Two new pieces for students of science and theology. Cardinal Schönborn’s third catachesis on creation has been translated into English, and there is this article in the Washington Post, which provides an excellent survey of the various reasons why people have become involved in the ID debate. As a number of people have begun to observe, there are at least two different issues at stake: the scientific validity of evolution, and its implications. I’m not particularly interested in the first of those questions, in part because I’m thoroughly convinced by the Darwinian model, and in part because I suspect a lot of the issues people have with the scientific question stem from their concern with its implications. I realize that people do have genuine issues with the science, and it would be dishonorable to accuse them of not having wrestled with their own biases. The important thing is that such criticism must play by the rules, and the rules of science are that you can’t invoke agency. Once you do that, as Schönborn observes, you have moved beyond science into philosophy.

At one point it was thought that science would replace philosophy. That position has proven to be incoherent, in the first place because that view itself, which has gone by the names of empiricism, positivism, and scientism, is itself a philosophical position, and one that cannot be verified scientifically. It is one of those statements that, if it is true, is unprovable. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates that such statements invariably exist in closed systems, and positivism is a closed system because it begins with a definition of what is and is not acceptable as evidence. In the second place, modern physics has come to the conclusion, as the Post article notes, that there are some properties of the physical world that are simply unknowable.

This is not to say, of course, that science should give up the field to philosophy. Science tells us true things about the world, and its truth must inform our views of our selves and of things larger than ourselves. Unfortunately many people have given up on this view of science, either because they no longer believe in the existence of truth, or because they find science (and the opinions scientists pass off as science) at odds with their own experience. Science becomes nothing more than the producer of technical marvels, a factory for iPods and cures for disease. What is missing is a connection with nature, not only that of the external world but our own as well. We are reasoning creatures, and if we fail to understand something when we are in fact capable of understanding it, we become unable to use its best aspects and enslaved to its worst.

If we are to avoid becoming superstitious we must face up squarely to the truth, even if it seems to destroy something valuable. The truth that confronted Darwin is the material and biological basis of human existence. We are made of matter, and we come into existence as the result of genes, genes which we share with the rest of life, and which cause us to be constructed in ways that give us certain abilities but also predispose us to certain weaknesses. Moreover, those genes came into existence through a long and bloody process of elimination. Darwin was a deeply religious man, and he seemed to rejoice in how beautiful it is to be so closely related to other living things, but he was also aware of how close evolution brings us to the cruelty of nature as well.

It is important to realize that this problem of the cruelty of nature is not new with Darwin. Even though evolution seems to require a great deal of death and suffering on the part of less fit creatures, this is not a function of evolution as such, but simply a consequence of living in an environment that not only feeds its inhabitants but consumes them. For every Darwin horrified by such death there is a Whitman who sees its beauty. The Galapagos did not square with Darwin’s image of God, but we must ask if there is not something wrong with that image. If the truth of evolution requires discarding the image of God as some large, benevolent teddy bear with no conception of suffering, so much the better. Those who worship that idol are blind to the sufferings of those around them.

The real problem that evolution presents to us is not about the nature of God, but about the nature of Homo sapiens. The genetic basis of life makes it impossible to deny that we share our nature with that of the animals. Anyone who has experienced the love of an animal will realize that this is hardly a bad thing. It is a tremendous pleasure to watch the love animals give each other as well; when I watched The March of the Penguins I found myself proud to be related to those birds. But by the same token it is sobering to see animals kill each other, and I suspect that the real problem people have with evolution is not what it indicates about God but what it indicates about us. There is a great temptation to deny our relationship with the animal kingdom. The desires we share with animals are frightening and often lead us to commit great harm to each other.

Science tells us that genes determine our physical form, including that of our brains, and that our minds are, to quote Steven Pinker, what our brains do. It seems inevitable that we should be completely at the mercy of our animal nature, and yet we know there are higher goods: justice, truth, and mercy, to name a few. In light of that there is a tendency to say that we are not really animals, and indeed not really matter at all. Ever since Descartes philosophy has tried to do an end run around the problem by dividing the world into a physical universe and a subjective universe, but the idea is much older than that, going back to gnosticism and Plato. Functionally speaking, most people are gnostics: they accept what science says about the physical world, but imagine they have a sort of diplomatic immunity with respect to it. Ultimately their conceptions of good and evil become partitioned along those lines, with matter and its constraints evil, and subjective desires and experiences good. This allows them to define themselves however they like, blaming all their bad tendencies on matter or its various manifestations, usually other people.

Gnosticism, as I asserted before, disconnects people from nature, leading us to treat it as something to be exploited, and leaving us at the mercy of our weaknesses. Yet it seems impossible to maintain the existence of the soul – and the higher goods – without resorting to it. But this is not the case, and you don’t have to take my word for it. In the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas we find a view of the soul that is totally consistent with the findings of modern biology, permitting us to cherish and understand our animal natures while loving those higher goods, without which we would not be human. Aquinas derives much of his natural science from Aristotle, so it is important to understand that for the ancients, causality was understood not simply in the sense of physical laws – one billiard ball hitting another, say, or one quantum state evolving into another – but also in terms of an agent pursuing a goal. To our ears this language can often sound hopelessly anthropomorphic, especially when describing natural events, but conversely our own language of causality would seem hopelessly limited to them, incapable of describing the world of human artifacts. Take a hammer, for example. What is its cause? In the Aristotelian framework, the cause of a hammer is what the person who made it intended it to do. That act (hammering) results in the composition of the particular hammer (out of materials that suit it to the act) as well as its resemblence to all other hammers (i.e. the form of the hammer). Aristotle’s great realization was that the act (hammering) is the form (of the hammer). You can almost think of an Aristotelian form as its industrial counterpart – a sort of matrix into which matter is poured – except that the material composition of the hammer is part of that matrix as well. It might matter which type of wood was used for the handle, but it doesn’t matter whether it was this tree or the other tree, so long as the sorts of hammers you made out of either tree were substantially the same (that is, able to perform the same act). Aquinas realized that this pertains to humans as well. For him, the soul is the form of the body. The material causes of a particular human (parents, genetic history, neurophysiology) matter because they contribute to the form of that person. But the form itself derives from that person’s purpose, from the single act that is his or her existence, and that purpose ultimately comes from God. It’s a mistake to think of the soul as some sort of immaterial ghost attached to a body at some point. The Catholic Church’s contention that each soul is a special creation does not, to my thinking, imply that at all. As Andro observed to me, it’s a mistake to think of that creation as happening in time at all. Rather, what Aquinas’s view of the soul means is that every human being, as such, blood, genes, and all, has a particular purpose, for which no other human is interchangeable.

It is an interesting question whether other animals, as individuals, have souls, or whether Nature itself has one. My own suspicion is that in a certain sense we can give animals souls by loving them and receiving their love. The same may well apply to life forms that we cause to evolve in computers.

(cdm | TheMaterialSoul)