Like a lot of people interested in matters of the
spirit, I've always had a somewhat conflicted relationship to
science. On the one hand, for anyone interested in humanity's
further evolution, it's hard not to be excited by the latest
findings of a discipline that, in a single century, has managed
to cure polio, crack the genetic code, send a probe to Saturn's
largest moon, and invent the internet. But on the other, there
is something about science's tendency to reduce even life's
greatest mysteries to the movements of matter alone that has
always left me a little chilled.
It probably goes back to my childhood. Raised by
theologically ambivalent parents who were as committed to their
agnosticism as many are to their faith, I was taught early on
that science, reason, and rationality are a far better guide to
truth than inspiration, doctrine, or dogma. But as years passed,
and my inbred agnosticism gradually gave way to a committed
spiritual quest, I soon began to have experiences of a deeper
reality, far beyond anything described in my science textbooks.
In the face of this unfolding world of meaning, purpose, and
mystery, the notion that science held the keys to ultimate truth
began to seem increasingly hard to accept.
I think the tension between these two sides of myself
hit its peak during my senior year in college. Having majored in
psychology because I thought it would help me understand human
nature, I'd spent my first three years judiciously avoiding the
“harder” scientific side of the field, focusing
instead on the “softer,” therapeutic, social, and
humanistic dimensions. So when I finally signed up for the
dreaded, mandatory “Statistical and Experimental
Methods” course, the last thing I expected was to be
interested. But as we sank our teeth into data analysis and
experimental design, once-foreign concepts like
“statistical significance” and “double-blind
control” began to take on an aura of magic for me. Even in
our mock experiments, the fact that I could scientifically,
experimentally, statistically prove that one hypothesis
was right and another wrong acted on my nervous system almost
like a drug. By the end of the term, to the disbelief of my
friends, I was even considering applying to graduate school in
experimental psychology. But as I began to look a bit more
closely at what would be involved, I soon came face to face with
an almost dogmatic materialism that seemed to grip the entire
field. In the end, my interest in higher matters got the better
of me, and it was my minor in religious studies and my growing
passion for the spiritual quest that ultimately set the course
for my life and career.
Although the call of the spirit saved me from a life in the
laboratory, however, my sympathies for science haven't gone
away. One result of this split personality is that whenever I'm
confronted with the battle between science and religion, I
always find it hard to take sides and end up in a sort of
internal battle of my own. Whether it's the ethical debate
surrounding biotechnology or the argument over the anthropic
principle* in cosmology, it's as if I have a red-horned skeptic
on one shoulder and a white-winged believer on the other, and
it's hard to know who to listen to.
Admittedly, the further I look back in history, the less
ambiguous it gets. When I think of Giordano Bruno having an iron
rod driven through his tongue and being burned at the stake for
proclaiming that the universe is populated with other suns just
like ours, I don't have much difficulty condemning the Church's
narrow-mindedness, to say nothing of its tactics. And there is
certainly no doubt in my mind over what the outcome of Galileo's
trial should have been. But follow the timeline a little closer
to the present, and, for me at least, the picture quickly starts
to muddy. Take the evolution vs. creation debate. There are few
public expressions of ignorance more annoying than the
insistence by fundamentalist Christians that biblical
creationism be taught as an “alternative theory of
origin” in our public schools. Yet when I see evolutionary
biologists using the unproven dogmas of neo-Darwinian theory to
convince our kids that they live in a purposeless universe, my
sympathies toward science start to fade once again.
Of course, if the science and religion battle were to stop
with the debate over biological evolution, I would, in the end,
have to come down on the side of science, even if I were to
quibble over the interpretation of some of the data. But if
current trends are any indication, the battle is not stopping
there. Nor does it seem to be calming down. In fact, in recent
years, thanks to the ambitions of two influential new scientific
disciplines, the attack from the science side seems to have
taken a somewhat more insistent turn. And this time, the target
is nothing less than our humanity itself.
The first of these emerging disciplines is evolutionary
psychology. Originally dubbed “sociobiology” by
biologist Edward O. Wilson, this relatively new field of study
is responsible for the frequent headlines in Sunday science
sections announcing the evolutionary origins of such complex
human tendencies as monogamy, moral outrage, and our love of
golf. Think Darwin as humanity's psychoanalyst, tracing the
psychological quirks of the species to the adaptive challenges
we faced in our childhood on the ancient savannah. Armed with
this powerful new explanatory tool, a growing throng of
theorists are racing to force every aspect of higher human
behavior—from altruism to spiritual seeking—through
the mechanistic grid of natural selection. As a result, many
dimensions of human experience that were once considered to be
beyond science's explanatory reach are now coming under the
scrutiny of the microscope.
But as effective as evolutionary psychology has been at
stretching Darwin's dangerous idea to its logical limit, it is
still largely a theoretical discipline, deriving its strength
more from the explanatory power of its model than from the
testability of its hypotheses. As such, it is, at best, still a
moderate weapon in the arsenal of those who aim to
scientifically explain the causes of human behavior and
experience. For the heavy artillery, however, they need not look
far. The thriving field of neuroscience promises to fill that
void and then some. Employing powerful new methods for studying
the intimate workings of the brain, the pioneers of this
increasingly self-assured discipline aspire to demonstrate once
and for all that the mind, emotions, and even consciousness
itself are entirely generated by the three-pound lump of gray
matter in our skulls. For a generation of researchers in this
field, the prime directive is to prove what Nobel laureate
Francis Crick, who turned to neuroscience after co-discovering
the DNA helix, called “the astonishing hypothesis”:
That “you, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in
fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
and their associated molecules. . . . You are nothing but a pack
of neurons.”