Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker

All the methods are pressed into the service of two ideals, and it is these ideals that advocates of science want to export to the rest of intellectual life. The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are deeper than the phenomena themselves. That’s why scientists laugh at the Theory of the Brontosaurus from the dinosaur expert on Monty Python’s Flying Circus: “All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end”—the “theory” is just a description of how things are, not an explanation of why they are the way they are. The principles making up an explanation may in turn be explained by still deeper principles, and so on. (As David Deutsch put it, “We are always at the beginning of infinity.”) In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions on which we are forced to concede, “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.” The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of raw faith, but progressively validates itself as more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules.