Lost in the Cosmos

attend biology class where you are taught modern evolutionary theory. On Sunday, you go to church, where you hear the story of creation from a fundamentalist preacher. Then you go to college and hear a liberal professor-theologian who teaches a class on Science and the World’s Great Religions. You speak to the professor-theologian about the dispute between the preacher and the biology teacher. The professor-theologian smiles and says: Both are right. Genesis is a mythical account of the origin of the Cosmos, the origin of life and the origin of man. There is a certain truth in this myth. There are other cosmological myths, each valid in its own way. There is such a thing as mythical truth. Indeed, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution through mutations and natural selection is in fact more impressive evidence of God’s majesty than the notion that God created the millions of species by separate and arbitrary acts of creation like a child modeling a menagerie out of clay.
    The student says: None of you is satisfactory. All of you are unconvincing—and you, the professor-theologian, may be the worst of the lot, satisfying nobody and papering over everything in the name of nothing. How can a myth which you say is untrue in the scientific sense be true in another sense? What is the truth? What I want to know is this, and it doesn’t seem to be too much to ask: whatever the time and place of the appearance of man, whether it was the Late Pleistocene, the Upper Paleolithic, whether in the caves of the Dordogne or the Neander River—please tell me, leaving God aside, apart from Darwin and Wallace, please tell me, not in detail, but only in the most general and schematic way—please tell me how it came to pass that matter in interaction, a sequence of energy exchanges, neurones firing other neurones like a binary computer, can result in my being conscious, having a self, being able to utter sentences which are more or less true and which you can understand. Please excuse my stupidity, but would someone draw me a picture? Or just tell me in principle how this could happen. Or, if there is a soul, please tell me what evidence there is that it exists, and if it does, how it is connected with this compact mass of billions of neurones which is my brain.
    How do you think his three elders, the scientist, the preacher, the professor-theologian, each of whom claims knowledge of a certain species of truth, would answer him?
    How would you answer him?
    (a) Stick with current scientific theory. It is more reliable than religion. Indeed, there may not be any such thing as soul, self, consciousness, and the rest.
    (b) God comes first, above all else, therefore above science. Believe in the Bible, and all else follows.
    (c) I don’t know the answer. Why don’t you stop complaining and become an anthropologist, a psycholinguist, or a neurobiologist and try to find out for yourself?
    ( CHECK ONE )

    Question (II): The anomaly of objectivism. In view of the proclaimed neutrality of the scientific method toward God and its openness to evidence, how do you account for the objectivist’s dislike of God, even when the possibility of God’s existence is raised by a scientist with the highest credentials?
    The following incident occurred at Harvard University, presumably a citadel of objective knowledge. I quote from an article by Charles Krauthammer (The New Republic, July 25, 1981): “Several years ago the great Australian neurobiologist, Sir John Eccles, ended a Harvard lecture on brain organization by admitting that although evolution could account for the brain, it could not, in his view, account for the mind, with its mysterious capacity for consciousness and thought: only something transcendent could account for that. The audience began hissing.”
    The anomaly lies in the fact that the Harvard audience, presumably endowed with mind, consciousness, and thought, and presumably with more intellectual curiosity than most, might have been expected to welcome the views of a famous neurobiologist on the subject—particularly in view of the failure of academic psychology even to address itself to these matters.
    Why did the Harvard audience hiss Sir John Eccles and not, say, Jane Fonda?
    (a) Because God and religion have a bad name, and deservedly so, what with the excesses of the Moral Majority and the fundamentalist attack on science and, especially, the absurdity of “scientific creationism.”
    (b) Because, while the scientific