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[Woodstock Report, March 1998, No. 53]
Copyright © 1998 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
Does the brain have anything to do with the soul? What is the relationship, if any, between our cerebral neural structure and our spirituality or religious faith? Does modern neuroscience render religious faith implausible? Or does neuroscience simply say that faith and spirituality are beyond its reach, or, even, its interest?
There is a lot of recent literature on neuroscience and most of it has something to say about the plausibility of religious faith--most of it quite unnerving to religious believers. One example can be found in a recent review by Steve Jones of Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works in The New York Review of Books of November 6, 1997. Jones says: "Few working scientists have much sympathy for those who try to interpret nature in metaphysical terms. For most wearers of white coats, philosophy is to science as pornography is to sex: it is cheaper, easier, and some people seem, bafflingly, to prefer it. Outside psychology it plays almost no part in the functions of the research machine." (pp. 13-14) Change "metaphysical" and "philosophy" in this citation to "religious" and "spirituality" and the message would be basically the same. Oh my!
How refreshing, therefore, to meet a neuropsychologist who is also a person of deep religious belief. I refer to Dr. Malcolm Jeeves who gave a lecture accompanied by slides of the brain, in a forum entitled "Neuroscience and the Soul." The Woodstock Center co-sponsored this forum with the Georgetown University Center for the Study of Science and Religion, directed by Professor John Haught. Dr. Jeeves is honorary research professor at the University of St. Andrews School of Psychology in Scotland and was former director of the Medical Research Council's Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group at St. Andrews. A leading experimental psychologist and past president of the International Neuropsychological Symposium, his most recent books are Human Nature at the Millennium: Reflections on the Integration of Psychology and Christianity and The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith. In 1992, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to psychology in Britain. Dr. Ayub Khan Ommaya, a professor of neurosurgery at the George Washington University Medical Center and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Research, Bethesda, Maryland, responded to Dr. Jeeves' lecture, and both entertained questions from the floor. I regret that we lack space in this issue for Dr. Ommaya's insightful reactions.
The forum was not only very well attended, it was enthusiastically received--pointing to keen interest and felt need. What follows is my summary of highlights.
In talking about mental life, people invariably use language taken from the contemporary, common sense "marketplace." For instance, today people speak of the brain as though it were a computer which "switches on and off." Or people will say, "I can't retrieve that bit of information." In Shakespeare's time, some people thought the mind was in the cardiovascular system, because the heart beat faster when you got certain thoughts and it quieted down with others! Others linked the mind to the brain because when there was brain damage thinking was affected. In Shakespeare's Henry IV, you'll find both theories. Portia says, "Tell me where is fancy bred,/Or in the heart or in the head?"
But where was the soul? The first theory held for the three ventricles in the brain, but it was abandoned in the discovery that animals also had these ventricles! Francis Crick published a famous work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which he says, "A modern neurobiologist sees no need for the religious concept of a soul to explain the behavior of human and other animals." He goes on further to say, "The idea that man has a disembodied soul is as unnecessary as the old idea that there was a life force."
In reaction, Dr. Jeeves said, "This is in head-on contradiction to the religious belief of millions of human beings alive today." You don't have to adopt a reductionist view, Dr. Jeeves added.
With the help of graphic slides of the brain, Dr. Jeeves described a series of discoveries, studies, and experiments on the brain that verify an undeniable relationship between the physical substrate and mental or psychological functions. There is, for instance, the 1848 textbook case of the very conscientiously moral and reliable railroad foreman, Phineas Gage, whose brain was damaged by a tamping iron. His cognitive functions were virtually unchanged, but he became irresponsible, unethical, immoral, and unemployable-- showing a strong link between emotional personality and brain functions.
Since the 1950s we have been able to link language and memory to brain function. Experiments on damaged brains show that these functions are localized. "Brain imaging techniques combined with advances in experimental psychology and cognitive psychology have led to enormous advances in our understanding of the relation between brain, mind, and behavior." Though it has been over-popularized, there is a basis for designating one hemisphere as artistic and the other as analytical. We have also localized in the brain our ability to recognize faces.
