Absence of Mind

In the Christianity and Literature Journal (vol. 6, no. 4), Credo blogger and executive editor, Matthew Barrett, has written a book review of Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (The Terry Lectures Series). Here is just a taste:

Most know Marilynne Robinson from her novels Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home. However, following in the genre of her 2005 work The Death of Adam, Robinson’s most recent work, Absence of Mind, is a collection of essays – given as Yale University’s Dwight H. Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy – which “examine one side in the venerable controversy called the conflict between science and religion, in order to question the legitimacy of the claim its exponents make to speak with the authority of science and in order to raise questions about the quality of thought that lies behind it” (ix). The exponents of science that Robinson has in mind are writers who view science through the lens of influential thinkers of the early modern period, which set science against the claims of religion. Absence of Mind is an analytical look at such attempts to dismiss religion in the name of science.

Robinson’s strength is her ability to be critical of thinkers who present a conception of humanity that is limited and insufficient. Robinson questions not the method of science “but the methods of a kind of argument that claims the authority of science or highly specialized knowledge, that assumes a protective coloration that allows it to pass for science yet does not practice the self-disciple or self-criticism for which science is distinguished” (2). Robinson has in mind sociologists, evolutionary psychologists and even philosophers who believe religion creates a proneness to delusion. Bertrand Russell for example argues that anyone who believes the world had a beginning only contributes to the “poverty of our imagination” (13) and he, therefore, need not waste his time even refuting arguments for a First Cause. Russell’s comment, which is common rhetoric today among atheistic evolutionists like Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, not only fails to utilize scientific investigation as a method, but also “tends to reduce it [religion] to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death, and this makes its persistence very annoying to them” (15). To the contrary, such thinkers as these believe they have crossed the threshold. As Robinson explains, the theories of thinkers like Darwin, Marx, and Freud were so definitive that any criticism was “nostalgia” and any skepticism “meant the doubter’s mind was closed and fearful” (21). How naïve a response this is given the age of doubt they lived in. Nevertheless, such ideas “presented themselves as the last word in doubt, the nec plus ultra of intellectual skepticism” (21). Rather than making scientific arguments, they have taken the intellectual high ground which supposedly is enough to demonstrate the lack of need to even address the claims of religion. Moreover, the type of world these men of modernity have created is one where the creature is an accident. However, as Robinson observes, such a view not only removes the existence of God but introduces emptiness into human experience and fails to explain the meticulous complexity of the cosmos in which we find ourselves.

Robinson also has a keen eye for methodological inconsistency and contradiction, usually apparent in what she calls “parascientific literature.” Naturalists like Dawkins and Dennett (a Nietzschean at heart) argue that we are an accident, a mere outcome of physical laws which are also accidental. The consequences for morality and ethics are devastating, as right and wrong are made relative. However, Robinson observes the major problem this poses for the history of altruism. Take social Darwinism for example. “Why would altruism persist as a trait, when evolution would necessarily select against the conferring of benefit to another at cost to oneself” (60). According to evolution, altruism should not continue to exist as a trait, since the survival of the fittest is a principle meant to defeat altruism altogether. Yet, evolution cannot explain the love and care one human being has for another. Moreover, what is to happen in society if the survival of the fittest mentality is to be followed? Some Darwinists try to explain acts of altruism (a Father saving his drowning son) by resorting to the genetic instinct to preserve one’s own kind. Robinson acutely observes the fallacy of such an appeal, “Do elderly mothers go unrescued, being past their childbearing years? Do firefighters run into burning houses looking for kith and kin? In how many instances would those disposed to altruism die in the rescue of strangers whose genetic proclivities were entirely unknown to them?” (63). Clearly, the Darwinian model cannot explain the moral instinct human beings have for each other’s well-fare, especially in those cases where the survival of the fittest is sacrificed for the survival of the weak and ill. Additionally, such a theory has little place for benevolence, kindness, and sympathy for those in society who are at a disadvantage. Robinson explains this best in The Death of Adam when she states, “The modern fable is that science exposed religion as a delusion and more or less supplanted it. But science cannot serve in the place of religion because it cannot generate an ethics or a morality. It can give us no reason to prefer a child to a dog, or to choose honorable poverty over fraudulent wealth. It can give us no grounds for preferring what is excellent to what is sensationalistic. … It is no wonder that the major arts in virtually ever civilization have centered around religion” (71). . . .