You are not a ghost in a meat blanket

Teaching science in a reductionistic world

I gave a very brief session with the above title at the recent Society of Classical Schools in Michigan meeting. I thought I would share a version of the same here. It will probably help, as you read it, to remember that it was aimed at teachers.

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Tara Ann Thieke, who has a knack for writing short, profound phrases, has the following pinned to her Twitter profile.

That is the message the world preaches to our students today - your body is just a machine, certainly, and if they give you the “ghost” part at all (because materialists also struggle to understand consciousness), you are a ghost in that machine. Transgenderism is a sort of “fully-formed” illustration of this teaching. After all, if you’re just a ghost trapped in a machine, maybe you are a female ghost trapped in a male machine - why not?

But Christians can make a related mistake too. I was chatting with Jonathan Cast about this issue recently, and (shared with his permission) he said the following:

Modern Christians focus on being a disembodied soul in heaven more than a resurrected man on the New Earth, but I think it's clear from the Bible they've got that backwards.

I’m just a science guy, but it does seem to me that many Christians-in-the-pews have made the emphasis, “some day you can die and your soul will go be with Jesus in Heaven”, implication being your body is unimportant (this physical world is unimportant), it’s better perhaps to throw it away. By contrast the message of the New Testament, I think, and the historical Christian message, puts greater emphasis on “Jesus is going to come back, and fix the world, and resurrect your body”. Humans are supposed to be embodied creatures, the body matters, our body is part of us. I think we are slowly correcting this mistake, but for the last several decades it has been a popular one.

So… the question of this talk is how do we avoid accidentally putting these errors into the minds of students. In a reductionistic world, how we do avoid accidentally (because I assume none of us are going to do it on purpose) teaching them they are just a machine, or a ghost walking around in a machine? You might divide this talk into two parts:

1. We got here, in part, because of the real successes of science.

2. What do we do about it?

The real successes of science

We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater - we got here, in part, because of the real successes of science. Science has had tremendous success cutting things up into tiny parts and pieces, and trying to understand the macro-picture by understanding the parts and pieces. But when I criticize the modern mindset, I sometimes call it a “parts and pieces view of humanity”. Is she a woman? No, she is a “birthing person”, or a “person with uterus” or some such. People are reduced to parts and pieces and functions.

But again, science has had a lot of real success, and real improvements in understanding, via reductionism of a type, so we can’t just toss it out. I’m a physicist at heart, but I am teaching a course in chemistry this semester, and perhaps more then physics, in chemistry you really get the sense that, “we’re going to study the smallest parts and pieces, and from that we will understand where the macroscopic properties come from”. It’s not especially profound, but a nice example of this might be hydrogen bonding in water.

Oxygen atoms want two more electrons, hydrogen atoms are happy with one more or one less (and, incidentally, interesting that we talk about the human body as a mechanism, but then talk about atoms as if they are people with desires!). Water molecules therefore have a positive end and a negative end, and the positive side of one molecule tugs on the negative side of another, and vice versa. Now in a sense (although this calls into question what it means to “see” something), no one has ever seen hydrogen bonding, because you can’t see water molecules, our very best instruments can only sort of see them. But in another sense, you see it all the time. It is why water sticks to water, why water is “sticky” generally. It is why water tries to form little balls. Applied to water as it freezes (together with the shape of the water molecule), it is why snowflakes have hexagonal symmetry and why ice floats in liquid water. We can understand those macroscopic properties by looking at the smallest pieces and building up from there. Indeed, one of the really awesome things about teaching science is exposing students to beauty and order in the universe that is otherwise invisible to them.

Or… I’ve been saying here that your body is not a machine… but sometimes we do, quite successfully, treat it as one. I still remember my advisor in grad school talking about going to the doctor to “get a plumbing problem fixed” - half our laboratory was plumbing problems, so likely the language came easily to him. We do fix some problems with the body as if there is some problem with the piping. Good Christian doctors warn about this temptation within medicine, that you can come to see your patient not as a human being, but just as a broken device that needs fixing.

(And then below is some red blood cells we photographed under a microscope at school recently, just because it is cool.)

Some red blood cells I photographed under a microscope recently.

But as an illustration of the problem… I recently read Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens, subtitled “A Brief History of Humankind”. Now this is definitely not the sort of book you casually give to a Christian teenager with, “here is how the world is!”, Harari presents a completely materialistic view of human origins and history. That said, he does say some things we can appreciate. He says humans are story-making creatures, and orient our lives around shared myths, and I think the classical education movement would agree with him there. He says that, in our modern world, the state and the market are replacing the family, but is that actually making us happier? He identifies Nazi Germany as a nation that followed the logical of evolutionary Darwinism! I doubt that made him many friends. So there is plenty to appreciate in this pro-materialism book.

But anyway, to share his thinking, a perhaps infamous passage is where he “fixes” the Declaration of Independence in light of what biology has taught us (he says). You know the original, I suspect.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Well that’s a whole lot of fiction, he says. Created? Bah. Equal? Have you looked at men recently, in what sense are they equal? Rights? Our concept of human rights doesn’t come from biology, it comes from Christianity. (!!) Happiness is a vague word, I’m not even sure what that is.

