Who Am I and If So How Many? (25 page)

The philosopher Diogenes is said to have found illumination in a barrel; nowadays it is sought in a brain scanner. But the fact that Persinger locates the religious center in the temporal lobe and Newberg in the frontal lobe is quite revealing. The temporal lobe is responsible primarily for hearing and speech comprehension; it also plays a major role in explicit memory. The frontal lobe, by contrast, orchestrates actions. Both regions of the brain govern ‘higher’ cognitive functions, but in very different ways. Like Persinger, Newberg was criticized for the sweeping conclusions he drew on the basis of relatively few experiments. Couldn’t religious feelings engage far more than a single region of the brain? And even if there is a specific place in the brain responsible for spiritual feelings, who is to say it’s really ‘God’ conveying the insights and enlightenment? Maybe we’re just inundating ourselves with feelings of enlightenment of our own devising, perhaps as the result of an evolutionary malfunction.

The neurotheological proof of God is far from persuasive. At best, it can show how perceived religious truths arise on a neurochemical level, but the notion that God actually speaks to man remains pure speculation. Even clear evidence that there are centers in the brain for religious experience would not mean that there is a bridge from the head to the world of the supernatural. Kant’s contention that proofs of the existence of God do not extend from one’s own realm of experience into a purportedly objective world applies here as well. Kant’s critique was aimed only at an ontological proof of the existence of God, but it applies to any neurotheological proof equally well.

But what about a causal approach? The causal proof for the existence of God does not use representations as a starting point, but rather seeks to find out why the world exists. However, there isn’t any need to assume that God was the First Cause that set everything in motion. The argument that nothing can arise from nothing posits a First Cause – but must the First Cause be God?

For some people it is easier to imagine an eternal God than eternal matter; for others, it is just the other way around. At least we know that matter does exist. We do not know that about God – at least not in a comparably sensory manner. Bertrand Russell’s belief that matter is eternal made him doubt the need for a First Cause. If everything has a cause, there is no beginning of matter or ‘first’ God. Russell took cynical pleasure in proposing the possibility of several Gods who create each other one after another.

Thomas’s theory of God as the First Cause is not a very persuasive proof of the existence of God. Perhaps it would have been better if he had remained somewhat more consistent in the objection he raised to Anselm’s proof: that any idea of God is inevitably too small. Something that is not fully accessible to our experience should not be set in stone. Many theologians have used this argument to reject
any
proof for the existence of God. The Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann claimed, for example: ‘Anyone who supposes that he can offer evidence for God’s reality by proofs of the existence of God is arguing over a phantom.’ Our vertebrate brain was not designed to give us direct access to what lies beyond the senses – if it did, it would no longer be beyond the senses. Thus, it is in the very nature of the matter that God cannot be seen, but only – in whatever form – experienced, or not.

But those who would like to prove the existence of God anyway have another ace up their sleeve. If the existence of God cannot be shown directly, for the reasons we have discussed, can’t it at least be demonstrated indirectly? This approach, which is the subject of lively discussions these days, especially in the United States, is taken up by ‘natural theology.’

The young Charles Robert Darwin was a big disappointment to his father. He was unfocused and slow to catch on when studying medicine in Edinburgh. The very idea of dissections turned his stomach. And every aspect of nature, from the starfish and crabs washed ashore to the birds in the field, held his interest more than his textbooks. After watching Charles go through the motions for two years, his father’s patience ran out. Enough of medicine! He enrolled his lackadaisical son at the venerable Christ’s College at the University of Cambridge. If Charles could not make it as a physician, maybe there was hope for him as a clergyman.

Soon after Darwin arrived at Cambridge in 1830, he was assigned a set of special rooms in Christ’s College, the very rooms where the renowned philosopher and theologian William Paley had once lived. Twenty-five years after his death, Paley enjoyed saintlike status at the university. His works were on Darwin’s required reading list. Even though the study of theology bored Darwin even more than medical school, the writings of Paley – unsurpassed and timeless masterpieces of theology – were a major exception. Darwin was spellbound by these books. In his free time, he roamed through the meadows and woods and collected beetles
and plants, but back in his study, he read and reread Paley’s
Natural
Theology
– the book of the creative plan for the universe, the divine scheme of nature, devised by the Great Designer of all things and detectable in every beetle, bird’s egg, and blade of grass. But who was this Paley, a writer who left an indelible impression on Darwin and whose proofs for the existence of God were considered comprehensive and authoritative through the mid-nineteenth century?

