Archbishop of Sydney

His Eminence,
Cardinal George Pell
Cardinal Priest of the Title of S. Maria Domenica Mazzarello

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Emergence and the Human Person - The Approach of Faith and the Work of Science

Paper delivered to a conference on “Brain, Mind and Emergence”

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
22 March 2003

An old friend of mine is a wonderful psychologist. We have used him for many years to assess potential seminarians, those who wish to become priests and I have told this friend that he is diabolically intuitive (certainly not a phrase he would have chosen).

He has also done a lot of work for the courts, especially in assessing offenders. On one occasion when giving evidence the judge asked whether his evidence came out of his testing of the offender or from his own intuitions. He replied that after 20 years of such work, the two streams ran into one another so that he could not always distinguish one from the other, which was which. He was refreshingly and unusually honest.
Therefore like everyone else at this symposium I too come to these questions with a personal world-view developed from my genes, background, education and personal decision making. What might be different from some is that my background is explicitly Catholic and my professional training is in theology, history, Thomistic philosophy and moral development.

I am deeply grateful for the invitation to be present and participate with a contribution taken from worlds of thought different from that of most speakers. Like the Old Testament writers, I was, at least before this conference, much more impressed by the wonders of the cosmos than the workings of the brain. Therefore those talks recounting experimental work on the human mind, and the good effects that will come from this, have been rich intellectual nourishment for me. I also thank the Templeton Foundation for their support for this multi-disciplinary conversation.

Any adequate theory of evolution, of emergence has to wrestle with the phenomenon of religion, and religion’s contributions for good and for evil, as well as the best and worst of all human achievement.

Christian academics and church leaders need to participate regularly in these discussions. Only last night a conference participant asked me whether the next Pope would maintain the regular high level dialogue between scientists and Vatican sponsored delegations. While I do not know who will be the next Pope, or when he will be elected, I replied that I was sure the dialogue would continue because science today has access to so many truths about humanity and the cosmos and also because the scientific outlook is so powerful an influence especially in the educated world.

I believe there is no necessary conflict between science and Catholicism or indeed most brands of Christianity. Nor do I believe that the imbroglio with Galileo in the 1620s and the brawl between Huxley and Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860 over evolution are typical of the relationship between the Church and science, especially since the foundation of the European universities in the thirteenth century by the Church. Regular contacts are a necessary precondition to validate this optimism of mine.

I mentioned that the best and worst of all human achievement need to be considered in any comprehensive evolutionary theory. We have to be able to account for Homer and Virgil; Shakespeare, Dante and Cervantes; Michelangelo and Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein. Music offers a particular example of human uniqueness; the majesty and energy of Beethoven, the delicacy and beauty of Mozart, the sublime harmonies of Bach, which hint more successfully than any other music (I believe) at the essence of a transcendent and loving God.

Evolutionary theory, and any theory of emergence, which history demonstrates cannot be understood as simply a progression towards the good, must also take account of the extraordinary malice, the overwhelming evil of twentieth century leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
Evil, especially human evil rather than the devastation from natural disasters is the principal intellectual problem for those who believe in a benign, interested and all-powerful God. But such evil also seems to pose a particular challenge to a blind, impersonal and pointless evolutionary process. Malice, like the Holocaust, so intentional, persevering and well planned, while being economically counter- productive, is of a very different order from a fatal territorial dispute between baboons, different even from the genocidal slaughter between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda.

With your indulgence and permission I would like to take this unpleasant line of thought a little further, because such discussion highlights our struggles to define human freedom, to establish whether there is one human nature, the suitability of machine as a metaphor for mind.

We have heard the confirmation during this conference of the collapse of any Western consensus over moral theory, despite the fact that civil life for most people in the Western democracies is more decent and humane than it has ever been anywhere. But individuals often have no personal coherent moral theory. Over the years this has not impeded thousands of individuals from taking clear, indeed sometimes passionate, positions on particular moral problems. Such moral enthusiasms are vital for our public and private life, but remain logically incongruous when not imbedded in some religious or secular framework.

