Who Am I and If So How Many? (24 page)

An exhaustive set of rules is essential. Even aside from Robert White’s transplants in Cleveland, it is evident that many pitfalls lie ahead. Stroke research is poised to take its first steps in the direction of brain transplants to replace particular stricken regions of the brain, which can succeed only if medicine can restore destroyed nerve tracts and nerve contacts. But if it can, won’t we have the knowledge to construct an actual brain? The idea of ‘artificial brains’ has captured the human imagination since time
immemorial
, but the new arts of neuroprosthetics and neurobionics are fueling real hope for ‘brain prostheses’ in the near future.

The implications of these advances for our view of man are vast, because a brain prosthesis – a machine with a mind – would not be mortal as we now understand the term. Wouldn’t someone with a brain prosthesis be superhuman? Doesn’t this sound like the artist Franz Marc’s vision for Expressionist painting: ‘building a bridge into the spirit world’?

The moral challenge for neuroscience and its practical
applications
is thus at least a double one. It has to guard people against abuse, and to prepare society for deep-rooted changes in the way we view ourselves and the world that certain types of brain surgery would usher in. Here, too, we must heed the Kantian caution that man must not be instrumentalized, because any misuse by the military and the secret service, or by marketing and
home-entertainment
electronics, has elements of instrumentalization.

The social consequences could be considerable, and the utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain is sometimes quite problematic. Society is therefore well advised to implement ethical
controls as early as possible and to bring in philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists to assess current neuroscientific research and anticipate future issues.

Before we leave our discussion of the traditional view of man and what constitutes humankind, we might wish to know something more about ourselves. We have learned about our cognitive faculties and considered some important moral questions. What remains is a look at human desires, yearnings, longings, and pleasures – in short, at faith, hope, and love, without which we would not be who we are.

Does God exist? And can his existence be proved? The only meaningful conception we can make of God is that of an infinitely great and perfect being. Anything else would somehow not be God, at least not in the Judeo-Christian sense. One might say that God is the greatest conceivable being. But if God possesses all conceivable qualities of greatness, he exists. If he did not, he would lack at least one quality, namely, that of existing – and would thus not be God. A being that would be impossible to improve on in one’s mind must therefore exist, because otherwise this conception would be absurd. Consequently, we can conclude that God does exist!

I don’t know whether that convinces you, but if it doesn’t, don’t blame me; I wasn’t the one who came up with it. The credit goes to Anselm of Canterbury, an Italian who spent most of his life in France yet bore the name of a city in England. He was born in about 1033 in the city of Aosta in northern Italy, and was named Anselmo. At the age of fifteen, he dreamed of joining a nearby monastery, but his ambitious father had bigger plans in mind for his talented son and wanted him to go into politics. When Anselm was twenty-three, he embarked on a three-year journey through France and was drawn in particular to the northern part of the
country. For more than a hundred years, the Normans had displaced the Franks from northern France and developed a blossoming culture, adopting the French language and the Christian faith of their predecessors. More than 120 abbeys were built in the Norman period, and they became highly developed cultural, economic, and intellectual havens.

Religious art also flourished in Normandy. The most famous monasteries and abbeys were St Wandrille, Mondaye, Jumièges, Hambye, the Trappist monastery in Soligny, and the Benedictine monastery of Bec. When Anselm arrived, Lanfranc, the pride of Normandy, turned the abbey of Bec into one of the most important intellectual centers in Normandy. In 1060, Anselm – after some hesitation – also entered the abbey. Three years later, Lanfranc became the abbot in the larger commune of Caen, and Anselm succeeded him as prior in Bec. Lanfranc’s close ties to William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, shaped his future path. In 1066, William conquered England, and Lanfranc became the archbishop of Canterbury. The cathedral, which later became world-famous, was at the time just a heap of rubble, having been burned down in the course of the Norman wars of conquest. Lanfranc repeated his Bec accomplishments in Canterbury. The framework of a magnificent Romanesque church with transept and choir arose from the rubble. While Lanfranc was building up the most important cultural and religious center of England in Canterbury, Anselm continued to develop Bec.

The only portrait of Anselm painted during the Middle Ages highlights his noble features: angular head, large nose, receding hairline, and long white hair running down the back of his neck. Anselm proved a brilliant choice for his new position. He became the abbot of an increasingly flourishing abbey, an elite training center with a monastery school and seminars in rhetoric. And he began to write his own philosophical and theological works. In about 1080, he completed
Monologion
and
Proslogion
. The latter work, a lengthy meditation on the nature of God, contains the proof of God that opened this chapter.

