One Christian perspective on understanding Christ

The basics of my faith are rooted in Christianity. I use a definition of Christianity that is quite loose, however. Christianity, quite simply, is the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who died and was resurrected for the salvation of all mankind. While this may sound quite common, my definition of Christianity largely ends there. ‘Son of God’ is specifically avoiding the concept of the holy trinity, particularly the notion that Jesus is God. Of about 10 years of discussions about this, I simply do not know this and don’t think the evidence is strong in its case. Furthermore, I do not think this duality is important. ‘Son of God’ to me is a sacred, holy position, as is God. Both fulfill particular roles.

Furthermore, this definition says nothing about rite and ritual, Catholicism or Protestantism. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who believes this central idea is Christian.

So even if that’s a common idea, perhaps now is where it deviates more substantially from most Christian thought. Please read my about page again before proceeding.

Part of my uneasiness about the concept of the holy trinity is the history surrounding early Christianity, a topic I’m interested in. Scholarship (armchair or not) about this period of history, the period of the life of the historical Jesus, is one way in which I feel most connected to God.

One major problem with the early Christianity surrounds the canonization process of the modern New Testament. While there is certainly the clear problem of literal interpretation of a set of translated works, this is a more global issue. The canonization process probably began around the time of Irenaeus in the late 2nd century CE, which is about 100-150 years after the death of Jesus (33 CE). The final canon in its modern form was not perhaps decided until the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine, around the middle 4th century CE. This is almost 300 years after the life of Jesus.

This in and of itself does not, of course, strongly suggest that these works are not somehow authoritative on early Christianity. However, it is when one starts to read about the politics of this canonization that it’s difficult to really trust the decisions of these men. Contrary to the popular teachings of Sunday school, the Bible is not a collection of books that were transcribed word for word directly from God (in English, no less). This is very different and not at all inconsistent to say that this does not mean that our current Christian canon isn’t divinely inspired …

There is a concept called special revelation, in which God intervenes on the activities of humans more or less directly. Many Christians believe that the canonization of the Bible is a product of this special revelation. However, I do not believe in special revelation because it is impossible to test, prove, predict, and understand at all (is God? This conundrum is why I call these things beliefs). The crux of the paradox is how one says one event is divinely inspired and another is ignored by God. The questions about who chooses these things introduces a considerable amount of tainted human interpretation that is, by nature, self serving.

Yet I believe in some semblance of the idea of general revelation, the idea that all of the events in the universe are known to God. An omniscient God knows all, by this definition, including all events past and future. (I’ll write one day at length about how this affects my idea of free will, or the lack thereof.)

Applying this idea to the canonization process, I believe that it is the way it is as the will of God. Simply, it is. Another way of saying this is that it is as divinely inspired as any other event in human history. What does this mean for authority of the New Testament (NT)? For me, it means that there are perhaps other sources of inspiration about the life of Jesus and what this means for the relationship between humans and God. Unfortunately, there are few Christians who share this idea.

One former Christian mentor once accused me (quite angrily) of being an arrogant intellectual about this concept, when I believe all of this inquiry to be central to my understanding of religion and faith. His central argument was that I was prone to picking and choosing what suited my understanding best, which is certainly a danger I acknowledge (for instance, our reverence of Paul is curious to me). I think that the NT is a collection of sources to varying degrees of interest that tell stories of the life of Jesus. I would like to consider them within their historical context in order to understand how to interpret what they say about Jesus.

The dates, for one, should be examined. The letters of Paul to various early Christian communities can be dated to about 50 CE, which is still far beyond the death and resurrection of Jesus. Mark is next, around 65 CE. The strange gospel of John appears to be dated around 80-100 CE, and the gospels of Matthew and Luke are probably also around 80 CE. These men did not live during the time of Jesus, and they were not first hand accounts of his life. It is conceivable that they were written accounts of oral traditions or sourced similarly from the same text. Yet the details surrounding this are unclear. I simply think these writings (like all) should be understood within context.

