Preface
This is a paper I wrote for an annual conference of the Heythrop Postgraduate Philosophy of Religion Philosophy Circle on the theme of ‘What does it mean to be human?’ in June 2003, though it was completed too late to be read at that conference.
Section 1: Introduction
There is now reasonable consensus among scientists on the main stages and timescale of the development of the physical universe, including our planet Earth and human beings. There is also some understanding of what, from a biological viewpoint, distinguishes the species Homo sapiens from other animals. The picture has become much clearer in the last half-century, although there are still points of detail subject to heated debate. This paper sets out a brief outline of what scientific investigation has broadly established, considers how this has led some thinkers to modify their view of God the Creator, and suggests some points relevant to answering the question “What does it mean to be human?”
Section 2: A brief history of the universe
The universe as we know it today began with the “big bang” between 10,000 and 20,000 million years ago, and has been expanding ever since. In the first fraction of a second, billions of particles and antiparticles were generated and then mutually annihilated in collisions. In the next few thousand million years, protogalaxies and globular clusters were formed, and clouds of gas and dust congealed to form stars. Throughout the universe, stars have formed, in some cases with planetary systems, have burned bright and have died – collapsing into white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes – from long before we existed.[1], [2]
In our corner of the universe, the story includes the condensing of the Sun and planets (about 4.5 thousand million years ago), the appearance of microscopic living cells on Earth (about 3.5 thousand million years ago), of plants (1.8 thousand million years ago), and of the first animals (typically, flatworms and jellyfish – 700 million years ago). Animals evolved and diversified – perhaps millions of different species – and reptiles crawled out of the sea onto land. The Permian Period (280 to 225 million years ago) was an interesting period in the history of the Earth. Around the beginning of the period, all the pieces of land came together in a single super-continent, Pangaea, surrounded by a single unbroken ocean. Then, around 255 million years ago, the super-continent began to shatter into pieces, there was a series of ice ages, and towards the end of the Permian Period a massive volcanic and climatic catastrophe occurred, in which possibly 95% of all species then living on Earth became extinct. It is estimated that only 25 of the animal species alive at the end of the Permian Period have left any descendants at all today. One group of reptiles survived the mass extinction and flourished, becoming the dominant species on Earth for 120 million years: the dinosaurs. They were suddenly extinguished, however, about 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period in another mass extinction, possibly through the collision of an asteroid with the Earth. (We know of five major mass extinctions, when many or most species then alive on Earth were extinguished permanently.) Mammals appeared soon after the Permian catastrophe, and several orders of mammals (including the first primates) survived the Cretaceous extinction.[3]
Around 25 million years ago, the ancestors of apes and humans could be distinguished from the various families of monkeys. The hominid family (the ancestors of humans and their closest relatives) diverged from the gibbons and great apes about five million years ago. Some of them began to walk on two legs. Human fossils (that is, of the genus Homo) date from 2.4 million years ago.[4]
These first humans, of the species Homo habilis, had brains much larger than their australopithecine predecessors or any modern apes, appear to have used stone digging tools, walked upright as we do, and lived in Eastern Africa. Another human species, Homo erectus, began to take over from Homo habilis about 1.8 million years ago, and spread out of Africa to Asia and possibly Europe, and is found in fossils up to 300,000 years ago. There are a few remains of another species, known variously as Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis, between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago.
Fossils of the species Homo neanderthalensis have been found throughout Europe, including England and Wales, and in the Middle East, dating from 150,000 to 30,000 years ago. The neanderthals had brains as large as or larger than ours, had a muscular stocky build like modern Eskimos or Lapps, adapted successfully to the severe conditions of the European Ice Age, used stone tools, looked after their infirm and disabled, and buried their dead. However, a new species (or possibly a subspecies of the same species as the neanderthals) known as Homo sapiens appeared before 160,000 years ago in Africa[5]. Homo sapiens co-existed with the neanderthals in the Middle East from about 100,000 years ago and competed with them for resources. Between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago the neanderthals seem to have died out, leaving our own species, Homo sapiens, as the only extant humans. One of the anatomical differences between the first Homo sapiens fossils and the neanderthals is the development of supralaryngeal airways which were less efficient for breathing and swallowing but which permitted speech.[6]
It seems probable that all people alive today share a common ancestor living in Africa between 150,000 and 60,000 years ago. There is some evidence, though it is uncertain, of a “genetic bottleneck” whereby all non-African humans are descended from a very small ancestral group containing only seven or eight breeding individuals for a period of 70 years. The descendants of this group emigrated to Australia (about 50,000 years ago), Asia and Europe (about 40,000 years ago) and subsequently to the Americas.[7]
Around 20,000 years ago, while still hunters and gatherers, people began to live (at least occasionally or seasonally) in larger social groups. Between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago there was a major shift in the subsistence of some groups to a reliance on domesticated plants and animals. These changes allowed people to give up their nomadic lifestyle and to settle in permanent communities with a subsequent growth in population size and density.[8] A little over 5,000 years ago writing was developed in Mesopotamia. About 3,800 years ago Abram migrated from Mesopotamia to Palestine. Five hundred years later Moses led his people back from Egypt to Palestine, where Jesus of Nazareth was born 2,000 years ago.
