Heading Towards a More Exact Understanding of Human Nature

Sometimes I’ve written entries which point to various scientific evidence that our soul-like characteristics are actually founded on matter and arise first of all, but not only, from such physical processes as hormonal flows or brain-cell activity. Soul-like characteristics seem to be matters of relationships rather than strictly of physical activity or physical states, so the hormonal flows that restructure a new mother’s behavior and perceptions work towards the benefit of her child. The hormonal flows and brain changes work to generate and strengthen maternal love.

It doesn’t bother me at all to think my stuff is ‘just’ the stuff of my body. It’s stuff that God made for His purposes. And, in its perfected form (think of the risen Christ), it’s sufficient for life without end as a companion to the Lord Jesus Christ. St. Thomas Aquinas had this to say about the relationship between a human being, his body, and his soul:

My soul [in Thomas the organ for thought] is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor is any man. [From the Commentary to 1 Corinthians 15 by St. Thomas Aquinas as quoted by Hannah Arendt in "The Life of the Mind" (page 43).]

Aquinas’ major mistake in regards to understanding human nature was thinking an immaterial entity was necessary for human (mostly abstract) thought, but he never made the mistake of placing core human attributes, which we share to some extent with other animals, in the soul. It is the physical man who loves, has faith, and has hope even if Aquinas thought those to be refined by association with the higher thoughts of the ‘soul’.

We’re creatures, embodied objects of God’s love. It bothers me not at all, surprises me not at all, to see growing empirical evidence indicating that our substance is that of our body and that, unlike even Aquinas’ moderate views, we probably are not some sort of pasting together of physical substance and some soul-stuff. It seems to me better to be this stuff that sits and types rather than some mysterious stuff with radically different properties than anything the biological me can even detect. Who would I be if I were not this flesh-and-blood me? My soul is not me. My soul is even less than St. Thomas thought. The soul is a set of aspects of this biological me, aspects coming from my relationships to God and my fellow-men and to this world created by God. And so, I retract my claim — my soul is part of me but it comes into being when the flesh-and-blood me responds actively to God and God’s Creation.

We shouldn’t be overly disturbed by the various scientific findings that tie us ever more tightly to this flesh-and-blood which is us. So, I’ll continue to make note of some of those findings, noting also that we do possess those aspects and characteristics which are considered by man to belong to the soul. In fact, we are heirs to a profound understanding of important aspects of human nature that was developed in the Bible, in the writings of Virgil and Shakespeare, in the music of Bach and Beethoveen. What we did was to fool ourselves into thinking that we have an invisible and undetectable substance that somehow controlled our flesh-and-blood substance. This was a dangerous understanding. Errors of such magnitude will always cause loss of faith in our human selves and even in our Creator when they’re seen as errors. Errors of this sort have likely played a role in the loss of faith in this age where we have good reason to know that science gives us certain kinds of truths and those truths which must be accepted on faith are presented by most Christians as being tied to ideas in conflict to those lesser but verifiable truths of science. Our children and neighbors will either think us to be crazy or lying.

Let me discuss a couple of recent empirical findings about human nature, starting with The right side of fair play:

Now, Daria Knoch and colleagues at the University of Zurich have discovered that this desire for justice is influenced by a small part of the brain – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or DLPFC – which constantly suppresses our more selfish urges.

Note that word ‘influenced’. Think also back to those poor sons or daughters of alcoholics who also had an overly strong taste for the elixir of life. When we’re concerned for another human being, we freely admit there is something to this inheritance of traits which have a bearing upon our behavior and characters but some of us are insulted when evolutionary biologists or geneticists say something similar. At the same time, we must remember We do have a substantial amount of moral freedom. It takes effort and patience and often a humble willingness to seek help for us to exercise proper moral control over our tendencies, but we can do much even when we lose the battle. With conscious awareness, we can sometimes overcome our selfishness, probably even when our DLPFC isn’t doing its job.

Some believe that we human beings are in a war of sorts against fallen souls when we’re actually in a struggle to discipline the different parts and aspects of our organic selves to higher moral standards. The explanations of evolutionary biology and the books of Moses are different but the reality is the same, even when it concerns male promiscuity as in this article: Of voles and men: exploring the genetics of commitment where we read

Love is all around us and love is in the air, and if I know my mainstream science reporters, today they will have you believe that love is in our genes too. A new report suggests that variation in a gene called AVPR1A has a small but evident influence on the strength of a relationship, the likelihood of tying the knot and the risk of divorce. It’s news for humans, but it’s well-known that the gene’s rodent counterpart affects the bonds between pairs of voles.