Evolutionary theory has to explain not only the wars, oppression and moral confusion that litter human history, but also the heroic moral striving and the developed moral theorizing which shine out regularly in the fog and mists of that same human history. This is no small challenge without God.

I want also to comment on the horrific incongruity in an evolutionary perspective of urban terrorism, the employment of young Moslem suicides as instruments of terror. These youthful suicides are offering a live, three- dimensional hermeneutic text to accompany Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (1933).

This short work is turning out to be a key-fable for understanding one poisonous corner of the post-modern world, one likely outcome of a truth-less society which has rejected or perverted its monotheistic moorings. It is generally conceded that sometime in the future young Wahabee Muslim-suicides could be carriers of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons used to destroy urban centres in America and elsewhere. Such chemical weapons could even lead to the end of man and his environment in some of the most advanced and socially productive cities in the world. Kafka’s fable prophetically pointed to the possible reversal of evolution, to the systematic turn towards bestialization.

At the other end of the moral spectrum, on a much happier note, emergence also has to find a place for outstanding spiritual leaders such as Jesus himself, or Confucius or the Buddha, or St. Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa who sparked such a lively discussion yesterday.

Mother Teresa has to be understood in terms of her own self understanding before we can evaluate her in any other terms. Her motivation was overwhelmingly religious; her prayers and actions reflected her love of God through Christ his Son. In doing all this, she was doing her duty. She did not appear to be full of “joy juices” and it is reductionist and bizarre to explain her actions as simply pleasure-giving to herself. If this was her aim her life was spectacularly misconceived. To me she regularly appeared as serene and compassionate and in her life-time she attracted thousands of nuns to join her. From her diary which is soon to be published it appears that for many years she was forced to work and pray without any religious consolation. Saints are not people who always perceive the Transcendent clearly and pleasantly, without a veil of ignorance and suffering or always feel God’s love intensely; much less are they individuals who pass through life in a state of sentimental euphoria. They do have a passionate conviction of the importance of God’s love and work.

Mother Teresa could and sometimes did speak very bluntly to (for example). Bishops, and could be tough and direct in her instructions. In Victoria, Australia her nuns were given a closed-down hotel as a residence. Mother Teresa personally took down the curtains because they were too expensive, inappropriate for the poor life style required of her nuns.

The robust altruism of the scientists who have spoken during this conference have much in common with Mother Teresa’s, even though the motivation is different.

A preliminary word on the nature of religion in the Western world today also might not go astray.

In his 1999 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh the philosopher Charles Taylor suggested that what we face today is not by any means a straightforward decline in religious belief and practice, but an increased plurality of religious belief and practice. Taylor — a Catholic internationally respected for his political and cultural critique, and for his contribution across the board to modern thought — makes the point that the religious impulse, what some have called ‘spirituality’ or the sense of the divine, is a constant. It has not gone; it may be in one of its more diffused periods, but it is constant. And it is not a constant in the way itching or fantasy is, but in the way the body, and reason, and argument are: it is a constant because it is a deep part of our nature and of human fulfilment.

If Taylor is right, predictions of a demise of religious belief and practice in the West are not prophetic: they are a misunderstanding of what is happening to faith in our lifetimes. People continue to seek the truth and consolation of religion in significant numbers; but without a strong cultural and intellectual underpinning, this search is fracturing into myriad unhelpful spiritualities, cults, and therapies. This is likely to hinder rather than help modern science.

As my second point I would like to mention the Christian notion of God. In a religious or historical sense if people of the Western world want to know about God, their first step should be to look at the life of Jesus Christ. Christ is God himself, revealing himself most fully: God’s love and his goodness projected, as it were, definitively onto the screen of history. But if the search for divine love and belief begins with the person of Christ, for our theoretical purposes today we should begin by reflecting on the concept of God and the relation of this concept to all other concepts.