I am not trained in any of the scientific disciplines required to validate the many elements of this story – quantum mechanics, astrophysics, palaeontology, zoology, genetic microbiology, etc. It seems clear, however, that the great majority of reputable scientists with the relevant disciplines are agreed on the broad picture and on the principal mechanisms by which our world was created – most notably the Darwinian theory of evolution of all living beings through natural selection. The evidence for human evolution in particular has increased greatly in recent years, not only through improvements in the analysis of the fossil record, but also through the study of genetics and DNA sequencing. It is difficult to pick holes in the web of scientific theory and evidence without challenging discoveries and principles underlying many other aspects of our daily lives, from electric light to antibiotics.
Section 3: How Do Humans Differ from Other Animals?
If we accept even the broad outline of Darwinian evolution, it is clear that humans share relatively recent ancestors with the great apes (orang-utans, gorillas, and chimpanzees). If we go back far enough, therefore, there must have been a group of creatures whose descendants include the whole human race, differing imperceptibly from a population, with the same parents or grandparents, none of whose descendants were human. If we could follow the generations down the hominid line, we would see the development of more and more features of modern human beings – both anatomical and behavioural – as well as some branches that became dead-ends (for example, the now extinct australopthecines and neanderthals).
Every living being has the “recipe” for its creation coded into the DNA molecule reproduced in every cell of its body. For higher animals, including humans, this recipe or genome is coded in a string of 30,000 million nucleotide bases which specify the combinations of amino-acids which ultimately determine the characteristics of an individual at birth, including its species. Work continues on decoding the human genome, to discover how it specifies the shape of my skeleton, the colour of my hair and whether I am naturally musical or not. But already we can compare directly a string of DNA from one person with that from another or with that of an ape, to see how much of it is identical and how much of it is different. Such tests indicate that chimpanzees are our nearest living relatives. Different ways of analysing DNA sequences give different figures, but comparisons of sequences containing mainly active genes have shown 99.6% identity between human and chimpanzee DNA.[9] Other species – gorillas, other apes, monkeys and other animals – are more distantly related to humans on these criteria.
Many of our anatomical differences from chimpanzees are evident, and some behavioural differences are clearly related to the differences in anatomy, such as walking upright rather than on our knuckles. More interesting are our intellectual and social differences – though these cannot always be dissociated from specialised anatomical developments.
An early indicator of intellectual development is the use and manufacture of tools. Many animals use tools – vultures use stones to smash ostrich eggs, Galápagos finches use sticks to probe bark for insects. However, apart from humans, apes and especially chimpanzees are the pre-eminent users and makers of tools. Wild chimpanzees select sticks for probing into a termite mound on the basis of width, strength and length.[10] They modify the stick, stripping it of its leaves so that it suits its purpose. They then thrust it deep into the termite mound and swiftly draw up a stickful of termites, which they strip off the stick into their mouths. But not all chimpanzees have learned this trick: in some chimpanzee “cultures”, termites are an unexploited food resource.
There have been many studies of the cognitive capacities of apes. Some chimpanzees and bonobos (also known as “pygmy chimpanzees”), in particular, have shown insight and ingenuity in problem-solving[11], have learned to recognise themselves in a mirror and to use their reflections in grooming[12], and to deceive their companions about caches of hidden food[13]. These results do not imply that chimpanzees have the same thoughts as we have when we perform the same actions; but they suggest that each of the chimpanzees in question had some mental representation of objects that were not present, had some degree of self-awareness, and could predict and manipulate to its own advantage the responses of others.
This leads us to the most important intellectual difference between humans and other animals: language. For 99% of human existence this has meant, of course, spoken language, developed about 500,000 years ago, not writing, invented about 5,000 years ago.
Daniel Dennett has proposed a progression, based on evolution through natural selection, from the simplest survival mechanisms of the earliest self-replicating macromolecules to the various levels of consciousness found in the higher animals and in humans.[14] Very briefly, some of the key stages are as follows.