I reiterate that I could well be wrong about all of this. But the continued scholarship into this period of time, so poorly documented by today’s standards, may give insight into the life of Jesus and the meaning of his life. And so with that, I have to attempt to humbly submit myself to this ignorance but desire to understand the full truth. The number of non-canonical texts on Christianity are staggering from this time period, but we’re only now in the best period of time in which nearly transparent scholarship can occur, unencumbered if we choose by political motivations. This is not to say that this occurs purely at all occasions, at all, but it’s an ideal to which academics may aspire.

Yet another argument on creation(ism)

All of this was prompted by an article in the Guardian on creation that I found particularly well written in a sea of poor discourse on the subject.

I am convinced that nearly everything meaningful to be said about the argument of creationism, intelligent design (ID), and evolution has been said. My position from a scientist and Christian’s point of view is straightforward. Obviously, there is a lot of evidence that exists regarding evolution. With respect to origins of the universe, there is also a surprisingly consistent amount of evidence for the big bang theory. So, my current belief, based on the evidence available, is that the big bang happened, and separately science currently paints a reasonable picture of the origin of life.

Now there’s something very intuitive about the idea that something had to precede the big bang, and that’s fundamentally what I’ll call God. (Call it what you like.) So, the event of creation, in my mind, occurred, but it’s not God placing tiny Lego humans, in their modern forms (whatever that is), on a pre-formed Earth. Creation was the release of energy from an infinitesimally small point into the expanding universe.

So that explains my theism. I am particularly Christian because I believe the fundamental story of Christ, based on all available evidence (Biblical and extra-Biblical accounts). My understanding of the canonization of the New Testament makes me believe that the Bible is more of a human document than it is handed down from God. While I’m much more inclined to take the Hebrew Bible on faith, it remains a question of faith and not science, though I’m pleased to see scientific and archaeological inquiries into the subject. Yet many of these fundamental beliefs I take on faith, and many of these questions cannot be addressed by science directly. It’s perhaps in my nature, however, to attempt to reconcile these two logical worlds in order to ensure that some sort of weird singularity doesn’t implode my head.

The theory of evolution, on the other hand, asks questions that are within the realm of science and testable science. We as scientists would be remiss if we did not admit that explicit statements about the past may well not be testable, but our observations are still meaningful, like a forensic puzzle, and we have the unique opportunity of having systems we can closely monitor in labs and in real environments to check consistency with current ideas.

For one broad example, biological conservation is striking. The preservation of even single, complex ion channels is maintained throughout species whose brains are vastly different. Just one of many, many examples of this is the human 6 transmembrane domain K⁺ channel herg, which is 70% similar in genetic sequence to a channel in the worm C. elegans and also similar to channels in the Drosophila fly and elk.

Modern evolutionary theory accounts for this. At least one alternative explanation to evolution that one might hear from the ID folks is that God could have placed these sequences in each species when God created them. This is not a testable hypothesis, and it is not scientific by definition. As far as science is concerned, until this is reconciled, end of discussion with respect to science!

With respect to education policy, and I probably have more to say at a later time on this issue, all of this sums up to the following. Evolution is a theory (like ALL other theories in science). It is not proven (like all other ideas in science). Evolution and big bang theories should be presented as a theory in science curricula. ID and creationism, on the other hand, have zero place, whatsoever, in a science curriculum. What could be explained is why this is, since it is such a curiously heated topic. As far as this scientist and Christian is concerned, it’s pretty binary.

Convergence of reality

While I think there are several good points floating around concerning the unique roles of science v. other explorations of truth, I am all but convinced that there has got to be a continuity that demands that they are consistent. Essentially, I am not saying that God cannot break the physical law in which we live; rather I tend to believe that God would not choose to. (I tend to think God has the choices that we think we have – there’s another whole volume of discussion, I am afraid.)

