Adam Gopnik writes that the argument between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris “is worth having”—and “in some sense it’s the only argument worth having.”

Adam Gopnik, writing in an aside in the New Yorker, says that the argument between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris “is worth having”—and “in some sense it’s the only argument worth having.”

That stunned me. It’s pretty darn categorical. Gopnik is usually a quite subtler thinker and gifted writer. Indeed, he is one of my favorite stylists.

According to Gopnik, Dennett’s and Harris’s opposing positions on the free will debate represent two differing options secular materialists have in place of faith. They both “reject superstition and the supernatural, but end in radically different places,” with one side “accepting that the materialist view of the world without inherent meaning can produce only fatalism,” and the other side saying, “it can give us the great if ambiguous gift of freedom.” A marvelous insight as usual with Gopnik, but just slightly cockeyed. It is rather that Dennett attempts to saddle Harris with said fatalism, but both men see their differing materialism in positive terms. There is no representative of the ugly position defended by “Lui” in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, which was part of the ostensible occasion for Gopnik’s article.