Some macromolecules teamed up with others to form simple cells and, about a billion years later, complex cells called eukaryotes with a degree of internal organisation and specialised subsystems to enable themselves to extract energy and material from the environment more efficiently and to protect and repair themselves when necessary. By replicating themselves in the form they had now reached, they were in effect transmitting information accumulated by previous generations on to their descendants. The most basic living organisms were blindly generated by more or less arbitrary processes of recombination and mutation of genes. The “best” designs survived and replicated, and the others disappeared. Dennett calls these organisms “Darwinian creatures”.
The next major stage was of organisms whose design contained elements that could be adjusted in the light of their experience as individuals – “operant conditioning” described by the behaviourist B F Skinner. Dennett calls these “Skinnerian creatures”. They confronted their environment by generating a variety of actions, which they tried out one-by-one until they found one that worked. They detected that it worked by getting a positive or negative response from the environment, which adjusted the probability of their reproducing that action on another occasion. Those fortunate enough to have built-in “reinforcers” that favoured successful behaviour survived and multiplied; those with the wrong selection criteria, favouring negative responses, died out.
Though “Skinnerian creatures” learn as they go, they do so by trial and error, which can be dangerous. A better system for survival involves preselecting among all the possible behaviours or actions so as to weed out the really stupid moves before they are hazarded in real life. As Karl Popper put it, this design enhancement “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead”. Unlike the merely “Skinnerian creatures”, many of whom survive only because they make lucky first moves, such “Popperian creatures” survive because they are smart enough to make better-than-chance first moves. As Dennett says, “Of course they’re just lucky to be smart, but that’s better than being just lucky”. Such Popperian preselection requires a filter, in the form of some sort of inner environment in which such try-outs can be safely executed – an inner environment containing lots of information about the outer environment and its regularities such that the surrogate actions it favours are more often than not the very actions the real world would also bless.
It is important to recognise, firstly, that none of the organisms or systems described so far require anything we would recognise as conceptual thought or beliefs, desires, emotions or intentions. Even though Dennett, like other writers on evolution, adopts what he calls “the intentional stance”, describing such organisms in terms appropriate to a rational agent in order to predict their behaviour as if it were goal-directed, it is simply a logical consequence of natural selection that the organisms that have survived in any numbers are those that have inherited the features described. Secondly, the steps in this progression are not sequential but cumulative: our bodies consist of billions of cells that individually are Darwinian creatures; they contain hundreds or thousands of Skinnerian subsystems, circulating and filtering our blood, providing protection against infections and diseases, controlling our muscles as we move, recognising and analysing visual patterns, etc., etc. Our guts and glands and the rest of our anatomy embody a great deal of information about the world our ancestors lived in. They contain wisdom, particularly about preferences, which can be exploited by our central nervous system, the “Popperian creature” that filters options before acting. One of the ways we achieve useful filtering is by putting candidate behavioural options before the bodily tribunal and exploiting the wisdom, however out-of-date or short-sighted, accumulated in those tissues. If the body rebels – for example in such typical reactions as nausea, vertigo, or fear and trembling – this is a useful sign that the contemplated act might not be a good idea.
The next step is to improve the inner environment by acquiring information from the designed portion of the outer environment, typically by using existing tools. The psychologist Richard Gregory has pointed out that not only does it require intelligence to recognise and maintain a tool (let alone fabricate one), but a tool confers intelligence on those lucky enough to be given one. The better designed the tool (that is, the more information there is embedded in its fabrication) the more potential intelligence it confers on its user. By using a tool, Popperian creatures can improve both the range of possible actions open to them and their ability to review and test these options. Dennett calls creatures who do this “Gregorian creatures”. And among the pre-eminent tools are what Gregory calls “mind tools”: in particular, words.[15]
There are other mind tools we make and use, such as landmarks, labels, pointers, symbols and other reminders that help us re-identify things. Dennett suggests that one of the most useful tricks humans have developed is to unload many of these representations or symbols from our overcrowded minds to the external environment, by rearranging or marking it, and by communicating them to other humans to become part of a culture. In Gregorian creatures like us, the representations of features and things in the external world become objects in their own right – things to be manipulated, tracked, moved, hoarded, lined up, studied, turned upside down, and otherwise adjusted and exploited.
