Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Incarnation and Evolutionary Biology
Christian theology has often seen Evolutionary Biology (and science in general) as an enemy, but it doesn’t have to be that way at all. In fact, many of the ground-breaking theological moments have come from embracing new discoveries. Of course, there have been exceptions.
In early modern science the understanding of relation between the body and the soul was deeply shaped by Rene Descartes, who argued for a radical dualism between the (extended) material body and the (thinking) immaterial soul. In Cartesian anthropology, strong distinctions were made among the “faculties” of the soul (the intellect, the will and the affections) and between these soulish powers and the human body.
The sciences of neurobiology, however, have shown how human cognition is deeply rooted in and dependent upon the electro-chemical neural function of the brain. In fact, all ‘reasoning” (and “willing”) emerges out of and is shaped by the “feeling” of the embodied brain. Higher cortical processes depend upon and are regulated by the functioning of various parts of the limbic system, which are linked through the brain stem into the whole energetic network of the body as it responds to its environment. Rationality could not have evolved, nor can it emerge within an individual, apart from the emotional responsivity of the biological organism. - LeRon Shults "Christology and Science" p. 35
Human communication is a complex system of symbolic reference. We associate mental frames (images, symbols, pictures) with physical pictures (letters, words, characters, etc.) Memory is a process of our brains developing a strong signal path from one frame to another. Narratives are the complex web of these frames. Our brains physically change by strengthening those frequent pathways between frames. The strength of these embedded narratives can influence how we then interpret the world around us. It becomes impossible to access a single frame without pulling up the entire web of related frames. Our understanding of humanity is one of those narratives and it shapes how we do theology. It becomes impossible to think about theology without speaking through our understanding of human origins and what it might mean to be a living, thinking organism.
The origin of modern Homo sapiens involved the crossing of a “symbolic threshold.” The conditions for the emergence of this capacity are clearly related to changes in the human brain. It has often been assumed that human plausible explanation for the selection pressure that led to the prefontalization of the brain in hominid evolution is that the brain and language “co-evolved.” Changes in the brain were a direct consequence of the use of words. The first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection process have affected hominid brain evolution ever since. So in a very real sense I mean that the physical changes that make us human are the incarnations, so to speak, of the process of using words. - Leron Shults “Christology and Science” p. 42
It seems that we did not simply develop language as a result of our larger brains. Our brains developed as we began to form symbols and make language. The use of symbols (language) made us more and more uniquely “human”. You might say that humanity has literally been spoken into existence. If our humanity is what happens when words become flesh as a complex web of synapse connections, then it radically changes how we might imagine God becoming man. However, it may only serve to reinforce our use of the metaphor “the word became flesh and dwelt among us”.
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2 comments:
>>The use of symbols (language) made us more and more uniquely “human”. You might say that humanity has literally been spoken into existence.
Very interesting and well said, though of course we could probably have a chicken-and-egg argument here. Language would not have been possible in the first place without the physical brain. Language may have driven the development of the brain, but the raw physical matter of the brain was there first. Language was the telos-- the end of the means the pre-existed it.
>>If our humanity is what happens when words become flesh as a complex web of synapse connections, then it radically changes how we might imagine God becoming man.
I love the perspective of Friedrich Schleiermacher in his Speeches on Religion that in producing the varied objects and forms of life around us, the Universe (which he uses as a synonym for God) is intuiting itself. God cannot be fully known in his own being even by himself, but as his incarnations become known to each other there is a sense in which God at least partially knows himself. Humanity's faculties for thought, symbol, and knowledge give voice to what Is. To speak is merely to signify the transcendent, because there exists nothing apart from him to be signified. In this view Word is the last rather than the first incarnation of God, but it is also the highest because it orders and gives name to all the others.
Chris,
Thanks for stopping by. I loved the Schleiermacher reference!
Shults makes reference to the "chicken/egg" phenomenon by using the term "co-evolved". Evolutionary biology suggests that brains did not just happen on the scene in the present form. Humans evolved the capacity of more complex language by using more language. But as with all traits developed through evolution, it is the need (value) for a trait that sustains the trait and makes it a part of descendant generations. Given what we know about brains, it makes sense to deduce that language was a skill that helped by providing a survival edge. I would include in this the early forms of language like signs and symbols. Evolution selected those early hominids with slight capacities for language and therefore Evolution produced language while language produced more complex brains by helping those hominids survive, etc.
We don't just speak in language. We also think in language. What would we "know" without a language to know it in?
I do concede that this is relative to our definition of knowledge. I guess I could argue against myself by suggesting that a tree "knows" water when it grows its roots to the nearest source.
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