The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

THE IDEA that human beings have been endowed with powers and properties not found elsewhere in the animal kingdom—or the universe, so far as we can tell—arises from a simple imperative: Just look around. It is an imperative that survives the invitation fraternally to consider the great apes. The apes are, after all, behind the bars of their cages and we are not. Eager for the experiments to begin, they are impatient for their food to be served. They seem impatient for little else. After years of punishing trials, a few of them have been taught the rudiments of various primitive symbol systems. Having been given the gift of language, they have nothing to say. When two simian prodigies meet, they fling their signs at one another.

More is expected, but more is rarely forthcoming. Experiments conducted by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth—and they are exquisite—indicate that like other mammals, baboons have a rich inner world, something that only the intellectual shambles of behavioral psychology could ever have placed in doubt. Simian social structures are often intricate. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas reason; they form plans; they have preferences; they are cunning; they have passions and desires; and they suffer. The same is true of cats, I might add. In much of this, we see ourselves. But beyond what we have in common with the apes, we have nothing in common, and while the similarities are interesting, the differences are profound.

If human beings are as human beings think they are, then religious ideas about what they are gain purchase. These ideas are ancient. They have arisen spontaneously in every culture. They have seemed to men and women the obvious conclusions to be drawn from just looking around. An enormous amount of intellectual effort has accordingly been invested in persuading men and women not to look around. “The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is ‘unassailable fact.’” Thus Nature in an editorial. Should anyone have missed the point, Nature made it again: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

Those not willing to put such sentiments aside, the scientific community has concluded, are afflicted by a form of intellectual ingratitude.

It is remarkable how widespread ingratitude really is.

ALFRED WALLACE: A DISSENT

Together with Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace created the modern theory of evolution. He has been unjustly neglected by history, perhaps because shortly after conceiving his theory, he came to doubt its provenance. Darwin, too, had his doubts. No one reading On the Origin of Species could miss the note of moral anxiety. But Darwin’s doubts arose because, considering its consequences, he feared his theory might be true; with Wallace, it was the other way around. Considering its consequences, he suspected his theory might be false.

In an interesting essay published in 1869 and entitled “Sir Charles Lyell on Geological Climates and the Origin of Species,” Wallace outlined his sense that evolution was inadequate to explain certain obvious features of the human race. The essay is of great importance. It marks a falling-away in faith on the part of a sensitive biologist previously devoted to ideas he had himself introduced. Certain of our “physical characteristics,” he observed, “are not explicable on the theory of variation and survival of the fittest.” These include the human brain, the organs of speech and articulation, the human hand, and the external human form, with its upright posture and bipedal gait. It is only human beings who can rotate their thumb and ring finger in what is called ulnar opposition in order to achieve a grip, a grasp, and a degree of torque denied any of the great apes. No other item on Wallace’s list has been ticked off against real understanding in evolutionary thought. What remains is fantasy of the sort in which the bipedal gait is assigned to an unrecoverable ancestor wishing to peer (or pee) over tall savannah grasses.

The argument that Wallace made with respect to the human body he made again with respect to the human mind. There it gathers force. Do we understand why alone among the animals, human beings have acquired language? Or a refined and delicate moral system, or art, architecture, music, dance, or mathematics? This is a severely abbreviated list. The body of Western literature and philosophy is an extended commentary on human nature, and over the course of more than four thousand years, it has not exhausted its mysteries. “You could not discover the limits of soul,” Heraclitus wrote, “not even if you traveled down every road. Such is the depth of its form.”

Yet there is no evident distinction, Wallace observed, between the mental powers of the most primitive human being and the most advanced. Raised in England instead of the Ecuadorian Amazon, a native child of the head-hunting Jívaro, destined otherwise for a life spent loping through the jungle, would learn to speak perfect English, and would upon graduation from Oxford or Cambridge have the double advantage of a modern intellectual worldview and a commercially valuable ethnic heritage. He might become a mathematician, he would understand the prevailing moral and social codes perfectly, and for all anyone knows (or could tell), he might find himself a BBC commentator, explaining lucidly the cultural significance of head-hunting and arguing for its protection.

From this it follows, Wallace argued, that characteristic human abilities must be latent in primitive man, existing somehow as an unopened gift, the entryway to a world that primitive man does not possess and would not recognize.