Some other animals moved from merely knowing how to do things (how to track their prey, how to escape their enemies) to making and using representations, off-loading problems into the world or into other parts of their brains, in a certain sense “thinking”, without knowing what they were doing. But, in Dennett’s view, only humans took the next, and the most momentous, step in the history of “mind design”: the invention of language. This enabled them to manipulate concepts, to reflect on what they knew, and hence to understand it. (One is reminded of Wittgenstein’s arguments that you cannot have mental processes that are by their nature inexpressible in a shared language.[16])
With language, therefore, came consciousness, sentience, intelligence, and (in due course) technology, culture and human society. Matt Ridley has argued that all our idealistic instincts for collaboration, respect for property, altruism, trust, and religion can be directly traced back to the pressures of Darwinian natural selection described by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.[17]
We do not yet know precisely how far down the road other animals like chimpanzees have followed us towards conceptual thinking, self-awareness, sentience of pain and pleasure, imagination. But it is clear that we have far surpassed them in all those areas, in the half a million years since our ancestors developed language, and that the fruits of our intelligence are gathering pace all the time. We are far better placed to draw on our experience and that of past generations, and to predict what will happen to us as individuals and to a very limited extent to future generations. But we still tend to have very limited horizons – we very rarely look back more than a few score generations or look forward more than two or three.
Section 4: Where is God in All This?
The traditional picture of creation assumed that, at the first moment of time (or over a very short period thereafter), God created out of nothing the world very much as we see it today. In so far as individual flowers, bees, birds or people came into existence subsequently, they could be seen as “hand-crafted” by the Creator God. The marvellous complexity of living beings far beyond anything humans could make, gave force to the argument from design: the Creator must be a super-intelligent and omnipotent craftsman. We could see that we humans were made in his likeness, because he did perfectly what we did imperfectly. Scientific advances of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Isaac Newton’s description of the solar system or Linnaeus’ classification of plants, seemed to strengthen this argument, most notably expressed by William Paley in his Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, of 1802. If we stumbled upon a watch, Paley observed, we could deduce from its precision and intricacy of design “that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use”. In the same way, when we contemplate the works of nature, “every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation”.[18] We are forced to conclude that the mind and purpose of the Creator could be discerned in the design of creation.
The argument from design, with its associated picture of the Creator, does not easily fit the evolutionary story of the universe outlined above. If we have to pick a moment of creation, it would seem to be the moment of the “big bang”. What was created was apparently an infinitely hot infinitely dense mass of quarks and anti-quarks, which almost all annihilate one another and are followed by billions of electrons and anti-electrons, of which only a handful survive into the next fraction of a second, and so on. As the physicist Richard Feynman said, “created and annihilated, created and annihilated – what a waste of time”.[19] And the story continues with stars and planetary systems, possibly including the beginnings of life, collapsing and disappearing, with the long slow evolution through chance genetic mutations of species, which are then extinguished for ever by catastrophes – not the way we would have created a world! Our understanding of the evolution of living beings enables Dawkins to ridicule Paley’s argument. “All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”[20]
Section 5: The Designer God
Philosophers and theologians who have understood and accepted the evolutionary account of creation have adopted one of two main positions on how it affects our understanding of God the Creator. The commoner approach, at least among Christians, is to require the Designer God to take a step back. He may not have directly crafted the universe as we see it today, but in the big bang he created a universe that could create itself by following the laws of physics and biology that he had decreed. John Polkinghorne, for instance, sees evidence of the divine intelligence in the beautiful equations of quantum mechanics and of the divine intention in the “anthropic principle”.[21]
The anthropic principle depends on the observation that, if any one of a small set of key mathematical constants in the scientific explanation of the universe had had a slightly different value from that which it has been observed to have, then the story would not have unfolded the way it did, and we would not be here today. Cosmologists have proposed the anthropic principle in two forms.
The weak anthropic principle is quoted by Polkinghorne (from Barrow and Tipler)[22] as: “The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable, but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the universe be old enough for it to have already done so.” Polkinghorne interprets this as the simple logical inference that, since we are here today, the universe must be such that life within it is possible. Hawking’s version of the weak anthropic principle has rather more explanatory power: “In a universe that is large or infinite in space and/or time, the conditions necessary for the development of intelligent life will be met only in certain regions that are limited in space and time. The intelligent beings in these regions should therefore not be surprised if they observe that their locality in the universe satisfies the conditions that are necessary for their existence.”[23] In other words, what might seem highly improbable parameters for the universe as a whole are less improbable in small regions, and (necessarily) we live in one of those regions. The weak anthropic principle might explain why, once the universe had expanded nearly to its present size, with a degree of overall uniformity but local variations, the possibility of life evolving somewhere is not totally implausible. But it is insufficient to explain the coincidences needed for the universe to expand to anything like its present size and composition.
Both Polkinghorne and Hawking reject the strong anthropic principle, though they quote it differently. Hawking’s version is: “there are either many different universes or many different regions of a single universe, each with its own initial configuration and, perhaps, with its own set of laws of science. In most of these universes the conditions would not be right for the development of complicated organisms; only in the few universes that are like ours would intelligent beings develop and ask the question: ‘Why is the universe the way we see it?’ The answer is then simple: if it had been different we would not be here.”[24] In his Brief History of Time Hawking ruled out the possibility that different regions of a single universe could each have its own set of laws of science, and challenged the idea that millions of alternative universes can in any sense be said to exist. (Some of his later theoretical proposals might, however, support the idea that countless alternative universes have existed.)