AND

Humans have our own version of the vasopressin receptor, with its very own unmemorable acronym – AVPR1A. Like its vole counterpart, it’s preceded by an important stretch of DNA that is rife with repetitive sequences. These are known as “repeat polymorphisms”; they are short genetic leitmotifs that vary in number from person to person. According to earlier research, these variations in this sequence can affect human behaviour and are linked to altruistic tendencies, the risk of autism and the age at which people first have sex.

We can now add the strength of relationships to that list.

BUT

Vasopressin is far [from] the only molecule involved in forming relationships, even in voles and there is still much we don’t know about the other players involved.

On the morning of June 7, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI “received participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which is being held in Rome from June 4-7 on the theme: Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy.” [Vatican Information Service press release of June 7, 2008.] I discussed this address in Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: Broadening the Horizons of Reason. In that address, Pope Benedict said:

Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.

What we are seeing in all these scientific research results is the empirical foundations of that more exact understanding of man. What we modern men need to do is to take these mountains of empirical knowledge, some of it so raw as to be facts or data and not yet knowledge, and make sense of it in light of our higher-level understandings of human nature and our small treasure of revealed truths, especially those which tell us of the relationship between creature and Creator. In an age where too many men are able to use modern empirical knowledge to more brutally exploit others or to simply kill them in large numbers, we have a chance to use this “more exact understanding of the nature of man” to do some good, to help us shape our own moral characters and those of our children. We have a chance to help us shape ourselves and our children to better serve God.

Restricting God’s Thoughts to Freshman Mathematics

[This entry has also been posted to my other blog, Acts of Being.]

Those who belong to that school of thought labeled Intelligent Design typically describe themselves as Christian, sometimes Jewish, and sometimes there is only an impression of a vague Theism. In any case, most of these thinkers would likely claim to believe in a Creator who is an all-powerful and all-knowing God. Yet, they think to understand the Lord’s work and His thoughts using what can be readily learned in less than two years of modestly difficult college work — a little calculus and some probability and statistics, a little chemistry and some astronomy and physics.

Do these thinkers imagine God’s thoughts and the possibilities open to Him as a Creator to be so limited? Math is hard. Physics is hard. Philosophy and literary studies are hard. Understanding God’s acts of Creation is all of that plus one hell of a lot harder. Anyone who thinks the Creator’s thoughts and acts can be understood by simply applying a few equations from Probability Theory 101 is deluding himself and insulting God.

Teaching Intelligent Design

Here’s a story about a new attempt to allow teaching of Intelligent Design and some other controversial hypotheses in public schools in Louisiana: New legal threat to school science in the US.

So far as I can tell, many of those trying to push Creationism or Intelligent Design into the schools are driven to do something irrational by legitimate fears for their children. From the 1960s on, many parents have seen that rapid societal and cultural changes had made it more difficult to raise children to be morally mature adults and to nurture some sort of faith in them. Many of those parents, and their friends at church and elsewhere, have felt their own beliefs under assault. Many scientists who don’t seem to be particularly harsh individuals, many other intellectuals of the sort which once appreciated at least in theory the problems of modern ‘alienation’, seem to have no sympathy for those who belong to particular cultures in a rapidly changing world, one where most changes work to increase activity of all sorts in the modern marketplaces and often by destroying that which is local and particular.

I advocate and will always advocate the idea that this world is part of God’s Creation and we honor our Creator by studying His world and trying to understand it in empirical terms. This includes what we we now call ‘science’ but also nearly all forms of organized knowledge gathering and analysis. But I sympathize with those who have good reason to fear some aspects of a world in which technical expertise is in far greater supply than wisdom, in which profits trump respect for the teachings of Grandpa and Grandma.

See Proving the Existence of Zeus for my position on Intelligent Design Theory.

See Debating Popular Intelligence Design for a good discussion of one of the major intellectual confusions behind those who accept the Creationist or Intelligent Design arguments.

