Deeper Into Superficiality

We belong to the surface of the world, and apply to it the classifications which inform and permit our actions...the meaning of the world is enshrined in conceptions that science does not endorse...conceptions that grow in the thin topsoil of human discourse. Our perspective on the world is not sovereign, but a by-product of the evolutionary process which created us. Its authority stands always to be usurped by the imperial ambitions of scientific theory.

—Roger Scruton[1]

We human beings are a part of nature—supremely complicated but unprivileged parts of the biosphere.

—Daniel Dennett[2]

Introduction

When it comes to the image we human beings have of ourselves and our place in the universe, all that is solid melts into the rising waters of scientific explanation. Where once we could conceive ourselves as utterly unique, occupying a very special place in the scheme of things, it is increasingly difficult to sustain this in face of what science tells us about our origins and nature. To borrow Roger Scruton's trope, the news is that we are superficial. Or, as a 1970's song propagated by National Lampoon put it, you are a fluke of the universe. From an objective point of view the universe would look pretty much the same if humans had never existed. The impulse to seek consolation by way of ignoring, evading, or denying this is understandable. It is, perhaps, especially understandable for those of us who adhere to the ancient faith in Christ. Our confession that we are made in the image of God was for centuries articulated with the conceptual resources of a pre-scientific world. It is challenging to integrate the image of human beings on offer from contemporary science into the biblical affirmation that we are God's creatures. Many persons of faith, seeing this as impossible, carry on a heroic but to all appearances hopeless struggle to safeguard something essentially human from capture in the nets of scientific explanation and thus preserve our image of ourselves. Many others, acknowledging that science has deflated the ancient human self-image, abandon the Christian faith as a vestige of the past, inextricably committed to a false picture of what we are.

This essay expresses the conviction that neither course is correct, and that there is a route to a robust account of our place as God's beloved creatures that is not merely consistent with the scientific picture, but enhanced by it. I will conclude this essay by suggesting a route to this happy outcome. To follow it is to delve more deeply into our superficiality and to come, at last, to the heart of the Christian Gospel. First, I will briefly enumerate some of the many ways in which science has brought down our exalted self-image.

Contingency

The textbook history of early modern thought portrays the discovery that the Earth is one planet among others, orbiting a sun that is one star among countless others in a cosmos that has no center or privileged locations, as destroying the conceit that we occupy the center, and thus the most important, part of the universe. This is anachronistic, since the point of the ancient and medieval idea that modern astronomy overthrew is that the Earth occupies the bottom, and thus the worst, part of the universe.[3] What was legitimately disconcerting was the parallel discovery of the vast size of the universe, with its implication that anything humanly imaginable is a negligible speck in it. Eventually, the daunting size of the universe was matched by the reaches of time. As Pascal said in his Pensées, “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me.”

We may soberly point out that however much the immense span of space and time beggars the imagination, a thing's size and duration have no bearing on its value. However, we should be daunted by our place in the abstract space of possibilities. You and I, dear reader, are contingent—nothing in the nature of things guarantees our existence—and we are vastly improbable. That we exist, rather than any number of other possible people, is a matter of sheer chance. To exist at all is to have won the greatest lottery of all. Had any number of things gone even slightly differently in the past, we would not exist. Had a different spermatozoon reached the ovum at which it aimed, some possible, but forever non-existent, sibling would now exist instead of you. Buffeted by Brownian motion, which is due to apparently inherently probabilistic quantum mechanical events, a spermatozoon's trajectory, and thus conception, is a chancy process. And, of course, who is conceived depends on the behavior of prospective parents, not just in the final intimate moments, but earlier in their lives. Further, their getting together to bring you into being was in turn dependent on an incalculable number of earlier actions and events that could have been otherwise. I have mused on the fact that if Hitler had not invaded Poland, and thus launched the Second World War, the United States would not have eventually gone to war, my maternal grandfather would not have been transferred from Cleveland to Boston with his daughter in tow, who there met and married the man who became my father. So, thanks Adolf! Had he behaved himself, there would be no me. For reasons that I cannot conceive my mother once informed me that I was conceived while my multitasking father was listening to a Red Sox game on the radio, causing me to realize that if the players had made a few different choices, the pace of coital events would have gone differently, and not me, but some possible but never actual sibling would have taken my slot in existence. One more reason to revere the Red Sox!

Some of my fellow Christians will find this implausible, at odds with the idea that each of us was specifically intended by our Creator. But the cost of this belief is high: either the creation is governed by deterministic laws, so that whoever eventually exists, what happens to them, and what they do is guaranteed by the initial state of the universe and those laws, or God more or less constantly intervenes to ensure things go according to plan. So, say, I exist only because in June 1951 Ted Williams at the last minute changed his mind and threw a fastball, rather than a curve, to the Brooklyn Dodgers' batter, and Williams made that choice because it was in the cards from the beginning of the universe, guaranteed by the laws and initial conditions. Or I exist because God miraculously intervened to nudge Williams into deciding on the fastball. Neither causal determinism nor relentless divine intervention is easily reconciled with human responsibility.[4] I may feel like an inevitable feature of the universe, but in reality my existence was far from a sure thing.