Polkinghorne puts forward his own moderate anthropic principle: “which notes the contingent fruitfulness of the universe as being a fact of interest calling for an explanation”. He quotes a parable by John Leslie: if there is a single fly on a blank wall, its being hit by a bullet surely calls for some sort of explanation. Either a marksman has been at work or many shots were fired.[25] The “many shots” explanation corresponds to the many universes of the strong anthropic principle, with the difficulties that raises. But the “marksman” explanation is of a different type. If a complex scientific theory comes up against the apparent fact that a highly improbable event has occurred, the only way of eliminating this flaw in the theory is to find a scientific or mathematical demonstration that the event is not after all so highly improbable. This is what the anthropic principle was proposed to achieve. In the absence of such a scientific or mathematical explanation, it would seem more reasonable to treat the theory as incomplete than to plug the gap with a “deus ex machina”. Polkinghorne recognises the different nature of the “marksman” explanation when he says that the mere improbability of our existence is not what is notable, it is the combination of that improbability with some other source of meaning. “The evolution of conscious life seems the most significant thing that has happened in cosmic history and we are right to be intrigued by the fact that so special a universe is required for its possibility.”[26]
For Polkinghorne and many other proponents of the Designer God, the creative input happened at the start, and since then the Creator has watched the forces he designed complete his work for him. This leads to a picture, which was present also in the traditional view before the theory of evolution, of the Creator as an “absentee landlord”. Christians may of course see God continuing to act in the world in other ways, through Christ and the Spirit; but the Father, on this view, either takes no further direct part in the world or very sporadically tinkers with his creation, especially in the Middle East, by means of “miracles”.
Section 6: Teilhard de Chardin’s Cosmic Christ
The other main camp of philosophers and theologians trying to relate God to evolution see him as somehow intimately and continuously involved with the evolutionary process. One of the most original Christian interpreters of evolution was the Jesuit palaeontologist Fr Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. His most well-known work, Le Phénomène Humain (completed in 1938 but not published until after his death in 1955, and published in English as The Phenomenon of Man) purports to be purely and simply a scientific treatise, not a work on metaphysics, still less a theological essay. In it he traces the story of evolution much as I have summarised, sometimes in almost poetical terms, up to the point where the first humans acquire the ability to reflect. “From our experimental point of view, reflection is, as the word indicates, the power acquired by a consciousness to turn in upon itself, to take possession of itself as an object endowed with its own particular consistence and value: no longer merely to know, but to know that one knows.”[27] This is what enables the individual human animal to become a person, and permits what Teilhard de Chardin calls the “hominisation” of the whole human species, as humans communicate and share this consciousness. He sees this as the latest and most significant step in the evolutionary progression on Earth, quoting Julian Huxley: “Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself”.[28] Just as geologists recognise the central metallic barysphere of the Earth, surrounded by a rocky lithosphere, in turn surrounded by the fluid layers of the hydrosphere and the atmosphere, and as biologists recognise another concentric layer, the biosphere, as the living membrane of the flora and fauna of the globe, so Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “noosphere” for the “thinking layer”. Within it have developed languages, cultures, industries, and philosophical and religious doctrines. For him, “the social phenomenon is the culmination … of the biological phenomenon”.[29]
Civilisation was born in the Neolithic age (10,000 to about 8,000 years ago) when the nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down to agriculture and domestication of animals. Teilhard de Chardin saw the present age as transitional, and for that reason spiritually restless and uncertain. He quoted Abbé Henri Breuil: “We have only just cast off the last moorings which held us to the Neolithic age.”[30] One clear trend has been the intermingling of people, through the invention of railways, cars and planes, and of ideas, through the invention of radio (and, we might now add, television, the internet and mobile phones). In place of the divergence of subspecies we might have expected from the history of evolution, mankind is remarkable for the extent of interbreeding and hence blending of genes between population groups. All of this enhances the unity of the noosphere.
In looking forward, Teilhard de Chardin saw only two options for humanity: we must either turn our backs on progress and throw away the achievements of evolution up to now, or advance beyond the individual and the personal towards something universal and hyper-personal. Consciousness (which started as a “within” of molecules, became the life in cells, and developed into reflective thought in humans) is to be further deepened, and all the individual consciousnesses in the noosphere are to coalesce into a unity. The ultimate point of psychical convergence (which lies at the end of space-time) is called Omega. In his account of evolution, Teilhard de Chardin outlines his own theory of the relationship between the energy of physical and chemical reactions, which is interchangeable with matter at the atomic level, and the “psychical energy” he sees as driving forward the evolutionary process. In the final stage of progress towards Omega, the psychical energy is identified as universal love.
