Thought this article about Noam Chomskys recent address at the Vatican might interest group members... Across the great divide by Edwin Cartlidge (published in The Tablet, 1st February 2014) Just what might one of the world’s great atheist scientists and philosophers have in common with the Church? Quite a lot, as became clear when Noam Chomsky addressed a Vatican foundation that aims to promote dialogue between science and religion On the face of it, Noam Chomsky and the Catholic Church seem unlikely bedfellows. Chomsky is considered by many to have been one of the twentieth century’s pioneering linguists, but is probably better-known to the wider public as a left-wing political activist and critic of the rich and powerful, whoever they may be. He has described himself as “a child of the Enlightenment”, and has called religion “irrational” and “dangerous”. A few days ago, however, he found considerable common ground with the Church. The occasion was a talk he gave at the Vatican entitled, “Neurosciences, Human Nature and Language”, in which he underlined the limits of human knowledge, arguing that a fundamental understanding of the world is likely to remain forever beyond the reach of scientists. Indeed, he urged his audience to embrace mystery, explaining that he had did not share the urge of many of his colleagues to reduce all phenomena to a set of basic building blocks. The 85-year-old Chomsky, emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was certainly made to feel at home. In his introduction to the event, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, described Chomsky as “one of the princes of linguistics”, while former student Andrea Moro, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Pavia, compared his impact on the field of linguistics to the revolution in physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. “Before Chomsky came along, it was thought that everything that there was to know about language was known,” he said. At the centre of Chomsky’s research has been the idea of “universal grammar”. In opposition to the view of behaviourists, who held that children learned languages through a process of simple imitation, Chomsky argued that all human beings have an innate capacity for language – a biological predisposition that allows children to construct and understand sentences they have never heard before. It is this belief in innate cognitive abilities that provides Chomsky with the grounds for mystery, as he explained to his audience on Saturday. He argues that just like any other organism, humans are limited by the biological blueprint that nature has given them. We have legs, arms and a mammalian visual system, he pointed out, rather than wings and insect vision. Likewise, while rats are unable to process prime numbers, humans cannot navigate like ants and bees. Crucially, he believes, these inherent constraints extend to our “higher mental faculties” – we simply don’t have the capacity to understand everything, not least the workings of our own minds. This position has earned Chomsky and a number of like-minded sceptics the label “new mysterian”. Originally coined by the philosopher Owen Flanagan in 1991, the name refers to those who argue that certain phenomena, such as consciousness, may never be fully understood. These people, critics say, are the successors of the “old mysterians” – those who, like the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, maintained that the world contains two fundamental and distinct kinds of stuff, body and mind, rather than a single type of material substance that would allow a unified description of nature. Chomsky, in fact, maintains that Cartesian dualism was “a perfectly respectable scientific doctrine” that happened to be disproved by Isaac Newton when he formulated his theory of universal gravitation – which showed how gravity determines the orbits of planets just as it causes objects on Earth to fall to the ground. Crucially, and unlike many other scientists, Chomsky maintains that this theory did not reveal the universe to be one vast clockwork mechanism. Instead, he says, it left us with a mystery: how was it possible that two objects could attract one another without being in physical contact? In other words, he says, Newton did not dismiss “the ghost in the machine”, but actually “exorcised the machine, leaving the ghost intact”. According to Chomsky, Newton’s revolutionary ideas led to a fundamentally new, and more modest, conception of science. Its aim, he says, was no longer complete “intelligibility of the world”, but rather, “intelligibility of theories about the world”. This, he claims, remains true today, arguing that Albert Einstein’s notion of curved space-time – which succeeded Newton’s action at a distance – “just deepens the mystery”. And in neuroscience, he maintains, a mechanical theory of the mind remains as far away as ever. “Concepts of determinacy and randomness fall within our intellectual grasp,” he says. “But it might turn out that ‘free actions of men’ cannot be accommodated in these terms.” Instead, they are consigned to what the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume called “that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain”. Chomsky’s talk was organised by the Science and Faith STOQ Foundation, which was instituted by Benedict XVI and whose scientific committee held its first meeting last December. The foundation follows on from the nearly decade-old STOQ Project – the initials stand for “Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest” – which itself goes back to the commission set up by Pope John Paul lI to investigate the Galileo affair. Mgr Tomasz Trafny, director of the Pontifical Council for Culture’s science and faith department, told me that the foundation is designed to provide an “institutional framework” and secure greater funding for the “promotion of dialogue between scientific knowledge and theological understanding”. “Theological thought today remains fairly detached from scientific knowledge,” said Trafny. “Our task is to offer to theologians and researchers the possibility of meeting and confrontation.” Neuroscience is a subject of particular interest, he explained, because it can help assess the extent to which biology “determines our being human” and the extent, conversely, that “our being human transcends the biology”. Chomsky’s talk was “just a beginning”, he added. “We want to enter ever more deeply and pose ever more specific and more difficult questions” regarding the brain and human beings. Just how much dialogue will be possible between scientists and theologians on this and other topics remains to be seen. Speaking on his return to the United States, Chomsky maintained a respectful stance on religion. Regarding the belief of his grandfather, an Orthodox Jew, he said that “the conclusions of his faith had nothing to do with my science. If he believed in the God of the Bible, that was a legitimate way for him to lead this life.” Indeed, on several occasions Chomsky has made statements supportive of the Catholic Church, such as in a 1995 interview, when he said of its role in central America in the 1980s that the Church “has played an honourable role in helping those in need”. On the broad relationship between science and religion, however, Chomsky has little to say. Indeed, for him “there is no relationship that I can see”. His challenge to “scientism” also seems quite different from that put forward by Cardinal Ravasi, for whom science is just one of a number of ways of understanding reality – others including philosophy, theology and art. Chomsky, in contrast, says that the limits of science are caused simply by mankind’s finite brainpower. He refuses to say what scientific knowledge might be obtainable by a more advanced being, simply stating that “science for an undefined organism is just not a well-defined concept”. The STOQ Foundation aims to put on similar talks once or twice a year, in addition to a range of other events that will, says Trafny, also encompass the theology of Creation and the environment. However, Trafny admits that “it is difficult to invite suitable guests”. Candidates, he says, must be heavyweight scientists and “open to exchange”. Does that then rule out dyed-in-the-wool materialists? “I see that with many materialists it is difficult to find a meeting point,” says Trafny. “I don’t exclude the possibility of a meeting with them, but it is more difficult to have conversations with those who do not recognise any possibility of transcendent dimension.” * Edwin Cartlidge is a science writer based in Rome.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 19:26:54 +0000
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