The same improbable contingency applies to the human species as a whole. As Stephen J. Gould's often said, if the tape of life's development were rewound and replayed the result would be different; other species would exist.[5] The existence of humans was far from inevitable, but as dependent on unlikely sequences of earlier events as the existence of each human individual. Species perpetuate themselves for long stretches of time, but they are “frozen accidents,” not kinds called for in the nature of things. Reaching further back in time, the same is true of the Earth, the Sun, the solar system, and the Milky Way. Had things gone slightly differently earlier in the history of the universe it would contain other galaxies, star systems, planets, and persons. At the beginning, all the inevitabilities were general: the universe was more less sure to give rise to galaxies, stars, planets, species and individuals of some sort or other, but the specifics were left to chance.

Viewed from the impersonal perspective of the universe, we look like afterthoughts. Contemplating this leads to a kind of metaphysical vertigo. As the Psalmist wrote, “We are fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps. 139.13)

Materiality

Most people believe that they are not merely their bodies, but that they have an immaterial part.[6] They see this essential component, the mind or soul, as immortal by nature, continuing to exist after the body's demise, its fate determined by one's behavior prior to death. This conviction answers to our deep-seated desire to transcend the material world and its vicissitudes, as well as our innate insistence that each of us finally get what he or she deserves. The human mind is mysterious to itself, so denying it its place in the physical world and projecting it into another realm was, for millennia, reasonable. It no longer is. Science leaves no serious doubt that the human mind is the functioning, embodied, socially situated brain, and that the seat of our cognitive and affective lives is the brain's neurocomputational circuitry. Ironically, it explains the intuitive plausibility of the mind being distinct from the body as a by-product of the brain's cognitive architecture: the information processing module that generates beliefs about biological life and the module that generates beliefs about minds do not communicate. We naturally continue to ascribe mental properties to persons after we know their bodies are dead. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe that we know of, and much of its workings remain to be explained. But the evidence that mind is a product of brain function is overwhelming. Here science accords with ordinary experience: we know, for example, that consuming gin in quantity deranges reasoning and moral judgment, and that a sharp blow to the head can cause loss of consciousness. Such phenomena are incomprehensible on the assumption that reasoning, moral judgment and consciousness itself are activities of an immaterial mind, not the brain. Some believe, or at least hope, that we must resort to an immaterial mind to explain subjectivity, that mere material things cannot possess consciousness and for this reason humans are fundamentally different from all other creatures, in our essentials beyond the grasp of greedy science, invisible to its objectifying lens. Yet this is unsustainable in light of what's obvious with no help from science. A cat, for example, feels pain when you step on its tail. It has a sensation, which is a state of consciousness. Thus, a physical object can be a subject. The implausible alternatives are that cats, and all other seemingly sentient non-human animals, are mindless automata, or that they possess immaterial souls. We lack a good explanation of how a material thing can be conscious, but this does not detract from our knowledge that some are. The assumption that the mind is the brain either already explains, or reasonably promises to explain, a great deal of the mind, although subjective experience remains beyond the current reach of science. However, this must be seen in light of the fact that those who contend that the mind is a non-physical entity also have no explanation of how it can be conscious, as well as having no explanation of anything else we know of the mind.

Acknowledging that we can understand ourselves only in rudimentary and fragmentary ways, we are tempted to conclude that we must be truly wonderful, mysterious beings. The alternative, which deflates our self-image, is that we must not be as smart as we thought we are.

Responsibility

The humbling realization that we are material creatures has pervasive implications for our image of ourselves. Perhaps most challenging is what follows from our being fully embedded in the natural world of cause and effect. All that transpires in the mind, including every decision, is an effect of natural causes. Whatever freedom of choice and moral responsibility we have must be consistent with this basic fact about our material nature. We cannot be the ultimate originators of our choices and actions: they lie along chains of causation that pass through us, and back, ultimately, to the beginning of creation. It is widely believed that such causation precludes the robust freedom with which we credit ourselves. If so, we must settle for freedom of a lesser sort, the freedom we ascribe to other persons and ourselves so long as one's actions are caused by one's choices, and one's choices are in turn caused by one's own reflectively examined beliefs and desires. We are responsible in that we are responsive to reasons and inhabit a social world in which we are called upon to justify our choices and actions by appeal to them. Human beings can be responsible for what they do, but not in the ultimate sense some envision. Our choices are caused by our reasons, what we want and what we believe about how to obtain it, but we cannot choose what to want or what to believe. We did not create ourselves. As moral agents, we do not stand outside the world, acting upon it, but can at best act with some approximation of rationality within it.[7]

Mind

From the ancient Greeks until midway through the past century, those who thought about such matters aspired to knowledge that had an absolutely certain foundation. To truly know, we must be beyond not only actual and reasonable doubt, but beyond any possible doubt. Careful processes of reasoning could, it was hoped, be rewarded with absolute certitude. Escaping the distraction of the body with its desires and sensations was a prerequisite for success in this quest for knowledge. Human reasoning, and the knowledge it creates, was qualitatively precisely like God's, differing only in its scope: we are not omniscient. It afforded a direct view of reality in itself untainted by parochial perspective or the possibility of error. The mind's materiality renders this high view of capabilities implausible.

