For G. K. Chesterton, this kind of insanity was the peculiar mark of the modern materialist. The modern materialist, bent on describing everything according to the tightly bound chains of physical cause and effect, attempts to explain sin by explaining it away. He thereby makes evil actions simply the result of innocent chemical reactions. Insanely bent on materialist explanations, he will not allow any spiritual explanations, and so loses his common sense and sanity along with his common humanity. For if there is anything that marks human beings as human, and common sense as common and sane, it is (as the great philosopher Aristotle maintained) the human capacity to distinguish between good and evil, just and unjust.
Chesterton wrote his Orthodoxy in the early 20th century as an attempt to answer the gibes of the new "scientific" materialists against Christianity. Since the juggernaut of materialism has only gained steam in the century that has followed, Chesterton's warning about the insanity and inhumanity of materialism is even more relevant.
Witness an article from the latest issue of Discover magazine, "Seven Deadly Sins," in which we are promised that science is now rescuing us from ignorance about the origins of sin by probing "the biology behind bad intentions." The goal of the article is to take the classic list of Seven Deadly Sins—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust—and explain their entirely biological sources.
According to the author, one Kathleen McGowan, "The most enjoyable sins," such as lust, gluttony, and avarice, "engage the brain's reward circuitry, including evolutionarily ancient regions such as the nucleus accumbens and hypothalamus; located deep in the brain, they provide us such fundamental feelings as pain, pleasure, reward, and punishment." And the nasty sins? "More disagreeable forms of sin such as wrath and envy enlist the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC)" associated with conflict and pain. Finally, overlapping both classes, we have the "more social sins (pride, envy, lust, wrath)" which "recruit the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), brain terrain just behind the forehead, which helps shape the awareness of self."
And the great struggle against temptations? Well, that's just the "inhibitory cognitive control networks" at the front of the brain, with some help from "regions such as the caudate." They collectively kick in when "you feel a spark of lechery, a surge of jealousy, or the sudden desire to pop somebody in the mouth…" The rest of the article continues along the same lines, informing the reader how certain parts of the brain light up when certain passions associated with sins are contemplated by those hooked up to a tangle of electrodes and imaging machines.
What's wrong with this type of scientific explanation of sin? Well, first of all, it's not scientific precisely because it confuses the cause with the effect. Imagine the following event. A jealous husband bursts into a laboratory where his wife has been working long hours with a fellow male scientist to whom she's obviously become romantically attached, and shoots his wife and her lover dead, and then turns the gun on himself. A third scientist witnesses the whole thing. When the police arrive they ask him what happened. He first replies by giving a long, drawn-out explanation of the physics of the gun and the nature of ballistics, as especially related to the physiology of the human skull. Impatiently, they press him again: "What happened?" He then goes on to explain the biology of the human arm, and the intricate arrangement of bone, tissue, nervous circuitry, and muscle structure that allows an arm and hand to perform precisely calibrated tasks such as fire a high caliber pistol with accuracy. The police, now ready to arrest him for flippancy, press him again: "What happened?" The third scientist then goes into a detailed account of the medial prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulated cortex, and how they light up the equipment when people experience lust and wrath. "Therefore," the third scientist concludes, "the mPFC and dACC are the culprits here." One of the policemen, clearly enraged, pulls his gun, cocks it, and presses it against the temple of the third scientist. "If that's all that happened," the policeman says with a smile, "then you won't mind at all what's about to happen now."
At this point, we assume, the sane humanity of the third scientist would suddenly be awakened out of the slumber into which his merely materialist explanations had put him. He would beg for mercy on the grounds that the policeman was capable of choosing to shoot or not to shoot him, rather than shooting being the mere result of brain chemistry.
And here is the lesson. It is one thing to explain someone else's sins away. It is even more gratifying to explain one's own sins away. But when we are about to be the unhappy victim of someone else's sin, we are snapped back to sanity, and declare for the age-old wisdom that bad intentions are more than interesting chemical reactions pulsing around our biological circuitry.
The central error of this kind of explanation is, again, that it confuses the cause with the effect. Anger makes our face hot; a hot face does not cause anger. Lust makes our heart race; racing hearts do not make lechery. In just the same way, the lighting up of certain areas of the brain when we contemplate particular actions is the effect of contemplating the actions and not the cause of it. We are embodied, spiritual creatures, a real union of soul and body. Our body is the means by which our soul thinks, feels, and acts. Like the bones, tendons, muscles, and nerves of the arm, particular areas of the brain are the physical means, the instruments, by which contemplated actions become actual actions. The central confusion—indeed, the insanity—of the materialist resides in his rejecting the reality of the soul. The result is that he must always focus on the physical means, the instruments, as if they were the cause.
But there is more darkness in such a materialist confusion. If science reduces sin to material explanations, it will seek a material cure. This is what Charles Darwin did with eugenics. If good morals are simply and solely the result of good breeding—in the very exact sense of the word—then bad morals are the result of bad breeding, or breeding gone bad. The implications are then obvious in regard to the cure. Those badly bred are incurable; their lot has already been cast; they have no more free will about the fact that they steal and commit adultery, than about the fact that they have brown hair and blue eyes. What is harmful and cannot be changed, should be eliminated. That is why the Nazis, in perfect conformity to Darwinism, executed criminals, along with other "biological misfits," such as the Jews, Gypsies, the retarded, and the physically deformed.
The same would be true if we reduce sin to the particulars of brain chemistry. If brain chemistry is the cause of what we call sin, then in manipulating the brain lies the cure for sin. Those whose brain circuitry fails to respond, must then be lobotomized, permanently anesthetized, or failing that, have their circuitry unplugged.
|
Click for a Printer Friendly Version