William Paley, born in July 1743 in Peterborough, came from a family of modest means in the service of the Church. His father scraped by on his salary as a minor canon of the cathedral church, supporting his wife, three daughters, and William as best he could, then put his solid grounding in Greek and Latin to good use when offered the position of headmaster at a small elementary school in Giggleswick, a village in North Yorkshire. The young William was soon at the top of his class, and his quick intellectual grasp and lively mind made people expect great things of him. When Paley turned fifteen, his father enrolled him at the University of Cambridge. Paley may have been frail and unathletic, but he was highly gifted. Christ’s College was an elite training ground for British clergymen and politicians. William would make a name for himself and realize his father’s dreams.

Paley was the youngest student at Cambridge, and his abilities were truly remarkable. He drew a great deal of attention to himself even as a student. His long, elaborately coiffed hair, his frilly shirt, and his expensive silk stockings were evidence of the young man’s determination to stand out. In the public debates at the college he cut a colorful figure with his grand, effusive gestures and tremendous passion. Some may have considered him a crackpot, but most applauded him for his sharp mind and rhetorical talent. Paley earned the highest grades on his final examinations of all the students in his class.

But he did not reap the professional rewards he was anticipating, and he had no choice but to accept a job as a Latin teacher at an academy in Greenwich, until he was hired to lecture at his alma
mater. In 1766, he returned to Christ’s College at Cambridge, and a year later he was ordained as an Anglican priest. Paley had high aspirations, and he was willing to do whatever it took to get ahead. He fantasized that by the age of thirty, he would be an attorney at the royal court. In the solitude of his room, he delivered fiery closing statements, and he fancied himself engaging in verbal duels with Prime Minister William Pitt and the most gifted orators in the British parliament. But the only positions this ambitious man from a modest background was offered were at two small parishes. In September 1777 he was given the vicarage of Appleby. Paley had set his sights higher, but the parish income did ensure his livelihood. He married the daughter of a well-to-do liquor dealer; she bore him four daughters and four sons, though she did not see her husband very often. In 1780, the bishop of Carlisle, a county capital near the Scottish border, hired Paley for the cathedral there and two years later named him archdeacon.

At the age of forty, he was finally able to show the world what he was made of. Instead of rhetorical duels in parliament, he now published compelling arguments. His style was polished,
persuasive
, and easily understood. He was drawn to the writings of his famous contemporary and compatriot Jeremy Bentham and reconciled utilitarianism with the Church position. Like Bentham, Paley viewed the goal of all of philosophy in a single principle: the increase of happiness. Man does not become good in the Christian sense by his faith, but only by his deeds, by assuming responsibility and by serving his community. Just as God devised a great variety of mechanisms, combinations, and interlocking connections in nature, all of us must adapt to our specific social milieu to achieve our calling.

Paley enjoyed a string of successes. The bishop of London offered him a lucrative position in the cathedral of St Paul’s; the bishop of Lincoln appointed him deacon of his diocese; the bishop of Durham offered him a comfortable and well-paid parish in Bishop Wearmouth. But his criticism of the Church and his liberal political outlook prevented him from becoming a bishop. Paley
was awarded an honorary doctorate at Cambridge and moved to Bishop Wearmouth, an idyllic town on the North Sea coast.

Here he found the time to write his last major work. He still considered the most important principle to be increasing pleasure and minimizing pain. The more purposefully a life revolved around realizing this individual and societal principle, the better. But how is the idea of purposefulness established in the world? What is the nature of the connection between the will of the Creator and the principles of the individual? In his study in Bishop Wearmouth, Paley wrote his most important book,
Natural Theology
.

Progress on the book was slow. A severe kidney ailment brought on bouts of pain that made it impossible for Paley to write for weeks on end. His plan to construct a theory of the universe based on a detailed study of natural phenomena proved exceedingly difficult. Paley explored everything he could amass in Bishop Wearmouth that would shed light on blueprints in nature. He collected the flight feathers of the chickens on the farms and the bones of fish at the beach, and he plucked grass and flowers at the wayside and immersed himself in anatomy books.

The key word in his new book was ‘adaptation.’ How did God arrange all the millions of living creatures in nature, and how did they accord with his will by intertwining physically and mentally to form a magnificent unity? In 1802, the book was finished, and it soon became a bestseller. Fifty years later, Paley’s
Natural
Theology
was still the best known teleological proof of God’s existence in British theology; in the words of the book’s subtitle, it provided
Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature
.

Paley was in awe of the great complexity of the living world, and he understood that it had to be presented in an extraordinary manner. His response was neither new nor original. More than a hundred years earlier, in 1691, the naturalist John Ray had attempted a very similar project, and many other philosophers and theologians had followed. But Paley formulated his views more
clearly and persuasively than had any of his predecessors. The most famous passage in the book is its opening – the image of the watchmaker. What is more admirable than the precision with which the gears and springs of a watch are produced and the complexity with which they are assembled? If we found an object like a watch on the heath, its accuracy and elegant design would force us to conclude

The image of the watchmaker of nature became inseparably linked to Paley’s name. His
Natural Theology
enjoyed more than twenty printings and reached a broad readership. Paley did not invent this image; he found it in the writings of the Dutch theologian Bernard Nieuwentijdt. But Nieuwentijdt had not invented the metaphor either. Back in 1696, William Derham published a treatise called
The Artificial Clockmaker
. And Derham, in turn, was reworking and updating the image of the complex mechanism of nature in Cicero’s
Nature of the Gods
.

