Yesterday I wrote of Robert Wright’s dishonest piece about Daniel Dennett in BeliefNet. After watching the video of the Wright-Dennett interview again, and re-reading Wright’s piece, I sent the following email to Wright, cc: Dennett.
I read the piece “Planet with a purpose” and then watched your interview with Dennett. I have to say that I find your triumphal announcement that:
> 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. Worse still, he did it on videotape, during an
> interview for my website meaningoflife.tv. (You can watch the
> relevant clip here, though I recommend reading a bit further
> first so you’ll have enough background to follow the logic.)
to be wholly unjustified, based on the video interview. You attempt to couple Dennett’s agreement with your hypothetical (“to the extent that… it would support …”) with earlier elements in the discussion in order to draw the conclusion that you were seeking. I don’t find that this argument works – the earlier discussion does not support your assertion that “He has already agreed that evolution does exhibit those properties”. Furthermore you don’t even have the courtesy to ask Dennett whether or not he agrees with the conclusion that you draw. In a discussion full of analogy, hypotheticals, and probabilities, the likelihood of inadvertent or intentional equivocation is extremely high. The upshot is that your written piece smacks of “Gotcha!”, rather than reasoned argument.
Even more important, earlier in the interview Dennett spells out very clearly an alternative (“natural selections happens because it can”) which is wholly inconsistent with your “higher purpose” conclusion. Unless you believe that Dennett is supporting two inconsistent positions, this should have caused you to question whether you had drawn a valid conclusion from the discussion as a whole. Yet you completely ignored Dennett’s naturalistic position when you came to write your Beliefnet story. This seems dishonest.
For myself, I find the attempt to apply the language of evolution, or natural selection, to “the system of the planet” is unhelpful and misleading. Natural selection, as you mention in the interview, arises from a combination of differentiated replication and scarce resources. The “system of the planet” is not obviously replicating, differentiating, or competing with anything else. To treat an aggregation of planetary phenomena, living and inert, as a “system” is one thing; it certainly helps us understand things like the salinity of the oceans and the recycling of atmospheric gases. To go from “system” to “organism” is at best a metaphor of limited value, and at worst a sentimental distraction.
As you may know, at least one commentator (Andrew Sullivan) read your story and interpreted it as “An Atheist Recants”. While in most cases it is the journalist who misleads with a simplifying headline, here I believe that he accurately summarized your – wholly unjustified – conclusion.
Geoff Arnold