Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (b. 1954, Montreal) is a Canadian-American cognitive scientist and psycholinguist, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Trained in experimental psychology at McGill and Harvard, his early academic work concerned language acquisition, mental imagery, and the computational theory of mind (Language Learnability and Language Development, 1984; Learnability and Cognition, 1989; The Language Instinct, 1994). He later turned to broad syntheses of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007), defending a nativist, modular, computational account of mind against blank-slate, postmodern, and dualist alternatives.

Pinker is not a philosopher of religion, but he has become a prominent secular voice on the God question. In Enlightenment Now (2018) and Rationality (2021) he argues that secular humanism, science, and Enlightenment reason — not religion — underwrite moral and material progress, an argument extended from The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). He aligns with the so-called New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens), treating religion as a cognitive byproduct and an obstacle to progress.

Critics including John Gray, Jessica Riskin, Philip Dwyer, and David Bentley Hart contest his statistical optimism, his use of historical data, his reading of the Enlightenment, and his treatment of religion as epistemically and morally deficient. His scientism and selective historiography remain widely debated.