Excluding the Hyperactive Amongst Us

See Did hyperactivity evolve as a survival aid for nomads? for another example of a human attribute that can be good or bad depending upon the context. I’ll provide a few quotes from the article:

The nomads’ active and unpredictable life centred on herding might benefit from spontaneity, says Ben Campbell, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, US, who was involved in the new study.

“If you are a nomad then you ought to be little more impulsive than if you are settled,” he says. “You should be a little quicker on the trigger.”

…

Why the mutation isn’t more common is a mystery, says Eisenberg. Another study found the impulsive variation in about 60% of native South Americans, but only 16% of Caucasian Americans. “It might be that there is a niche for a few people with more impulsive behaviour, but when there are too many of them those niches are filled,” he says.

…

The mutation “predisposes you to be more active, more demanding, and not such a pleasant person,” says Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, also in the US. “You probably do better in a context of aggressive competition.” In other words, in lean times, violent men may feast while passive men starve.

A number of years ago, I remember pondering the situation of some hyperactive boys and young men that I knew. I came to a conclusion similar to that of these scientists, but different. These young men were prone to misbehave in schools which expected of them an alien behavior, passive and quiet. Those young men also exhibited impulsive courage that made me realize that, if taught a proper discipline, they would be the ones who would, without hesitation, move to protect women or children or puppies. Not that men without hyperactive traits are incapable of courageous acts, but there’s at least a hesitation in the responses of most men, a period of evaluation and calculation. Sometimes it’s better to calculate and move with deliberation and sometimes it’s better to move without hesitation. Society might be well served by a mixture of men who calculate and men who move without hesitation.

I also saw that some of those boys and young men with hyperactive characteristics proved themselves more than willing to accept a certain sort of harsh discipline, that of the Marine Corps or martial arts. Though we manage to sometimes turn hyperactive boys and young men into sociopaths of a sort — at least when they grow up in certain unstructured setttings, they might actually serve the needs of communities by being willing to move without thinking.

Modern society, at least in Europe and North America, has been dominated by a middle-class with rather gentle manners, well-behaved in face of any authority and not just an authority which shows itself deserving of respect (such as Marine drill sergeants). We seem to assume that the ideal human being is one of these creatures who so obligingly fills slots in the workplaces of the modern world and then goes to buy what is offered in the well-organized, sanitary marketplaces. We don’t know how to deal with those human beings who can’t or won’t fit into their allowed slots and behave as expected. We don’t know how to use the full range of human attributes and seem to be blind to the advantages of having impulsively courageous men.

We are Also Outside of Us

Changing the colors of a bird in the most superficial and artificial way can change its hormone levels and make it a more aggressive breeder. (See Feather Colors Affect Bird Physiology, Barn Swallows Show.)

When John Henry Newman entered the Catholic Church, he gave up his comfortable living as an Anglican priest and accepted poverty. He moved to Birmingham to, among other accomplishments, found a school for poor children. One of his first acts was to spend most of his small stock of funds to buy new dresses for the girls who would be attending the school. Undoubtedly, he anticipated good results in self-esteem when those girls received, in most cases, the first pretty, new dress of their lives. How deep do such changes go? We don’t yet know but we should be very careful to work for the best and to fear the worst when we raise children or even when we set our own ways of living and thinking.

When I was young, most Americans still had the traditional middle-class habit of ensuring that each child had decent clothes for school (maybe a couple pairs of khakis and a couple sports-shirts for boys) and also a set of Sunday ‘church-going’ clothes (if only a modest blue blazer and pair of gray slacks from Sears for a boy).

Let me zag a little now that I’ve zigged. When I was reading about grizzly bears years ago, in preparation for an important scene in a novel, I learned that wildlife biologists had verified that Rocky Mountain grizzlies, especially the males, had been so big in the 19th century as to seem a different species from their 20th century descendants. Their speculation was: mother grizzlies could manipulate the genes of the young in their womb (not consciously of course), sending the message, “Grow big, son, we’re the dominant species” or maybe, “Be more modest in your growth, son, because there’s a dangerous species taking our territory and food.”

