Two old-timers, Max and Jake, spend every hour of
their retirement imagining and debating what life
is like in the world-to-come. Eager for the answer,
they make a pledge that whoever goes first will somehow
find a way quickly to communicate the news to his
surviving friend. After several years of such debates,
Max dies, and Jake promptly takes up his post next
to the phone. A day passes, a week, a month, six months—no
Max. But just as Jake is beginning to despair—"perhaps
there is no world-to-come"—the phone rings:
"Hello, Jake? It's Max!"
"Max, where in hell have you been? I've been
worried sick."
"I'm really sorry, Jake, but I had a devil of
a time getting to a phone."
"Well, never mind, Max, tell me, what's it really
like?"
"So I'll tell ya'. First of all, I get a good
night's sleep—11, 12 hours. I get up at sunrise,
I stretch a little, I perform my ablutions, I take
a walk, I eat a good breakfast. After breakfast, I
relax a bit, take a constitutional, admire the scenery—before
you know it, it's time for lunch. Lunch is delicious,
and very filling, so after lunch I take a little nap.
I get up refreshed, I wander down to the lake for
a little dip, I have a little sex, and—before you
know it—it's time for supper. I have a little supper,
take a little stroll, enjoy the sunset, and then I
sleep twelve hours."
"Max, Max, it sounds like Miami. It sure don't
sound like heaven."
"Heaven? Jake, who said heaven? I'm in
Montana. I'm a buffalo."
Keeping life human these days is no laughing matter.
Among the contemporary challenges to our humanity,
the deepest ones come from a most unlikely quarter:
our wonderful and humane biomedical science and technology.
The powers they are providing for altering the workings
of our bodies and minds are already being used for
purposes beyond therapy, and may soon be used to transform
human nature itself. In our lifetime, the natural
relations between sex and procreation, personal identity
and embodiment, and human agency and human achievement
have all been profoundly altered by new biomedical
technologies. The Pill. In vitro fertilization. Surrogate
wombs. Cloning. Genetic engineering. Organ swapping.
Mechanical spare parts. Performance-enhancing drugs.
Computer implants into brains. Ritalin for the young,
Viagra for the old, Prozac for everyone. Virtually
unnoticed, the train to Huxley's dehumanized Brave
New World has already left the station.
But beneath the weighty ethical concerns raised by
these new biotechnologies—a subject for a different
lecture—lies a deeper philosophical challenge:
one that threatens how we think about who and what
we are. Scientific ideas and discoveries about living
nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in
themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against
our traditional religious and moral teachings, and
even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom
and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up
among us—let me call it "soul-less scientism"—which
believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery,
can give a complete account of human life, giving
purely scientific explanations of human thought, love,
creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe
in God. The threat to our humanity today comes not
from the transmigration of souls in the next life,
but from the denial of soul in this one, not from
turning men into buffaloes, but from denying that
there is any real difference between them.
Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high:
at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our
nation, the continued vitality of science, and our
own self-understanding as human beings and as children
of the West. All friends of human freedom and dignity—including
even the atheists among us—must understand that
their own humanity is on the line.
Tonight I wish to offer an overview of the danger
and to suggest how it can be countered: I will first
describe the threats scientism poses both to human
self-understanding and to ethics. I will then identify
philosophical and religious resources available for
meeting the challenge.
We need first to distinguish the grandiose faith
of contemporary scientism from modern science as such,
which began as a more modest venture. Although the
founders of modern science sought certain and useful
knowledge, to be gained using new concepts and methods,
they understood that science would never offer complete
and absolute knowledge of the whole of human life—for
example, of thought, feeling, morality, or faith.
For they understood, as we tend to forget, that the
rationality of science is but a partial and highly
specialized rationality, concocted for the purpose
of gaining only that kind of knowledge for which it
was devised, and applicable to only those aspects
of the world that can be captured by such abstract
notions. The peculiar reason of science is not, nor
was meant to be, the natural reason of everyday life
and human experience. Neither is it the reason of
philosophy or religious thought.
Thus, science does not seek to know beings
or their natures, but only the regularities
of the changes that they undergo. Science seeks
to know only how things work, not what
things are and why. Science gives the
histories of things, but not their directions,
aspirations, or purposes. Science quantifies
selected external relations of one object to
another, but it can say nothing at all about their
inner states of being, not only for human beings
but for any living creature. Science can often predict
what will happen if certain perturbations occur, but
it eschews explanations in terms of causes,
especially of ultimate causes.