The proposition that God is the ‘being than which none greater can be conceived’ has been one of the most widely discussed arguments in the history of philosophy. Anselm’s discourse became famous as the first ontological argument for the existence of God. Ontology is the study of the nature of being, and an ontological proof of God uses intuition and reason to prove the existence of God directly. Let us recall the key point: since God is the greatest conceivable being, it is not possible for him
not
to exist. If he did not exist, it would diminish God’s greatness to an excessive degree. It would contradict the notion of something than which none greater can be conceived if something greater
could
be conceived. Consequently, it does not make sense for us to imagine that God does not exist.

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, Anselm’s proof for the existence of God – a single page in length – carried great weight. But of course it also provoked constant criticism. Its first critic was the Count of Montigny, known also as the monk Gaunio, who lived in the monastery of Marmoutiers near the city of Tours on the Loire. Gaunio wrote to Anselm that one could not use a convoluted definition to deduce that something exists. Gaunio copied Anselm’s proof, substituting ‘perfect island’ for ‘perfect being,’ to show, using Anselm’s own words, that this island necessarily existed. He wrote that just as unparalleled excellence proves God’s existence, the unparalleled excellence of the island also proves
its
existence.

Anselm endeavored to defend himself, calmly pointing out that his argument did not apply to islands and things of that kind, but rather represented an exceptional case. The leap from perfection to existence applied only to something that is unconditionally perfect, namely to God. An island, by contrast, is never perfect, he argued, and is by its very nature not the greatest conceivable being. Anselm took Gaunio so seriously that he insisted that his proof of God could be copied and distributed by other monks only in combination with Gaunio’s critique, and that Gaunio’s, in turn, would appear only with Anselm’s response. Anselm’s confident
and generous reaction in the controversy surrounding the proof of the existence of God enhanced his fame.

When Lanfranc died in 1089, the famous abbot of Bec was the obvious successor for the office of archbishop of Canterbury. But William II, the son and heir of William the Conqueror, wavered for four years as to whether he should bring the intelligent and self-assured Anselm to England before deciding to do so. The king’s doubts proved justified. The cathedral of Canterbury thrived in many ways under Anselm – the Church expanded and scholarship flourished – but it did not take long for the dithering king and his proud archbishop to become fierce competitors for the power of Church and Crown. After Anselm had been in office for four years, William refused to allow his disloyal archbishop to return home after a trip to Rome, and Anselm spent the next three years in Lyons. William’s successor, Henry I, allowed Anselm to come back to England, then sent him into exile yet again in 1103, this time for four years. When he returned in 1107, Anselm spent two more years in Canterbury until his death at the ripe old age of seventy-six. In 1494, the man who believed he had proved the existence of God was canonized.

The most extensive dispute about Anselm’s proof was launched 150 years later, by a theologian and philosopher who would far surpass the fame of the archbishop of Canterbury. Like Anselm, Thomas Aquinas was Italian. He was born the son of a duke in about 1225 in the castle of Roccasecca near Aquino. When he turned five, he was sent to a monastery, and at the age of nineteen, he resolved to join the Dominican order. He studied and taught in Cologne, Paris, Viterbo, and Orvieto, and in 1272 he established a Dominican school in Naples. Although he died in 1274 at the age of just forty-nine, he was extremely prolific, and it seems fair to say that no philosopher of the Middle Ages had a greater influence on the thinking of that era than Thomas.

After Anselm it became customary to introduce a theological treatise with a rational clarification of the question of God’s existence. But Thomas had major problems with Anselm’s proof.
Without mentioning his predecessor by name, Thomas criticized the way Anselm made the leap from the conception of God to God’s actual existence. The fact that I can conceive of a perfect God means only that God exists in my imagination, but not that he exists in reality. And Thomas did not stop there. He rejected the idea that it makes any sense to speak of the ‘greatest conceivable being.’ The greatest conceivable being is either so great that I cannot imagine it at all, or it is too small. Whatever I imagine, I can always add something to it to make it something even greater. The largest known number can always be followed by a +1. Anselm’s proof of God thus fails right from the outset, because there is no such thing as the greatest conceivable being.

Thomas had no intention of disproving the existence of God; he wanted only to show how to furnish a better proof of God. In contrast to Anselm, he thought that God’s existence was so great that it cannot be grasped by the human imagination at all. His own attempt to prove God’s existence thus takes an entirely different route. Thomas explains God from the logic of cause and effect. His proof of God is a causal proof of God. Since the world exists, it must have originated at some point, because nothing comes from nothing. Some kind of ‘efficient cause’ must have created everything or set it in motion. Whatever was right at the beginning of everything was itself unmoved – otherwise it would not be at the beginning, but would require an efficient cause as well. Thomas adopted the term ‘unmoved mover’ from Aristotle to designate what came first.

