Zoologist Richard Dawkins claims to love his wife, but my research team doesn’t believe it. Dawkins has made verbal avowals that he loves her but we suspected his reporting was just the self-ascription of an epiphenomenal mental state—like breath on a window, no better than a subjective fancy, an illusion. Because in order to be true (by Mr. Dawkins own logic), it must accord with a physically verifiable state in the brain.
Being head of the research team, I approached the venerated scientist at a book signing. When he heard of our concerns, he chuckled at first—then went red with irritation when he discerned that we were serious and also had serious funding. We had massive funding,and we were going to do our study and publish it. When I told him it was just his own misguided theory that he loved her, he replied that I was a mad distorter, an abuser of terminology.
No matter. I pressed him further, quoting from one of his books where he mentions “love”. “Where does a scientist of your stature get off using mumbo-jumbo like this? Or the words ‘elegance’ or ‘beauty’ for that matter? Or ‘awe’? These are classic examples of metaphysical bullshit.”
He turned a darker crimson and a muscle flapped in his jaw. “Human value judgments in verbal communication create a social cohesion between us, assisting group and thus, many times, individuals’ survival.”
“Nice trick,” I answered. “You haven’t answered the criticism. To what do they tangibly refer? Deriving function and function alone from phenomena is like deriving an 'ought from an is,' as Hume said. You are saying that you use these statements as rhetorical flourishes to seduce your readers into a more ‘fit’ social cohesion? To get them to agree with your surrounding argument? To what are your uses of the words appealing? They’re meaningless assertions of emotive state and have no extrinsic reality. They are metaphysical avowals of yours, and thus without meaning—just as your claims that you love your wife.”
He rose, cracking his knuckles. “So what if they are?”
After a heated exchange in which the book event’s attendees instinctively backed off, creating ample space for about of fisticuffs that never quite materialized, he invited our team to observe his actions over a period of time. By doing so, he claimed, the evidence would sweep away our perverse objections.
We accompanied him for a week. We took voluminous notes, video documentations. We watched him cook for his wife.They laughed over wine. Cuddled. Argued. Et cetera.
After analyzing these field observations, we still could not rule out the viable possibility that he wasputting on a façade for our observational benefit—empirical observation, after all, being the bedrock of scientific method. It was also within the realm ofpossibility that he was just having a fling with a woman he claimed was his wife.
I told him this hypothesis at his house. Teeth clenched, he rummaged through a drawer and showed me the marriage certificate and photos taken over decades with her. “There you go, you twit. You can check with the Royal Exchequer and verify it.”
I departed. Afterward, the team gathered testimonies from his friends, who averred that Dawkins loved his wife.
But this “evidence” was also mere subjective reporting. It was hearsay, and anecdotal—and pictures in this day and age can be easily Photoshopped. We asked for the negatives—which we found had conveniently “disappeared from the attic, you prat, sorry”—and had analysis done on the pictures. The tests were inconclusive; there were possible photographic effects going on, the shadows didn’t match up exactly, etc.
Thus there was still no direct, measurable evidence.
I rang him the news. After several slams of the phone receiver upon what was sure to be a smart Victorian-age desktop, he howled that such a study must therefore be conducted over a long period of time to establish both that she was his wife and he in fact loved her. So, with his magnanimous and unexpected consent, we remedied this by installing surveillance cameras in his domicile.
For weeks our observations went on, then months. The eminent zoologist eventually forgot the cameras were there. We observed identical behavior over this period as we did in our previous field study. When he was not off on his speaking tours railing against people’s belief in invisible gardeners and blind watchmakers and decrying the trauma inflicted by religion or hammering away in his study, he cooked for his wife, and cleaned, they kissed, they went to the symphony, the pictures, etc.
We closely studied all this footage, and were led to the conclusion that he had ambivalent attitudes about her at best. Did the problem lie with our obstinate insistence that he was lying? Not at all: Rationally, there existed a dozen possible alternative explanations for his behavior. There was no compelling reason to believe the dominant theory that he did love his wife. Dawkins’s actions were dispositional, anyway; it was merely a tendency of his to do these things that produced impressions in his friends that he loved her. There was no “smoking gun” confirmatory bit of physical evidence—none that would withstand peer review, anyway. Further, we knew nothing of his former love life to compare this observed behavior against—how he treated his previous girlfriends, whether perhaps he actually loved one of them and he was only settling with his wife.
It was also rational to posit that he possessed no conception of what the rest of the world’s cultures commonly define as “love.” Or that the behavior we observed conformed to what may have been his entirely misunderstood subjective interpretation of that condition. Or that his perceptions of his wife may even have been a hallucination, and not conform at all to what we observed and recorded.
There also existed the possibility, faint though it was, that he may have been a “meat automaton” of some sort who had been programmed to make those empty proclamations by an alien force, or something even more nefarious—for example, a series of proteins that lurked within every cell of his body…And why should we believe a process as unnatural as that?