In a word, our remarkable science of nature has made
enormous progress precisely by its decision to ignore
the larger perennial questions about being, cause,
purpose, inwardness, hierarchy, and the goodness or
badness of things—questions that science happily gave
over to philosophy, poetry, and religion.
Thus, in cosmology, for example, we have wonderful
progress in characterizing the temporal beginnings
as a "big bang" and elaborate calculations
to describe what happened next. But science preserves
complete silence regarding the status quo ante and
the ultimate cause. Unlike a normally curious child,
cosmologists do not ask, "What was before
the big bang?" or "Why is there something
rather than nothing?" because the answer must
be an exasperated "God only knows!"
In genetics, we have the complete DNA sequence of
several organisms, including man, and we are rapidly
learning what many of these genes "do."
But this analytic approach cannot tell us how the
life of a buffalo differs from that of a butterfly,
or even what accounts for the special unity and active
wholeness of buffaloes or butterflies or the purposive
efforts they make to preserve their own specific integrity.
In neurophysiology, we know vast amounts about the
processing of visual stimuli, their transformation
into electrochemical signals, and the mechanisms for
transmitting these signals to the brain. But sight
itself we know not through science but only from the
inside, and only because we are not blind. The eyeball
and the brain are material objects, take up space,
can be held in the hand; but neither the capacities
of sight and intellect nor the activities
of seeing and thinking take up space or can be held.
Although absolutely dependent on material conditions,
they are in their essence immaterial: they
are capacities and activities of soul—hence,
not an object of knowledge for a materialist
science.
Among many biologists, these important limitations
of science are today largely forgotten, as is the
modesty that they should induce. Instead, bioprophets
of scientism, exploiting powerful ideas from genetics,
developmental biology, neuroscience, and evolutionary
psychology, issue bold challenges to traditional understandings
of human nature and human dignity. Their faith rests
on a new unified approach to biology and human biology,
at once evolutionist, materialist, determinist, mechanistic,
and objectified.
Already Darwinism, in its original version 150 years
ago, appeared to challenge our special standing: how
could any being descended from sub-human origins,
rather than created directly by the hand of God, claim
to be a higher animal, never mind a godlike
one? Indeed, orthodox evolutionary theory even denies
that animals should be called "higher" or
"lower," rather than just more or less complex:
since all animals are finally in the same business-individual
survival, for the sake of perpetuating their genes-the
apparent differences among them are, at bottom, merely
more or less complicated ways of getting the same
job done.
The new materialistic explanations of vital, even
psychic, events leave no room for soul, understood
as life's animating principle. Genes are said to determine
temperament and character. Mechanistic accounts of
brain functions seem to do away with the need to speak
of human freedom and purposiveness. Brain imaging
studies claim to explain how we make moral judgments.
A fully exterior account of our behavior—the grail
of neuroscience—diminishes the significance of our
felt inwardness. Feeling, passion, awareness, imagination,
desire, love, hate, and thought are, scientifically
speaking, merely "brain events." There are
even reports of a "God module" in the brain,
whose activity is thought to explain religious or
mystical experiences.
Never mind "created in the image of God":
what elevated humanistic view of human life or human
goodness is defensible against the belief, trumpeted
by biology's most public and prophetic voices, that
man is just a collection of molecules, an accident
on the stage of evolution, a freakish speck of mind
in a mindless universe, fundamentally no different
from other living things? What chance have our treasured
ideas of freedom and dignity against the reductive
notion of "the selfish gene," or the belief
that DNA is the essence of life, or the teaching that
all human behavior and our rich inner life are rendered
intelligible only in terms of neurochemistry and their
contributions to reproductive success?
Many of our leading scientists and intellectuals,
truth to tell, are eager to dethrone traditional understandings
of man's special place in the whole, and use every
available opportunity to do battle. For example, consider
how the luminaries of the International Academy of
Humanism-including biologists Francis Crick and E.
O. Wilson and humanists Isaiah Berlin and Kurt Vonnegut—chose
to defend human cloning:
What moral issues would human cloning raise? Some
world religions teach that human beings are fundamentally
different from other mammals—that humans have
been imbued by a deity with immortal souls, giving
them a value that cannot be compared to that of other
living things. Human nature is held to be unique and
sacred. Scientific advances which pose a perceived
risk of altering this "nature" are angrily
opposed. . . . As far as the scientific enterprise
can determine, [however] . . . [h]uman capabilities
appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those
found among the higher animals. Humanity's rich repertoire
of thoughts, feelings, aspirations, and hopes seems
to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not
from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument
can discover. . . . Views of human nature rooted in
humanity's tribal past ought not to be our primary
criterion for making moral decisions about cloning.
