Pinker endorses Deus Project

tarav · Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 2:26 pm Post subject: Re: Pinker endorses Deus Project

Some of us talked about this in the chatroom on Thursday. On page 223 Pinker says, "And they cannot learn evolution until they unlearn their intuitive engineering, which attributes design to the intentions of a designer." It seems that such a statement shows that Pinker doesn't believe in a God.

PeterDF · Freshman Joined: 07 Jul 2003 Posts: 214 Gender:

I agree that it would be a good thing to steer people away from the more "defined" religions and it may indeed be that this is why Pinker and Wilson have endorsed it. (I can't speak for Dawkins but I don't think you would get his endorsement - unless that was a pig I just saw flying past my window.)

Achieving the goal of the Deism Project might not be a bad thing although I agree that the very vagueness of the message might be a problem.

However I think that the Deism Project has nothing to offer anyone who has a rigorous, rationalistic approach to metaphysics i.e. a true freethinker, bright or humanist; and I'll explain why. Take this quote from an earlier post:

Quote:
I think the fact that there is no answer to "why" for the universe... ...implies that the answer (and there must be an answer to such a fundamental question)

This makes perfect sense and on the surface it seems undeniable that there must be an answer to such a fundamental question. But the essence of Udcdeist's argument is that the answer is IMPORTANT. The problem with his argument is that importance only makes sense in the context of human experience. We can only gauge importance with the subjective or emotional aspects of our minds. Science seems to imply that the universe operates to a set of mechanistic rules. In this view importance can have no meaning. We might infer that it is important that a spark plug fires in order for the mechanistic system of a car engine to work, but that implies that it is important that the car gets us from A to B: a subjective judgement. We might equally infer that it was important for fish to modify their swim bladders into lungs so that they could begin the conquest of the land. But that argument is fallacious too, because there never was a plan to bring fish onto land. It is just that the simple contingent property that allowed those fish that happened to have swim bladders that performed more like lungs allowing them to stay out of the water longer survived and those that didn't perished. This all happened due to a purely mechanistic and unguided system.

No purely mechanistic system can have "importance" in the sense implied in the post. It certainly is important to "us", because we wouldn't be here otherwise, but the statement hinges on the assumption that there was importance and therefore a purpose to the iteration of existence. This might not be the case (and almost certainly wasn't unless you postulate the extraordinary prospect of the presence of a sentient mind before the "creation"). In this view there was no "why" for the Universe, it's inception was neither important nor unimportant it just was.

rielmajr · Almost a regular Joined: 25 Dec 2002 Posts: 47 Gender:

I reviewed the endorsement of E.O. Wilson for the Deus Project. Not much there, other than a simple endorsement of the project as an alternative to the superstition of most organized religion.

I also checked the UDC website. My conjecture that it was essentially the religion espoused by Tom Paine in his Age of Reason was proved correct. I guess that moving back a couple of centuries to an age in which belief in a disembodied divinity as the creator of the universe and its laws is a step up from the gaggle of sects, religions, superstitions, and science fiction like scientology that now predominate. I personally think that subsuming the universe/s under the aegis of a deity (however defined: creator, the collective packet of physical law, a loving yet uninvolved and noncorporeal entity, etc.) merely adds a confusing variable to the quest for understanding. I will admit, though, that the blank slate of a non-specific deity might allow those who accept the central premise of the Deus Project to invest their rejection of superstition and organized religion with a degree of zeal and emotion not available from a strictly secular world-view.


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