I have no basis for believing this except that, like Nathan mentioned, I favor consistency (and symmetry and simplicity, in case you’re curious) and believe consistency to be one of the tenets by which the natural world in which we live operates.

So coming from a physics background, we talk a lot about grand unified (physical) theories. If Lincoln is correct in there being multiple authorities, what happens at their interface?

And I have yet to see overwhelming inconsistencies ……. (please note that I am as wary of saying that as you are reading it)

At the end of the day, there’s more than a non-zero probability that exists that we’re all wrong, anyhow. Fun conversation.

Mind-body connection

This whole separation of mind and physical brain is so intuitive yet so foreign to me. What happens at the boundary (interface) between the two? Is such a question approachable/tractable by science and scientific methods?

As a pragmatic consideration, I do not see any real reason for considering the two separately. Here we are, these biological beings that live, reproduce, and die. Why must there be a physical or metaphysical soul? What within the framework of our understanding of God must allow for a physical soul to emerge? How is the mind different from the brain? What are the markers of a mind that are non-biological?

There is good evidence to suggest that neural activity can be traced in vivo on a sub-cellular level for every cognitive process through which we go (conscious or subconscious), including any spiritually based activity. Do physical changes occur? If there is any feeling or semblance that one’s perception of the world has changed after such an experience, then the idea is that the plasticity of the brain will be manifested in some type of neural change.

How does one define the mind? By what criteria can the idea of consciousness be expressed? Perhaps it is an unoriginal idea, but the best definition I have ever heard for consciousness is something to the tune of “appreciation of art.” I am not personally familiar with any well controlled experiments on the subject concerning lower mammals and the expression of an appreciation for art, but I do believe that it is not the creation of art but possibly the enjoyment of art that sets us apart biologically. If this can serve as a biological definition – albeit an untied, poorly thought out one – then it would predict that, if the hypothesis is that humans are the only conscious beings, then other animals would not show an appreciation or enjoyment of art.

How would this be measured? Well, I don’t know of many monkeys that are willing to discuss the annals of music, poetry, and sculpture, but certainly these things are just output from a system that has other biological markers of activity in pleasure-reward areas and “emotional discharge,” which is merely localized chemical activity possibly coupled with detectable rhythms and certain footprints of neural activity. If a framework can be developed that can show preference or appreciation from a biological basis, only then can one proceed to test in animals with which one cannot otherwise communicate.

A further prediction is then that even people who don’t necessarily like art will have similar neural responses that correspond to what is often called a “subconscious” appreciation thereof.

You see, such ramblings aside, science cannot even begin to approach the problem of consciousness for the same two reasons we have not found a grand unified theory of physics: (1) the definition/theory must be consistent with our present understanding and (2) the theory must make testable predictions that can be independently and experimentally verified. This is the very essence of the scientific method.

From my meager mind

The free press has recently been contemplating the concept of free will and its connection to neuroscience. Thanks to Nathan for pointing out a post that muses on a ten year old article by Tom Wolfe that still might echo the sentiments of many who are eyeing neural sciences with disdain and contempt or with solace and justification, depending on what you happen to believe.

At a recent conference, I had the good fortune of having lunch with a couple of postdocs in my department that seemed to have a genuine interest in the basis of my religious beliefs. One very nice but inadvertent compliment I received from these professional mathematicians was that my beliefs seemed, if nothing else, consistent.

This is possibly the first external, independent validation I have had that I’m not a total crackpot. (It still has thus to be proven.) Yet I find it rather irksome that the only ones who would find any intrigue into my religious beliefs are a couple of mathematicians and not a couple of fellow Christians. (This is not precisely true.)

There are many who might believe that neuroscience will be the final nail for those who might look at the world deterministically. This holds implications for questions of souls, free wills, and consciousness. However, there is a lot that I find inconsistent about all arguments for or against souls, free wills, and consciousness.