. . . The potential benefits of cloning may be so
immense that it would be a tragedy if ancient theological
scruples should lead to a Luddite rejection of cloning.
In order to justify ongoing research, these "humanists"
are willing to shed not only traditional religious
views but any view of human distinctiveness
and special dignity, their own included. They fail
to see that the scientific view of man they celebrate
does more than insult our vanity. It undermines our
self-conception as free, thoughtful, and responsible
beings, worthy of respect because we alone among the
animals have minds and hearts that aim far higher
than the mere perpetuation of our genes.
The problem, to repeat, lies not so much with the
scientific findings themselves but with the shallow
philosophy that recognizes no truths but these. Here,
for example, is evolutionary psychologist and popularizer
Stephen Pinker railing against any appeal to the human
soul:
Unfortunately for that theory, brain science has
shown that the mind is what the brain does. The supposedly
immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered
by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and
extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen.
Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on
the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the
universe. It is just as unwise today to ground it
on dogmas about souls endowed by God.
Without irony, Pinker, a psychologist, denies the
existence of the psyche. Yet he is ignorant of the
fact that "soul" need not be conceived as
a "ghost in the machine" or as a separate
"thing" that survives the body, but can
be understood instead as the integrated powers of
the naturally organic body—the ground and source
of awareness, appetite, and action. He does not understand
that the vital powers of an organism do not reside
in the materials of the organism but emerge only when
the materials are formed and organized in a particular
way; he does not under-stand that the empowering organization
of materials-the vital form or soul—is not itself
material.
There is, of course, nothing novel about reductionism,
materialism, and determinism of the kind displayed
here; these are doctrines with which Socrates contended
long ago. What is new is that these philosophies seem
to be vindicated by scientific advance. Here, in consequence,
would be the most pernicious result of the new biology—more
dehumanizing than any actual manipulation or technique,
present or future: the erosion, perhaps the final
erosion, of the idea of man as noble, dignified, precious,
or godlike, and its replacement with a view of man,
no less than of nature, as mere raw material for manipulation
and homogenization.
The new scientism not only banishes soul from its
account of life. It soullessly neglects the ethical
and spiritual aspects of the human animal. For we
alone among the animals go in for ethicizing, for
concerning ourselves with how to live. We alone among
the animals ask not only "What can I know?"
but also, "What ought I do?" and "What
may I hope?" Science, notwithstanding its great
gifts to human life in the form of greater comfort
and safety, is utterly unhelpful in satisfying these
great longings of the human soul.
Science, by design, is notoriously morally neutral,
silent on the distinction between better and worse,
right and wrong, the noble and the base. And although
scientists hope that the uses that will be made of
their findings will be, as Francis Bacon prophesied,
governed in charity, science can do nothing to insure
that result. It can offer no standards to guide the
use of the awesome powers it places in human hands.
Though it seeks universal knowledge, it has no answer
to moral relativism. It knows not what charity is,
what charity requires, or even whether and why it
is good. What, then, will remain for us, morally and
spiritually, should soul-less scientism succeed in
its efforts to overthrow our traditional religions,
our inherited views of human life, and the moral teachings
that depend on them?
Nowhere will this deficiency be more readily felt
than with regard to the proposed uses of biotechnical
power for purposes beyond the cure of disease and
the relief of suffering. We are promised better children,
superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls—all
with the help of the biotechnologies of "enhancement."
Bioprophets tell us that we are en route to a new
stage of evolution, to the creation of a post-human
society, a society based on science and built by technology,
a society in which traditional teachings about human
nature will be passè and religious teachings
about how to live will be irrelevant.
But what will guide this evolution? How do we know
whether any of these so-called enhancements is in
fact an improvement? Why ought any human being
embrace a post-human future? Scientism has
no answers to these critical moral questions. Deaf
to nature, to God, and even to moral reason, it can
offer no standards for judging change to be progress—or
for judging anything else. Instead, it tacitly preaches
its own version of faith, hope, and charity: faith
in the goodness of scientific progress, hope in the
promise of overcoming our biological limitations,
charity in promising everyone ultimate relief from,
and transcendence of, the human condition. No religious
faith rests on flimsier ground.
So this is our peculiar moral and religious crisis.
We are in turbulent seas without a landmark precisely
because we adhere more and more to a view of human
life that both gives us enormous power and that, at
the same time, denies every possibility of non-arbitrary
standards for guiding its use. Though well equipped,
we know not who we are or where we are going. Engineering
the engineer as well as the engine, we race our train
we know not where.
