to above) a complete failure.  Or the materialist could try to affirm the existence of “directedness” while at the same time reducing it to some non-teleological features of reality.  But that would require giving an analysis that neither surreptitiously eliminates rather than reduces teleology, nor implicitly smuggles it in again through the back door -- as attempts to solve problems like the “disjunction problem” tend to do.  No one has shown how to pull this off either.

If Coyne were serious and well-informed, though, those are the sorts of problems he would be trying to solve.  Yet a cringe-making attempt of Coyne’s some time back to deal with the challenge intentionality poses for materialism showed that -- unlike more formidable scientistic atheists like Rosenberg -- he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what the problem even is.  Not that he’s likely even to try to address it should he deign to comment on this post.  No doubt we’ll hear instead about how I’m just trying to rationalize my Catholic prejudices, or that most philosophers are atheists like Coyne, or that neuroscientists don’t believe in souls, or some other such stuff -- none of which has anything whatsoever to do with the subject at hand, of course, but that never stops Coyne.  But if he really wants slowly to work his way to a point from which he might someday have something remotely interesting to say about philosophy, Coyne could start by taking a lesson from former philosophy major Steve Martin.