The Wolfe article is interesting at best, in my opinion. The particular version of the article I read included almost zero citations, and so the claims (as within my informal web log) should be taken superficially at best. I contend that the Wolfe article is ignorance shrouded by eloquence. Nonetheless, it does fire up the ol’ gamma waves (30-100 Hz in EEG, depending on whom you ask) that may or may not be associated with higher cognition.

There are a few comments I would like to make on this article, which I will try to write independently of context for those who do not want to pour through Wolfe’s verbose article (mine is verbose too). I’d rather not paraphrase or quote heavily because I must freely admit that I don’t understand all of Wolfe’s references.

Determinism is state dependent

If there is a pervasive sense that neuroscience or neurogenetics will pave the way toward a deterministic view of the world, it is intimately coupled with this conjecture that “it would be possible to predict the course of any human being’s life moment by moment” (Wolfe).

This is nonsense. It is conceivable that the course of anything can be predicted moment by moment if we know the following things:

1. The initial state of the system (say, an individual human)

2. The physical laws governing the dynamics of the system

3. The system’s response to all inputs and outputs

4. All of the inputs and outputs at all time for a system

5. That the system is noise-free and not chaotic

Allow me a brief aside: the human body is immensely complex. Within the human, the brain is the single most complex thing we have ever encountered. To consider the growth of the brain one would have to consider billions of cells and even more molecules acting in tandem and knowing the precise chemical, mechanical, and electrical interactions of every single one.

Physicist Richard Feynman once said that anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics doesn’t. So too is the study of the human brain.

Consider a computer that can simulate that level of complexity (not yet existent). We would still have to know the precise state of the initial conditions, which in a deterministic framework can actually go all the way back to the Big Bang, if one can put aside from the moment any quibbles about its existence and say “the start of all things.” Thus the initial state of the system is infinitely more complex than we give it credit for.

Ok, even within a reasonable simplification, one could start with genes, and note along the way the thousands of errors made by the replication of genes for any given human, the errors made in the expression of proteins, and the resultant sentient being.

But that computer still would be charged with the task of taking into account the effects of every single state variable surrounding that system! At its extreme, this means every last movement of particles in the air that interact with our system, let alone any other sensory input in the auditory, visual, gustatory, and olfactory domains. If these are the important inputs, then the computer would have to know how each of those things affects the system, alters it, and is stored. We are no where near this ability yet.

Ah, but he said “yet.”

It is my belief that we as humans will never be this good. (But God is.)

Genetic determinism + initial state

Somewhere in what seemed to be a nice argument, another major problem exists. Even written in 1996, which we as scientists (in training, even) often chuckle at as being very old (in a rapidly changing field), any neuroscientist had access to plenty of information contrary to the idea that anything is fixed at birth.

Jon Kaas, among other neuroscientists, observed adult plasticity in mammalian brains for years. Though it may not have been conceivable then, neuroscientists in training of today are inundated with the idea that the adult brain, once thought to be static and only degrading, is actually quite dynamic and responds at a cellular and subcellular level to its environment.

Thus anyone who thinks that moment to moment prediction is possible from the initial state of birth is sadly mistaken, unless such a prediction has the robustness to take into account all of these subcellular changes to the very system whose journey they are predicting.

Shame on any neuroscientist that claims that your “brain is fully imprinted at birth” (Wolfe) – plasticity reigns, within the genetic limits, supreme.

Understanding the limits

There is no doubt that there are limits in any given system, including biological systems. If you’re not convinced of this, let me know the next time a human gives birth to 100 children simultaneously (or, insert your own incredulity here). I think genetics imposes certain limits. I cannot grow copious amounts of forearm hair to save my life. My feet are not getting substantially bigger, and I’m not entirely sure what I can (or would want to) do with that. It is true that manipulations can exist for many of these things, but discussing genetics even has the limits of controlled spontaneity. This could be an entire volume of books, let alone a blog post, so I must leave it here.

Understanding the limits of a technology is possibly more valuable than understanding its promise. In fact, I would argue that one can only know the promise of a technology once its limits are carefully considered.