Will we be able to combat the dehumanizing teachings
and moral bankruptcy of soulless scientism? As a cultural
matter, it is difficult to predict. But we are not
intellectually or spiritually resourceless. On the
contrary, we have good philosophical arguments
to rebut the soul-less teachings of scientism
and ennobling scriptural truths to nourish the
human soul. Together, they make possible a human
defense of the human. Let me offer a few elements
of such a defense, starting on the philosophical side.
First, despite what scientism says, our evolutionary
origins do not refute the truth of our human distinctiveness.
The history of how we came to be is no substitute
for knowing directly the being that has come. To know
man, we must study him as he is and through
what he does, not how he got to be this way.
For understanding our nature-what we are-or our standing,
it matters not whether our origin was from the primordial
slime or from the hand of a creator God: even with
monkeys for ancestors, what has emerged is more than
monkey business.
Second, regarding our inwardness, freedom, and purposiveness,
we must repair to our inside knowledge. For even if
scientists were to "prove" to their satisfaction
that inwardness, consciousness, and human will or
purposive intention were all illusory-at best, epiphenomena
of brain events—or that what we call loving and wishing
and thinking are merely electrochemical transformations
of brain substance, we should proceed to ignore them.
And for good reason. Life's self-revelatory testimony
to the living, regarding its own vital activity, is
more immediate, compelling, and trustworthy than are
the abstracted explanations that evaporate lived experience
by identifying it with some correlated bodily event.
The most unsophisticated child knows red and blue
more reliably than a blind physicist with his spectrometers.
And anyone who has ever loved knows that love cannot
be reduced to neurotransmitters.
Third, truth and error, no less than human freedom
and dignity, become empty notions when the soul is
reduced to chemicals. Even science itself becomes
impossible, because the very possibility of science
depends on the immateriality of thought and
on the mind's independence from the bombardment of
matter. Otherwise, there is no truth, there is only
"it seems to me." Not only the possibility
for recognizing truth and error, but also the reasons
for doing science rest on a picture of human freedom
and dignity that science itself cannot recognize.
Wonder, curiosity, a wish not to be self-deceived,
and a spirit of philanthropy are the sine qua non
of the modern scientific enterprise. They are hallmarks
of the living human soul, not of the anatomized brain.
A philosophical critique of scientism may give us
back our souls and restore the human difference. But
philosophy alone cannot answer the longings
of our soul or supply its quest for meaning.
For such nourishment, we must turn to other sources,
including especially the Bible. The Bible offers a
profound teaching on human nature, but, unlike science,
it locates that teaching in relation to the deepest
human longings and concerns. For various reasons,
we should turn first to the Bible's majestic beginning,
the story of the creation in Genesis 1—which,
not surprisingly, is the chief target of our soulless
scientism. Elsewhere I have argued that the teachings
of Genesis 1 are in fact untouched by the scientific
findings that allegedly make them "plumb unbelievable."
For Genesis 1 is not a freestanding historical or
scientific account of what happened and how, but rather
an awe-inspiring prelude to a lengthy and comprehensive
teaching about how we are to live. The Bible addresses
us not as detached, rational observers moved primarily
by curiosity, but as existentially engaged human beings
who need first and foremost to make sense of their
world and their task within it. The first human question
is not "How did this come-into-being?" or
"How does it work?" The first human question
is "What does all this mean?" and (especially)
"What am I to do here?"
The specific claims of the biblical account of creation
begin to nourish the soul's deep longings for answers
to these questions. The world that you see around
you, you human being, is orderly and intelligible,
an articulated whole comprising distinct kinds. The
order of the world is as rational as the speech that
you use to describe it and that, right before your
(reading) eyes, summoned it into being. Most importantly,
this intelligible order of creatures means mainly
to demonstrate that, contrary to the belief of uninstructed
human experience, the sun, the moon, and the stars
are not divine, despite their sempiternal beauty and
power and their majestic perfect motion. Moreover,
being is hierarchic, and man is the highest
of the creatures, higher than the heavens. Man alone
is a being that is in the image of God.
What does this mean? And can it be true? In the course
of recounting His creation, Genesis 1 introduces us
to God's activities and powers: (1) God speaks,
commands, names, blesses, and hallows; (2) God makes
and makes freely; (3) God looks at and beholds the
world; (4) God is concerned with the goodness of things;
(5) God addresses solicitously other living creatures
and provides for their sustenance. In short: God exercises
speech and reason, freedom in doing and making, and
the powers of contemplation, judgment, and care.
