Why do we resist changes in our beliefs about our selves, the world around us, and our relationship to God? Americans in particular, for all our claims to honesty about facts and our claims to have a hardheaded respect for reality, find it difficult to accept empirical evidence that we’re not quite the creatures we think ourselves to be, that the universe isn’t nearly the place our ancestors thought it to be.
Why do so many seem to recoil, for example, from the possibility that the immaterial parts of a human being are inalienable from the material parts evolving over the millions of years, evolving further over the millenia-length lifetimes of civilizations, and then developing in particular forms over lifetimes? Often, I’ve heard claims that it’s hard to believe in such a ‘materialistic’ view of the human being, which seems to reduce mind-like and soul-like aspects to ‘mere’ material aspects. My response would be simply, “We won’t understand any aspects of human nature until we understand the bodily foundations.” Just acknowledge the basic facts, then learn a bit of what physicists and mathematicians have discovered about the nature of being and of abstractions. Then, we’ll be able to speak intelligently about immaterial aspects of being, such as relationships. I’ve found no need to wave hands and speak of mysterious entities attached to human beings once I began to understand modern empirical knowledge, once I brought down my barriers against the reality of God’s Creation. Aquinas told us to do that centuries ago, to learn the wisdom of God by studying the creatures of God, but even Catholics who claim to highly honor him have no real understanding of his basic claims, of his methodology endorsed by Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Aeterni Patris, choosing instead to turn his speculative arguments into revelations of unimpeachable truths. To many Catholics, being ‘Thomistic’ means that we pronounce his conclusions about God’s Creation, based upon empirical knowledge circa 1340, to trump any conflicting conclusions based upon somewhat more recent empirical knowledge.
Take, for example, the soul. The loss of an entity we can’t see or hear or detect would seem to be little more than the loss of an entity which filled in some gaps in our knowledge. We have filled in those gaps in recent centuries with better and more complete knowledge of time and space and matter and of abstractions tied to physical reality. We have learned a lot by studying God’s Creation in disciplined ways and we have learned that the stuff of this physical universe has properties which fill in those gaps in a more natural way. If you wish, you can even think of matter as being frozen ‘soul-stuff’, but it’s better to simply acknowledge that modern science has taken the ancient idea of the ‘soul’ from us. Modern science has also given to us the opportunity to re-unite our mind-like or soul-like aspects with our embodied and particular natures. In other words, unlike Plato and perhaps Aristotle, unlike even Aquinas, we have ways of understanding our mind-like and soul-like aspects in terms of our human bodies. We have the possibility of seeing our human natures in a more unified way by grounding our mind-like or soul-like aspects upon our bodily natures. This opportunity is tied to the contingent nature of not only our particular universe, but also its fundamental structures of time and space and matter. We have discovered in the past century or so that it’s not just life but the universe itself that has developed from a vague and chaotic state to its current specific and somewhat organized state. What we’ve learned about the evolution of life fits in with those more fundamental discoveries about time, space, matter, and the nature of the abstractions which form many of our thoughts. The universe is consistent across its parts, stars evolving much like chemical processes do on the surface of at least one planet, some of those processes becoming self-sustaining life and some not.
Some would hold on to traditional ideas without even daring to reconcile them with modern knowledge of God’s Creation. These men take the technology and reject the knowledge underlying that technology, choosing to believe many fantastic things that were plausible in earlier centuries but no longer. They simply ignore inconvenient possibilities and even inconvenient facts of the most obvious sort and remain wedded to the ideas which were pushed into their heads when they were young.
Others can accept the technology and also the underlying knowledge — to the extent it helps them to break free of those aspects of moral and political and social traditions which they find inconvenient. This shows in those who would use evolution and other matters of modern knowledge to attack traditional religious beliefs but can somehow miss seeing that convenient knowledge is tied to politically inconvenient knowledge about such matters as genetic differences in ethnic groups which have evolved in different environments and as a result of different responses of their ancestors to those environments.
This ability to accept only an edited version of our knowledge of reality was first noticed, so far as I know, in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and was also discussed by Solzhenitsyn in the forward to the abridged version of The Gulag Archipeligo. Various writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hermann Melville, and Ray Bradbury have also discussed forms of intellectual or moral psychosis in essays, such as Hawthorne’s introduction to the first edition of The Scarlett Letter, or displayed such behavior in novels, such as Moby Dick and The Confidence Man by Melville and Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury. Like Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, we can say our means are sane, it’s our ends — including our understanding of what it all means — which are insane. In Christian terms, we know how to confirm our opinions against all evidence but we don’t know how to listen to God speaking through His Creation. Most believe that we have truth in our minds, while I believe that we are born with basic mental abilities which can shape themselves to truths found in God’s Scripture and in His Creation, but only if we direct ourselves to such a task.
What seems interesting to me is my optimistic view of the possibilities of the human mind. I’m optimistic just because of my view of the human being as a peculiar sort of ape which evolved by natural processes in this physical universe. Because our minds have evolved at the species level and then have developed at the individual level, we can encapsulate knowledge — even wisdom — found in a Creation far greater than we are. We can learn to think as our Creator thinks. Our minds can be, in a sense, the entirety of Creation rather than simply what lies inside our skulls. Natural processes have brought about a set of mental capabilities which are retrospectively understandable and also remarkably powerful. Those mental capabilities are totemic in men who are hunters-gatherers, allowing men to put themselves in the place of the animals they hunt, imagining themselves to be fleeing human hunters and anticipating the actions of those animals. In a sense, our minds haven’t changed in fundamental ways, but the modern mind has shaped itself, in some, to knowledge of a greater Creation while that early mind was shaped to knowledge of a local environment of, say, deer and blueberry bogs. While our ancestors imagined themselves to be that mammoth fleeing them, a more recent human being named Albert Einstein imagined himself to be moving along with a ray of light or traveling in various accelerating or non-accelerating elevators. The second set of imaginings were possible because Einstein’s ancestors had evolved the capabilities of anticipating the actions of animals. In both cases, the human mind functioned well just because it was, so to speak, sent out to encounter a reality greater than we can find inside ourselves — until that very reality is encapsulated in our minds.