I’m simplifying in a somewhat grotesque manner to make a point, which is: we, that is — our bodies, can’t be something which isn’t a possibility in our genes, but our genes give ranges of possibilities rather than locking us into one set pattern of development. Our genes aren’t just a set response to our ancestors’ environment but rather a set of responses to some finite but perhaps wide-ranging set of possible environments. Ultimately, genes work through our bodies to help enable various possible relationships with our environments including our parents and siblings and friends, and also relationships with God’s Creation in its greater aspects. The inner changes and outer changes in these sorts of processes are intertwined and this statement holds also for the evil versions of these changes which can create serial rapists as one example. Dress your children like respectable human beings and it may well have a real effect on their attitudes and habits and ways of thought. Dress your children like a street gangster and you should let your fears run wild.

Sin and Survival

In reading a short article on the web about bears rubbing against trees (it’s marking by both males and females and not scratching a different itch), I saw a comment about females marking partly to protect their young: a male bear will sometimes kill a female’s young to bring a mother back into heat and mate with her.

Behavior of that sort is truly ‘sometimes’ even for bears which are typically one of the less social of social mammals — especially the males and most especially the big males who need lots of food and wander over large territories. Still, I’ve read articles by wildlife biologists who have observed males socializing with cubs while the mother looks on without objecting.

Yet, brutal behavior remains a factor, behavior that I would call immoral even for non-human social mammals. This leads towards a very difficult problem, one not handled well by any view of evolution that I’m aware of:

Some of our less desirable instincts and tendencies were necessary for the survival and reproductive success of our ancestors. A male who left more young left more young even if he did it by occasionally killing the young of another male.

This is a real problem for mainstream Christian interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve and, in general, for mainstream Christian understandings of human nature. Put a bit simplistically:

If our ancestors had been sinless, they wouldn’t have survived, or at least wouldn’t have left as many descendants as their nastier neighbors.

Most modern Christians claim to accept some version of evolutionary theory and accept that we share common ancestor with the chimpanzee, a creature capable of as much nastiness as a man. Presumably, that ancestor was as nasty as his two major descendants. At what point in the evolution of humanity would we expect a ‘sinless’ Adam and Eve to have arisen? From nasty animal to sinless ancestors of all men to fallen man? Not plausible.

A real problem for those who think our ancestors were some sort of sinless Platonic archetypes who fell into a state of sin by their own (culpable) fault. In fact, the evidence is growing that we were born into a world, a phase of Creation, which is a battleground between order and disorder. We are creatures born as true citizens of this world.

Is this viewpoint in conflict with the story of Adam and Eve, with the Bible as a whole? As most Christians understand that story and that book, yes. However, my reading of the story of Adam and Eve would lead me to believe it wasn’t a story of a fall into a state of sin but rather a story of an awakening of man into an awareness of his state. Try reading those chapters in the book of Genesis and the following chapters giving the ‘genealogy’ of human technology — the founding of cities and crafts and so forth. Read those verses and keep your mind open. Do you really find anything supporting those many sermons and homilies and books of theology about the fall of Adam and Eve? Or was it a moral awakening which occurred in conjunction with a sudden awareness of at least divinity if not of the true God?

What We Can All Learn from Mennonite Political Teachings

I’ve learned what I know of Mennonite beliefs from the books of John Howard Yoder, specifically The Christian Witness to the State, The Politics of Jesus, and When War is Unjust. The last book is actually his effort to explicate Catholic just-war theory in as rational a form as possible and I’ll deal with that in another entry.

For now, I wish to emphasize a criticism that Professor Yoder first directed at some of his fellow Mennonites: their political views have been corrupted (my term) by a flavor of modern liberalism and don’t correspond with the views traditionally taught by Mennonites. Those traditional Mennonite views are very similar to those taught by Quakers in the early generations of that faith though modern-day Quakers seem to me to be also corrupted by that same flavor of modern liberalism. The traditional Mennonite view, at least according to Yoder’s analysis starts with this truth which any Christian should believe:

A Christian’s primary public duty is to witness to the Lord Jesus Christ and to His Good News and this is tied to his moral duty to follow Christ’s teaching in his own behaviors, private and public.

