

David Klinghoffer

In an important new book, Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves (Pantheon), British physician and historian James Le Fanu speculates that Darwinism works that way for many people. It’s a “comfort blanket,” explaining everything about living creatures in tidy materialist terms without having to appeal to mysterious, unknowable forces outside nature. Maybe that’s why scientists and laymen alike get so very upset and even abusive when you try, however gently, to tug it out of their arms.
Darwinism hasn’t been aired out or laundered in about 150 years. It’s a closed loop, effectively unquestionable, despite the fact that major chunks of biological evidence are against it. Le Fanu, about whom I’ve been writing this series, focuses on DNA and the human brain. Darwinism stands for the belief that everything can be explained in natural terms, but these two features of biology unyieldingly defy such comforting explanations.

And a good thing that is, too. Because if the mind really did reside entirely in the brain, if the mind were genuinely reducible to the brain, that would mean the end of free will — a computer ultimately can do only what it’s programmed to do (in this case, programmed by a mindless nature) — and that in turn would spell the end of moral responsibility.
In fact, materialist scientists and other thinkers have often denied the reality of free will. Le Fanu quotes Britain’s leading neuroscientist, Colin Blakemore: “We [may] feel ourselves to be in control of our actions, but that feeling is itself a product of our brain, whose machinery has been designed by means of natural selection.”
But cognitive science has demonstrated clearly that non-material things — thoughts — can change the brain itself. This is the scientifically confirmable reality behind cognitive therapy where altering the way you think about your own thoughts can remake brain circuitry in ways that anyone can see by a glance at “before” and “after” PET scans of brain activity.
On this point, Le Fanu discusses the research of UCLA’s Jeffrey Schwartz, another Darwin doubter: “Professor Schwartz and others [demonstrate] how ‘beliefs and expectations’ can ‘modulate’ the physical activity of the brain,” thus “restor[ing] the notion of personal responsibility.”
Fascinatingly, Le Fanu describes an enigmatic dance between physical and non-physical forces that drive life’s development, whether historically in the formation of species or individually in the growth and maturing of a single human being. It’s clear however that while life has a physical basis, it’s something beyond the merely physical that drives it all.
Le Fanu is not being coy when he writes that this observation provides “no direct evidence for a Creator.” But he finds “there is vastly greater evidence of ‘design’ — for those who would wish to interpret it as such — than for the supposition that the vast panoply of nature should be the incidental consequence of…numerous random genetic mutations.”
Why that matters, not just to science but to the way we live, Le Fanu takes up at the end of the book. More on that tomorrow.