Josh Clayborn has posted some good thoughts on “neurotheology”. I’d like to continue the discussion. (It occurs to me that “discussions” are hard to have when you don’t have a comment system. Anyway…)

Christianity fairly consistently holds that humans are both spiritual and material beings, and that well worked-out doctrines of the Incarnation and Resurrection suggest that we ought to allow for our physical bodies to be fairly significant to our overall functioning as persons. After all, we have these bodies, and they’re ours, and God seems to be pretty happy with the situation.

I see neurophysiology as a tidal wave that is just now beginning to crest. I predict that the next fifty years will bring a deluge of naturalistic explanations for every facet of human behavior you can imagine, including spiritual experience. We shouldn’t find it prima facie troubling that God, who enabled us to interact with him to begin with, should equip our bodies to support that interaction in some way. (The pluralistic implications of physiologically similar phenomena across the experiences different of religions will have to be dealt with separately. We can cross that bridge once the stream gets too high to ford.)

Neurophysiology (or whatever you want to call it) is going to have to grow up a lot before the fun really starts. Right now it’s just giddy with all of the legitimate observations an inferences it’s able to make, and all of the insight into human behavior that it’s able to provide. It holds huge promise for the treatment of all kinds of real suffering, so I say we should cheer it on and even jump in for a swim as our young people have ambition and ability. But I’m guessing that fifty years down the road it will start to run out of gas. It will do a wonderful job explaining all kinds of things up till then, but eventually little problems will emerge that defy facile naturalistic explanation. This will look from the outside like the rate of change of discovery finally starting to taper off, but it will really be another indicator of the end of the usefulness of the dominant paradigm. Time to subvert it, baby!

A good parallel would be the current state of origin-of-life research, wherein leading researchers are looking for space rocks to introduce life to the early earth, since the broadly agreed-upon conditions of the early earth are unsuitable for a successful outcome of the Stanley Miller primordial soup experiment, performed fifty years ago this year. Almost nobody is really conceding the defeat of the naturalistic paradigm and falling on their knees in submission to Christ as a result of this (although, hey, they should), and nobody probably will when I am an old man and the neurophysiological tidal wave has rearranged the beachfront the way I think it will. But naturalism will still only deliver so much explanation and no more–which makes sense, if only that much is actually “natural.”

In the end, far from being explained out of his creation, God’s work will again be visible to those who have eyes to see.

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• Posted by Tim on Friday, October 10, 2003 at 1:29:38 pm PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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