As stated, I think most Christians would hesitate to deny this view. Unfortunately, this is where the hard work of begins and many avoid the work of determining what it is they’ve been taught in their tradition, whether it’s correct, and what it means for them personally. American Catholics and Protestants tend, in my opinion, to work to secure safety and comfort and social respectability before devoting some energies to hopeless efforts to reconcile anti-Christian behaviors with subjective Christian beliefs. Professor Yoder wouldn’t be likely to use the term ‘public duty’, choosing instead to get right to the core of public duty: political duty. Thus it is that he points out correctly and clearly that a Christian is a witness to the state. But, as he understands it, this is an overly simple view. As a convert to the Catholic Church, I would suggest that we first need to learn how to witness to our family-members and neighbors, our fellow-parishioners and even our clergymen. He may have missed this need just because he grew up in a community bound by both faith and family-ties whereas most Catholic and Protestant Americans have been willing to leave behind faith and family to the extent necessary to prosper in the modern fascist economy and polity. I confess I have failed to properly witness even those I love without confusing or antagonizing some of them. Sometimes I simply have not the courage to stand before the tide. Then again, we have to choose our battles and pray the Holy Spirit will let us know when the time has come.

Priests, Ministers, Monkeys, and Truth

If I were to speak of my main goal in my work at this website and my other website, Acts of Being, I would say this:

I’m trying to build a vocabulary and stock of concepts that would allow Christians to speak truthfully to the greatest extent allowed by our current stock of knowledge (early in the 21st century).

Recently, I heard a homily by a new priest. While wishing to remain respectful of a man with some very good qualities, I have to say I was horrified at the way he dealt with a situation. He was speaking of a young girl who came to him and announced sadly, “Somebody told me we’re descended from monkeys and that means we’re no good,” or words to that effect. His response, as far as I understood his incoherence at that point, was to tell her she wasn’t descended from monkeys.

I could have been listening to a fundamentalist preacher who’d stepped out of the pages of a Flannery O’Connor novel. That’s not all bad. One of the points she was making in her novels was: those fundamentalist preachers had remembered some truths (such as the all-encompassing demands of faith) which had been forgotten by more liberal clergymen as well as by the skeptics of our age. Admitting that, I’d say that a Catholic priest should be educated well enough to realize that we are descended from monkeys (and also to know that St. Augustine admitted the possibility of a descent from some non-human species back in The City of God, 1400 years before the birth of Darwin). It’s the duty of a faithful clergyman, Protestant or Catholic, to deal truthfully and openly with the world as God made it and to be able to understand that world and the Biblical messages as part of the same story.

Could Adam and Eve Have Made Christ Unnecessary?

The answer is: Christ’s self-sacrifice was necessary to save us, to make us true companions of God. No action by any human being could have changed that fact. No action by any human being could have reduced our dependence upon the work of Jesus Christ. In the sense of needing salvation in Heaven, no possible creature could be saved by some sort of natural grace because God has to act to make that creature suited for life in a radically different phase of Creation. The Almighty has to act to purify and raise that creature before it can be happy sharing His life.

There are many who would claim to believe that we need Christ to save us and then they go on to claim the Bible tells us that Adam and Eve were created in a state of grace the same as the state of the saved who belong to Jesus Christ. Then, as the story goes, the snake seduced grace-filled Eve into an act of disobedience to God and she, in turn, brought grace-filled Adam into that state of disobedience. A careful reading of the third chapter of the book of Genesis might lead to the suspicion that we’re reading the story of Adam and Eve through interpretive lenses and not simply accessing a clear and obvious understanding of that strange story.

The story of Adam and Even is presented in a mythical form and apparently borrows much of its content from the heritage the Hebrews shared with the various pagan traditions of the Near East. To treat it as if it were presented as literal truth is, among other errors, to do great injustice to the treatment of the story of Jesus Christ in the four Gospels. Some might think that the entire Bible should be raised to the level of the Gospels in the sense of historical reliability and truth-bearing capacity, but the real effect is likely to drag the Gospels down to the level of the books of the Bible which are intended as myths or allegories which teach a lesson of some sort rather than relating historical facts which carry their own direct truth.

That story of our mythical ancestors also has an edge to it. God Himself isn’t presented in the best possible light. The all-knowing Creator is presented as being surprised by actions of His creatures. He seems to be defeated, at least in the short-term, by the snake and can do no more than promise a decisive counter-attack at some vague time in the future. Moreover, God seems unreasonable in punishing Adam and Eve for not meeting expectations that might well have been beyond human capabilities.

Something is wrong with that story of Adam and Eve or perhaps something is wrong with our interpretations of that story.