Reductionist Exact Scientific understanding may not lead us to a better understanding of what it is to be human.
Stacy over at Accepting Abundance (fab blogger – one for your feed reader) has a post up entitled: Scientific Mystery and Absolute Mystery.
Here’s some snippets, but do hop over and read it all:
In Catholic theology it is acknowledged that there are two kinds of mysteries. A mystery is something that is hidden or unknown that we seek to know. The distinction between scientific, or natural, mystery and divine, or absolute, mystery lies in the difference in what the created mind can know and what it cannot know.
We humans want to understand how things work and move, how they are related and how to manipulate matter in order to improve our lives by making them healthier, easier or more beautiful. Science seeks to understand and reveal the mysteries of the natural world. Science, exact science, is the quantitative study of physical things in motion and while that may sound simple, it works so well.
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The Holy Trinity, the Incarnation and Divine Grace are revealed Truths to mankind, but they are not natural truths of the physical world. They are absolute mysteries, which means that while not contrary to human reason they are, and will always remain, beyond human reason to fully comprehend. They not only surpass the power of the created intellect in this life, but also in eternal life. These highest Truths concern God himself, and simply, creatures (we) are not God.
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Thus scientific discovery, which must measure physical things, has no business making divine propositions, but the combination of scientific mystery unveiled and divine mystery unveiled can work together to lead us towards ultimate Truth because the One who reveals is the same One who creates, and He is existence itself.
I made the following observations – and please do bear in mind this was written off-the-cuff and I’m certainly a layman in the hard sciences.
According to the book I’m reviewing: “Spirituality and Psychiatry“ the main accusation levelled against exact sciences are that they are prone to reductionism.
This reductionist tendency serves to hinder these sciences from exploring anything other than the quantitative, objectively observable.
As a consequence, issues of the interplay between humans and their spirituality are ignored by these sciences.
What I am in fact proposing, is that even with 100% total reductionist scientific understanding of the physical workings of humans – including neuroscience of the brain – this may not lead us to a better understanding of what it is to be human. The fact we also have the Divine spark within us, confounds this further.
And so your conclusion would seem a valid fix:
…the combination of scientific mystery unveiled and divine mystery unveiled can work together to lead us towards ultimate Truth because the One who reveals is the same One who creates, and He is existence itself.
This was Stacey’s excellent response:
Stuart, this is great! Thank you. I still consider myself new to this stuff and that’s why I am careful to reference where I get the ideas I’m explaining. I love how Stanley Jaki views science. He puts it in its place. These days people make too much of it.
In the theology courses I’ve taken (which are only 4 now) I learned for the first time how these new paradigms are not new at all. Before the general time period of the Reformation, Descartes, Kant and especially Hume, science, philosophy, the human individual body and soul were dealt with holistically. Cartesian dualism invited the materialism and empiricism that the book you are reading (I read your reviews and they are very useful!) is addressing. The short synopsis is that Cartesianism taught that mind and body were separate, the general attitude (protest and reform) away from religion focused on empiricism/materialism, so the mind/spirit/soul were dismissed as things of religion more or less. As Jaki puts it, that’s when psychiatry and psychology “lost their minds” and became weak disciplines in trying to be too physical.
In a Trinity course I learned that the word “person” came from the first century Trinitarian debates to explain three Persons in one God. That concept of individual led to the word person being applied to human individuals (and angels). “Person” is derived from the Greek word “psyche”, thus psychiatry and psychology were never intended to be exact sciences to deal with the quantifiable physical world, but human person sciences that deal with body and soul inextricably intertwined.
The divorce of science and religion was most prevalent in the UK and the US around the 1700-1800′s and it’s permeated our cultures now. People today are not taught how to talk about the “soul” yet it is as much who we are as our bodies – together.
Reductionism in exact science is appropriate. In discourse about the human person, it is not. That’s how I understand it anyway.
The wisdom of the Church! Yet again. It never ceases to amaze me.
As if I haven’t been overly verbose already, I’ll also add that I’ve dealt with mental illness and healing for me really came in learning to accept myself (I’m intense!) for who I am. When I realized God has a purpose and I am the way I am for a reason I learned to use it instead of fight it. Meds helped but only in that context. Thus the title of my blog, in part.
You are onto something in your thinking about bringing faith back into treatment. I with you 100%. Keep saying that! Thank you for saying that!
Super response, which speaks for itself.
On a personal note, this is the second encouragement I’ve received today relating to my Spirituality and Psychiatry book review, which is so motivating.
I’m currently thoroughly enjoying the next chapter entitled: Neuroscience of the Spirit, and look forward to sharing my findings with you.
June 3rd, 2011 at 3:04 am
As a psychological researcher and Christian myself (I’m a Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Austin), I have certainly seen the limitations of quantitative research in explaining a few large pieces of the human experience. I think this tends to happen due to researcher bias, cultural forces, and the file drawer problem.
However, I think social scientists can sell ourselves short by assuming that the small pieces we discover cannot lead to significant improvement in human understanding. It is quite a challenge, because it seems to me that understanding is often more elusive than mystery. In the end, I think that knowing more about how our machinery works helps us to serve God and bring about his kingdom. Good thoughts!
June 3rd, 2011 at 10:36 pm
In his book “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, Dan Dennett makes the distinction between reductionism and what he calls “greedy reductionism”. His argument is that one can always reduce a system to constituent parts in the process of understanding it, but it is possible to take this too far and thereby lose the utility of reductionism.
For example, a car engine is a system. If you didn’t know how it worked and wanted to find out, it would be sensible to turn it into a pile of pistons and valves etc, making notes about how it all stuck together. You could then think about how the parts interact to make it all go. That is reductionism. Greedy reductionism, on the other hand, is reducing the engine to a pile of atoms, making notes, and trying to see how the atoms fit together to make a working engine. I suppose that it’s theoretically possible to do, but you would be knee-deep in useless detail.
Similarly, the human mind is a system. At least from an atheist point of view, it must be possible to reduce it to a stack of interactions between neurons but, per Dennett, you’d be daft to try if you wanted to understand how the system worked. What you would try to do is find the right level to reduce it. In this case, that is more likely to mean identifying lower-level brain functions and trying to model their interactions, rather than reducing the whole thing to a pile of neurons and simulating them on a supercomputer.
For example, a year or so ago New Scientist had some research on combat stress. Apparently, soldiers under fire can do some bizarre things, such as sitting down in the open and getting out their sandwiches. Sometimes they do horrendous things. The research suggested that certain mixtures of stress hormones disable your ability to make a rational choice between possible causes of action – the guy who got his sandwich out was hungry, and doing something about that got picked over finding cover. That is pure reductionist thought, but at a sensible level.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you that reducing the mind to a stack of interactions between neurons isn’t helpful, but I think that that is true independent of whether or not we have a soul.