Philosophical treatise ranks Robinson among the brightest

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | April 6, 2010

Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead, was the book that launched a thousand Christian book clubs. Her new book, Absence of Mind, from Yale University's Terry Lectures, might not resonate with the Gilead audience, but it reveals the deep intellect and wisdom behind the novel.

The title refers to what Robinson argues is missing from modern thought: the mind, the individual subjective experience of perception and reflection. Science, she says, has leapt from biology, theory and real science to "parascientific" statements of faith. It has reduced the mind and all that we experience and think to a brain, a lump of complex, evolved flesh that we, as individuals, are unqualified to speak of meaningfully. Science knows us better than we can know ourselves, say the pundits of parascience, so we can't trust our own sense of who we are.

Parascience, Robinson says, grew out of 19th century positivism. She discusses Auguste Comte as an early progenitor of parascience, moves to Freud, whose ideas have been largely discredited but whose influence remains prevalent, and then to contemporary parascience writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and E. O. Wilson. All of them, she says, use the language of science to claim legitimacy for their inconsistent, non-scientific statements of faith about what it means to be human.

For example, Robinson posits, science has never meaningfully and consistently made any real sense of altruism. Parascience tells us that we cannot trust our experiences of feelings like love, generosity and courage nor actions that reflect those feelings. It can all be explained by science. But that leap from real science to faith-in-science is an intellectual sleight of hand, and like any good trick, it's hard to notice. Not so fast, says Robinson, who wants to put science in its place and restore the wonder and mystery of the subjective experience.

Beneath the complex philosophical argument, Robinson makes a profound defence of the Imago Dei and of love. This book resounds with wisdom, passion and prophetic anger. She wants to wrest our souls back from the overreaching claims of science and remind us of the ancient wisdom of the poets: life is a miracle.

This is a book of dense philosophy from a brilliant novelist with a poet's ear. It is stunning. It places Robinson among the very brightest of Christian history's thinkers and writers. She levels the contemporary intellectual playing field, raising up the profound humanism of Christian belief and putting parascience in its place. It is a sound, passionate, thorough Christian apologetic. I cannot praise it too highly.