Is There Purpose in Biology?  The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. By Denis Alexander,

Chapter 1: The Historical Roots of Purpose in Biology

We are reviewing the book: Is There Purpose in Biology?  The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. By Denis Alexander.  Chapter 1 is The Historical Roots of Purpose in Biology.  Alexander thinks, and I agree, it is most always useful to examine the historical roots of an idea; to put it in perspective and realize how ideas develop through culture and history.  Of course “biology” is the combination of two Greek words bios, life, and logos, the study of—or the discourse about.  In earlier centuries the “study of life” would have been part of “natural history” as distinguished from “natural philosophy”, which was deemed, until the 17^th century, to be superior because it provided causal and logical demonstrations while natural history was merely descriptive.  The word biology itself doesn’t appear until the 18^th century Swedish natural philosopher, Carl Linnaeus, famous for his classification system of plants and animals, used it. 

By the late 19^th century science was becoming more professionalized, and biology developed further as a distinct discipline in the early 20^th century with its own journals and professional societies.  But the “study of life” goes all the way back to the Greek philosophers.  Alexander mentions Aristotle, who taught there were four causes of things: material, formal, efficient, and final.  The “efficient cause” maps most closely to what modern science focuses on.  But Aristotle would have included the telos, the final cause, which asks the question, “why”.  From telos we get the word teleological, which means “having and end or purpose”. 

The Stoics, mentioned in Acts 17:17-19, were a school of Greek philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC.  One of their best known expositors was the Roman lawyer, Cicero (106-43 BC) who said:

When we see a mechanism such as a planetary model or a clock, do we doubt that it is the creation of a conscious intelligence?  So how can we doubt that the world is the work of the divine intelligence?  We may well believe that the world and everything in it has been created for the gods and for mankind.

This argument preceded the famous William Paley metaphor 2,000 year later, when Paley compared the world to a watch, thereby inferring design by a watchmaker.  Cicero’s arguments were taken up by early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian (AD 160-225) as a way of promoting belief in the one creator God to the surrounding pagans. Alexander also mentions a number of Islamic scholars, such as Al-Jahiz, who drew attention to an argument from design, and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111) who wrote a book called The Wisdom in God’s Creation / Creatures, pointing out the many ways in which structures and aspects of the living world fulfilled God’s purposes.

No review of the history of science would be complete without reference to Italian Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274).  Aquinas Christianized Aristotle into medieval theology and formed the system known as “scholasticism”. Gradually, nature began to seen as a book which could and should be read alongside the sacred text of Scripture. Aquinas said, “It is the knowledge we have of creatures that enables us to use words to refer to God”. 

The period of the Reformation not only changed the way people began to read Scripture, but also changed the way they read the text of nature.  The Reformers insisted that the text of Scripture should be read only according to its literal meaning, not according to allegorical meanings. The Reformation’s deep suspicion of all various forms of authority of the ancients, including the early Greek philosophers, led to the new way of reading the natural world as well stripped of allegorical layers of meaning.  The 17^th century also saw the rise in the “mechanical philosophy”, the idea that the universe operates on machine-like principles.  Today mechanism and meaning are often pitted against each other as if incompatible, but in the 17^th century the machine was always God’s machine.  Aristotle’s “Final Cause” came to be understood, not as a telos immanent in the natural object, but rather the purpose for which God had designed the thing. 

The providentialist natural theology of the 17^th century received a potent challenge during the 18^th century, particularly from Scottish philosopher David Hume, who took to task William Paley’s argument from design based on the “watchmaker” analogy. At the same time was the rise of materialism on the European continent in connection with the French Revolution from the philosophes, a collection of writers who were the intellectuals of the 18th-century Enlightenment.  They included such luminaries as:

• ·         Voltaire (1694–1778)
• ·         Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
• ·         David Hume (1711–1776)
• ·         Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
• ·         Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
• ·         Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771)
• ·         Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783)
• ·         Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
• ·         Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794)
• ·         Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794)
• ·         Francesco Mario Pagano (1748–1799)

Which brings us to Charles Darwin (1809-1882).  Although Darwin lost his faith later in life, he was steeped in Paley’s works during his education and always maintained that evolution was compatible with religious belief.  Denis writes:

But to a large degree it was his theory that killed off any idea of a broader Purpose for evolution, mainly because of the role that “chance variation” was perceived to play in his theory and, perhaps even more so, because adaptations engineered by natural selection subverted one of the key arguments of a certain form of natural theology, namely, the understanding that complex organs like the eye, the human brain, and so forth were due to God’s direct creative action …we note that as far as wider public perceptions were concerned, it was the image of evolution as a “chance process”, coupled with the idea that the theory had killed off the design argument, that most reinforced the idea that evolutionary biology must be a purposeless narrative.

In the second half of the 19^th century the professionalization of science gathered pace and the science and faith which had been so previously integrated began to go their own separate ways.  As the religious influence in biology declined, Darwin’s theory was utilized in support of virtually every 20^th century ideology: capitalism, communism, racism, militarism, eugenics, feminism, atheism, and so on.  In 1970, the French molecular biologist, Jacque Monod published Chance and Necessity in which he argued that since evolution was based on chance, so the universe was one in which Chance ruled.  Monod said, “Man knows now that he is like a gypsy camping on the edge of the universe where he must live.  The universe is deaf to his music, indifferent to his hopes, as to his sufferings or his crimes”.  In the early years of the 21^st century, so called “new atheists”, following Monod, started making all kinds of ideological extrapolations out of evolutionary biology.  How all these extrapolations can be inferred from molecular biology is never quite clear.  Denis concludes:

The aim here is definitely not some attempt to reinstate religious arguments derived from biological design or teleology.  Nor is our aim, it should once again be emphasized, to suggest that Purpose can be inferred from biology, but rather the more modest claim that when you stand back and look at the evolutionary process as a whole, it just doesn’t look “necessarily purposeless”.  At least if that particular ideological extrapolation has its wings clipped, it will then be possible to move on and have a more informed discussion about biology and theology.

