Jesus Creed Admin: September 2009 Archives

Last week I posted on an article from Discover Magazine on the science of sin (Part One and Part Two). This article described a number of studies where the human brain was imaged as a function of external stimulus. These kinds of studies are in their infancy - so the results should be considered with interest and a dose of healthy skepticism.  The basic ideas are sound - but as the work progresses there will no doubt be refinements and changes in the understanding of human response.

There are key points here that we need to take seriously though. The first that strikes home is human embodiment. We cannot separate soul, spirit, mind and will from the human bodies that contain said soul, spirit, mind or will.  The second is that the human mind or will is malleable - research is demonstrating that the brain contains a conscious self-regulatory system. As one researcher said: "This network provides us with the evolutionarily unprecedented ability to control our own neural processing - a feat achieved by no other creature."

In the course of a few posts over the next several weeks I would like to think through some of the ramifications of these ideas in the light of Jesus and Paul, and in the context of Christian thought through the ages. I am not an expert in much of this, so I look forward to learning from the comments and conversation.

Let's start off with a simple question.

Is there any role for human effort in the development of spiritual and ethical maturity (Christian virtue) or is it simply the power of the Spirit through the grace of God working within one's life?

"Why does being bad feel so good?"

Studies of brain response to various situations may provide important insights to this question.

In the last post in this series we considered some of the science pertaining to lust, gluttony, and  sloth as discussed in the article "Seven Deadly Sins" in the September 2009 issue of Discover Magazine (the magazine has a website at discovermagazine.com - but this article is not available on-line, at least not yet).

Today I would like consider the last four --- pride, envy, greed and wrath. Greed has not been studied explicitly, but the other three have.  Despite the fact that these seem to be sins of the will or spirit rather than the body, they, like lust, gluttony and sloth, have biological roots and observable signals in the brain.

Envy is interesting - in a study of envy a number of volunteers were observed using fMRI (functional MRI) while they read one of three scenarios - the key one described a student similar to the volunteer, but better in every respect.  The conflict detecting regions of the brain fired and the response was similar to that for pain. This leads to the suggestion that envy is a kind of social pain.  Later, when reading about this student's downfall, the reward and pleasure regions of the volunteer's brain fired.  Not only this but the greater the pain in reading about the student's success, the greater the reward in reading of the student's downfall.  The reward response is along the same line as that experienced from food - or sex. It feels good.

Is envy sin? Is the pleasure in reading of a virtual rival's downfall sin?

While much of the furor over the conflict between science and faith centers on the question of origins and evolution - it is not limited to these questions alone. The sciences also impact our understanding of human behavior and human response and this can also lead to increased understanding or to conflict.

The September 2009 issue of Discover Magazine has an interesting article on the Seven Deadly Sins (the magazine has a website at discovermagazine.com - but this article is not available on-line, at least not yet).  The article poses a question "Why does being bad feel so good?" and describes research being done these days to explore the science of sin.  One of the most interesting techniques used in these studies is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), another is PET (positron-emission tomography). In these technique the active areas of the brain are mapped as the subject responds to certain stimuli.

Consider one sin - Gluttony. In one experiment the researcher asks his volunteers to come in hungry.

He then torments them, asking them to describe their favorite food in loving detail while he heats it up in a near by microwave so that the aroma wafts through the room. ... the motivational regions in their brains go wild. Parts of the front orbital cortex, which is implicated in decision making, also light up. (p. 50)

These and other studies indicate that obese people have lower reward sensitivity and that areas involved in inhibitory control are less active.  In fact it appears that overeating downregulates inhibition control.   Tongue in cheek (I think) the article suggests that this offers moral absolution. If a sin isn't voluntary it isn't a sin - at least according to Thomas Aquinas - and we are wired to overeat.

This is a relatively minor example - but it leads to an interesting question.

What role does chemistry or biology play in our understanding of sin?

Chapter 11 of Simon Conway Morris's book Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe is titled Toward a Theology of Evolution, and to this we now turn.

Conway Morris suggests that the view - common among many educated westerners steeped in enlightenment ideals - that the world is ours for the taking, to be bent to our pleasures or whims is a recipe for disaster. We need to recover a broader view of the world.

First, we need to recall the limits to science.  It is no bad thing to remind ourselves of our finitude, and of those things we might never know. ... At its simplest it is a precautionary principle, and more significantly a belated acknowledgment that the architecture of the Universe need not be simply physical.  We should also recall, as if we needed reminding, that we are mortal and limited, and thus should remember that the old myths of unrestricted curiosity and corruption of power are not necessarily fables.

Second, for all its objectivity science, by definition, is a human construct and offers no promise of final answers.  We should, however, remind ourselves that we live in a Universe that seems strangely well suited for us. ... Not only is the Universe strangely fit to purpose, but so, too, as I have argued throughout this book, is life's ability to navigate to its solutions. (p. 326-327).

NT Wright commonly notes when speaking or writing that there are many ways of knowing - and scientific knowing is but one of these. What science does well we would do well to head - but there is more than this to the world around us. This leads to two key questions for us to consider.

What are the limits to science as a means to explore the world? How else can we know?

Several weeks ago we began a series looking at Simon Conway Morris's book Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. After a brief hiatus I  will come back to this book with two final posts; today a discussion of the force of his argument from convergence (Ch. 6-10, pp. 106-310), and in the next post a discussion of his chapter: Towards a Theology of Evolution.

Conway Morris is the Professor of Paleobiology at Cambridge University.  His research is focused on "the study of the constraints on evolution, and the historical processes that lead to the emergence of complexity, especially with respect to the construction of the major animal bodyplans in the Cambrian explosion." His work is published in all of the major journals of the discipline including Science and Nature.

The central chapters of Conway Morris's book outline (in a rather rambling fashion) the evidence for his hypothesis that evolutionary convergence is ubiquitous and that the progress of evolution, far from being random and highly contingent on chance events, is in broad brush strokes predictable.  This is not farfetched wishful thinking and others are thinking along similar lines. As an example Conway Morris quotes an article in the journal Evolution discussing the evolution of body size and its tendency to increase. The authors of this article state: "We suggest, however, that Gould's ... emphasis on randomness be replaced with an emphasis on deterministic outcomes that result largely from the role of ecological processes in speciation and extinction." (p. 306).

Here are the questions I would like to consider today:

Is there room for randomness in your understanding of God and creation?

How much of what happens is predetermined and controlled by God? Is a process that is random in detail but globally deterministic consistent with the sovereignty of God?

Yesterday we finished off a discussion of John H. Walton's fascinating look at The Lost World of Genesis One. In the discussion of scientific explanations of origins in proposition 16, p. 136 Walton draws an analogy (He uses a few...

Scot has handled most of the discussion on John Walton's (professor at Wheaton) new book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, but I am going to jump in with a post on his next...

I will return to consider the next chapters of Conway Morris's book Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe next week. Today I would like to take a brief detour and consider another question. Many authors - Dawkins and...

Last week I took my eldest to Bethel University in St. Paul (well Arden Hills) where moving in was truly an experience. The President of the University and his wife, Jay and Barb Barnes, greeted each and every new student...