God is not like any other item in the universe; in fact, God is not an item in the universe: indeed, not an item at all. Until we grasp this extraordinary fact, we cannot even begin to see the radical brilliance of the early Middle Eastern scribes who first articulated monotheism in the Old Testament.
God is not a thing, not part of nature at all, however nature is understood. This is what it means to call God ‘Creator’.’ God is not merely a god of the gaps in our knowledge. In humility we acknowledge these gaps and struggle to fill them. God is not diminished by advances in human understanding. To claim that the universe is a creation is to say that the universe does not explain itself. Wonderful as it is to study and manipulate, the universe’s only adequate explanation lies outside itself. Yet outside itself there is nothing, literally no-thing. Hence, our God is not a thing: not an item explaining natural, universal processes; not an all-powerful and eternal superman or a great neurobiologist in the sky. Rather, God is the reason for the universe and for neurobiologists; the reason for nature, and explanation, and process, and the necessary pre-condition for every pious or blasphemous, theistic or atheistic, thought there has ever been.

In most cases, whatever we believe to be the truth about nature and our place within it, God’s existence and our grounds for believing in and worshipping him will not be affected. A radical materialism and probably a radical determinism for the human heart would preclude Godly belief. But God is not a rival hypothesis to any scientific or metaphysical hypothesis: he is the reason why there exist the things and processes and hypotheses that do exist; the reason why there are things rather than nothing at all.

Yet God’s other-ness to nature does not mean nature is autonomous of God. Part of what Christians mean by calling God ‘Father’ is that he is the provident origin of all that exists. God is responsible for nature, including our nature and our minds: he is the beginning and the end of our thoughts, and he is omnipresent along the way. Good science need not make the slightest suggestion that this God is irrelevant. Indeed, by acknowledging God to remain at the level of fundamental explanation good science can accommodate God respectfully, and even celebrate him, while pursuing its own methods. I think the beautiful quotation from John Burroughs—“After science has done its best, the mystery is as great as ever” —understates science’s contribution, because the achievement of the mystery maker is revealed scientifically as more brilliant, beautiful and strange than we could ever have imagined.

Part of my interest in our Emergence project is precisely the role for God and for religion it makes possible. But I think too that this traditional view of God and religion is of value to science. The danger of the contemporary diffusion of religious sensibility into a thousand different sects and spiritualities is that this creates a thousand little gods, pagan systems in which parts of nature are themselves adored. This is incompatible with modern science and a serious philosophy of nature. However, where the theology of creation is accepted and understood, nature is perceived to be other than God — even if a delightful participation in the divine mind — and to be the proper province for autonomous scientific research.

Men and women are made for reasoned thought and for transcendent relationships. Yet we have also seen (in prodigious detail for a layman like myself) that humans are also parts of the animal kingdom, with aspects of our nature that are very ancient and fully continuous with parts of the non-human creation. Just as we cannot think whatever we like but have to follow laws of logic, principles of evidence and the limits of our own experience, so we cannot do whatever we like but are constrained by the deep and pre-human parts of our own complex natures. We do not have full knowledge or full control: we are finite. Yet we have the urge to know ever more and more, and the urge to do ever more and more. This pull to the infinite suggests we are a finite nature that has not emerged purely from finitude but has been shaped by the infinite itself for our good and His glory. It seems to me that philosophies and science without God and religion are inadequate to explain fully our material and finite nature. We are what we are, but what we are is greater than mere nature. We are persons, which means, astonishing though it is to ponder, that we are intimates of God.

I do not know how many consequences for investigating the processes of evolution follow from accepting or rejecting the God hypothesis. But it can and often does have immense consequences for personal and communal lives. Even a creator-God, without mentioning final judgement, is a threat to radical human autonomy.

A belief in pantheism or deism does not bring too many social consequences or too much cultural baggage, but the same cannot be said about the Judaeo-Christian concept of God even in a context of emergence.

George Steiner has written apocalyptically about “the singularity, the brain–hammering strangeness, of the monotheistic idea,” the concept of the Mosaic God. “Brain and conscience”, he wrote are commanded to vest belief, obedience, love in an abstraction purer, more inaccessible to ordinary sense than is the highest of mathematics. The God of the Torah not only prohibits the making of images to represent Him. He does not allow imagining.

