in her first big movie break, Roman Holiday, in 1953. The Islamic clerics who run the country denounced and vainly tried to forbid this unseemly behaviour in young women because it was clearly in defiance of traditional Islamic practice.
Clerics, of whatever persuasion, are rarely happy with social and cultural change. The difficulty they always face when they confront a challenge to established social relations is what to do about the sacred scriptures upon which their particular system is based, particularly if the new developments promote change in the status of women and the understanding of human sexuality. Another example of this tension, expressed this time through Christianity, was the row that broke out in England and the USA in the summer of 2003 over the proposed appointment of two gay men as Anglican bishops. Traditionalists noisily opposed the appointments on the grounds that the Bible condemned homosexual relationships, while supporters pointed out that the writers of the Bible did not have our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. The bullying tactics of the traditionalists prevailed in England and, after several weeks when he was rarely off the front pages of the world’s newspapers, the priest in question was forced to withdraw. In the USA, however, the Church authorities confirmed the election of a gay man as a bishop, and he was subsequently ordained, though the row that surrounds his appointment is likely to continue indefinitely within the Anglican Church.
The Bible and the Koran were written thousands of years ago, so they naturally reflect the human arrangements and understandings of their time. This is why the flux of history is tough on clerics who believe that everything in their scriptures is permanently commanded, including male dominance and homophobia, because it means they have to apply first-or seventh-century customs to twenty-first-century men and women, who, not surprisingly, don’t much care for them.
It is the idea of God behind these ancient ways of organising society that is the main source of difficulty, because God is always claimed as the basis for the enduring authority of the systems that are under siege. Traditional religions have a picture of God as a superhuman person, possessing absolute power over us, who inhabits a heavenly realm that is separated from the earth, but is in regular contact with it, the way NASA communicates with its space stations. Many people find the NASA model for God, as a supernatural engineering and maintenance agency, very difficult to hold today. Religion used to claim with considerable cogency that, given the intricacy of our nature and the way we are precisely adapted to the universe, a great external intelligence had to have designed it all. It was expressed by William Paley in the famous ‘lost watch’ argument in 1802. If you found a watch when you were out walking and marvelled at the perfect intricacy of its design, you would correctly deduce that it had been created by a watchmaker. So it was with the universe itself, the argument went. The idea of God the Designer offered an explanation for the way species seemed to be so miraculously adapted to the world in which they found themselves. That explanation worked for centuries, until Darwin came along with an alternative account that was truer to the facts and therefore more satisfying. He showed that we were not the result of a straightforward piece of planned engineering, but of an unimaginably long and painful process of trial and error through which successful species gradually adapted themselves to their environment. The process was hit-and-miss and intrinsically wasteful, completely unlike the precisely designed economy of the religious explanation. According to Martin Rees, ‘fewer than ten percent of all the species that ever swam, crawled, or flew are still on Earth today’.8 Richard Dawkins called one of his books The Blind Watchmaker to make a similar point.
Apart from a few defiant creationists, most people in the West today have abandoned the old argument from design. What is now left of the explanatory use of God to account for the organised intricacies of planet earth has retreated to one of the last frontiers of human knowledge, which is the human mind. Religious explainers now try to tell us that the mind inhabits the brain, but is not reducible to it. This is sometimes called the Ghost in the Machine theory: the idea that our bodies, though they are physical mechanisms, are inhabited by an invisible spiritual reality called mind or soul, exactly in the way that God is understood to inhabit and direct the universe. This is a development of Plato’s idea that fundamental reality is spiritual and immaterial, but that it assumes the form or appearance of matter in actual entities, the way the Invisible Man in the old movie would sometimes wrap himself in bandages and pop a pipe in his mouth so that people could locate his presence. The significant thing about the appearances was that they were mere shadows of heavenly realities and had no enduring life of their own; only the spiritual had enduring life. Applied to individual humans, this gave us the idea that our bodies are temporary habitations for our souls, and when the body dies the soul returns to its immortal state.
What gave this theory such a long run was the experience of our own consciousness. We seemed to ourselves to be more than material realities. Our mind was an invisible power that transcended our bodies, so it was easy to believe that it had an independent and separate existence that would outlast its house of clay. By extension, God was understood as the Super Mind or Spirit that activated the created universe but was independent of it. As is the way of these things, this theory, the last frontier of defensive religion, quickly becomes the next frontier of science, and Antonio Damasio, a leading neuroscientist, is one of its explorers. In his book Looking for Spinoza,9 Damasio explores the mind/brain question from a philosophical as well as a scientific angle. He offers an account of the way evolution has endowed us with a complex neural system that enables us to regulate our life in a way that maximises well-being and minimises pain. He tells us that those neural reactions of pain or pleasure we call ‘feelings’ were built from simple responses to external events that promoted the survival of the organism. Feelings are brain states, whether of fear or compassion, that prompt us to respond to our environment in ways that will be conducive to our own safety and flourishing. The mind is not some sort of self-existent ghost that temporarily inhabits our flesh; it is a way of describing how the brain expresses our bodies. But, as I have already pointed out, because of the way we experience ourselves as somehow transcending our bodies, it is easy to understand how we were led to posit the idea of a self that existed independently of its physical container. That assumption about ourselves is strengthened by the fact that the gift of memory enables us to recognise patterns in our experiences, thereby giving us some level of control over our instinctive responses to the pressures that beset us. And by enabling us to unify our own remembered history, however inaccurately, the experience of memory lends force to the tendency to abstract ourselves from the brain that has so intelligently organised our experiences for us. The tragic disproof of the claim that there is a fundamental essence in us that is independent of the body is clearly demonstrated in cases where assaults to the physical brain change or utterly destroy the personality or selfhood of the person, long before their body as a whole has died. We could apply to these tragic people some of the words from Larkin I have already quoted – ‘nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with’.
Damasio’s investigations force us to reappraise some of the most vexing philosophical problems that have haunted us since the emergence of consciousness. Are we controlled by a separate reality, whether it is God in the case of the universe or the mind in the case of ourselves, or are the structures of both the universe and the mind explicable in terms of themselves without reference to outside forces? Darwin gave us a way of understanding the evolution of life on earth without the necessity for an external agency to guide its development. Damasio offers us a parallel explanation of the mind that is hopeful as well as convincing. The fact that it is hopeful is interesting. One of the many charges that retreating religionists make about the explanatory advance of science is that, by reducing everything to biology, it leaves no ground for a satisfying spirituality or an authoritative ethic for humanity. However, scientists increasingly argue that nature itself provides the best basis for ethics because it prompts us to live prudently and to care for one another, as well as for the earth on which we live, if we want to survive and flourish. This is a theme that I shall develop in a later section of this book. Damasio even offers us a naturalistic account of human spirituality. He writes:
I assimilate the notion of (the) spiritual to an intense experience of harmony, to the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection. The experience unfolds in association with the desire to act toward