Besides language, memory, and recognition, behavioral traits are related to brain condition. Electronic scans of psychopaths show abnormal brain function. A recent study was made of twelve murderers. Studies have also been made on autistic children, on Alzheimer patients, and on schizophrenics. "Now all of this," Dr. Jeeves said, "sounds as if what happens to the brain determines what happens in mental life and in behavior. That should not be the take-home message. It is clearly linked to it but there is another aspect to this."
Dr. Jeeves went on to make several concluding points about the relevance of these studies to religion. It's best expressed in his own words. "First of all, I've tried to argue that all the evidence in neuroscience points us to a psychosomatic or somatopsychic unity. There are intimate relations between mental life, emotional life, and neural structures, including the spiritual dimension. By the spiritual dimension, I mean essentially a relationship with God. This applies to making moral judgments (remember my slides on psychopaths); it applies to certain forms of uncontrolled aggressive behavior (remember the slides of the murderers). It actually also applies to so-called neuroticism and extroversion. A study has just been reported in which five hundred people with neuroticism or extroversion were given PET scans, which showed that the brains of the two groups differed. So our personalities are reflected in changed neural structures.
"I've said the spiritual dimension is not immune. If you read the histories of some of the great religious leaders of the past, you will find that they were not immune to the kind of changes which I've been talking about this evening. If the spiritual domain was totally separate from the rest, then no matter what happened to the brain, the spiritual dimension would go on as usual. But this is clearly not the case. You probably know from friends who have been severely depressed that their spiritual life is likewise affected. It is not a separate thing. It is an intrinsic part of the whole person.
"What is interesting to me is this emphasis on psychosomatic unity. Here I get into dangerous territory. But this, my Biblical scholar friends say, is what they've been telling us for a hundred years and we've not been listening. Biblical scholarship shows that the Hebrew-Christian view emphasizes the unity of the person, while the Pagan-Hellenistic view separates the person into bits. It is interesting that we are now recapturing what the Biblical scholars have been saying all along. It's also interesting that in the great creeds of the Church--the Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed--there's no reference to immortality at all. The great creeds refer to resurrection, not immortal souls floating about. I said I'd be provocative here. But what interests me is that recent work in neuroscience is making us recognize afresh the unity of the human person.
"Now this raises the whole idea of soulishness. Evidence seems to support the view, not that I have a soul, but that I am a living soul. This is what the Biblical scholars tell me. I shouldn't talk about having a soul which is hooked into something else, but that I am a living soul, a living being. Then we've got to ask, 'Well, okay, what is it which is distinctive about this kind of soulishness?' What I want to suggest is that one of the central concepts of soulishness is the idea of relatedness: relatedness to others, relatedness to self, and, above all, relatedness to God. This capacity for relatedness, this quality of soulishness, is not possessed in this way or to this degree by our non-human primate cousins. In many ways they are very similar to us in brain structure, but they do not possess this capacity for relatedness.
"Let me continue deeper into dangerous territory. When I ask my theologian friends what the thinking is today about the imago Dei (image of God), many of them tell me that one of the key features of the imago Dei is an ability for a covenant relationship with God. This essential feature of the imago Dei conferred upon humankind is part of our soulishness. And I would argue that our relatedness is made possible because of the remarkable capacities we have as a result of our enormous cerebral cortex. We have abilities for self-reflection, for looking into the future, for reflecting on the past, for contemplating ethical and social issues--which is not possible with lesser brains.
"Now finally, I want to suggest that this emphasis on the unity of the person and the unity of our soulishness also has negative aspects. It warns us of the danger of making snap judgments of other people. It encourages compassion when we realize that changes in neural substrate may make it more difficult for some people to be like this or do that. It makes us less ready to make snap judgments about other people. I think also that it warns us against something that is mercifully not the case today but used to be the case, namely, a great desire to save souls, but to disregard the person. Any concern that we have as Christians should be as much a concern for people's physical and mental health as for their spiritual health. We're not allowed to separate off the spiritual."
It is easy to see why Dr. Jeeves' remarks were greeted with such enthusiasm by our standing room only crowd at this Woodstock Forum. And you see why we are so grateful to Professor John Haught for coming up with this proposal.