His fixed version:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

He says, “there are no such things as rights in biology. There are only organs, abilities, and characteristics.” You’re just parts, pieces, and functions. Elsewhere he says, “every technical problem has a technical solution”, which surely describes the modern mindset about all kinds of stuff.

What do we do about it?

Well, we do not want to lose students in the reductionism that, among other things, has been responsible for turning women into “birthing people”, and so on. How do we combat that when teaching science? At this point, I’m afraid I must tell you that the problem is easier to diagnose than to solve (though I suppose that goes for all problems, or we’d hardly call them problems at all). Here are a few thoughts though, and maybe you can share your own later.

First, here is a cheap answer, but by golly if you can get students to ask questions which are just begging you to address the topic directly, that sure helps. I got the following questions from students earlier this month, the first from a tenth grade girl, the second from an eleventh grade boy.

(And if you’re wondering, in what classes did these questions come out? The answer is “study hall” so… yeah. And I think without any prompting whatsoever. Students are fun.)

These are interesting questions. The second one… phew, who knows, I’m not even sure that’s a well-posed question. I think (recognizing them as a relatively low-quality source of information), I referenced reports from near-death experiences.

But the first. That gets into the heart of the issue, and it gets into the question of consciousness, which nobody can answer. (Actually, in another very honest moment, the Sapiens authors writes that biology, despite extensive efforts, cannot explain consciousness. Of course materialists believe the explanation must entirely be within the brain, because they have nowhere else to put it.) It raises hard questions for Christians too, inasmuch as… Christians can suffer head injuries that seem to affect their thinking, Christians get dementia, Christians can get drunk. So although we say the human person survives death, it is also quite obvious that the brain matters. I think (admitting also my own ignorance) my short answer to the student was that her personality is a real part of who she is and I would expect it to, largely, persist. And then I shared what is a common metaphor in Christian circles, at least, that proposes the brain as a sort of transceiver, through which the soul and body interface. And yes, even if everything is fine on both sides of the radio set, if the radio set itself is damaged, that will affect your behavior here and now.

How can you get students to ask you such questions? It probably helps that they know I will think about anything with them. I think some, at least, theology teachers might be loathe to speculate on anything where the Bible isn’t clear. But students expect their science teachers to be not quite all there, so you know, that’s helpful. Ahem.

Second, recognize that curriculum is of limited help here. You have to add your own stuff. Rarely is it, “let’s turn to chapter four in our textbook, which is about how the body isn’t just a machine”. Nearly all my best comments come from additional reading and thinking I’ve done on my own. Indeed, that is one reason teaching is an awesome profession, you can say “I just read this really neat thing, now let’s all talk about it”.

Why must you behave this way? For one, most Christian curriculum is fighting the battle against yesterday’s atheism. E.g., if your curriculum is taking on “relativism”, that’s a sure sign it’s out of date - modern atheists aren’t relativists, they are dogmatists of the highest order. Rarely, they will still use the language of relativism, but that is a last-ditch, they have no arguments left against you, “how dare you judge what works for me” move. But that’s only employed as a no-other-options-left comment.

But it shouldn’t surprise us that the curriculum is battling against yesterday’s atheism. It takes time to make new curricula, and by the time it is done, the world has changed. And then, after you’ve made it, you don’t want to quit using it!

And two, this sort of thing just isn’t the focus of the curriculum. A common complaint made against the government schools is that they teach all this bizarre indoctrination, when they should just be teaching “reading, writing, and arithmetic!”, goes the complaint. On the one hand, we recognize well that every school is going to impart certain worldviews and ways of thinking. But on the other hand… actually, a whole lot of our time does go into teaching how to read, write, do math, do science, and so on. That’s why chapter four will rarely be about how your body isn’t just a machine.

Therefore, three, be well-versed in the battles of the day so you know what you need to confront, and can do so intelligently. I used to teach at a public college, and one of the upsides (pardon) of teaching there was that I was confronted with the cultural madness every day. Now I’m not anymore, and that’s sad. Ahem.

But truly, it helps a whole lot to be engaged enough with the world to know where the conflict lies. I know social media is regularly cursed, but I have found Twitter very helpful for this personally. Social media is what you make it, and you can use it intelligently and make awesome connections, or you can let it drive you crazy.

And read widely, and share some of things with students. We did briefly discuss some stuff from Sapiens in class. As I was preparing this talk, the latest First Things magazine lands in my mailbox, and the very last article is titled “Machine”!

But, as we know, La Mettrie’s position finally swept the field: all nature, no revelation. He allows not even a “ghost” lurking inside the metal plates. Whatever the “soul” is, he argued, it can be exhaustively analyzed according to physical, and hence biological, phenomena. Individual brains (whose “fibers” are “played” like violin strings, as he delightfully put it), cognitive combinatory facility, internal chemistry, the neural origins of sexual arousal, drugs like opium—add them all up and you get ­human consciousness and spirit.

Well that sounds oddly familiar. So be engaged, read good stuff, and you will have material to discuss with students.

(And all that said… I would love your own feedback and advice, now.)

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