An Open Letter to Steven Pinker

Dear Professor Pinker:

I'm reading your new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I began reading it with the assumption that I would fully agree with its optimism about the future of our species and our admittedly troubled world. And I do agree with many of your arguments stating that most of us tend to be overly pessimistic about the future, for reasons you cogently lay out. I myself find it all too easy to be pessimistic, given what's going on today.

But I find I also have real problems with the general tenor of your arguments and with your basic outlook.

Let me begin stating my objections by discussing how you deal with the subject of climate change. In your chapter on The Environment, you quite correctly tell your readers that human activity has fueled global warming, and that we need to do something about it, soon. I agree with you. I also like how you laud the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment: reason, science, humanism, and progress.

But when you dump a copious amount of mud on religion, I have to part company with you.

With respect to climate change in particular, I think you are mistaken about Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home, whose subject is the need for the world to properly address global warming. You write:

Starting in the 1970s, the mainstream environmental movement latched onto a quasi-religious ideology, greenism, which can be found in the manifestoes of activists as diverse as Al Gore, the Unabomber, and Pope Francis. Green ideology begins with an image of the Earth as a pristine ingénue which has been defiled by human rapacity. As Francis put it in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise be to you), “Our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life . . . [who] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.” The harm, according to this narrative, has been inexorably worsening: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” The root cause is the Enlightenment commitment to reason, science, and progress: “Scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history,” wrote Francis. “The way to a better future lies elsewhere,” namely in an appreciation of “the mysterious network of relations between things” and (of course) “the treasure of Christian spiritual experience.” Unless we repent our sins by degrowth, deindustrialization, and a rejection of the false gods of science, technology, and progress, humanity will face a ghastly reckoning in an environmental Judgment Day.

It's a gross misreading of Laudato Sí to compare it with the Unabomber's ramblings or with any "quasi-religious ideology" such as "greenism." The pope's encyclical is not quasi-religious; it is as fully religious as human forms of expression can ever be. And it is a reasoned argument that admittedly proceeds from a different set of foundational assumptions than your own — but it is a reasoned argument. In wholly accepting the findings of climate scientists, it reaches many of the same conclusions as you do. And in underscoring our human responsibility, as we put the brakes on greenhouse emissions, to protect the needs of people living in developing countries with expanding economies, it is magnificently humanistic.

*****

This is why I think your book actually plumps as much for outright atheism as it does for your stated ideals of reason, science, humanism, and progress. But religion per se is not inherently and ineluctably at war with those Enlightenment values. In fact, the Catholic Church of which I am a liberal member extols those values.

True, it seeks to balance those values with religious faith and tradition. Pope Francis's basic assumptions see humanism, for example, as flowing directly from the teachings of Jesus. And with respect to science, the conservative Pope John Paul II made it clear that one of your favorite topics, evolution, is perfectly consistent with Catholic belief — as long as scientists don't try to peer back before the creation of the universe at the instant of the big bang, and as long as they don't try to deny the existence of the human soul.

Nor am I aware of any teaching of the church that denies the other two of your "big three" scientific understandings. In addition to Darwinian evolution, they are entropy, or a general tendency toward increased disorder, a fundamental principle of how the universe works; and information, any ingredient of cosmic reality which serves to reduce entropy or disorder.

I think you are wrong in maligning religiosity by picking on its very worst aspects, such as a clinging to superstition, as a springboard to championing outright atheism. Wrong, in at least two ways. One, religion as I personally know it has outgrown erstwhile sins like fostering rank superstition, fighting infidels in crusades, and burning nonbelievers at the stake.

Two, evolution has given us humans an innate tendency to believe in a God or gods. That's not going to change. So when you argue for sensible measures to avert climate change while at the same time crossing swords with Pope Francis, you put the backs up of Catholics like myself who would otherwise hope to agree with you. Not an excellent strategy, in my opinion, in that it does not bespeak a rational appraisal on your part of the actual situation of your audience. It is as though you are saying that if we don't take the Enlightenment ideals to the extreme of casting out all of our human religious beliefs, we face a dark future indeed. Put more tersely: the only true basis for optimism is atheism.

That's at the very least a big tactical mistake, Professor Pinker. You want to enlarge the reason-science-humanism-progress choir, not shrink it!

Yours truly,
Eric Stewart