Biology and the Christian Faith: Second of Two Parts

We turn now to those achievements associated with the relatively new disciplines of molecular biology, microbiology, and biochemistry. These achievements have been rapid and startling, to say the least, and they have brought these disciplines into the forefront of the news-making activities of our scientific specialists. If nuclear physics has made it uncertain whether or not we will continue to populate this planet, biological researches have given rise to profoundly new ways of understanding the significance of human life. “This branch of science,” says C. P. Snow, “is likely to affect the way in which men think of themselves more profoundly than any scientific advance since Darwin’s—and probably more so than Darwin’s.…”Quoted in R. Clowes, The Structure of Life, London: Penguin, p. 14. In a similar vein Professor J. Lederberg says, “The sudden successes of biology, brought about through systematic confluence with the physical sciences, now demand an understanding of the nature and destiny of man that must be the principal intellectual task of the brave new world.”N. Calder (ed.), The World in 1984, Vol. I, London: Penguin, 1965, p. 24.

Biological researches have recently come to terms with the cell structure of living and non-living things, and as a result of intense and widespread examination of the composition and function of these cells, not only has human life (and not least mental activity) become much more fully understood, but new light has been shed on the origin of life itself and new horizons opened for the future evolutionary development of the human species.

1. The human brain. The study of the human brain as the key to our understanding of the mind is not the interest solely of biologists. It is that point of the human anatomy where the interests of several disciplines coincide, and the conclusions arising from the study of the physiology of the brain or the psychology of mental behavior are particularly the field in which philosophers and theologians have traditionally moved. The scene has not changed, and the age-old problem of the body-mind relationship seems just as far off from a conclusive solution as it has ever been.

An enormous amount of analytical research has gone into the brain in recent years, and the emerging picture is one of increasing complexity. Professor D. MacKay writes:

Twenty years ago, the picture of the neural network revealed by light microscopy was intricate enough in all conscience. Some 1010 elements, each with hundreds of ramifying connections, already bespoke a complexity comparable with that of the whole communication pattern that links the population of the earth. In the past two decades the electron microscope has added at least two orders of magnitude to this complexity, and the picture of chemical interactions of unimagined subtlety is now being superimposed.Science Journal, May, 1967, 43.

Despite this complexity, however, the desire to “crack the mystery” of the human brain continues and, with it, the desire for some simple or single explanatory principle of mental behavior. “Our final aim,” writes Lord Adrian, “is to bring human behavior within the framework of the physical sciences. It may be absurd to suppose that we shall ever succeed in going further and fitting the human mind into such a framework which, incidentally, has boundary problems of its own. But we shall travel hopefully.”Ibid. 3.

Such a goal has proved somewhat elusive, however, as the BBC symposium on “The Physical Basis of the Mind” indicates. “The physical basis of mind encroaches more and more upon the study of mind, but there remain mental events which seem to lie beyond any physiology of the brain,” says Sir Charles Sherrington.P. Laslett (ed.), The Physical Basis of the Mind, Oxford: Blackwell, 1950, p. 3. “The real trouble comes,” comments Lord Adrian again, “from the feeling that there may be an important part of the picture which can never be fitted in, however long we may work at it.”P. 5. Professor W. E. Le Gros Clark concludes that neither the anatomist nor the physiologist is “able even to suggest how the physico-chemical phenomena associated with the passage of nervous impulses from one part of the brain to another can be translated into mental experience,”P. 24. while Professor W. Penfield even revives the much feared dualism of Descartes when he says “something else finds its dwelling place between the sensory complex and the motor mechanism, that there is a switchboard operator as well as a switchboard.”P. 64.