To accomplish such feats of imagination or the bodily feats of an athlete, the brain needs interfaces to the external environments and to the other parts of the same body, regions of the brain which hold those models of our bodies or models of our greater selves which exist across spans of time and space. Those mental processes have allowed a ‘self’ to come into being by way of brain activities which are being researched intensely.
Most of us have seen pictures of a homunculus in our brain, reflecting the nervous system resources devoted to specfic bodily regions, so that fingers are outsized on that little human being in our brain, more so in a concert pianist or a watchmaker. The brain shifts resources if we lose our sight so that our hearing and touch become more important. When that happens, that cartoonish fellow in our brains loses his eyes and grows elephant ears and still larger fingers. That cartoonish fellow is our main contact with our physical environment and not just a funny drawing in books about the brain.
There’s a far more complex and more mysterious process occuring in the human brain which I’ll describe for now as a modeling of the self as an entity with a somewhat continuous existence in smaller or greater regions of time and space, depending upon the culture and the individual. We construct ourselves and those constructions are us to our conscious awareness because those constructions are the interfaces between our embodied selves and other parts of reality. This isn’t a doctrine of solipsism but rather one of a creature born into and adapted to a world of developmental processes, a world in which evolution of a family line and development of an individual occur as a result of lucky or unlucky, effective or ineffective, responses to opportunities and dangers. Our animal awareness and our self-awareness are interfaces between physical and cultural reality and our bodies and our more abstract selves.
See Staking Your Faith on Gaps in Empirical Knowledge for a short discussion of the way in which we form our sense of self in light of fairly recent discoveries that some, perhaps all, out-of-body and near-death experiences, are seemingly caused by disruptions to those systems which construct our senses of ‘self’.
I’ll interject a warning here, one based upon other recent discoveries about the brain which I’ve discussed a number of times in my blog entries. Research indicates our embodied selves often make decisions, at least certain types of easily studied decisions, before the regions of the brain associated with self-conscious regions become active. This indicates to me that our self-consciousness has little to do with our current lives. I think our self-consciousness plays a major, potentially dominant, role in shaping our greater beings and their actions for the future. That ‘self-conscious’ self isn’t the human being, but rather a part of the human being. In a simplistic but useful way, I could say the ‘self-conscious’ self is a set of brain processes which serve certain needs of the human being.
The human mind evolved in specific settings, starting with that general setting we know as our immediate physical reality. Even some of the most fundamental truths built into our brains are not necessary truths but rather truths dependent upon certain contingent properties of our empirical world. For example, young infants show a strong belief in the continuity of the existence of physical objects. Such a belief has to be qualified in a scientifically advanced society. Nuclear physics, gravitational theory, quantum mechanics, evolutionary theory and various other theories of self-organizing systems and selectional processes, have all cast doubt upon the stability or even the continuity of existence of material entities or even entire classes of entities. The large degree of continuity of existence we observe is actually due to our position as short-lived, medium-sized creatures in a fairly cool but not frigid universe.
Yet, our experience of the continuity of existence is real and was real to our ancestors. Brain processes assuming such a reality allow us to avoid reasoning each time about the likelihood that cliff in front of us will still be there when we return this way next year. Our belief in the continuity of existence of most things is so strong an instinct that even death was seen as something to be explained away. We think our selves must surely have existence beyond death. In early stages of the evolution of the human mind, there even seems to be a belief in some sort of life after death for the animals a hunter kills and eats. Hunters in many cultures will pray for forgiveness to the spirits of that animal.
Those beliefs in life after death weren’t irrational, even if the motivations seem obscure to modern thinkers, but we need new ways of thinking about the human race, about the individual human being, about death, about the human mind, about the possibilities of life after death. We need to honestly confront the modern empirical knowledge that indicates rather strongly we humans are the result of billions of years of evolution, that the foundations of human nature are flesh and blood. We Christians in particular need to take the knowledge which comes from studying God’s Creation and make sense of it in light of our Christian faith.
We can do that because our minds, being open and creative responses to at least some significant part of Creation, are not bound by the limitations of the present ideas of the human self and what it can be aware of, what it can know. If we could somehow see our ancestors walking around the plains of Africa 100,000 years ago, it’d be hard to guess from their behavior that they would give rise to creatures which could fly to the moon, could probe the secrets of nature, could travel into the abstract regions of greater and greater infinities, could explore forms of narration not strictly limited by ordinary human sense of time and space, could even become aware of a transcendent God. The facts of the matter lead to a narrative explanation in which human accomplishments are possible just because the human mind is an evolved entity which seeks the only true sort of understanding for a creature — an ability to take in the world around that creature so that fundamental aspects of reality become basic components of thought and more complex aspects are constructed from those basic truths by proper forms of reasoning. Those forms of reasoning are themselves derived from our inborn mental capabilities shaped by our responses to various sorts of experiences.
We oppose the idea that the human race has evolved and is part of a physical system of evolution and development because we wish to hold on to an idea of a more stable and more permanent self. We insist on seeing our ‘true’ selves as existing above the flux of events, because other possibilities, more in tune with our current empirical knowledge, are psychologically threatening to us. We want our thinking processes to have absolute validity. We want ourselves, once born, to have absolute existence. Consequently, we reject, in various ways, more reasonable understandings of the human race which indicate such views of ourselves are irrational.