Why us?

No to naturalism

WHY US?
How science rediscovered the mystery of ourselves
By James Le Fanu
HarperCollins. 303 pages. £18.99
ISBN 978-000712-027-7

This is a book about the findings of science in the last 20 years.

James Le Fanu, the author, is a medical doctor and writer, a Cambridge graduate with articles in the BMJ, New Scientist and the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Since 1992 he has written weekly columns for the Sunday and Daily Telegraph.

‘Nothing buttery’

The thesis of the book is that the findings of recent scientific research have totally undermined, not scientific method but the philosophy of scientific materialism or ‘naturalism’. This is the much vaunted idea that we and our world are ‘nothing but’ the atoms and molecules of which our physical bodies are composed and what derives from them. Such ‘scientific naturalism’ is a one-dimensional view of things, but James Le Fanu provides powerful evidence which shows that reality must have a dual nature. Mere materialism fails completely to explain the world and up-to-date science shouts that fact aloud. There really is what we might call a ‘spiritual’ realm.

Obviously this is of great interest to Christians. Le Fanu himself does not appear to be a Christian. He is probably some kind of deist in the line of Voltaire. ‘Voltaire, despite his antipathy to established religion, held there to be nothing so self-evident as the two halves of human experience, of the material and the non-material, from which he could only infer the necessity of there being an “eternal and supreme” God.’

Double thrust

The thrust of the book is twofold. First, the current mapping of genomes (the total genetic information of an individual member of a species) has revealed information which makes neo-Darwinism utterly untenable. Second, the neuroscience revolution which has come from using the PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scanner on the human brain has shown that the most exact knowledge of your brain cannot give a knowledge of your mind. In other words, the human mind is more than something generated by the brain.

Let’s get a taste of the nitty-gritty of Le Fanu’s evidence.

End of neo-Darwinism

Although there was a great fanfare of publicity surrounding the completion of the human genome project back in 2000, as if the holy grail to understanding existence was now in our hands, since then things have gone pretty quiet. The reason is that what has been discovered is not what was expected.

‘Problems’ were raised initially by the comparative paucity of the number of human genes. The discovery that the human genome is virtually interchangeable with that of our fellow vertebrates such as the mouse and the chimpanzee — to the tune of 98% or more — left virtually nothing to account for those very special attributes that so readily distinguish us from other creatures — our upright stance, powers of reason and imagination, and the faculty of language (to name but a few). It turns out that a sea urchin has more or less the same number of genes as ourselves.

The neo-Darwinian idea of a ‘gene for this and a gene for that characteristic’ has turned out to be far too simplistic, in fact light-years from the truth.

For example, ‘that single mutation for sickle-cell anaemia began to appear ever more exceptional’. Many genetic illnesses proved to have not one but dozens of possible ‘mutations’. Further, it emerged that it was possible to have a devastating genetic mutation without causing any abnormality at all — as illustrated by two sisters, both with the same defective gene, one of whom inherited the expected blindness and the other who did not. ‘These complexities, inexplicable in the conventional understanding of how genes work, became ever more perverse’, writes Le Fanu. It became clear that genes do not have single, discrete functions, but are ‘multi-tasked’, the same gene being involved in the development of many different parts — eyes, nose, brain, pituitary gland, etc. — and not alone, but in unison with thousands of other genes all working together. 6,000 of the fly’s total of 13,000 genes are involved in some way in the formation of its heart for example. It is now clear that ‘context is all’ and that a gene can have quite contradictory properties, depending on what is required. Le Fanu writes that such discoveries posed ‘an ever more daunting challenge for the supposed mechanism of evolutionary transformation. For when it takes 6,000 genes to build a heart, what chance was there that a random mutation in any one of them might generate a beneficial variation in favour of the heart’s further perfection?’