The account that emerges, shaped by the realization that the mind is a brain crafted by mindless natural selection, not an immaterial substance engaged in pure reasoning, portrays human knowledge as a product of the brain's sensory connections to the rest of the world. Knowledge is belief that is true and which is caused by a reliable process. We know by seeing, for example, because light impinging on our eyes initiates a cascade of neural causes and effects that cause the brain events that are visual sensations, and they in turn cause us to have beliefs about what lies outside the mind. This process is reliable, but it is not infallible. It sometimes gives rise to false beliefs and we think we know when we don't. We can investigate the causal processes that cause our beliefs, either confirming or weakening our confidence in them. However, all such inquiries are local, necessarily carried out against the background assumption of the general reliability of our sensory and reasoning functions. Scientists who explore the mechanisms of vision, or memory, or reasoning itself cannot dispense with reliance, however cautious, on their ability to see, remember what they see, and to reason about it. We have no place to stand from which we can validate our means of knowing as a whole, from the outside. We could be completely deceived. We cannot avoid acting on faith in our native capacities.

What we are able to know by way of scientific investigation of ourselves chastens the impulse to exalt our capacity to know. The brain is the product of eons of natural selection, taking its final shape in the last few hundred thousand years on the African savanna. There, our ancestors' minds were adapted by natural selection for life in small hunter-gatherer groups. What mattered for reproductive fitness there was not the capacity to obtain knowledge of the world as it truly is, but by economical means to acquire beliefs and desires useful for surviving long enough to raise children. Various defects in our reasoning today are explained by appeal to the fact that our minds are essentially similar to the stone-age minds of our ancestors. Why do human beings find it obvious that heavy objects fall faster than light ones? Because this false belief works well enough in a world where air resistance tends to slow the descent of light objects. Why do we like the taste of salty, fatty, and sweet foods so much, even though eating them in quantity is bad for our health? Because in the ancestral environment such foods were hard to come by, necessary for nutrition, and obtained only by those with a strong motivation to make the effort. Why do we have difficulty believing that the misfortunes that befall us are matters of chance, rather than due to malicious unseen actors, human or divine? Because when constructing mental mechanisms to detect threats, selection favors false positives, which are merely inconvenient, over false negatives, which can be fatal. Human beings are innately subject to various cognitive and perceptual illusions because minds are the result of blind evolution, not of intelligent design.

Nowhere is the gap between what we are and how we have traditionally conceived ourselves greater than when it comes to self-knowledge. We are, to a surprising degree, “strangers to ourselves.”[8] Experimentation reveals that human beings lack access to the unconscious sources of their desires and preferences and, when called upon to explain them, confidently confabulate reasons. We are reliably moved to act by factors we see as having no motivational force, and even by factors of which we are unaware. A well-known example are ethnic and gender biases which we may be sure we do not harbor, yet which scientific study brings to light. Clever experimenters easily manipulate us into doing things we regard ourselves as freely doing. Again, when asked to explain ourselves, we indulge in fiction. Our powers of reasoning are more generally deployed for rationalization, defending convictions we hold not as conclusions, but as unconsciously fixed presuppositions. Actual honest reasoning is a hard-won achievement, not something we do naturally.[9]

We have long supposed that we possess a special faculty for knowing what we want and believe, that introspection infallibly informs us of the contents of our own minds. If I sincerely assert that I believe cats are vicious, I might be wrong about cats, but how could I be wrong in believing that I believe this? Yet a large and converging body of evidence points toward the conclusion that much of the contents of our minds is knowable to us only in the way we know what goes on in other minds: by interpreting empirical evidence. We employ a single fallible capacity for “mind reading” for our own minds and those of others.[10] Similarly disconcerting results appear in the study of perception. We imagine that we see what is before our eyes, but those of you who have encountered the “invisible” gorilla on the basketball court, or examples of “change blindness,” know this is not true.[11] Perception supplies a highly edited and biased description of the world, not a transparent window on whatever happens to be there. We often see what we expect to see when it's not there and we fail to see what is there when we do not expect to see it. Colorless, invisible photons strike the eye, triggering chemical events in nerves that initiate multiple levels of extraordinarily complex computation, culminating in the conscious representation of a world of colored, three-dimensional, moving, objects. This process is profoundly influenced by what we expect and care about. Seeing what's in front of us is more like writing the great American novel than like being a tiny neutral observer—a homunculus—watching an internal television screen.