But as unoriginal as the image of the watchmaker was in his day, Paley took it far more seriously than had any of his forerunners. He went through the whole body, head to toe, and showed how each and every part corresponded to the inner workings of a magnificently constructed watch. He reserved his greatest
admiration
for the human eye, which he compared to a telescope, and concluded that there is exactly the same proof that the eye was made to see as that the telescope was made to support the eye. The
eye had to have had a creator, just like the telescope. Paley provided a great variety of examples to illustrate his arguments. ‘Make a change in any part of the human body, e.g. take a finger-nail, and instead of having it at the back of the finger, suppose it fixed on the forepart; how inconvenient for handling, and in many other respects would such a change be!’

Paley was in excruciating pain by the time he finished writing the book. Again and again he sought explanations for why the divine creation, which was exquisitely conceived, would include pain and suffering. If God created the kidneys, why didn’t he prevent them from hurting and bleeding? Paley remained vague on that point, alternately defending God’s creation by insisting that the good far outshines the bad and hoping that the process of creation would not be complete until evil and suffering ceased to exist. But Paley’s own suffering did not cease; it only worsened. He was finally offered the position of bishop of Gloucester, which he had wanted for so long, but it was too late to accept it. He spent his final months bedridden, and in May 1805, blind but lucid, he succumbed to his kidney ailment in his house in Bishop Wearmouth.

Paley’s work was complete. He felt he had unraveled the mystery of creation in the principle of adaptation of organisms to nature; all of biological nature was purposefully set up by its creator. But Paley could not know that he had not brought natural philosophy to an end; in fact, thirty years later, he became the impetus for a new theory that devised an entirely new framework for ‘adaptation.’

Two years after reading Paley’s
Natural Theology
, the newly minted Anglican clergyman Charles Darwin boarded the research vessel
Beagle
to travel to South America. The observations he made of both living animals and fossils shook the foundations of his view of life. The plants and animals adapted to their environment, just as Paley had written, but they evidently did so again and again. Paley’s ‘general plan’ of a watchmaker who had set the whole mechanism of nature in motion once and for all was not in
evidence. The Church dogma of the existence of a personal God lost its credibility.

Darwin fretted and wavered for more than twenty years, until 1859, when he published
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
, which moved away from Paley’s argument. He
reluctantly
declared in his autobiography, ‘We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.’ Where Paley had envisioned a grand harmony, Darwin saw only a ‘struggle for existence.’ If nature were indeed a watchmaker, this watchmaker would have had to be blind. As Richard Dawkins has commented in
The Blind Watchmaker
, ‘Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered … has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all … it is the blind watchmaker.’ Darwin’s
Origin of Species
ultimately limited mention of Paley to a single passage: ‘Natural selection will never produce in a being anything injurious to itself, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous.’

Paley’s influence on Darwin, while powerful, did not stop the latter from advancing a theory of evolution that insisted on autonomous species adaptation to nature. Instead of naming God as cause and operating principle, Darwin invoked nature itself. ‘Nature does’ is one of his most frequent phrases. Darwin’s contemporary Jean Pierre Marie Flourens (see ‘The Cosmos of the Mind,’ p. 20) was one of the first to scorn Darwin’s use of nature as the subject of these claims. How, Flourens argued, can nature be goal-oriented without having goals? How can it conceive of purposefulness if it does not think? Although Darwin’s theory of the autonomous adaptation of species had found widespread acceptance within about thirty years, fundamental doubts linger
even today, especially among critics who rally around the concept of ‘intelligent design.’

Darwin’s contemporary and bitter adversary, the prominent Irish physicist William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, led the opposition to Darwin’s theory. Darwin was stung by Kelvin’s attack, because Kelvin, a physics professor at the University of Glasgow, enjoyed worldwide renown. Kelvin began by casting doubt on the timeline for Darwin’s evolution, which he found insufficient for all the developments Darwin was outlining. He calculated the age of the earth at 98 million years, though he later reduced this number to 24 million years. If the earth were older, Kelvin argued, it could no longer be as hot in the interior as it is; but he failed to take into account that radioactivity retains the heat in the interior of the earth. In 1871, the same year that Darwin’s
Descent of Man
appeared in print, Kelvin spoke of the ‘
overpoweringly
strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design.’