Proud atheists

Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, America's brainiest couple, confess that belonging to one of America's most reviled subcultures doesn't mean they believe scientists can explain everything.

By Steve Paulson

Read more: Books, Christopher Hitchens, Books Features, Iraq War, Atoms and Eden

Oct. 15, 2007 | "I've always been obsessed with the mind-body problem," says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. "It's the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here."

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, "The Mind-Body Problem," Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she's drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She's also fascinated by history's great rationalist thinkers. She's written nonfiction accounts of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He's a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she's a philosopher who's taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America's brainiest power couples.

With a series of bestselling books on language and human nature, including "How the Mind Works," Pinker has emerged as his generation's most influential cognitive theorist. His work on the evolution of language, and how humans possess an innate capacity for language, revolutionized linguistics. His writing about the nature/nurture debate helped shift prevailing thinking away from seeing human nature as a blank slate.

Pinker and Goldstein share a basic philosophical outlook, but I discovered that their views diverge somewhat when it comes to the "science and religion" debate. In a wide-ranging joint interview, we talked about animals and language, atheism and astrology, Iraq and faith, and their most recent books, Goldstein's "Betraying Spinoza" and Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature."

Steve, do you think language is what makes our species unique? Is this the defining trait of human beings?

PINKER: It's certainly one of the distinctive traits of Homo sapiens. But I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. I think this triad -- language, social cooperation and technological know-how -- is what makes humans unusual. And they probably evolved in tandem, each of them multiplying the value of the other two.

You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect.

PINKER: That's right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the door open, we say, "John opened the door." If John opens the window and a breeze pushes the door open, we don't say, "John opened the door." We say something like, "What John did caused the door to open." We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on "Law and Order," where you have to figure out if the person who pulled the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the same model of causation.

I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an assassin's bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, "I just shot him. The doctors killed him." The jury disagreed and he went to the gallows. It's an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.

Rebecca, you've written a great deal about competing philosophical theories of language. Do you think our mind can function apart from language? Or does language define our reality?

GOLDSTEIN: Obviously, much of our thinking is being filtered through language. But it's always seemed to me that there has to be an awful lot of thinking that's done prior to the acquisition of language. And I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I'm thinking. So there's something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind.

As a novelist, this must be something you think about.

GOLDSTEIN: Very much so. My novels begin with a sense of the book, a sense of the place, and then I have to find the language that does justice to it. Strangely, I find that in my philosophical work as well. And in math; I've done a lot of math. I have the intuition, I'll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. So I've always had a keen sense that thought does not require language.

What do you make of the language studies of various animals -- for instance, the bonobo Kanzi, who's learned to piece together simple sentences by pressing lexigrams. Is that real language?

PINKER: It isn't a scientific question whether something is real language. That's really a question of how far you want to extend the word "language." I think the scientific question is: Are the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas who are trained by humans doing something that's fundamentally the same as what children are doing when they first acquire language? I suspect they are quite different. You need experimenters hell-bent on training chimpanzees, whereas with children, you can't help but acquire a language if you're a child in a human community. Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. And while it's impressive that chimps have been trained to learn a few dozen or even a couple hundred symbols or signs, the ability to combine them is quite rudimentary and forced.

You each dedicated your most recent books to each other, and I'm curious about how your relationship has influenced your work. You've both written about language and human nature, about religion and the power of reason. Do you talk about these things around the dinner table?

GOLDSTEIN: [Laughs.] Yes, there's no way around it. Our work spills over into our lives, and our lives spill over into our work.

PINKER: But that's not the only thing we talk about.

Would you say your common interests are partly what brought you together?

GOLDSTEIN: Oh yes, completely. Actually, we met through each other's work. I was a great fan of Steve's work. And then I discovered that he had cited me in one of his books. It was my unusual use of an irregular verb. So it was completely through our work and my tremendous interest in Steve's work that we first came to know each other. I don't know if I should say this, but when I first met Steve in the flesh, I said that the way he thinks had so completely changed the way I think -- particularly what I had learned from him about cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology -- that I said, "I don't think I've had my mind so shaken up by any thinker since [18th-century philosopher] David Hume." And he very modestly said, "That can't be the case." But it was the case. So I can certainly say that Steve has profoundly influenced the way I think.

PINKER: I've certainly been influenced by Rebecca as well. Our connection isn't just that we met through an irregular verb, which sounds like the ultimate literary romance of two nerds finding each other. [Goldstein laughs.] Rebecca as a philosopher is a strong defender of realism -- the idea that there is a real world that we can come to know --which emboldened me to press that theme in my own writings, even though people often say that we just construct reality through language. And the topic of consciousness -- how the mind emerges from the body, and what makes the three-pound organ that we call the brain actually experience things subjectively -- is a theme that runs through both my nonfiction and Rebecca's fiction and her philosophical writings.

Do you show each other your articles and books as you're writing them?

GOLDSTEIN: Yes, we've each seen each other's work in early drafts and in the final work. But this is the first time I've ever shared my work with anybody while it's happening. I'm very private about my work. So this has been a very new experience for me. Now I'm wondering how I ever wrote any books without having Steve read them.

Are you very open in your criticisms and suggestions about each other's work?

PINKER: Very much. But we're not brutal.

GOLDSTEIN: We can be brutal. [Laughs.] Sweetly brutal.

PINKER: But yes, we each say, "This isn't working. This joke isn't funny. I don't think your readers are going to understand what you're trying to get at here."

Next page: Do the authors of the new atheist books understand what it feels like to be a religious person?