Apart from a few defiant creationists, most people in the West today have abandoned the old argument from design. What is now left of the explanatory use of God to account for the organised intricacies of planet earth has retreated to one of the last frontiers of human knowledge, which is the human mind. Religious explainers now try to tell us that the mind inhabits the brain, but is not reducible to it. This is sometimes called the Ghost in the Machine theory: the idea that our bodies, though they are physical mechanisms, are inhabited by an invisible spiritual reality called mind or soul, exactly in the way that God is understood to inhabit and direct the universe. This is a development of Plato’s idea that fundamental reality is spiritual and immaterial, but that it assumes the form or appearance of matter in actual entities, the way the Invisible Man in the old movie would sometimes wrap himself in bandages and pop a pipe in his mouth so that people could locate his presence. The significant thing about the appearances was that they were mere shadows of heavenly realities and had no enduring life of their own; only the spiritual had enduring life. Applied to individual humans, this gave us the idea that our bodies are temporary habitations for our souls, and when the body dies the soul returns to its immortal state.
What gave this theory such a long run was the experience of our own consciousness. We seemed to ourselves to be more than material realities. Our mind was an invisible power that transcended our bodies, so it was easy to believe that it had an independent and separate existence that would outlast its house of clay. By extension, God was understood as the Super Mind or Spirit that activated the created universe but was independent of it. As is the way of these things, this theory, the last frontier of defensive religion, quickly becomes the next frontier of science, and Antonio Damasio, a leading neuroscientist, is one of its explorers. In his book Looking for Spinoza,9 Damasio explores the mind/brain question from a philosophical as well as a scientific angle. He offers an account of the way evolution has endowed us with a complex neural system that enables us to regulate our life in a way that maximises well-being and minimises pain. He tells us that those neural reactions of pain or pleasure we call ‘feelings’ were built from simple responses to external events that promoted the survival of the organism. Feelings are brain states, whether of fear or compassion, that prompt us to respond to our environment in ways that will be conducive to our own safety and flourishing. The mind is not some sort of self-existent ghost that temporarily inhabits our flesh; it is a way of describing how the brain expresses our bodies. But, as I have already pointed out, because of the way we experience ourselves as somehow transcending our bodies, it is easy to understand how we were led to posit the idea of a self that existed independently of its physical container. That assumption about ourselves is strengthened by the fact that the gift of memory enables us to recognise patterns in our experiences, thereby giving us some level of control over our instinctive responses to the pressures that beset us. And by enabling us to unify our own remembered history, however inaccurately, the experience of memory lends force to the tendency to abstract ourselves from the brain that has so intelligently organised our experiences for us. The tragic disproof of the claim that there is a fundamental essence in us that is independent of the body is clearly demonstrated in cases where assaults to the physical brain change or utterly destroy the personality or selfhood of the person, long before their body as a whole has died. We could apply to these tragic people some of the words from Larkin I have already quoted – ‘nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with’.
Damasio’s investigations force us to reappraise some of the most vexing philosophical problems that have haunted us since the emergence of consciousness. Are we controlled by a separate reality, whether it is God in the case of the universe or the mind in the case of ourselves, or are the structures of both the universe and the mind explicable in terms of themselves without reference to outside forces? Darwin gave us a way of understanding the evolution of life on earth without the necessity for an external agency to guide its development. Damasio offers us a parallel explanation of the mind that is hopeful as well as convincing. The fact that it is hopeful is interesting. One of the many charges that retreating religionists make about the explanatory advance of science is that, by reducing everything to biology, it leaves no ground for a satisfying spirituality or an authoritative ethic for humanity. However, scientists increasingly argue that nature itself provides the best basis for ethics because it prompts us to live prudently and to care for one another, as well as for the earth on which we live, if we want to survive and flourish. This is a theme that I shall develop in a later section of this book. Damasio even offers us a naturalistic account of human spirituality. He writes:
I assimilate the notion of (the) spiritual to an intense experience of harmony, to the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection. The experience unfolds in association with the desire to act toward others with kindness and generosity. Thus to have a spiritual experience is to hold sustained feelings of a particular kind dominated by some variant of joy, however serene. The center of mass of the feelings I call spiritual is located at an intersection of experiences: Sheer beauty is one. The other is anticipation of actions conducted in ‘a temper of peace’ and with ‘a preponderance of loving affections.’ These experiences can reverberate and become self-sustaining for brief periods of time. Conceived in this manner, the spiritual is an index of the organizing scheme behind a life that is well balanced, well-tempered, and well-intended. One might venture that perhaps the spiritual is a partial revelation of the ongoing impulse behind life in some state of perfection. If feelings testify to the state of the life process, spiritual feelings dig beneath that testimony, deeper into the substance of living. They form the basis for an intuition of the life process.10
It is the life process, the encounter with Being itself, that is becoming the focus for human spirituality and ethics today. Traditional religious explanations for the mystery of life, which were entirely understandable in their time, projected the significance of life beyond itself to a supernatural self-existent reality that was believed to have called life into existence and upon whom life was permanently dependent. This binary theory of reality inevitably downgraded the significance of the world itself, because it was held to be a rival to its creator; and it projected the credit for humanity’s best discoveries and insights onto this imagined distant authority. Christianity, without entirely understanding what it was doing, tried to balance the record by claiming that God in Christ had become immanent in the world, and had embedded himself in human nature. At the same time, it tried to retain the traditional idea that God was also entirely separated from and transcendent to the world. This is the basis for its claim that Jesus Christ was completely man and completely God at the same time. Contemporary secular spirituality finishes the process that was begun in Christian theology, by severing humanity from its dependence on a supposed external supernatural authority. We seem to be living through a time in which one part of humanity is beginning to claim autonomy or self-governance for itself and to acknowledge that meaning now has to be discovered in the life process itself. We may be no closer to understanding why there is a world, but we are now able to accept the fact that the world itself is the source of the values and meanings we prize most, not some hypothetical transcendent reality which did none of the work yet claims all the credit. One way to express this is to say that the spirit is now engendered by and encountered in the world in which we find ourselves. Rather than positing an external force to account for our most cherished experiences, we begin to understand how they were generated within us in response to the life process itself. And it is through us that the universe has become aware of this. This is mystery enough to be going on with, without hanging on to ancient hypotheses that now create more problems for us than they solve.
Intrigued by the strangeness of it all
But after six uncomfortable hours in the chair, I need more than another coffee break; I need something to take my mind off the dizzy contemplation of the mystery of Being. By nine o’clock in the morning I am being stunned by the serious weirdness of the universe. I once asked a couple of distinguished scientists what was