I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog (yes, I know he’s infuriating, but he’s such an entertaining contrarian – and at least he doesn’t have Christopher Hitchens’ vicious streak), and I came across a little piece that I’ll reproduce in full:
AN ATHEIST RECANTS: Philosopher Daniel Dennett, author of the influential 1995 book, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” now says he sees a higher purpose in the universe. Bob Wright breaks the news.
Now anyone seeing that headline would naturally conclude that Dennett had “recanted” his atheism – that he now believed in God. Puzzled, I read the piece by Robert Wright that Sullivan linked to. And Wright certainly launches into the topic with enthusiasm, asserting:
I have some bad news for Dennett’s many atheist devotees. He recently declared that life on earth shows signs of having a higher purpose.
So what is this “higher purpose”? We’re meant to assume that it is “God”, obviously. Yet here’s the money quote, later in the piece:
1) Dennett’s climactic concession may not sound dramatic. He just agrees reluctantly with my assertion that “to the extent that evolution on this planet” has properties “comparable” to those of an organism’s maturation—in particular “directional movement toward functionality”—then the possibility that natural selection is a product of design gets more plausible. But remember: He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties. Ergo: By Dennett’s own analysis, there is at least some evidence that natural selection is a product of design. (And this from a guy who early in the interview says he’s an atheist.)
[Interjection: Note the assumption that “directionality” implies (not merely “is compatible with”) “design”, and that “design” implies a divine, non-natural designer – otherwise how is this incompatible with atheism? Sloppy. Back to Wright:]
2) Again: to say that natural selection may be a product of design isn’t to say that the designer is a god, or even a thinking being in any conventional sense. Conceivably, the designer could be some kind of natural-selection-type process (on a really cosmic scale). So Dennett might object to my using the term “higher purpose” in the first paragraph of this piece, since for many people that term implies a divine purpose. But “higher purpose” can be defined more neutrally.
So now “higher purpose” may just be an emergent property of a higher-level natural system – for example, natural selection applied to a many-worlds cosmology. I don’t see anything that Dennett has said that is incompatible with atheism.
Wright’s agenda is all too clear, as his closing paragraph shows:
Still, one could mount an argument that evolution on this planet has at least some of the hallmarks of the divine—a directionality that is in some ways moral, even (in some carefully delineated sense of the word) spiritual. In fact, I’ve mounted such an argument in the last chapter of my book Nonzero. But Dennett hasn’t signed on to that one. Yet.
And having read most of Nonzero, I’m reasonably confident that Dennett wouldn’t sign on to it. While there are some very interesting ideas in the first half of the book, the last chapter is full of equivocation, particularly around the notions of “design”, “purpose”, and “divine”. It’s nowhere near as good as Wright’s earlier The Moral Animal.