One of the questions that perplexes me is, why (at least among those with active intellects) do there seem to be three kinds of people: those who believe in God but not Darwin, those who believe in Darwin but not God, and those who, like me, believe in both?
It occurs to me that it has to do with authority figures.
By an "authority figure" I mean a person in command. Religious fundamentalists believe that God is, first and foremost, such a person. Scientific atheists own to no such personal figure of authority. For them, authority comes impersonally from the scientific method and the discovery process it underwrites.
As for me, although I call myself religious I have trouble envisioning God as mainly an authority figure. Whatever my relationship with God is, it is not one of submitting to Him as an absolute master.
I find it interesting that the word "authority" is so closely related to "authorship." Fundamentalists think of the Bible as the authorial work of the One Lord of All. God wrote it, so it must be absolutely, literally true.
An assumption fundamentalists make is that God does not speak to us in metaphors, so slippery and fuzzy in their interpretation. To the mind of a fundamentalist, metaphors and other such soft forms of utterance do not go with the assertion of absolute sovereignty.
The scientific atheist uses metaphors without ceding them much authority. To a Darwinist, "survival of the fittest" is a convenient metaphor for the much more nuanced theory of natural selection that forms the core belief of Darwinism. Natural selection as it is understood toady actually talks about statistical probabilities, not stern absolutes of survival and death. Such a metaphor as "survival of the fittest" is not actually seen as binding on the theory per se.
Likewise, when scientists talk to us ordinary folk about quantum theory or string theory, they speak in analogies we have some chance of understanding. But when they talk among themselves, they prefer to use mathematics as a lingua franca.
Neither in the case of religious fundamentalists nor in that of scientific atheists does metaphor carry final authority. To religious liberals like myself, on the other hand, metaphor itself is apt to be seen as the central repository of authority.
No one person, divine or otherwise, is absolutely in command. Nor is absolute authority to be ceded to an impersonal process such as the scientific method. Rather, authority comes ultimately from within the individual mind. It is an emergent property of the brain.
It is, accordingly, a creative process, and like all creative processes, it springs from the metaphorical capacity of the mind.
That is a capacity that is explored in The Idea Machine, an article that appeared recently in The Baltimore Sun. According to Michael Salcman, a Baltimore neurosurgeon quoted extensively in the article, "The brain is a metaphor-making machine. It routinely expresses the concrete in terms of the figurative."
Salcman cites the poet Robert Frost to the effect that "poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another." Says Salcman, "That is what artists and scientists do all the time. The ability to compare one thing to the next is inherent to the way the brain is structured."
Scientists use metaphor to say one thing and mean another when they are thinking loosely, en route to making some concrete discovery. Yet the discovery itself, when they write it up as an article in a peer-reviewed journal, has to stand up to the decidedly non-poetic scrutiny of pursed-lipped skeptics who may not be thrilled in the least. Whether it's right or wrong, there has to ultimately be some authoritative way to express what they have discovered without using fuzzy, Frost-like language to put it across. There has to be the crisp equivalent of E = mc2 at the bottom line.
When it comes to religious fundamentalists, they too insist that saying one thing and meaning another is not what God, in revealing Himself to humankind in the Holy Bible, would do.
Why is it that people on both sides of the Is-There-A-God question — and lots of other folks, too — consider it non-kosher to use figurative language to say one thing while meaning another? Especially when the thing which is meant by the utterance can hardly be encapsulated in everyday prosaic language, why is it so bad to rely on what the Sun article calls the "association regions" of the brain as a way of communicating what we think the ultimate nature of reality actually is?
The "association cortices" constitute what the article says is "the vast majority" of the human brain's neuronal constituency. Each of our brains contains about one trillion nerve cells or neurons, each with 10,000 synapses that link them across a narrow gap to other neurons. The associational cortices are no different in their organization from other areas of the brain, but instead of being dedicated to specific tasks like sensory input from a single organ or movement of a single muscle, they "respond to more than one type of sensory input" and tell us how one input pattern is like others we have experienced before.
The uniquely human capacity for unencumbered "free association" — unique because no other species possesses such a richly complex associational region in its brain — is the spark of our creative genius.
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| Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam" |
The article hints that Michelangelo foreknew this finding of modern neuroscience concerning creativity and gave us a clue to it in his fresco "The Creation of Adam," in the Sistine Chapel. Or else, why does the Creator's swirling purple cloak form the shape of a human brain?
So religious fundamentalists today, and to a lesser extent atheistic scientists, are oddly in agreement that what the Sun article calls the "most human and complex parts" of the brain — the association cortices that give us our capacity for metaphor — are unreliable as sources of authority.
As a religious liberal who is perfectly comfortable with an authority figure that is anything but crisply concrete — the metaphorical capacity of the human mind — all I can say is, "How odd!"