But the idea that a biological species might possess latent powers makes no sense in Darwinian terms. It suggests the forbidden doctrine that evolutionary advantages were frontloaded far away and long ago; it is in conflict with the Darwinian principle that useless genes are subject to negative selection pressure and must therefore find themselves draining away into the sands of time.

Wallace identified a frank conflict between his own theory and what seemed to him obvious facts about the solidity and unchangeability of human nature.

The conflict persists; it has not been resolved.

WHAT NO ONE DOUBTS

No one doubts that human beings now alive are connected to human beings who lived thousands of years ago. To look at Paleolithic cave drawings is to understand that the graphic arts have not in twelve thousand years changed radically. And no one doubts that human beings are connected to the rest of the animal kingdom.

It is rather more difficult to take what no one doubts and fashion it into an effective defense of the thesis that human beings are nothing but the living record of an extended evolutionary process. That requires a disciplined commitment to a point of view that owes nothing to the sciences, however loosely construed, and astonishingly little to the evidence.

It is for this reason—no science, little evidence—that the kinship between human beings and the apes has been promoted in contemporary culture as a moral virtue as well as a zoological fact. It functions as a hedge against religious belief, and so it is eagerly advanced. The affirmation that human beings are fundamentally unlike the apes is widely considered a defect of prejudice or a celebration of trivialities. “Chimps and gorillas have long been the battleground of our search of uniqueness,” Stephen Jay Gould remarked, “for if we could establish an unambiguous distinction—of kind rather than degree—between ourselves and our closest relatives, we might gain the justification long sought for our cosmic arrogance.”

Following Stephen Jay Gould, whose “cool authentic voice” he finds irresistible, Christopher Hitchens endorses the Master in declaring against cosmic arrogance. I may well be its last supporter, all things considered. “If the numberless evolutions from the Cambrian period could be recorded and ‘rewound,’” Hitchens writes, “and the tape played again, he [Gould] established there was no certainty it would come out the same way.” Having no access to the tape of life, Gould established nothing of the sort, of course; I am recounting the story line purely pour le sport. And what sport it is, involving as it does only the celebration of an obvious tautology. Had an early vertebrate named Pakaia not survived, its survivors, Hitchens reports in amazement, would not have survived. No deflation of arrogance could be more rigorous. Or less interesting. I would find Hitchens’s thoughts even more gratifying than I do had he not enlarged them to encompass nonlinear dynamics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, subjects that in his ineptitude he waves like a majestic frond.

When it comes to the apes, the argument is so uncertain that it must be made with the assurance that arises from the affirmation of an absurdity. In writing about “our inner ape,” Frans de Waal is thus concerned to demonstrate “how much apes resemble us and how much we resemble them.”

How much, then, do we resemble them, or they us? No, really? The correct answer, of course, is that although we resemble apes in some ways, we are nonetheless quite different, and we are different in ways that are of great biological and moral importance. If this is the correct answer, it is not the one de Waal is proposed to endorse. “If an extraterrestrial were to visit earth,” de Waal writes, “he would have a hard time seeing most of the differences we treasure between ourselves and the apes.”

I suppose that if a fish were thoughtfully to consider the matter, she might have a hard time determining the differences we treasure between Al Gore and a sperm whale. Both of them are large and one of them is streamlined. This is, perhaps, one reason fish are not more often consulted on important matters of taxonomy. Or anything else.

Wishing a more detailed (but no more obvious) demonstration, both the fish and de Waal’s extraterrestrial would profit from reading a fundamental paper on the subject. Writing in Science in 1975, M.-C. King and A. C. Wilson provided for the first time an estimate of the degree of similarity between the human and the chimpanzee genome. Far more than was thought possible at the time, King and Wilson claimed, human beings and chimpanzees share the greater part of their respective genomes.

Whence the conclusion that if our genomes match up so nicely, we must be apes.

In the second section of their paper, King and Wilson describe honestly the deficiencies of this idea. Human beings and the apes, they observe,

There is nothing in this that was not evident to Alfred Wallace. Or to any student of comparative anatomy. King and Wilson went on to suggest that the morphological and behavioral differences between humans and the apes, if they were not due to variations between their genomes, must be due to variations in their genomic regulatory systems. These are the systems that control the activities of the genes by telling various genes when to sound off and when to shut up. They are of an astonishing and poorly understood complexity, if only because they themselves require regulation. Higher-order regulation in turn involves higher-order codes beyond the genetic code. Codes then require their own regulation. Even the simplest cell involves an intricate, never-ending cascade of control and coordination of a sort never seen in the physical world. It is entirely safe to assign the differences between human beings and the apes to their regulatory systems. Nothing is known about their evolutionary emergence and we cannot describe them with any clarity.