Only in the epilogue of The Phenomenon of Man, and in other works, does Teilhard de Chardin translate the theory into a Christian framework. He picks up a strand in Christian theology sometimes called “the Cosmic Christ”, based on various passages in St Paul[31] and John 1:16, and developed by the Greek fathers, particularly Origen.[32] In this line of thought, Christ is the fullness, the completion, the fulfilment, the “Pleroma” of all creation, which Teilhard de Chardin identifies with Omega. God is the controlling factor in the whole process of “pleromatization”, and Christ as Omega provides the link between the final collectivity towards which creation is moving and God himself. Christ mediates between the multiplicity of creation and the ultimate mysterious unity of the triune God.
“But Christ’s role is not to be viewed solely in these broad cosmic terms. We need to see it also in terms of the known history of the process. And here it becomes natural to speak of the goal in terms of “parousia” rather than “pleroma”. In the work of creation, Teilhard can envisage the Word as drawing the world on historically until it was ready for the Incarnation. Christ’s saving work in his life, death and resurrection were a further continuation of that process. After that came the Christian Church. It … is that part of human existence which brings into focus the whole saving work of Christ, by which he is drawing on the whole world to its final state of existence. Thus the Church can appropriately be designated the central axis of evolution.”[33]
Teilhard de Chardin’s religious superiors forbade him to publish any of his philosophical or theological writings during his lifetime. Consequently, some of his ideas seem to lack the clarity that might have followed from critical analysis by other thinkers. His papers, published after his death, show that he had reflected on these themes over a period of forty years. Unfortunately, since he was forbidden to teach these ideas to pupils, there has not been any significant development of them by others subsequently.
Section 7: A N Whitehead’s followers and Process Theology
Alfred North Whitehead was the co-author with Bertrand Russell of the three-volume foundation of 20th century formal logic, Principia Mathematica. His Gifford Lectures of 1927-28, subsequently published as Process and Reality – an Essay in Cosmology[34], were adopted, particularly in the United States, as the source work for a school of “process philosophers” including a number of “process theologians”. By contrast with Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Whitehead’s Process and Reality contains a rigorous if fairly indigestible definition of a new metaphysics, which he called a “Philosophy of Organism”, but which is now usually known as “process metaphysics”.[35] In this the basic elements of reality are not stable substances or “things”, but what Whitehead calls “actual occasions” – fleeting events that can be linked together in various ways, for example as steps in a process or activity, or as momentary states of a thing or person, seen as inevitably changing over time. “Being” is subordinate to “becoming”. The ultimate notions involved in the meaning of “entity” or “being” are creativity, one and many. He designed this system as a more appropriate way of analysing an evolving natural world than the unchanging Aristotelian categories underlying almost all other Western philosophy. Because it starts from a very different basis, it is not easy to assimilate or translate into “substance” metaphysics. The way Whitehead sets out his “speculative scheme” in Process and Reality beginning with a long list of definitions, and his adoption of a number of common words (such as “feeling”, “satisfaction”, “society”) as terms of art with meanings very different from those they have in everyday use, do not help. But the scheme has stood up well to the test of time as a robust metaphysics, despite some developments and modifications by Whitehead’s followers.
God is central to Whitehead’s scheme, with three roles: “the foundation of order, the outcome of creativity, and the goad towards novelty.”[36] He is “an actual entity immanent in the actual world, but transcending any finite cosmic epoch – a being at once actual, eternal, immanent and transcendent.”[37]
An implication of this, explored at length by one of Whitehead’s followers, Charles Hartshorne, is that in certain respects God cannot be unchanging and (in the sense understood by Aquinas) omniscient. Although both Whitehead and Hartshorne were sons of Anglican priests, their accounts of God were broadly theistic rather than Christian, with little attempt to express within the scheme traditional doctrines such as the Trinity, Atonement or Salvation. David Ray Griffin has argued that, although process theology is a philosophical (or natural) theology, arguing its positions in terms of strictly philosophical criteria without appeal to special revelation, nevertheless it can more accurately be called a Christian philosophical (or natural) theology because of its birth in a Christian cradle.[38] He himself refers to Jesus “in a normative way that would not be natural to a theologian of another tradition”.[39] Some current process theologians have addressed Christian issues much more directly: for example, Jerry Korsmeyer has reanalysed Roman Catholic doctrine on original sin in the context of human evolution,[40] and the Jesuit Fr Joseph Bracken, among others, has developed a process theology of the Trinity.[41] Another current trend in process thinking is a rapprochement with European postmodernism. Griffin called his variety of process theology “constructive postmodern theology” in opposition to the deconstructive approach of Derrida and others; but a recent book by Bracken finds much common ground between Whitehead and Jean-Luc Marion, Louis-Marie Chauvet, Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and others.[42]
In Whitehead’s view, all individual entities are experiencing subjects. The things of this world are serially ordered occasions of experience. Each occasion of experience is a creative synthesis of “feelings” of prior events, and the process of coming together is called a “concrescence”, containing several phases. Firstly, it is called into actuality by God, who shares with it an element of divine creativity and provides it with a physical standpoint and an initial aim (that is, a graded spectrum of possibilities for how the occasion can form itself). Secondly, the becoming subject feels its past occasions and feels its surroundings (the rest of the Universe) in varying degrees. It pulls its feelings together into a subjective aim and becomes concrete, enjoying a brief period of “satisfaction”: in doing so it is self-creative to the extent it has been given creativity. This subjectivity is an attribute of all occasions from those of an electron to the “dominant occasions” of consciousness in the human brain (or mind or soul). Then the subject perishes and becomes an object, which means it exerts causal influence on other occasions. The pasts of all occasions are taken into the being of God, where they are preserved everlastingly.
