Venter's Life, Rosenberg's Reality

We begin new texts today in both Bioethics and A&P.

Craig Venter's Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life begins with the simplest of questions, borrowed from Erwin Schrodinger: "What is life?"

(Does it occur to anyone else, at this point, to quote Douglas Adams' Marvin ("the paranoid android"): Life! Don't speak to me of life... Or, "This is the sort of thing you life forms enjoy, is it? I ask merely for information.")

We'll try to decide, in the weeks ahead, if their mutual answer that life is patterned information (with DNA as its "code-script" or software) is too simple. But nobody will ever accuse our author of humility. "When we announced our creation of the first synthetic cell, some had asked whether we were 'playing God'... God was unnecessary for the creation of new life, [so] I suppose that we were."

The job seemed available.

Alex Rosenberg's Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions will strike many as similarly hubristic and even less humble. Another Blue Devil, Rosenberg differs from his colleague Flanagan in not only not disdaining scientism ("the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything") but actually embracing it, and finding the expressive (non-assertive) "stories" of non-scientists irrelevant and distracting. He bites that bullet and grins through it.

Those who've been 'round the block in my classes before will anticipate my early line on all this: Flanagan's pragmatic pluralism expressed the right temper of receptivity to multiple stories as generating their own appropriate universes of discourse, reflecting a Jamesian "Hands Off" attitude that frowns on reductive attempts to say that anything (including knowledge) is "nothing but X." Rosenberg's scientism, by contrast, is obnoxiously self-congratulatory and unimaginative towards the meaningful possibilities of various ways of being human.

I wonder if Rosenberg's read "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" or attempted to absorb its wisdom?

It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.

Or Pragmatism?

There is no RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get confused. Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; but whether either be TRUER absolutely, Heaven only knows. 

But my early line is drawn in sand. I want to measure it against our later texts, and wonder if the kinder and gentler-sounding scientism of Sagan will in fact play out all that differently. I wonder, too, if Flanagan's and James's and my versions of pluralism "defend experience against philosophy" as diligently as they should, if they aim to differentiate themselves sharply from Rosenberg's certitude.

As Richard Powers' Thassadit Amswar said, knowingly, in Generosity: I'll try not to decide more, yet, than God.

Or Darwin and Dawkins and Venter.