21 Grams

How much does the human soul weigh?  Sounds like a ridiculous question.   But according to a “scientific” study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts, the answer was 21 grams.  Dr. MacDougall identified six patients in nursing homes whose death was imminent.  According to Wikipedia, one of the patients lost weight but then put the weight back on, and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few minutes later lost even more weight. One of the patients lost “three-fourths of an ounce” (21.3 grams) in weight, coinciding with the time of death. MacDougall disregarded the results of another patient on the grounds the scales were “not finely adjusted”, and discounted the results of another as the patient died while the equipment was still being calibrated. MacDougall later measured the changes in weight from fifteen dogs after death.  MacDougall reported that none of the dogs lost any weight after death, thereby concluding that dogs had no soul (it is widely believed he poisoned the dogs to cause their death)(1).  Needless to say, even at the time, MacDougall’s experiment was widely criticized and thoroughly rejected by the scientific community.

But before MacDougall was able to publish the results of his experiments, The New York Times broke the story in an article titled “Soul has Weight, Physician Thinks”, and so the story entered and endured in popular culture.  In 2003 a movie, entitled 21 Grams, directed by Alejandro (Birdman, The Revenant) Iñárritu, came out and provided a unique opportunity for reflecting on both spiritual and scientific questions.  A review of the movie, and a reflection of the enduring pop culture phenomenon, was published on the website, “Christ and Popular Culture” listed on the Internet Monk’s Blogroll.  The review is by Tim Burbery.  Tim Burbery is Professor of English at Marshall University. His research examines the intersection of science, theology, and literature.  Take a minute to read Burbery’s review.

The interesting turn in Burbery’s review comes when he discusses a theory offered by a prominent Oxford physicist, Roger Penrose in his book, “The Emperor’s New Mind”, that suggests that, indeed, the soul may be, as we say, a thing, something physical if immaterial.  Burbery says:

Dubbed the “quantum soul” by some, the theory’s official name is less sexy: Orchestrated Objective Reduction, or Orch OR for short. It’s a possible answer to what has been called the “hard problem of consciousness” in science, that is, the origin and nature of consciousness. Whence self-awareness? Do animals possess it to the extent that humans do? Do we have an inner essence or core—a soul? Is consciousness necessary to earthly life, even to the universe, or could life have flourished even if earth was populated solely by zombies? Orch OR also engages these and similar questions.

Now this would seem to be just another example of “woo science” except that after reading The Emperor’s New Mind, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff stepped forward and offered Penrose a mechanism: microtubules, tiny tubes in the brain composed of a protein called tubulin. Supposedly, tubulin “makes up the skeletons of our cells, including neurons. What makes them interesting is their … potentially quantum role”, according to the book by Charles Seife, “Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes”. They can be both extended and contracted at one and the same time, “in a state of superposition” (according to Seife). Put another way, the microtubules might provide a site for the quantum brain. And, they might be the seat of—wait for it—the soul. Thus, Orch OR was born.  Burbery summarizes Orch OR thusly:

In presenting their theory, Penrose and Hameroff parted company with most scientists, the majority of whom posit that consciousness arose slowly by an evolutionary process, as neurons began firing, more and more, with one another. Orch OR, on the other hand, argues that consciousness arises not between, but within, microtubules, inside the neurons, where quantum events take place. As they become “orchestrated” with each other, they produce discrete, quantized moments of awareness, which, taken together, result in what we call consciousness—somewhat like a film, as many separate frames produce the illusion of a “moving” picture.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Orch OR is its inversion of common sense, in which consciousness is a localized phenomenon. We tend to regard consciousness as starting with the human subject and radiating outward; our brains evolve, and then we’re able to look beyond ourselves and perceive things. But Orch OR argues that in fact, there are quantum events happening outside of us, ones that become entangled with our brains, and which, as it were, spark or fire our consciousness. To quote Penrose and Hameroff, “There is a connection between the brain’s biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe.”

Did you get that… “a connection between the brain’s biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe”?  Hah! I knew it!  What have I been trying to tell you?  Take a moment to view this fascinating video from Hameroff.  Hameroff remarks that “the soul is a real entity in terms of quantum information embedded in the universe.” Hameroff also claims that that information, because it’s quantum, experiences quantum entanglement with things outside the body, and thus, in theory, could be reconstituted after death.

Now, quantum effects are not limited to the sub-atomic world, but have also been observed in phenomena such as plant photosynthesis, and quantum biologists (go ahead and Google “quantum biology”) have proposed that certain birds are able to navigate on their migrations by using quantum entanglement.  I bookmarked this LiveScience article, “Schrödinger’s Bacteria? Physics Experiment Leads to 1st Entanglement of Living Organisms” and was going to post on it, it seems appropriate to this discussion.  I’ll be interested to see what Klasie Kraalogies says about this when he recovers from the temporary blindness from excessive eye-rolling that I have induced by this post 🙂

Burbery concludes: “As Christians, then, we don’t need science to prop up our beliefs, true, but we should at least be aware when scientists are working on something that overlaps with, and in some ways reinforces what we believe.”  I would tend to agree with that.  A purely materialistic reductionist viewpoint has always had trouble accounting for personal individual consciousness, except as pure epiphenomena.  The idea that our personal consciousness, our soul, is an illusion is an entirely circular argument. If it is an illusion, it is a deeply persistent one.

1- The fact that he poisoned 15 dogs to test his theory leads me to conclude that Dr. MacDougall had no soul.