This is the framework within which the process view of a human person can be developed. As a complex organism, a human being is composed of a serially ordered string (or “society”) of occasions – dominant or high-level occasions corresponding to the complexity of the organism. Parts of the experience forming those occasions may be felt consciously, other parts will not be. But only the occasions of a human being could contain the highest levels of consciousness – no other organism has that capability. Throughout his or her life, the human being creates himself or herself: each momentary occasion draws on past occasions and on the environment, but contains a spark of creativity, of spontaneity, producing some novelty. Consciousness is merely the highest level of experience, which ranges from the simple influences felt by an atom through the interactions of simple life forms with their environment, to the considerable cognitive powers of higher animals. A living body is a co-ordination of high-grade actual occasions. The human brain is a very high-grade organ of central control. “The mind” is simply a way of referring to this highly unified structure of occasions so as to emphasise their unity and the richness of their inherited experience, partly through the many complex subsystems of the body. Whitehead can see no evidence for the separate existence of a soul as an enduring entity. He does not (at least in Process and Reality) give much prescription for mankind’s destiny or ideals, but accepts that social activity, morality and religion are natural developments of humans, and hints that love, tenderness and living in the present moment, as exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth, are types of God’s relationship to the universe. As already mentioned, God in his primordial nature gives unity, order and value to every concrescence, and God in his consequent nature receives the whole of reality into himself. If we have a God-given direction in which to move, it is towards unity and intensity of experience.
Followers of Whitehead have been more prescriptive in various ways as to what we should do. Mostly they seem to follow a line similar to Teilhard de Chardin: human beings are the pinnacle of evolutionary development so far, but need to evolve further into super-humans. One person who has developed process thinking in a slightly different direction is a London-based Sacred Heart Missionary Fr Diarmuid O’Murchu. In his view we need to abandon the anthropocentric will to power, and stop asking “How do we control consciousness?” We should be asking “how do we submit to its higher wisdom?” We should accept that we belong to a reality greater than ourselves, and that everything is held irrevocably in the embrace of a benign life-force.[43] That may mean that evolution and the growth in cosmic consciousness should continue on a path that does not include Homo sapiens. If so, we should accept that as for the best[44].
Section 8: Conclusion
Some conclusions may be drawn from the above on the issue of what it is to be human. The history of the human race is a very brief episode in the story of the universe – even the dinosaurs lasted much longer than we have so far. Even in that brief period we have evolved both physically and – more importantly – intellectually and culturally. Therefore any description of human nature as it is in 2003 AD – particularly one involving our cognition, rationality, imagination, free will, or social relationships – is unlikely to apply to human beings 500,000 years ago and may not apply to our descendants a few hundred generations into the future. We are embedded in an immensely varied world of living organisms to which we are related by descent and of which our bodies are composed. We have today far greater capabilities than other organisms, based on our ability to talk to one another and thereby to collaborate. This may mean that each of us can play our tiny but potentially valuable part in conjunction with others to build a future in accordance with a dimly perceived divine plan, though much more of the work will be done by our descendants, who may evolve powers much greater than our own. Or it may be God’s plan that humans, like the dinosaurs, have played their part (whatever that may be) and are soon due for extinction.
Notes:
[1] Timothy Ferris: Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Vintage, London, 1990: passim; summarised pp 413-416.
[2] Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time from the Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam, London, 1988: esp chh 3 & 8.
[3] Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, BCA, London, 1992: pp 29-30, 133-4 and references quoted there.