We did extensive research on his past. This took eight months, and a lot of hospital bills and bail monies. We concluded his present behavior with his wife was no different than it was with previous girlfriends—only that the façade has gone on longer.
Again I confronted him. After his fist whistled past my jaw, he composed himself and relented that convincing me was a futile endeavor. I was a madman, he shouted. He deigned to “enlighten what little shard of rationally” I had left to tell me that I should have an absolutely clear criterion of what love is, and then it shall be proven to me. Then the restraining order would kick in.
I showed him our previous research onlove that demonstrated inconclusively that it even existed in a scientific sense—but that the strongest material criteria was that it was comprised of a limited set of chemicals in the brain that were aroused in the presence of a certain person or object, with associated behaviors that ranged widely, from self-ascripted avowals to mortal self-sacrifice for that object’s welfare all the way to the beating of it to death with a hammer.
He sighed wearily and leaned on the shoulder of his scale plastic replica of Homo Neanderthal and averred that such a thing, by its nature as we defined it, was impossible to prove scientifically.
Impossible to prove scientifically—yet it exists? I retorted that, again, this placed his ascriptions of love for his wife on the same level as that of a person who avows being transformed by a Pleideian into a Nazi Sasquatch UFO pilot and back again. He was inevitably enraged by this riposte, and (after narrowly averted another whistling fist) I countered that there existed clinically measurable biological states that, consistent with our research, indicated the existence of “love” while in the presence of the “beloved.”
He adjusted his tie and agreed. There exist chemicals within the brain and body and neural pathways that could be tagged showing that the biological state indicated the case was true.
I said fine—we will hook you up to such machines, then. I revealed that we had possibility of leasing a newfangled “neuro-translator” that could render thoughts from Wernicke’s area of the brain visible on a screen, as both images and text. We could procure one of these advanced machines easily, for a one-shot $150,000 leasing fee from the Departmentof Homeland Security’s DARPA wing.
“Fine,” he croaked “—fine! Get on with it!”
And after this final test, he added, the cease-and-desist would definitely be filed.
We hooked him up and tested him for a week. When we examined the hard neurological data correlative to his avowals and daily actions, plus the machine’s related imagery and text, the team was dumbfounded. Dawkins couldn’t possibly love his wife, what with those ten thousand things wafting haphazardly through his noggin! During the presence of the telltale pheromones, hormones, dopamine and serotonin associated with “love” there appeared visual fragments of scenes from his life, taxonomic orders, faint stretches of prose, images of colleagues who irritated him and intellectual sparring partners alike. There were vivid memories of Gould, and Hitch, Dennett, other “Brights”—all of it in rapid kaleidoscopic succession.
His wife figured in about once every hundred images. He cannot love his wife if such a procession was going on, could he? Perhaps he loved Hitchens? Or Gould? Or the Piltdown Man—because that bogus guy got a lot of screen time.
There was no there there to identify as the object of his “love” chemicals and behavior—no signified in this mélange that could in turn clearly signify the object.
I showed him the results (in the presence of the Scotland Yard officials who would soon take me into custody) and announced that either we must do away with the concept of love entirely, or metaphysical conceptions beyond the reach of scientific quantification must be given new coin in the intellectual economy.
He whipped off his spectacles and snapped, “You will just have to take my word for it that it is real. When it comes down to it, there are certain things that science can be about, and others that it cannot. The condition of being in love is one of them that it cannot be about.”
“What of your famed critique of Gould’s two magisteria? The science/religion domain split?”
“Rubbish the two magisteria!”
I stepped back, looking for an implement in my defense—perhaps that Australopithecus jawbone on the desk. The Yardies tensed and stepped forward. “I must have to have faith in you that what you say is true.”
“Yes!”
“And you must have faith in your wife.”
“Yes!”
“And you must in turn have faith that I—and the rest of the world—believe the both of you.”
Dawkins was now the color of a telephone box. “Not necessarily, you twisted fruitcake—it’s only to the two of us that this matters, ultimately!”
I was surprised by this. “Suppose the two of you had mental experiences consistent with what the culture calls ‘seeing a UFO,’ or suffering a ‘time-slip to the 14th Century.’ Would something like this also count as something only the two of you should believe was real? Would you attempt to tell others and be prepared for the consequences as a scientist?”
He closed his eyes and dipped his head in exasperation, then nodded to the Yardies.
“Faith, professor—faith,” I managed as the bobbies closed in. “Blind bleeding faith. It’s more than just an advantageous strategy. In addition to having formal, functional properties, faith must have content. It possesses what philosophers call ‘intentionality.’ The content is not a chimerical ghost. It is also teleological in a sense that goes beyond your penurious fitness-survival criteria. The content is irreducible to a pragmatic framework such as you’ve retailed over the years.”
“Have fun in the stripey place. I know I will, out here.”
