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The Implications of Neurobiology on the Study and Interpretation of Scripture

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The Implications of Neurobiology on the Study and Interpretation of Scripture READING THE BODY, READING SCRIPTURE: THE IMPLICATIONS OF NEUROBIOLOGY ON THE STUDY AND INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE David Cave This paper considers what the neurobiological reading of the body implies for the reading of scripture. By ‘the neurological reading of the body’ I refer to how modern science and culture draw upon cognitive science and genetics to explain and to understand what it means to be human. And by the ‘reading of scripture’ I refer to the practice of the various religious traditions to understand our humanity based on claims of inspired and revealed insights, said to come from some agency transcendent to our naturalized mind and body. I contend that within a naturalistic system these two readings are not mutually exclusive but interrelate such that the reading of one informs and illumines the reading of the other. Among many quarters, the reading of the body has come to rival, even replace, the reading of scripture (and here I refer to scripture broadly understood, of no particular religious tradition) for defining and guiding us in what it means to be a human being. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks, in “The Neural Buddhists,” comments on the widespread interest in neuroscience and genetics and surmises that its proponents will not so much undermine a belief in God as undermine the claims of scripture. He says, “The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public cul- ture . and yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a side- show. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God; it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.”1 Brooks cites con- temporary scientists such as Daniel J. Siegel, Michael Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio, and Marc D. Hauser who claim that human con- sciousness and our values and emotions such as love, altruism, compas- sion, and fears of all sorts, are a product of our neural circuits and of the evolutionary adaptation of our genes to preserve the self and our species. The biologist Richard Dawkins clearly equates the biological reading of 1 Brooks, David “The Neural Buddhists,” New York Times, May 13, 2008. © David Cave, 2011 | doi:10.1163/9789004225343_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. David Cave - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:05:04AM via free access 16 david cave the body to the reading of scripture when he says “DNA sequences are the gospel documents of all life, and we have learned to decipher them.”2 In other words, there is no need to consult scripture when we can find the good news (the gospel) for humanity in our genetic constitution. Brooks’ observation and the claims of those he cites have their iconoclastic pre- cursor in Darwin, whose theory of natural selection forever became the bête noire of scripture’s account of the same, especially among those who purport a divine hand behind nature and human life. Today, PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and CAT (Computerized Axial Tomography) scans and, particularly, functional MRIs (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) have become the primary authoritative means by which the scientific community reads the body.3 These scans have taken on authoritative status not only among specialists but among the general public as well. Here, for instance, in Figure 1, we see an fMRI scan of the lateral frontal cortex of the brain from a study that tested changes in the function and structure of a patient’s brain due to chronic pain. This study revealed that pain can affect the brain’s volume of grey matter, thereby influencing one’s capacity to think and emote.4 Michael Hagner, professor of science studies in Zurich, says that new types of imaging different from earlier scanning techniques, such as traditional X-Ray technology, are ushering in a new way to understand ourselves as human. “The situation has changed,” he says. “Images of the brain produced by means of these techniques grace half or whole pages in glossy magazines and daily papers. They give the impression of open- ing a new window onto the functioning of the brain and hence also onto 2 From Dawkins’s book, The Blind Watchmaker (NY: W.W. Norton, 1986), quoted in Goldberg, Steven Seduced by Science: How American Religion Has Lost Its Way. NY: NY University Press, 1999, 125. 3 The neuroscientist, Alex DaSilva, University of Michigan, who conducts research on the brain’s response to stimuli, said to me when I visited his lab that fMRIs have been accepted as authoritative in depicting the brain as it really works. While its findings are not conclusive or without interpretive variation, fMRIs, he says, provide the most accurate rendering to date of the brain at work. And, from clinical trials, he says he has not come across anyone who does not accept the images of the brain as not being theirs; people did not contest the abstract scientific rendering of what they see as their brain. Nevertheless, despite the authoritativeness ascribed to fMRIs, interpretations derived from them, not unlike the many erroneous (and arrogant) interpretations of scripture, are not without errors and false claims. See The New York Times article, “The Scan that Didn’t Scan,” by Kolata, Gina (October 14, 2008). 