Current science describes the brain as the mind in virtue of its computational powers. The intrinsically meaningless states of the brain become meaningful thoughts in virtue of the causal roles they play. A state of one's brain is an idea, and an idea of a cat, because it is characteristically caused by the presence of cats, and in turn characteristically causes behavior appropriate to there being cats in the vicinity. There’s nothing intrinsically cat-like about this mental item. The mind is not, however, an all-purpose computer, like the one on which I am writing this, but an interconnected set of dedicated information processors. Each receives information from the senses or from other modules, and each outputs information to other modules or to the muscles that move us. Thereby the brain navigates the person as a whole though her natural and social environment. We lack conscious access to much of this computation. For example, the brain parses the continuous stream of sound speakers produce into distinct phonemes and morphemes, then into grammatical sentences and we finally hear intelligible speech. But we have no direct knowledge of how we do this, just as we have no knowledge of how our intentions to speak cause the lungs, vocal cords, tongue and mouth to produce our own continuous auditory stream in response.

The mental modules that comprise our minds interconnect in various ways, but not all possible interconnections exist. The mind's modularity involves a degree of encapsulation: some modules do their work without sending their output to other modules that could have put it to good use.

As in the intuitive plausibility of non-physical minds referred to above, information in one part of the mind is not accessible to another part. A striking example of this are optical illusions that persist even after we understand their causes and know that how they make things appear is not how things really are. What one knows is not communicated to, and thus does not modify, our perceptual mechanisms.

Many now seek to explain innate human religiosity as a by-product of our cognitive architecture, a result of the interaction of modules evolved for other purposes. This is in a sense an evolutionary explanation, but it does not dignify our tendency to belief in unseen agents such as gods, demons, or the spirits of ancestors as an adaptation. It's an accident of our brain's evolved architecture.[12]

Somehow, the output of various modules is bound together, so, for example, one has a unified experience of seeing and hearing the fire truck go by. But the mind falls far short of being the unified whole it long imagined itself to be. The verbalizing components of the brain engage in ongoing self-description, constructing a more or less coherent narrative, but this self is an incomplete and only somewhat accurate gloss on what we really are. Its relation to what goes on in the depths of the mind/brain is analogous to the relation of your computer's graphical user interface, what you see on the screen, to the software and hardware invisibly at work inside. Developing a self that reveals what we really are, and thus being a principled, consistent agent in the world, is an ideal we approximate only with effort.

The Human World

At another level, the limits of the evolved material mind are no less profound. Our powers of reasoning and imagination, and the sensory capacities they rely on, evolved to detect what's going on in a narrow range of reality. Our sense organs are sensitive to only a fraction of the possible sources of information in the universe: “visible” light is a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, and hearing detects only a relatively small range of sound frequencies. Most of what goes on around us is hidden. Deeper knowledge of the world must be indirect, accomplished by way of instruments that supply a second-hand experience of what is out there.

Human beings are middle-size things, made for coping with a world of things on a comparable scale. We are epistemological Goldilocks, lacking natural access to most of reality. Our minds are not naturally equipped to deal with the unimaginably small, the realm where the behavior of atoms and their components determine what goes on in the world we experience. Nor are they naturally equipped to deal with the unimaginably old or large. The world as we experience is not too large, not too small: it is the middle world.[13] Reality is many orders of magnitude smaller, larger, and older than what we can experience. The observable universe is 13.76 billion years old, and its diameter is 28 billion light years, but it is still expanding, once having been infinitesimally small. The implication of special relativity, that whether two events are simultaneous is relative to observers’ inertial frames of reference, and general relativity's implication that space has varying curvature, is deeply at odds with our normal experience, as are the phenomena of quantum mechanics, inscrutable to our conceptions of objects, cause, and effect, and describable only mathematically. It used to be said that only a handful of people in the world understood relativity. It is true today that no one understands quantum mechanics; at best some of us know how to do the calculations that enable wonderfully precise and accurate predictions about what our instruments will detect and which underly our electronics technology. This limited knowledge of such matters does not come easy. It is the hard-won reward for scientific work, demanding the use of our evolved native faculties in ways for which they are not adapted. It is not a surprise that the scientific picture of the world is in so many ways beyond what we can imagine, at the edge of what we can grasp by any means. To all appearances, we do not find ourselves in a world that was made for us, one for which are capabilities are well suited.