Master genes

With the difference in gene numbers so small between some species, the hunt was on for a few ‘master genes’ which might explain why such a small variation commanded such a vast difference. ‘Master genes’ were discovered by the Swiss biologist Walter Gehring. ‘But when Gehring and his colleagues pursued this extraordinarily important discovery further, they found something yet more astonishing still … that precisely the same “master” genes mastermind the three-dimensional structures of all living things: frogs, mice, even humans. The same master genes that cause a fly to have the form of a fly, cause a mouse to have the form of a mouse.’

Le Fanu sums up by saying, ‘from an evolutionary perspective, while the near-equivalence of the human genome to that of our primate cousins would certainly confirm our “common ancestral heritage”, everything beyond that finding — is a nail in the coffin of Darwin’s proposed mechanism of natural selection acting on numerous small, random genetic mutations’.

For all its scientific sophistication the human genome project paradoxically ends up telling us nothing of real interest about ‘humanity’.

According to Le Fanu (despite the best efforts of Richard Dawkins), Darwinism, the biological ‘theory of everything’, has fallen flat in the face of the data. He goes on to argue ‘that there must be some non-material formative influence that, from the moment of conception, imposes the order of form on the developing embryo (of the various creatures) … and holds it constant while its cells and tissues are continually renewed as it grows into adulthood’.

The unfathomable brain

The PET scanner captures astonishing images of the brain in action — highlighting the location of electrical activity as processes such as seeing, memorising and thinking are going on. The invention of this machine is looked upon by many as a defining moment in neuroscience.

Le Fanu takes us through the history of the science of the brain from Pierre Paul Broca’s discovery back in 1861 of the speech centre, through the unravelling of the brain’s staggering powers of information processing, prompted by analogy with the computer. But observing the brain in action has revealed processes which no one expected. For example, recent observation has uncovered how, in the act of our seeing, ‘every detailed nuance of the three-dimensional world is generated inside the brain, deconstructed and reconstructed within a fraction of a second; how the brain categorises memories in different “baskets”, shifts them from one to the other and somehow maintains them as a permanent record in those ever-changing neural circuits; how, contrary to every known law of nature, non-material thoughts and emotions directly influence the physical structure of the brain’.

Confronted with these recent advances, Le Fanu titles one section of his book, ‘The rediscovery of the soul’, and quotes the philosopher Colin McGinn saying: ‘The bond between mind and brain is an ultimate mystery, a mystery that human intelligence will never unravel’.

Restoring a balanced view

The cumulative legacy of the genome project and the new neuroscience is to have subverted the four pillars of the naturalistic worldview: that Darwin’s theory accounts for all diversity in the living world and ourselves, and that the ‘secrets’ of life lie in the material genes, and those of the mind in the workings of the material brain.

Is it possible, with a bit more research, that Darwin and the idea that humans are merely material beings under the ‘illusion’ that they have an autonomous self, might be rehabilitated? Le Fanu replies: ‘The answer to all these questions must be no’. Reductionism has been rolled over by current scientific research. He says: ‘The time has come to break the silence and restore a coherent, balanced view of ourselves and our world by putting aside biology’s foundational evolutionary theory and embracing the dual nature of reality. This may perhaps seem highly improbable, but it cannot be long before a proper appreciation of the true significance of the findings of the recent past begins to sow doubts in inquisitive minds’.

The author goes on to spell out some of the great benefits that will come from the laying aside of reductionist science. He does not expect change to come very soon. He realises that the old scientific establishment is deeply entrenched. However, when the change comes, he sees it as bringing enormous benefits to science itself. ‘Liberated from the dead hand of evolutionary certainty… [science will be able] to turn its attention to all those substantial questions which have so far eluded its methods of investigation.’ He then sees that this paradigm shift ‘must also lead to a new interest in and sympathy for religion in its broadest sense’.

This is all most interesting to Christians who have never bought into a reductionist view of science. Not least the dual nature of reality will rehabilitate the doctrine of the Fall in the minds of many, for physical reality cannot be separated from moral and spiritual concerns.

Perhaps it takes someone like Le Fanu to get the ball rolling. Hugely knowledgeable, but not locked into the peer-group pressure of the present scientific academy, he has done us a great service in speaking out so cogently and bravely.

How science rediscovered the mystery of ourselves