Whatever the source of the human distinction in nature, its existence is obvious, and when it is carelessly denied, the result is a very characteristic form of inanity.

Thus Jonathan Gottshall recounts his experiences in reading Homer’s Iliad while under the influence of the thesis, as he puts it, that “people are apes.” It is a thesis that he attributes to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. “But this time around,” Gottshall explains, “I also experienced the Iliad as a drama of naked apes—strutting, preening, fighting and bellowing their power in fierce competition for social dominance, beautiful women and material resources.” Social dominance and material resources are, in fact, not quite to the point. “Intense competition between great apes, as described both by Homer and by primatologists, frequently boils down to precisely the same thing: access to females.”

The governing words in this quotation are “boils down,” and as in so many such analyses, what is essential is not what has been distilled but what has evaporated.

That is, everything of interest in the Iliad.

At the height of the battle of Stalingrad, a young lieutenant with the 24th German Panzer Division wrote in his diary that Stalingrad “by day, is an enormous cloud of burning blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night comes, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals feel this hell, the hardest stones cannot endure it; only men endure” (italics added).

Would anyone reading these words imagine that man’s endurance is anything like the zestful competition of apes eager to copulate and vexed when they cannot?

This suggests an obvious counsel of humility. It is one that may profitably be directed toward biologists overmuch worried about cosmic arrogance. Before putting aside so carelessly “the idea that man was created in the image of God,” first consider the ideas you propose to champion in its place.

If they are no good, why champion them?

And they are no good. So why champion them?

THE DARLING

Edward Wilson published Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene during the 1970s. Since then, evolutionary psychology has become a contemporary darling. The story that it advances is one that takes place entirely within the human species. No apes need apply, for none are wanted.

The essentials are simple and they have the simple-minded structure of a fairy tale—indeed, the philosopher David Stove entitled his attack on evolutionary psychology Darwinian Fairytales. The significant features of human psychology first arose during the late Paleolithic era—the so-called Era of Evolutionary Adaptation. For reasons that no one has properly specified, it was then that human beings devised their responsive strategies to the contingencies of life—getting food, getting by, and getting laid. These strategies have persisted to the present day. They are at the core of the modern human personality. We are what we were. There followed the long Era in Which Nothing Happened, the modern human mind retaining in its structure and programs the mark of the time that human beings spent in the savannah or on the forest floor, hunting, gathering, and reproducing with Darwinian gusto.

If their content is negligible, the influence of these stories is immense. Commenting on negative advertising in political campaigns, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, remarked that “there appears to be something hardwired into humans that gives special attention to negative information.” There followed what is by now a characteristic note: “I think it’s evolutionary biology.” The fact that there is nothing hardwired about human beings, because they are not wired at all, is passed over as incidental. The metaphor has taken on a life all its own, and now that it is living, it has grown great.

Having provided an explanation of negative campaign advertisements, evolutionary biology also explains war and male aggression, the human sensitivity to beauty, gossip, a preference for suburban landscapes, love, altruism, marriage, jealousy, adultery, road rage, religious belief, fear of snakes, disgust, night sweats, infanticide, and the fact that parents are often fond of their children. The idea that human behavior is “the product of evolution,” as the Washington Post puts the matter, is now more than a theory, it is a popular conviction. The conviction is so popular that it may even be impudently opposed to the regnant conventions of political correctness. The result is an inspiring clash of clichés. In an article published in Psychology Today, Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa describe what they consider ten politically incorrect truths about human nature. They regard these truths as discoveries, and in recounting the first item on their list report with an explorer’s sense of satisfied astonishment—Would you look at that?—that “men like blonde bombshells.” If this is a truth about human nature, it has not been especially well hidden.

Nor does it seem to cry out for any explanation beyond the obvious. Men like blonde bombshells because they are blonde bombshells. I would even go further. Men seem to like bombshells no matter the color of their hair.

What more is really needed?