[4] C B Stringer in Steve Jones, Robert Martin & David Pilbeam (edd): The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, CUP, Cambridge, 1992: pp 241-251.
[5] Press reports 12 June 2003 (e.g. Independent p 5) of skull discovered at Herto, Ethiopia, documented by Prof Tim White in current edition of Nature.
[6] Philip Lieberman in Jones, Martin & Pilbeam: op cit. p 136.
[7] Shahin Rouhani & Steve Jones in Jones, Martin & Pilbeam: op cit. p 283.
[8] Frank Hole & Juliet Clutton-Brock in Jones, Martin & Pilbeam: op cit. pp 373-385, 402-410.
[9] Sagan & Druyan: op cit. p 277.
[10] P C Lee in Jones, Martin & Pilbeam: op cit. p 342.
[11] E.g. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh & Roger Lewin: Kanzi, the Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, Wiley, NY, 1944 as retold in George Page: The Singing Gorilla, Headline Book Publishing, London, 1999, pp 90-92.
[12] E.g. Gordon Gallup: Self-Recognition in Primates, American Psychologist 31 (1977), pp 329-338, described in Sagan & Druyan, op cit. pp 378-9, and in Jones, Martin & Pilbeam., op cit. p 111.
[13] E.g. P C Lee in Jones, Martin & Pilbeam: op cit. p 111, and Sagan & Druyan: op cit. pp 379-380, and references quoted there.
[14] Daniel C Dennett: Kinds of Minds, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1996: pp 83-101.
[15] Dennett, op cit. pp 99-100, and reference there to Richard L Gregory: Mind in Science: A History of Explanations in Psychology, CUP, 1981.
[16] Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (2nd edn), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958: Pt I §§ 243-363.
[17] Matt Ridley: The Origins of Virtue, Penguin, London, 1997; Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene, OUP, Oxford, 1976.
[18] William Paley: Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, London, 1802, quoted in Richard Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker, Longmans, London, 1986, p 4.
[19] Richard Feynmann, talk at the University of Southern California, 6 December 1983, quoted in Ferris, op cit. p 352.
[20] Dawkins: The Blind Watchmaker, p 5.
[21] John Polkinghorne: Beyond Science, CUP, Cambridge, 1996, pp 79-92.
[22] J D Barrow & F J Tipler: The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, OUP, Oxford, 1986, p 16, quoted in Polkinghorne, op cit. p 87.
[23] Hawking, op cit., p 137.
[24] Hawking, op cit., p 138.
[25] John Leslie: Universes, Routledge, 1989, pp 17-18.
[26] Polkinghorne, op cit.: p 88.
[27] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (tr. Brian Wall): The Phenomenon of Man, Collins, London, 1959, p 165.
[28] Teilhard de Chardin, op cit. p 221.
[29] Teilhard de Chardin, op cit. p 223.
[30] Teilhard de Chardin, op cit. p 214.
[31] Particularly Rom 8: 19-23; 1 Cor 3: 21-23; 8: 6; 15: 20-28; 2 Cor 5: 19; Eph 1: 4, 9-10, 20-23; 3: 9-11; 4: 9-10, 12-13, 15-16; Phil 2: 9-11; 3: 21; Col 1: 15-20; 2: 9-10, 15, 19. Also Heb 1: 2-4, 10; 2: 5-9; Rev 1: 17; 2: 8; 3: 14; 22: 13.
[32] cf James Lyons: The Cosmic Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin, OUP, Oxford, 1982.
[33] Lyons, op cit. pp 207-8.
[34] Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality (corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W Sherburne), The Free Press, NY, 1978.
[35] See Nicholas Rescher: Process Metaphysics, SUNY, Albany NY, 1996, for a useful introduction.
[36] Whitehead, op cit. p 88.
[37] Whitehead, op cit. p 93.
[38] David Ray Griffin: God and Religion in the Postmodern World, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1989, p 9.
[39] Griffin, op cit. p 10.
[40] Jerry D Korsmeyer: Evolution & Eden, Paulist Press, New York, 1998.
[41] E.g. Joseph A Bracken SJ: Society and Spirit – A Trinitarian Cosmology, Associated University Presses, Cranbury NJ, 1991; Joseph A Bracken SJ and Marjorie H Suchocki (edd): Trinity in Process – A Relational Theology of God, Continuum, New York, 1997.
[42] Joseph A Bracken SJ: The One in the Many – A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship, William B Eerdmans Publishing Co, Grand Rapids MI, 2001.
[43] Diarmuid O’Murchu: Evolutionary Faith, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY, 2002, pp 179-181.
[44] Diarmuid O’Murchu: Quantum Theology, Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, (Revised edn) 2004, pp 191-2.
Goodness Gracious 