Perhaps the hardest thing science calls upon us to believe is the extent to which what seems to belong to a world independent of us is actually not a feature of the world, but what we project upon it. Color is the outstanding example. Looking out my office window, I see an assistant dean's midnight blue late-model BMW in the parking lot. We know that the car's color is not something adhering to its surface. The molecular microstructure of the paint reflects light at a particular frequency. The reflected light impinges on my eyes and by the complicated route referred to above causes me to have a visual sensation. My mind represents a blue BMW; it represents that physical object as blue. In an obvious sense, the car is not really blue: the light-reflecting molecules in the paint are not themselves blue; a molecule has no color. We say the car reflects blue light, but in an obvious sense this is not true either: nothing blue streaks from the car to my eyes. All that is there is invisible electromagnetic radiation, something essentially no different than a radio wave, not the kind of thing that can be blue. That leaves my brain. My sensation of the blue car is identical to some state or event in my brain, yet no neurosurgeon who locates it will find it to be blue. There might be something blue in my brain, but if so it's a coincidence or a sign of something having gone wrong. This is unsurprising: a sensation is a mental representation, and we don't reasonably expect a representation of a thing to have the properties the thing has. We should not expect the brain's representation of something as blue to be blue, no more than we expect the linguistic representation “blue” to be blue or the word “car” to have wheels. Retreating to the non-physical mind would be of no use here: surely no immaterial thing has something blue in it. Colors, after all, are supposed to be properties of two-dimensional surfaces, something no non-physical entity has. Reality has no place for blue. Colors are ways we represent things, not characteristics of the things we represent. We represent the world as having them although literally it does not. This is not to say that this is sheer fiction. There really is a category of objects that under certain conditions cause us mentally to represent them as blue. It is, though, a highly gerrymandered class of things. There is no straightforward correspondence between the frequency of light reflected and the representation of a particular color. The BMW will look blue under a wide range of lighting conditions, with different frequencies causing the same sensation. And objects that reflect the same frequency will be represented as having different colors. The scheme for representing objective reality with which natural selection has endowed us is no realistic rendering or perspicacious map. Yet it is not a mere fiction: it is grounded in the reality that is really there and with which are ancestors had to cope in order to become our ancestors. Natural section can track only what exists and has an effect on fitness. It can detect recondite patterns that emerge from the world's complexity and make minds that spontaneously represent the world thus patterned with simple identifying properties. Various items might have little in common except that a creature's responding to them in a particular way enhances its fitness. In that case natural selection can devise minds for which it is enormously useful to project a simple, homogeneous property upon disparate objects. That the target objects do not have, and could not have, that property in any strict sense is no impediment. The mind has no problem representing things as having properties they could not possibly have; think of your visual representation of an Escher engraving of a physical scenario that could not exist in reality.

What's true of color is true of a great deal of what makes our world meaningful and valuable. We inhabit a world replete with equally superficial qualities. Things are sweet, sour, cute, beautiful, ugly, disgusting, interesting, funny...just insofar as humans have evolved to categorize what they experience in these ways.[14] In David Hume's words, we “spread” these qualities upon objective reality. The illusion that they are simply there, characterizing things as they are in themselves and independent of us, is not easily, and perhaps never entirely, overcome. To be human is to be a superficial creature inhabiting a superficial world.

This holds even for our moral nature. A well-received theory of human moral psychology explains our moral concepts, sentiments, and behavioral dispositions as adaptations to social life.[15] The reasonable interpretation of this theory portrays moral properties as projections upon choices, actions, and social situations we have categorized in ways that map not an underlying, fully objective reality, but what is, or is not, conducive to social life and the reproductive fitness it makes possible. To be human is to inhabit a realm of moral meanings, but it is a superficial realm. The moral truth is, for the individual and for societies, inescapable but it is not ultimately objective, grounded in a reality independent of us. It is relative to the human species.

At the limit, human consciousness itself might be understood along these lines. Rather than being a profoundly mysterious property that emerges when matter is configured in certain complex ways, perhaps it is one more property that we project upon other persons and animals, as well as upon ourselves. It seems so mysterious and resistant to being located in the physical world because, like color, it's a property nothing could literally have. If so, being conscious is akin to being blue. On this account, to be conscious is to be the kind of thing we are evolved to make a target for this type of projection. Along with the rest of our capacities to categorize and characterize things, it is explicable as a matter of computational cognition, realized in the brain's neural circuitry.[16]

Finally, at the most basic level, there is the possibility that time and causation, inescapable features of the world of human experience, are not fundamental features of physical reality. This is, in fact, a widespread view in some quarters.[17] As much as being funny or being blue, they might be superficial, artifacts of our ways of representing a reality that at bottom is unimaginably different from the world as we conceive it, a world we can describe only at a far remove, not in its native language. Our construal of what is may be a very long way from the way things really are.

Irreducibility

Many on the current scene look to the fact that the human mind cannot be reduced to the workings of the brain as a reason to see ourselves as unique among creatures, even as possessing a kind of transcendence of the material world. I believe this is a mistake. Our irreducibility does nothing to make us special. It is no surrogate for transcendence. It is in fact another reason to acknowledge our superficiality, that as Roger Scruton put it in the quotation at the start of this essay, we belong to the surface of the world.