For Miller and Kanazawa, the demands of science are more considerable. What they require is an explanation beyond the obvious. Aussitôt dit, aussitôt fait, as the French say. No sooner said than done. Our ancestors millions of years ago, they assert, were evidently concerned to discover fine, healthy women, and lacking suitable gynecological skills, necessity compelled them to pay attention to their secondary sexual characteristics. Whence the popularity of blonde bombshells. The subject has been the focus of research extending over decades, psychologists investigating the extent to which blonde bombshells are bombshells with never-flagging zeal and, in some cases, even conducting their research in various strip clubs the better to establish that various bombshells really are blonde.

Unneeded as an irrelevance, these ideas are implausible as an explanation. If sexual preferences are rooted in the late Paleolithic era, men worldwide should now be looking for stout muscular women with broad backs, sturdy legs, a high threshold to pain, and a welcome eagerness to resume foraging directly after parturition. It has not been widely documented that they do.

Our ancestors are in any case unavailable. Claims made on their behalf are unverifiable. The underlying tissue that connects the late Paleolithic and the modern era is the gene pool. Changes to that pool reflect a dynamic process in which genes undergo change, duplicate themselves, surge into the future or shuffle off, and by means of all the contingencies of life serve in each generation the purpose of creating yet another generation. It is precisely these initial conditions that popular accounts of human evolution cannot supply. We can say of those hunters and gatherers only that they hunted and they gathered, and we can say this only because it seems obvious that there was nothing else for them to do. The gene pool that they embodied cannot be recovered.

The largest story told by evolutionary psychology is therefore anecdotal. It has no scientific value.

We might as well be honest with one another. It has no value whatsoever.

THE HUMAN MIND

It was just yesterday that Freud depicted the human mind as a fabulous haunted house. The image has had an enduring value, if only because on some level we are all haunted by things we cannot name and do not recognize. The analytical deficiencies of Freudian theory are nonetheless considerable, for if the Freudian house was haunted, Freud was unable to say who haunted it. Items such as the id, the ego, and the superego functioned as characters in Freud’s system. They had needs, they made their demands known, they were artful in concealment; and these are among the attributes of the human mind for which an explanation was originally needed.

The haunted house has given way in our time to the digital computer. The argument proceeds in steps. The first involves the dismissal of the mind as a separate ontological category. Mind and brain, as Descartes supposed? This is Cartesian dualism and widely rejected by philosophers. “Every aspect of thought and emotion is,” Steven Pinker has argued in How the Mind Works, “rooted in brain structure and function.” This tells us where the mind is by telling us where it has gone to. It has been swallowed up by the brain. If one needs directions, it suffices to tap significantly at one’s skull:

How a craving for raspberry Jell-O might be located within the human brain, Pinker does not say. Perhaps it involves neurons devoted to gelatin? I am asking in a spirit of honest inquiry.

With the mind removed, it remains for Pinker to explain how the brain undertakes so many activities formerly undertaken by the mind. As it happens, this is not a problem either. It is the brain’s capacity to process information, Pinker believes, that “allows human beings to see, think, feel, choose and act.” The digital computer is precisely a device designed to process information. Whereupon we discover how the mind works. The same significant tap may be invoked for a second time.

Between Tap One and Tap Two, the mind has been demoted (No such thing) and explained (No such thing is a computer).

Whatever one might say about Steven Pinker’s thoughts about the human mind, they do not lack for dramatic vigor.

In 1936, the British logician Alan Turing published the first of his papers on computability. Using nothing more than ink, paper, and the resources of mathematical logic, Turing managed to create an imaginary machine, one capable of incarnating a very smooth, very suave imitation of the human mind.

Known now as a Turing machine, the device has at its disposal a tape divided into squares, and a reading head mounted over the tape. It has, as well, a finite number of physical symbols. The reading head may occupy one of a finite number of distinct physical states.

And thereafter the repertoire of its action is extremely limited. A Turing machine can, in the first place, recognize symbols, one square at a time. It can, in the second place, print symbols or erase them from the square it is scanning. And it can, in the third place, change its internal state, and move to the left or to the right of the square it is scanning, one square at a time.

There is no fourth place. Without a program a Turing machine can do nothing else. In fact, considered simply as a mechanism, a Turing machine can do nothing whatsoever, the thing existing in that peculiar world—my own, of course—in which everything is possible but nothing gets done.

Although imaginary at its inception, a Turing machine brilliantly anticipated its own realization in matter, with Turing’s ideas giving rise to the modern digital computer.