Doubters may wonder whether this is truly the case
about God—after all, it is only on biblical authority
that we regard God as possessing these powers and
activities. But it is indubitably clear—even
to atheists—that we human beings have them, and
that they lift us above the plane of a merely animal
existence. Human beings, alone among the creatures,
speak, plan, create, contemplate, and judge. Human
beings, alone among the creatures, can articulate
a future goal and use that plan to guide them in bringing
it into being by their own purposive conduct. Human
beings, alone among the creatures, can think about
the whole, marvel at its many-splendored forms, wonder
about its beginning, and feel awe in beholding its
grandeur and in pondering the mystery of its source.
Please note: These self-evident truths do not
rest on biblical authority. Rather, the biblical text
enables us to confirm them by an act of self-reflection.
Our reading of this text, addressable and intelligible
only to us human beings, and our responses to it,
possible only for us human beings, provide all the
proof we need to confirm the text's assertion of our
superior standing. This is not anthropocentric prejudice,
but cosmological truth. And nothing we shall ever
learn from science about how we came to be
this way could ever make it false.
In addition to holding up a mirror in which we see
reflected our special standing in the world, Genesis
1 teaches truly the bounty of the universe and its
hospitality in supporting terrestrial life. Moreover,
we have it on the highest authority that the whole-the
being of all that is-is "very good":
And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold,
it was very good. (Gen. 1:31)
The Bible here teaches a truth that cannot be known
by science, even as it is the basis of the very possibility
of science—and of everything else we esteem.
For it truly is very good that there is something
rather than nothing. It truly is very good that this
something is intelligibly ordered rather than dark
and chaotic. It truly is very good that the whole
contains a being who can not only discern the intelligible
order but who can recognize that "it is very
good"—who can appreciate that there
is something rather than nothing and that he exists
with the reflexive capacity to celebrate these facts
with the mysterious source of being itself. As Abraham
Joshua Heschel put it:
The biblical words about the genesis of heaven and
earth are not words of information but words of appreciation.
The story of creation is not a description of how
the world came into being but a song about the glory
of the world's having come into being. "And God
saw that it was good."
There is more. The purpose of the song is not only
to celebrate. It is also to summon us to awe and attention.
For just as the world as created is a world summoned
into existence under command, so to be a human being
in that world is to live in search of a summons. It
is to recognize, first of all, that we are here not
by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved
gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel
the need to justify that gift, to make something out
of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence.
It is to stand in the world not only in awe of the
world's existence but under an obligation to answer
a call to a worthy life, a life of meaning, a life
that does honor to the divine-likeness with which
our otherwise animal existence has been—no thanks
to us—endowed. It is explicitly to feel the need to
find a way of life for which we should be pleased
to answer at the bar of justice when our course is
run, in order to vindicate the blessed opportunity
and the moral-spiritual challenge that is the true
essence of being human.
The first chapter of Genesis—like no work of
science, no matter how elegant or profound—invites
us to hearken to a transcendent voice. It answers
to the human need to know not only how the world works
but also what we are to do here. It is the beginning
of a Bible-length response to the human longing for
meaning and whole-hearted existence. The truths it
bespeaks are more than cognitive. They point away
from mere truths of belief to the truths of life in
action—of song and praise and ritual, of love
and procreation and civic life, of responsible deeds
in answering the call to righteousness, holiness,
and love of neighbor. Such truths speak more deeply
and permanently to the souls of men than any mere
doctrine, whether of science or even of faith. As
long as we understand our great religions as the embodiments
of such truths, we friends of religion will have nothing
to fear from science, and we friends of science who
are still in touch with our humanity will have nothing
to fear from religion.
Like Max and Jake, I have no knowledge about the
world to come. Unlike Max and Jake, I have never given
it more than a moment's thought. For, whatever might
be the fate of our souls when act five is over, it
is the pursuit of their well-being here and now, while
the show is still running, that is in my opinion the
crucial human task—yesterday, today, always. Regarding
this truth and this work, no soul-less teachings of
science or scientism should ever leave us buffaloed.
# # #
In 1987 the Manhattan Institute initiated a lecture series in honor of Walter B. Wriston, banker, author, government advisor, and member of the Manhattan Institute’s Board of Trustees. The Wriston Lecture has since been presented annually in New York City with honorees drawn from the worlds of government, the academy, religion, business, and the arts. In establishing the Lecture, the Trustees of the Manhattan Institute—who serve as the selection committee—have sought to inform and enrich intellectual debate surrounding the great public issues of our day, and to recognize individuals whose ideas or accomplishments have left a mark on their world.