A half-century ago, the reductionist project seemed feasible. The brain is the thing that bears mental properties, it is the mind, and the brain is composed of cells, which are composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of the elementary particles of basic physics, so, it seemed, we ought to be able to say anything that is true about the mind using only the austere vocabulary of physics. We should be able to replace “Marvin is in pain” with some complicated statement deploying only the concepts and categories of neuroscience. That neuroscientific statement would in turn be replaceable with some even more complicated statement of chemistry. And that chemical truth would, at last, be replaceable with some enormously complex statement using only the austere vocabulary of physics. We should be able to refer to the fact that Marvin is in pain directly referring only to the doings and relations of quarks and electrons. Thus, pain could be defined in terms of physics. These reductions were, of course, said to be possible only in principle, not in practice, but since those advocating this grand reductionist project were philosophers, the practical impossibility did not dampen their enthusiasm. What did eventually extinguish the enthusiasm, and finally the project itself, were accumulating theoretical objections that proved to be insurmountable. Beyond the (only qualified) success of the reduction of chemistry to physics, the program ground to a halt. One simple example: if pain is identical to such and such a human brain state, then cats, kangaroos and hypothetical Martians and artificial intelligences cannot be in pain, an implausible implication. Mental concepts like pain do not reduce to neuroscience, let alone to fundamental physics. Pain cannot be defined in terms that refer only to neurons, molecules, atoms, or quarks.

Nowadays many seize on this result to conclude that the human mind must be something unique in the cosmos, not a mere physical thing, not merely a highly evolved arrangement of the things known to physics, and thus safe from the rising tide of scientific explanation. But this is a mistake. Most of the things in the world share this irreducibility. A particular pizza, for example, is nothing but a particular set of quarks and electrons, yet we cannot define what it is to be a pizza using only the concepts and categories of physics.[18] Any number of ways of configuring the elementary physical things results in a pizza; each is sufficient for a pizza to exist, but none are necessary, there are too many ways to be a pizza for that; no definition of pizza in scientific terms. Pizzas, like minds, are “multiply realizable.” There is no smooth mapping of the concept pizza onto the physical world. A pizza is one of the things we get when we assemble some of nature's fundamental constituents—whatever they turn out to be: electrons, quarks, strings, branes, or things we do not know about yet—in certain ways. Pizzas, along with most of what we know and love, belong to the surface of reality. They are not among its fundamental constituents. Nor are they even things that can be defined in terms of the fundamental things. They exist only as a result of history and accident, a highly contingent and improbable arrangement of the world's basic constituents. Pizzas are superficial, as are the human beings that bake and eat them. Being irreducible makes one ontologically mundane, not special. “Non-reductive materialism” avoids no problems that reductive materialism poses. Dwelling on irreducibility is not the route to celebrating human uniqueness or to denying that we are nothing but material things.

Embracing Superficiality

The too familiar hubris of secular humanity notwithstanding, modernity when informed by science has been a course in humility, an ongoing erosion of our pride in what we are, of our sense of categorical superiority, of the conceit that we stand above the natural world. Chastened as our self-understanding is, the human difference is not to be denied. Among the created things we know of, we are the only persons. We alone exhibit the conjunction of consciousness and intelligence that makes for self-consciousness and thus personhood. Persons alone possess moral agency, the freedom and responsibility of whatever kind is available to material beings. But this is to be explained in ordinary, scientific terms, as are the characteristics of all other material things. As impressive as persons may be, at least to themselves, they exist, and have their consciousness, intelligence, and all that entails, only because the chancy processes of biological evolution have assembled nature's basic constituents in this way. We are material, evolved, contingent things of a rather remarkable sort, but we are material, evolved, contingent things, not something more.

Many find all this either true and tragic or a deplorable falsehood, a denial of our elevated status. Christians in particular may find the image of humankind science delivers as utterly foreign to our confession that we are God's beloved creation, called to serve as his image in creation. I conclude this essay by challenging this response, offering the beginning of a strategy to incorporate the scientific image into a compelling Christian account of human nature and our place in the universe.