Needless to say, contemporary linguistic analysts such as Professors A. J. Ayer and G. Ryle sweep aside such faltering admissions by exposing the logical confusion of which they are supposedly guilty,Pp. 70–9. but the satisfactoriness of this critique is more than doubtful, as Mascall has indicated.Christian Theology and Natural Science pp. 219–25. Cf. A. Farrer, The Freedom of the Will, London: A. and C. Black, 1958, pp. 6–21. The problem which these BBC speakers confronted was and is a serious one. It cannot be dismissed as a pseudo-problem nor does it seem susceptible of a “reductionist” solution (e.g., “epiphenomenalism” or “behaviorism”Cf. I. G. Barbour, pp. 353–4.). We may agree with Dr. A. Isaacs that “the mind is a property, or collection of properties, associated with the matter of the brain,”The Survival of God in the Scientific Age, London: Pelican, 1966, p. 69. to which he adds: “This does not mean that mind becomes an extended material entity; on the contrary, it is a concept representing those properties and activities associated with specific forms of matter which have attained a certain complexity of organization.”Ibid. Cf. D. Lack’s comment: “For the scientist must be able to trust the conclusions of his reasoning. Hence he cannot accept the theory that man’s mind was evolved wholly by natural selection if this means, as it would appear to do, that the conclusions of the mind depend ultimately on their survival value and not their truth, thus making all scientific theories, including that of natural selection, untrustworthy” (Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief, p. 104). One may compare with Lack’s comment the position of C. S. Lewis, who says, in “Is Theology Poetry?” in Screwtape Proposes a Toast, London: Fontana (Collins), 1965, p. 58: “If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot see how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.” Over against this position the admission of Maynard Smith is significant: “… an independent Ego is to biology what a God who stops the sun in the sky is to astronomy” (I. T. Ramsay, ed., Biology and Personality, p. 72). And we may also agree with Donald MacKay that “both mental and physical categories of explanation are needed in order to do justice to the mysterious unity we call a human person.”Science Journal, p. 46. But the question of the relationship between these phenomena or languages still awaits clarification. I. G. Barbour, who attempts some such clarification in terms of “organismic biology,”Barbour, pp. 359–60. points out that the present recognition of the complexity of the nature of man accords well with the biblical view. The biblical view of man is that he is an integrated whole, body and soul, whose redemption is not just partial but complete—he anticipates resurrection, not just immortality. He concludes:

The idea of man as a many-leveled unity seems to us more consonant with both the biblical and the scientific viewpoints. The highest level of man’s total being may be represented by the concept of the self, conceived not as a separate entity but as the individual in his unified activity of thinking, willing, feeling, and acting. The self is described not in terms of static substances but of dynamic activities at various levels of organization and functioning. It is this integral being whose whole life is of concern to God.P. 363.

2. Origin of life. Although Richard Hooke in 1665 had discovered the presence of what he calls “cells,” it was not until 1838, as a result of the work of Schwann and Schleider, that it was recognized that cells are the fundamental particles of life. In 1861 Max Schultze offered the definition that a cell was “a mass of protoplasm containing a nucleus.” In the last one hundred years our knowledge of cells has advanced so that now not only is the composition and content of various cells known but the central role played in the phenomenon of life by the nucleic acid molecules in the cell (RNA, DNA) is also understood. “If proteins are the stuff of life, the nucleic acid molecules can be said to hold the secret of life.”R. Clowes, The Structure of Life, p. 75. Perhaps even more emphatically,

It is this writer’s belief that what is already known is sufficient evidence for saying that the basic secret of “Life” IS the behavior of DNA and that all other things: RNA, proteins, enzymes, membranes, cells, tissues, behavior, intelligence, language and finally human civilization, have come from it as a natural consequence.Current Affairs Bulletin, p. 63.

This research into cells has had repercussions in two directions which are relevant to the interests of Christian theology. It has apparently clarified the problem of the commencement of life on this planet, and it has cast a rather surprising light on the future of mankind. So far as the past is concerned, it appears to have taken away the last defenses of “vitalism” and has made it possible to describe the origin of life exclusively in terms of chemical components.Clowes, pp. 10–12, Current Affairs Bulletiin, p. 51. Not only has it made such an explanation possible, but it has led to the successful synthesizing by two American biologists of a deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA molecule.Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December, 1967. While admitting that the formation of a DNA molecule is not the same thing as the formation of a cell (which is a different level of organization), Professor Clowes is lyrical about this line of research. “The assumption that organic molecules can arise by non-living processes thus permits us to conceive of the emergence of life as a series of logical transitions rather than one great leap forward”P. 100. This, he feels, “makes scientific sense” and delivers us from having to believe “the events as described in Genesis.”P. 99.