The promotion of the computer from an imaginary to a material object serves the purpose of restoring it to the world that can be understood in terms of the physical sciences. As a physical device, nothing more than a collection of electronic circuits, the digital computer may be represented entirely by Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field. The distinction between a computer and its program is duplicated in the distinction between a physical system governed by certain specific laws and its initial condition—the state from which it starts. We are returned to the continuous and infinite world in which mathematical physics tracks the evolution of material objects moving through time in response to the eternal forces of nature itself.

If something is gained by the assimilation of the brain to a computing device, something is lost as well, and that is the recognition that deep down every one of these metaphors is profoundly limited. A certain “power to alter things,” Albertus Magnus remarked, “indwells in the human soul.” The existence of this power is hardly in doubt. It is evident in every human act in which the mind imposes itself on nature by taking material objects from their accustomed place and rearranging them, and it is evident again whenever a human being interacts with a machine. Writing with characteristic concision in the Principia, Isaac Newton observed that “the power and use of machines consist only in this, that by diminishing the velocity we may augment the force, and the contrary.” Although Newton’s analysis was restricted to mechanical forces, his point is nonetheless general. A machine is a material object, a thing, and as such its capacity to do work is determined by the forces governing its nature and by its initial conditions. Before an inclined plane can do work, it must be inclined.

Those initial conditions must themselves be explained, and in the nature of things, they cannot be explained by the very device they serve to explain. An inclined plane does not incline itself. This is precisely the problem that Newton faced in the Principia. The magnificent system of the world that he devised explained why the orbit of the planets should be conic sections, but Newton was unable to account for the initial conditions that he had himself imposed on his system.

This pattern, along with its problem, recurs whenever machines are at issue, and it returns with a vengeance whenever computers are invoked as models for the human mind.

If the brain is a computer, then the very same thesis about the human mind should be in force whether we describe the human mind as a digital computer or whether we describe the human mind in terms of a device that is logically identical to a digital computer—an abacus, say. The thing is a trifle. Made of wood, it consists of a number of wires suspended in a frame and a finite number of beads strung along the wires. Nevertheless, an idealized abacus has precisely the power of a Turing machine, and so both the abacus and the Turing machine serve as models for a working digital computer. By parity of reasoning, they also both serve as models for the human mind.

Yet the thesis that the human mind is an abacus seems distinctly less plausible than the thesis that the human mind is a computer. And for an obvious reason: It is absurd. It is precisely when things have been reduced to their essentials that the interaction between a human being and a simple machine emerges clearly. That interaction is naked, a human agent handling an abacus with the same directness of touch that he might employ in handling a lever, a pulley, or an inclined plane.

With the nakedness of interaction revealed, a characteristic problem is revealed as well. While an abacus may represent certain human intellectual operations such as addition or subtraction, it cannot represent its own initial conditions. Regarding her big-nosed customers with indifference, it is the Chinese cashier at the Imperial Gardens who does that. The force that she brings to bear on an abacus is muscular, and so derived from the chemistry of the human body, these causes ultimately emptying out into the great ocean of physical interactions whose energy loosens and binds the world’s large molecules.

No known chain of causes accommodates the inconvenient fact that by setting the initial conditions of a simple machine, a Chinese cashier has brought about a novel, an unexpected, an entirely idiosyncratic distribution of matter. The initial state of any mechanical artifact represents what the anthropologist Mary Douglas called “matter out of place.” Explaining even the simplest of human acts, the trivial tap or touch that sets a polished wooden bead spinning down a wire, requires tracing the causal chain backward. But that leads only to a wilderness of causes, each of them displacing material objects from their proper settings, so that in the end the mystery is simply shoveled back until the point is reached when it can be safely ignored.

A chain of physical causes is thus not obviously useful in explaining how the human mind imposes itself on matter. But neither does it help to invoke the hypothesis that another abacus is needed to fix the initial conditions of the first. If each abacus requires yet another abacus in turn, the road lies open to the madness of an infinite regress. Daniel Dennett has argued in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology that if receding computers are, like himself, diminished in their capacity, the regress may end in some trivial mechanical device, one that he describes as “stupid.” But if those receding computers are too thick to function as models of the mind, how do they do what they are said to do?

And if they are not, how have we been advanced?

If we are able to explain how the human mind works neither in terms of a series of physical causes nor in terms of a series of infinitely receding mechanical devices, what then is left? There is the ordinary, very rich, infinitely moving account of mental life that without hesitation we apply to ourselves. It is an account frankly magical in its nature. The human mind registers, reacts, and responds; it forms intentions, conceives problems, and then, as Aristotle dryly noted, it acts.