The first, and most important, move is to step back from ancient assumptions about how God must have created, and thus what we, and the world, must be like, and to ask the simple question: given God's revealed purposes in creating, how might he have created? A wise creator will, of course, choose means well suited to his ends. In Christian perspective, God's aims in creating are revealed, not hidden. The Triune God, an everlasting community of loving persons, freely chose to reach beyond himself, bringing into being persons he can invite to share in his ongoing life and work. This need not be God's sole purpose in creating, but it is the one revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

Given this divine creative intent, we ask about the most likely means. One possibility is that God would design the created persons he calls to fellowship with their Creator. That is, the creatures that exist exist, and have the characteristics they have, because this is what God specifically intended. This could be accomplished either indirectly, by establishing the world's initial conditions and authoring deterministic laws that guarantee that in due course precisely the persons God intended to exist come into existence. Or God could intervene in the created world, guiding natural processes to the intended end. However, there is a third possibility: God chose to create persons without designing them. He established the initial conditions and authored laws that are not deterministic, leaving an element of genuine chance in nature's course. Thus, whoever eventually comes about is caused by, but not specifically intended by, God. The created persons' existence answers to God's general intention that there be created persons, but not to a specific intention as to the kind of creatures created.

Assuming God has the power and wisdom to create either by design or without it, we should conclude that it is far more reasonable to believe that he chose to create persons by chancy means, rather than to design them. A telling analogy is prospective human parents and the way they choose to produce a child. Perhaps in the future, empowered by genetic engineering, parents will have the option to design their children. The child thus created would have exactly the characteristics her parents intended her to have. I submit that this method is incompatible with the goal of bringing into existence a person truly distinct from oneself, someone who can freely choose to enter into, and grow in, a personal relationship of love and trust with her parents. Such a relationship depends upon the child's “psychological distance” from the parent. A designed child would be incapable of conceiving herself as a person in her own right, rather than a mere extension of the parent. One can have a genuine personal relation only with the other. Further, on the assumption that the choices a person makes are effects of her genetic endowment and her environment, the designed child has, at most, an impaired freedom. Whatever she does is intended by, foreknown by, and caused by her designer. Responding to her, the parents are responding merely to the foreknown effects of their own actions. No matter how wise and good the parents are, this is not the appropriate way to proceed if their aim is to have a child with whom they can interact as a person distinct from themselves.

Wise humans might design their homes and maybe even their pets, but they would not design their offspring. They would do things the old-fashioned way, switching on the radio for the game and letting nature take its chancy course to whatever surprising results ensue. The wise God who seeks created persons who can be in communion with him would likewise eschew design. If the scientific account of human origins is right, God chose to create us but not to design us. Science confirms our theological expectations. God did not create us by miraculous intervention or by deterministic secondary causation. We are the products of a lengthy natural process with only generally intended, and specifically wildly improbable, outcomes: Darwinian natural selection in a world governed by indeterministic fundamental laws. This indicates neither divine non-existence nor divine indifference but the loving intention that there be persons who are not God, but who can freely receive the vocation of serving as God's image in his creation and sharing his life.[19] If this is true, the longstanding quest for signs of design in the world is misguided. Because it is the creation of the God of the Bible, the God who in abject humility came among us as one of us, not of some imagined generic deity committed to command and control, we should not expect to discover design in nature. The design is found only at the most general level, at the selection of the most primeval initial conditions of creation and in the choice of its fundamental laws. The products of such a process are, of course, material things, not transcendent beings but part and parcel of the physical world. Contingently and improbably constructed by the blind natural processes the Creator devised, we are, as we have seen, creatures that inhabit the shallows of reality. Paradoxically, this very superficiality is the sign of our special status, one due not to the kind of creatures we are but to what our Creator does on our behalf.

Finally, I will speculate further. As science has invaded the human domain, Christians have been alert to the possibility of ignoring, denying, or undermining what is special about humans, the risk of regarding us as more like animals and less like God than we really are.[20] Such concerns are sometimes entirely in order. However, the concern more deeply rooted in the biblical tradition is the danger of human pride. The primal temptation was not to be like the animals, but to be like God (or gods); it was to deny our status as creatures. We are more likely to foolishly compliment ourselves than to adopt too low an estimation of what we are. The tradition, both Christian and secular, has thought of humanity as the crown of creation, the most impressive of God's creatures. In light of how our creator has revealed himself, we should doubt this.

God did not have to create; he would have been no less good had he not created. Yet he freely chose to create, and to bring into being persons truly distinct from himself. This reaching out to the other manifests the fact that God is love. God's creation of persons distinct from himself is not necessitated by his nature, but it is profoundly in keeping with it. The biblical witness deepens this, portraying God as not just graciously reaching out the other, but reaching down as far as he can. Those God calls have no reason to imagine they are especially worthy, elect in virtue of their merit, moral, metaphysical, or whatever. On the contrary, the God we encounter in Scripture reaches down to the last and least. He exalts the lowly. Consider the remarkable text (Deuteronomy 7.7) in which God deflates Israel's pride at being his elect people, advising that he chose them not because they were great, but the least of nations. This manifestation of God's character extends onward: you and I are privileged to bear witness in faith to the God who was in Christ not because we deserve this high honor; it is a gift given with rather shocking indifference to our merits. And, I suspect, it extends backward to creation: God chose humankind to be his image, to be his witness in the creation and to share in his work, not because we are the greatest of creatures, but because we were as far down as he could reach.