The nineteenth century German philosopher Nietzsche who famously declared “God is dead! God stays dead! And we have killed him!” believed that the doctrine of a single deity is “the most monstrous of all human errors.”

However the second part of Steiner’s theory is equally provoking as he speaks of the liberating doom of the murder of God. Steiner believes that the Jewish genocide of 1936-45, principally the Nazi Holocaust but also Soviet anti-Semitism was Western culture’s attempt to “eradicate those who had ’invented’ God, who had, however imperfectly, however restively, been the declarers of His unbearable Absence.”

I have included mention of these terrible claims of Steiner, not because I am sure about the causation of the Holocaust, but because I did not want to sell the Judaeo-Christian God, my God, short.

The distance between the one true God, that Infinite Mystery of demanding Love and ourselves is far greater than the gap between ourselves and the apes, between ourselves and J. B. S. Haldane’s many types of beetle. But only a God of such omnipotence is capable of being the cause and end point of our universe, where the human brain wider than the sky and the human heart deeper than the sea struggle along among the infinities of space and time.

A short post-script on morality. Nothing stirs people up more than the linkage of morality to religion. Yet Catholics, at least, teach that the most fundamental moral truths are not only a matter of religious belief, but of the natural moral law. In other words, the basic moral truths are available to those capable of serious thought and willing to do the hard thinking. I am aware of various attempts to relativize moral values, to submit them to purpose-less evolutionary forces. I think these attempts are misconceived. Morality is not a set of burdens to be explained away or reduced to contracts, pacts, and survival strategies for particular organisms or whole species. Rather, morality is what locates us as human; the natural law simply affirms the nature of those who grasp it to be human nature. We are the beings whose healthy functioning includes sharing in truth, society, family relationships, life and health. Other creatures flourish by sharing in only one or two such goods or values; we require to flourish on multiple levels. Moreover, our own mind – our reason — informs us that we should seek this flourishing, for ourselves and for others, reasonably-not greedily, not unjustly, not unintelligently, etc. It is in this sense that morality might rightly be said to ‘emerge’, along with those other aspects peculiar to human minds, such as aesthetic experience and love.

Thus I do not think our moral framework is right because it serves us well: rather, I believe it serves us well because it is right. It suits our nature our material but greater-than-material nature as rational animals created out of love, made for love and for happiness, and headed towards perfect love and true happiness.

In addition to these natural truths, we should recall that, just as much of our scientific outlook is specifically Christian in origin and assumptions, so much of our moral and political outlook derives from the context of Christianity: specifically, though not exhaustively, human dignity, universal benevolence, freedom, equality. Even the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity so brutally pursued by the French Revolution of 1789 are inconceivable without Christianity. In short, the basis of our way of life and our organisation of human affairs is heavily indebted to Christian principles and Christian ideals.

Like many of the listeners yesterday I too was intrigued by the claim that a normal person cannot commit murder. Even if we recognize the useful distinction of usual and normative as two meanings for normal, such a claim might be made by someone who believes in human nature and that normal humans cannot commit serious crimes. I believe this incompatibility is implausible. History is full of counter examples. More probably though it comes from the “mental air” of the Judaeo-Christian altruism, the French Revolution principles of liberty, equality and fraternity and the American Declaration of Independence.

Certainly the ancient Romans would have found such an attitude to their barbarian enemies incomprehensible. Plutarch tells us that Julius Caesar captured and sold more than a million slaves during his conquest of Gaul.

The discussions in Spain during the conquest of Central and South America on whether the natives there had human souls constitute a half-way house to our modern consensus about the importance of human life (which does not stretch to the unborn however). Universal human rights are one outgrowth from the Christian doctrine of universal love.

God and many concepts of emergence and evolution can coexist quite happily. Indeed a good case can be made that emergence actually needs the concept of God for coherence and completeness. Just as the contemporary dialogue about the nature of the good life, about how people can be educated to live meaningful good lives needs continuing input from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.