It is somewhat pathetic to see the eagerness with which Professor Clowes believes in a process which “has never been observed either in nature or in the laboratory” (i.e. the formation of a cell),Isaacs, p. 44. because it, at least, offers an alternative to the Genesis narrative! One is reminded of C. S. Lewis’s response to a similar pronouncement by Professor D. M. S. Watson, “Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?”Lewis, p. 56.

It is pathetic not only because of the eagerness with which the hypothesis is adopted but also because the challenge posed by Genesis remains unaffected! It is not necessary to insist that Genesis teaches sudden leaps in the appearance of phenomena, and it is surely not an unimpressive thesis that such changes as did occur in the phase of chemical evolution were not just accidental but intended. The view that God was the author of life has not been disturbed by advances in knowledge of this kind. When Dr. A. Isaacs says, “The ultimate particles which constitute the material universe are such that they spontaneously interact in certain ways, organizing themselves without apparent outside intervention, into units of increasing complexity,”Isaacs, p. 160. one wonders what he expected to see as evidence of supernatural intervention! On the basis of this reasoning, the “theistic hypothesis” of Moses on the banks of the Red (or Reed) Sea after the successful crossing of the children of Israel would have been entirely unwarranted.

3. Man’s biological future. The forward-looking effects of the research into the DNA molecule are, perhaps, even more significant. Professor Lederberg, in an article entitled “A Crisis in Evolution,” reviews the chemical and biological phases of evolution and points out that since the emergence of homo sapiens “our evolution has been principally cultural.” He continues, “Man, the historical animal, practises his civilization with the same biological instruments as the Neanderthal.”Lederberg, p. 25; cf. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, London: Fontana (Collins), p. 1965, p. 305. “But,” he says, “just in the instant era, our culture is achieving knowledge and control of its biological instruments that are capable of purposefully altering them.”Ibid. L. C. Birch agrees: “In the broadest terms, biology is putting into man’s hands the means of controlling his own destiny.”The Gazette (Sydney University), November, 1967, p. 212.

The possibilities of affecting our future are many and varied. Lederberg himself suggests five “euphenic” measures which centre on the modification of development, influencing the character of single organisms, in contrast to the populational impact of eugenic measures.”Pp. 26–7. These include organ transplants, artificial prosthetic organs, lengthening of life, brain modification, and “clonal reproduction.” Clowes,Clowes, pp. 290–302. Mitchison, Beale, Kenedi, and Brown all, similarly, have their suggestions for the future.The World in 1984, pp. 196–208. This future, so soon to come upon us, is not only an age of automation and cybernetics. It is also the age when homo sapiens becomes homo biologicus—

a strange biped that will combine the properties of self-reproduction without males, like the green-fly, of fertilising his female at long distance like the nautiloid molluscs, of changing sex like the xiphophores, of growing from cuttings like the earth-worm, of replacing its missing parts like the newt, of developing outside the mother’s body like the kangaroo, and of hibernating like the hedgehog.J. Rostand, Can Man be Modified?, London: Secker and Warburg, 1956, p. 34.

Little wonder that Professor R. M. Kenedi when estimating the future of bio-engineering says, “Prediction of the shape of things to come twenty years hence in any definite form is impossible, not because of lack of visible trends, but, on the contrary, because the potential is enormous.”The World in 1984, p. 204. Teilhard de Chardin expresses this mood of boundless optimism in memorable words:

Of old, the forerunners of our chemists strove to find the philosopher’s stone. Our ambition has grown since then. It is no longer to make gold but life; and in view of all that has happened in the last fifty years, who would dare to say that this is a mere mirage? With our knowledge of hormones we appear to be on the eve of having a hand in the development of our bodies and even our brains. With the discovery of genes it appears that we shall soon be able to control the mechanism of organic heredity. And with the synthesis of albuminoids imminent, we may well one day be capable of producing what the earth, left to itself, seems no longer able to produce: a new wave of organisms, an artificially provoked neo-life. Immense and prolonged as the universal groping has been since the beginning, many possible combinations have been able to slip through the fingers of chance and have had to await man’s calculated efforts in order to appear. Thought might artificially perfect the thinking instrument itself; life might rebound forward under the collective effect of its reflection. The dream upon which human research obscurely feeds is fundamentally that of mastering, beyond all atomic or molecular affinities, the ultimate energy of which all other energies are merely servants; and thus, by grasping the very mainspring of evolution, seizing the tiller of the world.Pp. 274–5.

What does the Christian say in the face of these possibilities? He can say at least three things. First, man’s function as “a little lower than God” is to exercise dominion over the works of God’s hands (Gen. 1; Ps. 8). Our physical and mental characteristics which enable us to do this are no accident. We are created for this purpose (in part). If this dominion includes the controlling and altering of our environment and the overcoming of limiting factors within ourselves (e.g., use of glasses for sight or surgical operations), it can conceivably include genetic manipulation and the development of intellectually or physically superior types of people. Such people will still be answerable to God, for this is the ever-present concave side of the convex surface of their humanity. Wide differences of temperament and ability exist “by nature”; such techniques would only tend to affect nature in this area as other techniques have done in other areas.

Secondly, because we are sinful people whose will it is to exclude God and upon whom, therefore, the wrath of God abides (John 3:36), there will always be that proneness to abuse and distort every advance in knowledge and increase in ability. As this knowledge increases and our capacity to affect things includes more fully our own personalities, the potential harm which we may do ourselves increases also. C. S. Lewis’s spacefiction novels issue a terrible warning to societies which “advance” along a route defined by these biological dreams of the future (especially That Hideous StrengthAldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932, 1950) is a classic on this subject.). Sir MacFarlane Burnet has urged that having satisfied ourselves intellectually about the matter we should call a halt,The Boyer Lectures, 1966. and Jean Rostand poses the question,

May we not gradually, from one bold step to another, have entered certain fields which ought to have remained forbidden to us? Perhaps we ought not to have gone back to the sources of being? Perhaps human life should go on propagating itself in the shadow and science should never throw on it the beams of its intrusive light?P. 69.

Our past and present provide us with more than enough evidence of irresponsible, irrational, and destructive patterns of behavior. Quite apart from the depressing diagnosis of the Bible, our own history does not make it possible for us to view these biological possibilities of the future in any mood of calm assurance.

Thirdly, the future of man has already, we believe, been shown to us in Christ. He is our future in the sense that he is the one towards whom we press and he is the one who makes the reaching of this goal possible. He stands, as Teilhard de Chardin rightly says, at the “Omega-point” of human destiny, but, and here we must join issue with Teilhard, the Bible will not permit us to endorse the view of an upward developmental thrust from the Alpha to the Omega, from the elemental matter through chemical and biological evolution till the “noosphere” is reached, from which point the road leads on until the process converges at the Omegapoint of hyper-personal existence in God. As architecturally impressive and symphonic as this vision undoubtedly is, it has little in common with the biblical view of man’s natural propensities and of the apocalyptic nature of human salvation. Man, left to himself, ultimately builds Babel and not the City of God! Man’s salvation, already secured in Christ, has been achieved for us through the judgment of death and the supernatural intervention of resurrection. These are dislocating events which lie across the path of projected evolutionary advance. Jesus, raised from the dead, stands as the redeemed man who is at the same time our Redeemer (Heb. 2). All power and dominion is in his hands, and it is only as we flee from ourselves to him, from our life to his death, from this earth to his heaven, that we can anticipate any part in that glory into which he has already entered. Any “future” outside Christ can only be the “negative” one of existing outside our destiny at the “Omega-point” of frustration and remorse.

These are not issues on which biology or any other science can pronounce, but they are issues to which every biologist and every man must give his full attention and to which he must make his full response.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Rev. 21:1–4).

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