There were probably other options. God's creation having given rise to exactly one kind of personal creature is too close to none. The laws and original state of the creation would have made inevitable many persons of many unspecified kinds. Given that we are the ones God called as his image we should infer not our superiority among created persons but the opposite. Humans may be the Israel of the universe. A proper Christian humility can see our vocation as imago Dei not as a sign of our superiority, of similarity to God, but of our being the most problematic of created persons. Perhaps we are the lepers of the cosmic community of persons. The universe might be replete with better, wiser, more deserving created persons that God passed over in electing humans as his image. We might be as close as anyone can get to the boundary between what is and is not a person.[21] This, at least, could explain a lot. Perhaps it is probable that creatures such as we are would do our best to deny and reject our Creator out of foolish pride. Eliciting a free and genuine response to God's call from the likes of us might be a prolonged and costly undertaking. It might even require that God, always having intended to make himself a home among his creatures, becomes a member of this rebellious, particularly obtuse and self-destructive species. And to require that the creator to at last deliver these wayward creatures by letting them do their worst to him, subjecting him to a humiliating death as punishment for blasphemy and sedition for challenging their virtue, pride, and power. It might mean that while God could have been the incarnate king from the beginning, he willingly became the crucified savior. God, implacably committed to those he had created, reaches down to the very depths of hell to reclaim the creatures he loves. In this alone, not in the kind of things we are, lies the glory of being human. We are God’s, not gods. Daniel Dennett is right to point out that we are not privileged in the way our traditional image of ourselves suggests. But such privilege is insignificant in contrast to the privilege of being created by, loved by, and saved by God. Looking more deeply into our superficiality enables us to see more deeply into the meaning of our faith.

[1] Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (Penguin, 1997), 240-241, 208. [2] Daniel Dennett, “Forward” to Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism (MIT Press, 1984). [3] In contrast, the new science portrayed the heavens as having no place for heaven, an abode of God, thus truly troubling traditional belief. See Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume I: The Triune God (Oxford University Press, 1997), 202. [4] This is one good reason among others to eschew an individualistic reading of Ephesians 1.4, where we read that God chose us before the foundation of the world. [5] As my colleague Randy Jensen has pointed out, Gould's metaphor is inapt: if you replay a tape you get the same result every time. [6] Despite its prevalence in folk-theology, the notion that the Bible underwrites a dualist conception of human nature lacks a firm foundation. See, e.g., Joel Green, Body, Soul and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008). Still, we must acknowledge that the Christian materialist faces significant challenges, e.g., providing an account of the identity of persons through time that allows for a gap in existence between death and resurrection, and an account of how Jesus can be fully God yet not exist between the first Friday and the first Easter. [7] My view is that the freedom and responsibility we can reasonably care about is compatible with everything about us being causally determined, but not if there is a creator. If God created a deterministic universe, then everything we do is not only caused by, but foreknown by and intended by God, and thus we are not free and responsible; he controls us. In a universe created by God, creatures' freedom requires indeterministic causation. [8] Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Harvard University Press, 2002). [9] See Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard University Press, 2017). [10] See Peter Carruthers, The Opacity of Mind: An Integrative Theory of Self Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2011). [11] Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Harmony, 2011). [12] See, e.g., Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Basic Books, 2001.) [13] Mark Haw, Middle World: The Restless Heart of Matter and Life (Macmillan, 2007). [14] This is not to deny the significant role that culture and what we learn in it plays here. [15] See, e.g., Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We are - The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (Pantheon, 1994). [16] For explorations in this direction see Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why it Matters (Penguin, 2015), Michael S. A. Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Keith Frankish, Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (Imprint Academic, 2017). [17] Plato in the Timaeus, and much of the philosophical and theological tradition after him, thought of this world as the “moving image of eternity,” temporal 'becoming' in contrast to timeless ‘being.’ I conjecture that the opposite is closer to truth: created reality is temporal only in a derivative, superficial way and in its nature timeless, unchanging, static, a material image of its creator, who is ever active, ever changing, always becoming more fully himself. [18] In philosophy talk any pizza is token-identical to a particular configuration of atoms, etc., but pizzas are not type-reducible to, and thus not type-identical to, the types of physics. [19] In accord with most recent scholarship, I assume that the idea of our being made in the image of God has to do with our vocation to represent God in creation, not a matter of any real or imagined similarity to God. Of course, this presupposes that human beings do resemble God in some ways; presumably only a person can hear and respond to God's call, although the ways in which human beings are persons is radically different than the way God is a person. [20] C. S. Lewis is a familiar example in, e.g., That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man. [21] Technically, humans are reasonably regarded as the third species of chimpanzee, along with the bonobos and common chimps. Only a relatively small number of (mostly regulatory) genes separate us from creatures who are a lot like us yet not persons, not full-fledged inhabitants of the space of reasons.