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To the Editor:

Leon R. Kass’s talent for moralistic invective is apparently not matched by a commitment to scholarly due diligence [“Science, Religion, and the Human Future,” April]. Had he read my writings beyond one paragraph in a letter to the editor that he quotes (for that matter, had he read that same paragraph more carefully), he could not have written that I reduce the human mind to mere matter and am “unaware of the fact of emergent properties, powers and activities that do not reside in the materials of the organism but emerge only when the materials are formed and organized in a particular way.”

This point, the foundation of my field, cognitive science, is one that I have made repeatedly, at length, and with all the expository power I can muster. The mind is not the brain but it is, as I say, “what the brain does” (Mr. Kass’s parsing overlooks the crucial word “does”). By this I mean the brain’s ability to manipulate information in ways that mirror logical, statistical, and other normative principles. As many philosophers have shown, this dissolves the apparent mystery that the brain is a physical object but can traffic in abstract ideas involving meaning and truth.

Mr. Kass is free to use the word “soul” to refer to the software of the brain, but he is mistaken if he thinks that this equation, free of any conception of divine provenance or survival after death, is compatible with the way the vast majority of people use the word. Nor is it clear how invoking a soul illuminates any intellectual problem beyond slapping a label on what we feel we do not understand.

The uselessness of soul-talk is particularly evident in the thriving science of consciousness, the study of “inner states” that Mr. Kass decrees to be impossible. In fact, every time your eye doctor gives you a test for color-blindness, he is quantifying your inner states. True, scientists and philosophers disagree on how to explain the very existence of inner experience. (Some argue it is a pseudo-problem, others that it is just an as-yet unsolved scientific problem, and still others that it shows a limitation of human cognition analogous to our inability to visualize four-dimensional space-time.) But no one has ever shown how mentioning the word “soul” or its religious associations provides even a glimmer of insight.

Mr. Kass believes he is doing the world a service by arguing that modern biology—and the larger enterprise of science and secular reason of which it is a part —poses a grave threat to meaning and morality. One may question whether the sowing of such fear is wise. Progress in our understanding ourselves as part of the natural world is intellectually exhilarating, conducive to human flourishing, and probably unstoppable. Rather than insisting that morality is a fragile Judeo-Christian antiquity that must be sheltered from the blossoming of knowledge, one could show, as philosophers have done for millennia, that it has a robust foundation that is of a piece with that knowledge. Morality is rooted in the interchangeability of perspectives: the fact that an intelligent social agent, in dealing with other such agents, has no grounds for privileging his interests over theirs. Growing from an innate kernel of empathy, morality has been expanded by a cosmopolitan awareness that encourages people to imagine themselves in the shoes of people unlike themselves. No small part of this awareness is the modern biological sensibility that we are a single species, made of the same stuff arranged in the same way, and therefore with fundamentally similar feelings and interests.

Mr. Kass seeks instead to ground morality in the “truths” of an Iron Age tribal document. His exegesis of the first chapter of Genesis is unquestionably eloquent and imaginative. I look forward to seeing how he handles the later passages that celebrate genocide, tolerate slavery and rape, and prescribe the death penalty for idolatry, homosexuality, blasphemy, and working on the Sabbath.

Steven Pinker
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Those who fear that the advance of science is producing a belief in “scientism” that threatens Judaism and Christianity, and therefore Western civilization, can draw no comfort from Leon R. Kass’s article. As he concedes, science “works”: it cures diseases, creates nuclear weapons, and flies us to the moon and back. He might have added that religions also “work.” They offer consolation to believers and admonish them to behave morally. They also promote intolerance, persecution of dissent, and calls to aggressive crusades.

Mr. Kass’s analytical points about the limitations of science as a way of knowing in no way vindicate a theological alternative. What if, as he contends, all that is natural and human cannot be reduced to the quantifiable, measurable data that science relies on? Do the limits of science establish the validity of the religious perspective any more than Marx’s critique of religion established dialectical materialism as scientific truth?

Mr. Kass himself relies on secular philosophy, not theology, to define the human nature that he thinks science cannot fully fathom. “Never mind ‘created in the image of God,’” he writes, “what elevated humanistic view of human life” is defensible against scientism? Its challenges can be met “even without turning to religion.” Accordingly, Mr. Kass cites Aristotle’s concept of the soul, not the radically expansive concept developed by Judaism and Christianity. Similarly, his concept of morality relies not on the Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount but on the efforts of “the giants of Western philosophy, including Leibniz, Spinoza, and Kant,” to construct a basis for human freedom and dignity once nature had been ceded to science.

When he discusses beliefs arising from the acceptance of Scripture, Mr. Kass shows them to be either incredible or irrelevant. He acknowledges that literalist readings of the accounts of creation and miraculous divine intervention are “misguided.” Yet, as he points out, miracles do matter for believers. Either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not, and “on the truth of his resurrection rests the deepest ground” of Christian faith. Should this truth be accepted or not, and if so on what basis? Having raised the issue, Mr. Kass avoids discussing it. Instead, he rests his case for the validity of the religious way of knowing on a reading of Genesis, which he says enables us to rise above mere animal existence and contemplate the grandeur of the universe and the mystery of its source. But even the “self-evident truths” we find there, he adds, “do not rest on biblical authority.”

What, then, does rest on biblical authority, if not the account of creation or miracles or the belief in resurrection? What exactly is left to counter scientism? What remains, it seems, is not theology or creedal, ritualistic religion but humanistic, philosophical rationalism.

Sanford Lakoff
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California

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To the Editor:

Leon R. Kass’s statement that “there is nothing in Scripture to support” the “too neat” view that God “binds His power” in order to make science possible overlooks Psalm 148, which calls for the heavenly bodies to praise the Lord Who not only created them by His command but established them under permanent laws that they may not violate.

This idea that God made inviolable laws of nature goes beyond Genesis’s teaching (cited by Mr. Kass) that the sun, moon, and stars are merely not divine. Conceiving of nature as governed by law is the starting point for science.

Bill Linder

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