A popular sentiment is that the amazing technology of brain imaging is somehow going to debunk all myths about humanity. Each week, one can read popular media fluff concerning “the predisposition to believe in God,” “Researchers use Brain scans to predict when people will buy products,” or “Imaging Pinpoints brain regions that ’see the future’.”

But imaging is not faultless. Imaging has imperfect spatial and temporal resolution. Magnetic resonance imaging cannot capture the dynamics of Ca²⁺ flowing into neurons and setting off cascades of second messenger signaling schemes involving complex molecules of proteins. That’s not what it’s for; in fact it is for getting functional data on gross structures by looking at a very indirect measure of blood oxygen changes in a particular region of the vasculature surrounding the brain’s surfaces based solely on the arguable and as of yet unproven premise that there is a definable and consistent or at least predictable correlation between this blood oxygen and neural activity in a given region of the brain! There is only so much one can surmise from such data, and thus those 21st century anatomists who study with the wonderful technological tools of fMRI must tread carefully in their conclusions (as must we all in science, religion, life, etc.)

Everything that we see here is a product of what came before

This is really the essence of determinism. It is not so much that the future is predictable as it is that the present is a product of the past. It cannot be any other way (though I would argue that it could infinitely so; rather it was not any other way), and so I guess I’d argue for this as an absolute truth. Even if the details are somewhat disputed, an absolute truth exists. Even if one argues that God has somehow intervened in mysterious ways that are difficult or impossible to explain with the laws we have teased out of the reality in which we live, the fact that it happened the way it did influenced where we are today.

Perhaps there is a negative sentiment surrounding the earlier history of psychologists, who were the neuroscientists of their day. But I would argue for respect and reverence to these thinkers, such as Freud, whose ideas I may not agree with, but I acknowledge that his ideas were possibly the natural precursor to our ability to explore the depths of the human psyche (with an inextricable connection to the physical brain). I have read (no reference) that Freud was very interested in cellular and molecular level explorations of the human brain; this is a concept that is well ahead of his time, and thus he did not have two fundamental elements necessary to explore such levels completely: the aggregation of knowledge that we so thoroughly enjoy today and technology, which we still do not have in a satisfactory form.

P.S. Phrenology is not the precursor to EEG (??) as mentioned in Wolfe; rather, phrenology is simply the precursor to topography, the study of functional anatomy. EEG (electroencephalography) is simply a recording modality of electrical activity on the cortical surface that is one of several measures by which this topographic organization is mapped.

Never fear, your paradigm is in tact

Unless a scientific experiment can be designed to test free will, the question will always be one of speculation and sheer belief. So believe away that you have free will or that you do not. It has never been a question of science, yet. Some would claim the same for string theory. A good theory must do two things: accurately explain the things we hold to be true and make predictions that are experimentally verifiable. String theory in many of its various iterations does the former, but no one has teased out valid experiments for much of the latter. And thus it remains to be seen.

The same goes for states of consciousness, the existence of God, free will, and the soul. These are not questions of science, and it is my belief that consciousness is the only of these things that really will become a biological question. Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying, “One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike, and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

I believe that this is a wise statement though I would argue that the most precious thing we have is that which Nathan, among many others against our logical brains, hopes is true – that the soul exists in a world ordained by a benevolent God.

And so I leave you …

I believe that consciousness can be thought of as a biological problem. I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the neurological machinery. However, souls, free wills, and God(s) are not questions of biology. I do not know what is meant by the concept of a soul, and I do not believe in it. I believe in a benevolent, omniscient God. I am too dumb to understand the concept of God, but I still believe in it. I do not believe in free will. I believe that (genderless) man “does what he can until his destiny is revealed to him.” I believe that our purpose on earth as humans is clear. (But I’m not gonna tell you what it is!)

As if that’s not enough, I believe that we should not hold anything in science as absolute truths but as theories that are pretty well supported by observations but can certainly be usurped at any time by better evidence.