And in none of this do we seem to be doing anything that can be explained or expressed in terms of what the brain does, or what any machine can do.

“Mind is like no other property of physical systems,” the physicist Erich Harth has reasonably remarked. “It is not just that we don’t know the mechanisms that give rise to it. We have difficulty in seeing how any mechanism can give rise to it.”

LAKE OF DOUBT

One of the curiosities about the current enthusiasm for various pseudo-scientific accounts of the human mind is that deep down those most willing to promote its premises are least willing to accept its conclusions.

Whatever scientists may say on those all too frequent occasions when they are advising the rest of us what to think, one thing that they do not say is that they believe what they are telling us to think. The result at times is moving. Writing to the widow of his old friend Michele Besso, Einstein remarked that “now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Whatever the illusion, he acknowledged ruefully, it is one “stubbornly held.”

More often than not, the disjunction between what scientific figures claim and what they believe represents a strikingly successful exercise in self-delusion. When it was first published, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene took the intellectual world by storm. Conversion experiences among young men were widely reported. They still are. The idea that we are all “lumbering robots” designed by natural selection to advance the interests of our genes has become one of those things believed widely because widely believed. The mystery has even been celebrated in art. First promoted at the Cambridge Science Festival, Lifetime: Songs of Life & Evolution is a drama whose “mission [is] to spread the good word on evolution.” There are tributes to Richard Dawkins, one song entitled “I’m a Selfish Gene and I’m Programmed to Survive.” Although I have not seen it, I am persuaded that this theatrical endeavor is horrible beyond measure.

What is remarkable in all this is that no one taking selfish genes seriously takes them seriously. Richard Dawkins has gone out of his way to affirm that he, at least, is not under the control of his genes. “I too am an implacable opponent of genetic determinism,” he has written. His genes are not so selfish as to tell him what to do. Who knows what might happen if he gave them a free hand? He may lumber, but if he does, the dead wood is under his control.

It is the rest of us who must lumber on.

The most unwelcome conclusion of evolutionary psychology is also the most obvious: If evolutionary psychology is true, some form of genetic determinism must be true as well. Genetic determinism is simply the thesis that the human mind is the expression of its human genes. No slippage is rationally possible.

Psychologists will now object. They have the floor. There is the environment, they say. It, too, plays a role. The environment has, of course, been the perpetual plaintiff of record in Nurture v. Nature et al. But for our purposes it may now be dismissed from further consideration. If the environment controls how men are made and how they act, then they are not born that way; and if they are not born that way, an explanation of the human mind cannot be expressed in evolutionary terms.

How could it be otherwise? On current views, it is the gene that is selected by evolution, and if we are not controlled by our genes, we are not controlled by evolution.

If we are not controlled by evolution, evolutionary psychology has no relevance to the origin or nature of the human mind.

And if it is has no relevance whatsoever to the origin and nature of the human mind, why on earth is it promoted so assiduously to within an inch of its life or ours?

A successful evolutionary theory of the human mind would, after all, annihilate any claim we might make on behalf of human freedom. The physical sciences do not trifle with determinism: It is the heart and soul of their method. Were boron salts at liberty to discard their identity, the claims of inorganic chemistry would seem considerably less pertinent than they do.

When Steven Pinker writes that “nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives,” he is expressing a belief—one obviously true—entirely at odds with his professional commitments.

If ordinary men and women are, like Pinker himself, perfectly free to tell their genes “to go jump in the lake,” why pay the slightest attention to evolutionary psychology?

Why pay the slightest attention to Pinker?

Either the theory in which he has placed his confidence is wrong, or we are not free to tell our genes to do much of anything.

If the theory is wrong, which theory is right?

If no theory is right, how can “the idea that human minds are the product of evolution” be “unassailable fact”?

If this idea is not unassailable fact, why must we put aside “the idea that man was created in the image of God”?

These hypotheticals must now be allowed to discharge themselves in a number of categorical statements:

There is no reason to pay attention to Steven Pinker.

We do not have a serious scientific theory explaining the powers and properties of the human mind.

The claim that the human mind is the product of evolution is not unassailable fact. It is barely coherent.

The idea that man was created in the image of God remains what it has always been: And that is the instinctive default position of the human race.