But how should we imagine this unmoved mover, which is, after all, unimaginable? To be what it is, it has to have all the attributes that the world does not have. It has to be absolute, eternal, true, unimaginably intelligent, and perfect. To form an image of God, man has to cast off accustomed conceptions one by one. The more human conceptions I jettison, the less
darkness
surrounds me. I have to envision a being that does not consist of matter and that is not bound by time. God is almighty and omniscient, infinite and unfathomable. His will is
absolute and perfect, infinite in his love and the quintessence of happiness.

For philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, the goal was to mediate persuasively between reason and faith, and to explain how man actually knows who or what God is. No prominent philosopher of the Middle Ages entertained any doubts about the actual existence of God; it was just a matter of showing how God was conveyed to the mind.

Yet this was precisely the route Immanuel Kant took in his
Critique of Pure Reason
(1781). All representations I devise of the world, Kant explained, are representations in my head (see ‘The Law Within Me,’ p. 104). My senses enable me to gain experiences, which my understanding turns into representations, and my reason helps me to sort out and assess them. But I know nothing of what lies completely outside the world of my sensory experience. And here, according to Kant, lies the quandary in any proof of God. If I construct the representation of an absolutely perfect being for myself, it is a representation in my head. Anselm had to concede that as well. Even if I use the representation in my head to deduce that it is part of God’s perfection to exist in reality, it is still only a representation in my head. Anselm failed to see that. For him, God had leaped out of the head into the world. But in reality, Anselm had only shown how the representation that God must exist formed in his head; no more and no less.

When Kant confronted the ontological proof of God, which he knew in Descartes’ variant (which is quite similar to Anselm’s proof), his critique of the logic of proofs for God took off. His influence was enormous. Although people continued to offer various proofs of God, the ontological proof was laid to rest for quite some time.

Remarkably, new proofs of God have been emerging recently within the scientific community, specifically from the otherwise fairly levelheaded field of neuroscience. Some neuroscientists even believe that they have penetrated the mysteries of God. The first one to claim advances in this area was a Canadian neurologist
named Michael Persinger, at Laurentian University in Sudbury. In the 1980s, Persinger, who is now in his sixties, undertook a series of strange-sounding experiments in which he placed his test subjects on chairs in a soundproof basement at the university and had them put on dark glasses. Then he outfitted them with a motorcycle helmet containing electromagnetic coils that emit relatively strong impulses, allowing him to measure and manipulate brain currents. Many of his test subjects claimed to have sensed a ‘higher reality’ or a ‘presence,’ as though suddenly someone else were in the room. ‘Some say that they feel their guardian angel or God, or something along those lines,’ Persinger reported. The intrepid Canadian is convinced that religious feelings originate under the influence of magnetic fields. This phenomenon is especially evident when there are abrupt variations in the earth’s magnetic field, for example, during earthquakes. How often does mystical experience
accompany
natural catastrophes? People with a high temporal-lobe sensitivity are particularly susceptible to these kinds of magnetic influences. God and geomagnetism are thus quite closely linked, at least in Persinger’s view. Unfortunately, no other neuroscientist has been able to replicate these experiments, and the neuroscientific community generally regards Persinger as an eccentric.

His younger colleague at the University of Pennsylvania, Andrew Newberg, has had more success in this area. In the late 1990s, Newberg, who is board certified in internal medicine, nuclear medicine, and nuclear cardiology, designed a whole series of experiments to fathom the mystery of faith. He chose deeply spiritual individuals – Franciscan nuns and Tibetan meditators – to be his test subjects, and he used SPECT imaging to observe the blood supply in their brains. The test subjects began to meditate and to immerse themselves in their faith. As they approached the transcendent peak of their meditative state, they tugged on a string, and Newberg released a radioactive dye into their IV line so he could study the resultant changes on a monitor. The parietal and frontal lobes were most clearly affected, with activity in the parietal lobe decreasing while increasing in the frontal lobe. Persinger had
identified the place at which God touches us as the temporal lobe; Newberg situated it in the frontal lobe.

Persinger remained cautious about his findings – but not Newberg, who boldly and euphorically proclaimed that the existence of a religious center in the brain is highly significant; after all, it was clearly God himself who devised and instilled this center in us, and he is always right there within our brains. Newberg’s book describing his experiments,
Why God Won’t Go Away
, became a bestseller.