4 DaSilva A.F., Becerra L., Pendse G., Chizh B., Tully S., et al. “Colocalized Structural and Functional Changes in the Cortex of Patients with Trigeminal Neuropathic Pain.” PLoS ONE 3, no. 10 (2008): e3396. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003396. David Cave - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:05:04AM via free access reading the body, reading scripture 17 Figure 1. Frontal Cortex (Lateral). Panel A and B—The latero-frontal cortex was parcellated in seven sections. Panel C—BOLD (de)activation following allodynic brush stimulation in TNP patients showed bilateral activation in the frontal mid- dle, and inferior gyri that extended in part to the frontomarginal cortex, as well as deactivation in the contralateral superior frontal sulcus. There was also bilateral activation in the posterior orbital gyrus. Panel D—Most of the functional clusters of allodynic (de)activation were precisely colocalized with cortical thinning. David Cave - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:05:04AM via free access 18 david cave the mental life of man, an impression that captions and comments do their best to reinforce.”5 He adds, “in the history of the human sciences, innovations in visualization technology have affected the perception of the physical and mental nature of man. Neuroimaging has transposed psychological phenomena into visual categories and thus changed their epistemic and cultural status.”6 Barbara Stafford, an art historian at the University of Chicago, whose work as of late has focused on what neuroscience can shed on the act of perception, herself speaks of anatomical and neural visual images taking on the credibility of truth, as the image in pre-Enlightment literacy once did. We are following in a “conceptual and perceptual revolution,”7 she says, adding that we are in the “media age of vocal, aural, and, above all, optical rhetoric . .”8 Computer simulations and visualizations of the brain and of its nerve cells provide neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists literal insights into the brain as it thinks and responds to tactical, emo- tional, and visual stimuli, bringing into view what for human history has been formerly hidden. This move toward the visualization of knowledge “has broad intellectual and practical implications on the conduct and the theory of humanities, the physical and biological sciences, and the social sciences,” she says.9 As such, it has implications on the reading of texts, hence, on the reading of scripture. These advanced scanning techniques comprise a sub authority within the overall authoritative claims of modern science, which is one of the (primary) authorities affirming an immanental worldview in competition with traditional religion and its claims to transcendent truth.10 The legal scholar David Goldberg says the religious are often pressed now to articu- late a response to science, an onus he attributes to the religious for having been “seduced by science,” whereby they must now justify their beliefs and convictions on the basis of scientific claims rather than upon their own experience and reading of scripture.11 Goldberg defines and differ- 5 Hagner, Michael. “The Mind at Work: The Visual Representation of Cerebral Processes,” in Renee van de Vall and Robert Zwijnenberg, Eds. The Body Within: Art, Medicine, and Visualization. Leiden: Brill, 2009, 68. 6 Ibid., 67. 7 Stafford, Barbara. Good Looking: Essays on The Virtues of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, 21. 8 Ibid., 22. 9 Ibid., 23. 10 See the philosopher of secularity Charles Taylor in his chapter “Religion Today” in his A Secular Age. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007. 11 Goldberg. Seduced by Science, 2ff. David Cave - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 04:05:04AM via free access reading the body, reading scripture 19 entiates science and religion too dualistically, but his point is taken. The reading of scripture can no longer be undertaken indifferent to the way science itself reads the world, that is, indifferent to the fact that human life and our neurobiological workings are inextricably tied to nature. If we grant, though, the prevailing scientific and philosophical assump- tion that the world is what it is, that nature is all that we have—this being the prevailing philosophical premise for the past century, with historical roots to Aristotle—and we reject nature as a mirror of a transcendent, Platonic universe, then where does this leave scripture, generally thought12 to be revealed and to hold eternal truths for shaping the individual and communal life of millions of believers? How do we reconcile scripture as a ground and as a guide with the confident assumptions of cognitive sci- ence and evolutionary genetics and within the cosmology of naturalism? Reading the Body as Reading Scripture To begin to answer these questions, it is helpful first to correlate the read- ing of the body with the reading of scripture.
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