Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life: Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference. It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!). I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul. This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed. I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts. Below is Part V, and here are links to Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.
Neurobiology, the Soul, Moral Agency, and Law
The notion of “moral agency” is precisely what many legal theorists interested in neurobiology are challenging. Martha Farah notes with some understatement that “[t]he idea that behavior is determined by physical causes is hard to reconcile with the intuitive notions of free will and moral agency on which our legal systems are based.”[1] “Free will” – at least “libertarian” free will – is an illusion, they argue. Among their most compelling bits of evidence for this claim are studies suggesting that the brain signals the body to engage in actions before we become consciously aware of the action we will take.[2] This “precognition” suggests that our actions are automatic responses to stimuli and that our conscious “decisions” are really merely ex post determinations not to “veto” what the brain has already signaled its readiness to do. We have, at best, “free won’t” rather than “free will.”[3] Therefore, “according to neuroscience, no one person is more or less responsible than any other for actions. We are all part of a deterministic system that someday, in theory, we will completely understand.”[4] The notion of “responsibility” is only a “social construct,” law is an instrumentalist tool useful for engineering of the society we are constructing, and the society we are constructing ultimately is reducible to the evolutionary history embedded in our brains.
Sin: Parallel or Orthogonal to Neurobiology?
The neurobiological account of personhood and responsibility implies some obvious dissonances with theology, but we might focus for a moment on a possible area of congruence. In one sense, neurobiology confirms St. Paul’s cri de coeur: our wills are not our own. Human beings are bent towards conduct that we label “violent,” “selfish,” “antisocial” or “sinful.”
Evolutionary sociobiology also trades in cooperation and altruism, or at least the appearance of “altruism” through “group selection.”[5] The game theoretic coordination of group activity is a lynchpin of sociobiological theory. For sociobiology, like St. Paul, we often find that we are at war with ourselves, and like St. Augustine, we can discern self-serving motives even behind our most seemingly benevolent actions. In a practical sense, whether we say that positive law is an expression of selection for social traits that promote group survival, or that positive law is necessary to curb the influence of sin, we appear to be saying much of the same thing. The ultimate “good,” whether it is a biological imperative or a Divinely appointed eschatological goal, is human flourishing.
But of course, in some ways the similarity is only superficial. The Christian account of sin is that it is alien, an invader introduced into creation by cosmic evil forces, human will, or both.[6] The Biblical story of the temptation of Adam and Eve must be an imaginative literary portrait if the scientific account of human origins is even close to true, but nevertheless, for Christian theology to have coherence, the story must be ontologically true at some basic level. From the perspective of Christian theology, our essential created nature is “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Humans are God’s image-bearers, created for wholesome relationships with God, each other, and the rest of creation. If the inclinations and brain-mind mechanisms we have inherited from our evolutionary past are called “sin,” is the image of God itself sinful, and is God then the author of sin?[7]
The Christian account of how sin disrupts human “flourishing” also offers a different horizon than that of sociobiology. From the perspective of sociobiology, “flourishing” is simply and only the survival of genes, and the survival of genes is simply and only a material and historical drive. Sociobiology can speak of what “works,” but it cannot speak of what is “good.”
For Christian theology, human “flourishing” derives ultimately from God’s goodness. The telos of creation is peace, the harmony of right relationships and the full flowering of all the gifts God has bestowed on the creation. This teleology of creation derives from the perichoretic relationality of the Triune God Himself. The creation, Christian theology asserts, is “contingent,” in that it depends on God’s creative, sustaining will for its existence. However, the creation is not arbitrary. It had to be and it will be consistent with God’s own loving character because God is love. The telos of creation, including that of human beings, therefore is ultimately eternal and eschatological. The material and historical nature of humanity, although corrupted, is not elided, but is transformed proleptically by the eternal and eschatological.
A Christian account of law and neurobiology in relation to the problem of sin and human flourishing, then, can incorporate the findings of the neurosciences but can never permit human ontology to be reduced to those findings. Whether a nonreductive physicalist Christian anthropology is in this sense truly “nonreductive” remains an open, indeed difficult, question.
[1]Martha Farah, “Responsibility and Brain Function,” available at http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/penn-neuroethics-briefing/responsibility-a-brain-function
[2] Garland, Neuroscience and the Law, supra Note 48, at 56.
[3] Id.
[4] Id. at 68.
[5] For an overview of the concept of group selection, see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Darwinian Evolutionary Ethics: Between Patriotism and Sympathy, in Evolution and Ethics, supra Note 1. Richerson and Boyd summarize their perspective through the following propositions:
(1) that group selection is the basic mechanism explaining human moral impulses; (2) that an immense gap exists between the moral faculties of humans and other animals; (3) that the moral faculties evolved in the common ancestors of all living humans; and (4) that moral progress arises when humans create social institutions that enlarge sympathy and control patriotism.” Id. at 62.
[6] For a good discussion of sin and the problem of evil, see Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side: Putting the Power of Evil in its Place (InterVarsity Press 2003).
[7] In some respects, this question mirrors the debated in Reformed theology between “infralapsarians” and “surpalapsarians.” There also remains the vexing question of the “origin” of evil and the presence of the “serpent” in the Garden (Gen. 3:1). Some contemporary theologians are seeking to recapture the Patristic reflection on a “cosmic fall” that implicates the creation in evil “before” the fall of Adam. See, e.g., John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (SVS Press 2006). The quotation marks around the notion of something “before” the fall of Adam here reflect the idea that our Western, linear ideas about time do not map neatly onto the Biblical picture of creation, evil, sin and death.