Human Biology and Spiritual Reality
Originally published in the Gentleness of God (Fall 2010) Issue
We live in a world of dichotomies. Some are true, others are false. Many of them deal with deep issues regarding our being
and doing. Science and faith, truth and authority, material and moral, and so on. In October of 2010, Trinity Forum organized an evening conversation between two experts to poke around at some of the dichotomies that flourish today, and investigate if they really hold up under the light. William Hurlbut is a physician and Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford. Dallas Willard is Professor of Philosophy at the USC School of Philosophy. The title of the event was “Human Biology and Spiritual Reality.”
Those two topics have more in common than might be first evident, both as points of conversation and in the way they affect our lives. That’s because they address the question of “What is real?” And how we ask and answer that question, Willard argues, determines how we live. Many modern philosophers claim that only the “empirical” is real, the empirical encompassing only that which we experience with our senses and feelings. But perhaps that’s a claim that needs to be reexamined, or at least we need to look again at how narrowly we define “empirical.” The broader meaning of empirical includes reason and authority.
The notion of authority is suspect in our day, and rightly so for its misuses throughout history. Keep in mind, though,
that most of what we know we take from authority, whether it’s the make-up of the periodic table or the recent trends in global warming. Authority is fine if it can be tested, and we can learn a lot from sources of authority. The only authority
that is bad is that which cannot be tested. Although the misappropriation of authority and even reason have led to disastrous results in the last several centuries, restricting our definition of reality to include only what can be detected through the senses brings along
its own host of problems. One cannot live life and make decisions based solely on the material. Willard asserts that we need knowledge that is adequate to base our lives on. And that knowledge needs to encompass not just our senses and feelings,
but also reason and reliable authority.
Is there room in knowledge for spiritual content? Hurlbut pressed this issue during the evening, inviting listeners to consider the possibility that there is a biological basis for spiritual ascent in humans and suggesting that spirituality is not just subjective experience but rather part of reality. It is built into our being to see moral meaning in material situations. Hurlbut mentioned that if
a chimpanzee was crucified, its fellow creatures wouldn’t get it. They would be disturbed and scream and throw sticks at it. If a whale were stuck on a beach, no animals would care about it, not even other whales. It is only the human who would see the seriousness of the situation and take steps to save the whale. And when a man is crucified, it is only the human who can see at the same time immense injustice as well as profound salvation.
The spiritual dimension of our lives has implications on how we view and treat our bodies and our actions. Whatever our philosophical or spiritual background, there is an awesomeness in the unity of the human person that behooves us to be reverent in our interventions in it, from the earliest stages of the embryo to the last breaths of life. Hurlbut brought up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birthmark.” It speaks of a husband who has a wife who is almost perfect, except for a birthmark. In his quest to make her perfect, he coerces her into a treatment that only continually disfigures her. It is similar to our modern attempts to perfect ourselves and our loved ones. When it comes to novel genetic modifications to perfect our bodies and intellect, it’s not just a matter of opening Pandora’s box. We may be denying our very identities. Whether our aspirations for perfection are steeped in lofty or base motives, we risk writing ourselves out of our own story if we do not respect our given nature. These matters bring up questions pertaining to responsibility, and the thorny issues of sin and free will quickly follow. The narrowness of empiricism may have us believe in an equally narrow determinism that boils down our actions to our physiology and external circumstances, Willard laments, but responsibility and decision-making are things every person engages in every day. Even the most ardent determinist does not go into a restaurant, look at the menu, and wait to see what happens. Our material make-up and outside circumstances may be the basis of our decision-making, but in the end we as persons decide our actions. And if we believe that, we may make ourselves better off. Hurlbut cited a study that showed that those who had an understanding of free will made decisions that had better results than those who simply ascribed their lives to chance.
But even if we move beyond a view of the world that is simply governed by chance, we still are beset by the uncomfortable
coexistence of both love and suffering. Hurlbut suggested that we might look to the cross and the One crucified upon it for the answer. There before us is both suffering and injustice, yet the choice of Christ to be crucified was one of love, giving His life for his fellow man. On the cross we see the moral manifested in the material. There was neither meaningless matter that found itself at some random place and time, nor some disembodied idea or spirit which hovered amorphously for us to guess at its purpose. At Calvary, there was a perfect unity of the physical and the spiritual. At the foot of the cross we can meditate on, and maybe even answer the question of what is real. What is real is love, and the greatest manifestation of Love was a Person.