Along with blind and mysterious attacks on Charles Darwin, (to be covered soon in this series) a common accusation leveled by spiritual teachers against biologists is that they conceive of living organisms as machines.
I’ve already covered Rupert Sheldrake doing this (here), but pretty much every spiritual teacher who claims to be in some measure “scientific” will inform their audience that about 400 years ago Rene Descartes declared that animals are nothing more than a collection of levers, pulleys, and other mechanisms, who clunk and ratchet about until they stop functioning.
It is true that Descartes presented physiology in these terms. He really did think that just as the difference between a rock and a clock is simply a matter of complexity, so too is the difference between a clock and a dog. For Descartes, a dog was no more “alive” than a clock. Nor for him did a dog any more have an inner life than would a clock.
Descartes granted humans, uniquely, a soul. This non-physical, immaterial soul grants consciousness to the human body, and can reach down into the brain and steer the body about, guiding its movements and actions. In itself this idea was not an entirely new notion: previous thinkers (Galen, for example) thought the soul inhabited the ventricles, the several empty channels that run through the brain. But Descartes decided that the pineal gland, as it was a single structure in the centre of the brain, unpaired like many other recognisable structures on either hemisphere, was the “seat of the soul”.
This conception raised a number of problems, all of which were raised at the time.
Where did all this complexity come from? Descartes said God designed it, built it, wound it up and set it off running. God then withdrew and watched the various components clunk out their fate, with only humans able to choose a non-determined path.
What exactly is life? Many animals do unmistakably appear to have an inner life. Descartes simply ignored this. As the biologist Ernst Mayr wrote in 1982:
[Descartes’] proposal to reduce organisms to a class of automata had the unfortunate consequence of offending every biologist who had even the slightest understanding of organisms. Descartes’s crass mechanism encountered, therefore, violent opposition…
Here we come across the first problem with the claim by spiritual teachers that modern biology is simply an extension of Descartes; that biologists simply took Descartes’ assumptions and ran with them. According to Sheldrake, Mayr should be reporting that Descartes was right, and his ideas were immediately accepted.
Instead, we find that many of the objections that spiritual teachers raise against Descartes today are not devastating criticisms to which modern biology has no answer. In fact, exactly the same objections were raised by biologistsas soon as Descartes published his work.
And now it gets weird. Because some of Descartes’ ideas that were roundly criticised, disproven and discarded by biology were in fact adopted by various spiritual traditions. Embarrassingly for any spiritual person who realises this, these ideas are still being promoted today, by the very same spiritual teachers who have built their career on their attacks on Descartes.
Even more embarrassingly for them, it leads them to make exactly the same mistakes that Descartes made: errors that were already cleared up 450 years ago! And then they wonder why biologists today get a little impatient with them when they indignantly trot these same ideas out as being “answers to the questions biologists refuse to ask.”
The pineal gland as the seat of the soul was kept alive somehow until Helene Blavatsky picked it up and stuck it into Theosophy, cobbled together in the late 1800s out of Christian mysticism and some stuff skimmed off from Hindu scriptures. It can still be found in New Age teachings today, still associated with the 6th Chakra, Ajna, or “third eye”. But where in yogic traditions this “Chakra” is analogous to the ability to visualise, the idea that it’s the pineal gland that does this is obviously stupid, as we now know that it’s a gland.
But Descartes should have known he was wrong about the pineal gland at the time he wrote about it. He argued that it is suspended on very fine fibres and that it can somehow vibrate in accordance with the subtle winds of the spirit, that everything else in the physical world is oblivious to; and that only humans have it. Had he been a more careful anatomist, he would have seen for himself that these fibres don’t exist, and had he checked with other anatomists, they could have told him this. And the pineal had already been found in animals as well.
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The next problem that was solved hundreds of years ago, but which spiritual teachers still haven’t caught up with is a more serious one: Descartes’ theory of matter.
Descartes conceived of matter as consisting of tiny inert particles. According to him, these are like tiny oddly shaped billiard balls, whose interactions are determined by their shape. It was God, the unmoved mover, who set the grand clockwork in motion.
According to spiritual teachers, biologists still believe this, only without God. And where, these teachers indignantly ask, does the complexity of life come from? Ha! Biologists have no answer.
As Rupert Sheldrake says, claiming that no one knows how mushrooms grow:
How on earth did these separate threads know what to do? They’re all [chemically] the same to start with, but some form the cap, some form the gills, some form the stem, some form the membrane at the top. How on earth did these cells know what to do, to harmoniously coordinate with the rest?
Different parts of a plant–
have completely different structures and yet they have the same veins and the same chemicals, so the chemicals alone can’t explain it.
Yep, those little inert billiard balls can’t organise themselves, can they? Biologists, according to Sheldrake, simply refuse to consider this issue because they know they have no answer.
Unfortunately for Sheldrake and his multitude of colleagues, botanists don’t have a nervous breakdown at the sight of a mushroom. And while embryologists no doubt feel wonder and awe (and maybe a bit of shock too underneath it all) watching an embryo develop, they don’t lose any sleep over what to say if a student confronts them with a Sheldrakean question.
There are two developments that Sheldrake and all the rest have missed out on. One is chemistry. The only people today who use Descartes’ ideas on chemistry are Sheldrake, Lipton, Chopra, and all the rest. Any spiritual teacher who says “it can’t just be random chance” is in fact a follower of Cartesian chemistry — which was unpopular in the 1600s, and completely discarded by science due not only to Newton (which spiritual teachers today don’t realise — gravitational theory is anti-Cartesian), but also in part to alchemy.
Yes, alchemy. Alchemy contained the notion that particles, whatever they, are not inert; rather they are dynamic thingies, have more properties than shape and react to each other in more dynamic ways than simply bouncing off each other, as Sheldrake thinks they do.
This means that where Sheldrake thinks that atoms must need a (supernatural) “higher organising principle”, Paracelsus could have told him in 1450 that the elements can organise themselves in highly complicated ways. Such ideas were transformed into the foundations of modern chemistry by Robert Boyle and others, shortly after Descartes’ time. This in turn revolutionised biology.
(Paracelsus also conceived of the human body as a kind of alchemical lab, where chemical reactions occur — an important contribution to biology. Spiritual teachers still like Paracelsus, but his actual contributions to science have of course dropped off their radar.)
But chemistry alone indeed “can’t explain it”, as Sheldrake notes. But what he hasn’t noticed is that biology is a separate subject to chemistry. Although laws of physics and chemistry are the basis for biology, biology is above all a study of systems. Evolution, for example, wasn’t discovered by going into more and more detail, but rather by taking a step back and looking at how the whole thing functions. Evolutionary theory looks at the various processes by which diversity and complexity arise. Common descent demonstrates that life is indeed one. You might call it “holistic”. But for some reason, spiritual teachers won’t have a bar of it.
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Biology freed itself from the conception of matter as inert billiard balls, but modern spirituality hasn’t. And it never will, because that would ruin everything. Inert billiard balls need “higher powers” to organise them. “Inanimate” matter needs a vital force, an energy, to animate it, otherwise life itself is impossible. And the distinction between animate and inanimate is built squarely on a foundation of inert billiard balls.
And this holds the door open for “quantum physics” to come to the rescue, with its “energy”, which can be renamed a life force, which can then organise all those little billiard balls.
But it’s too late. Biology has already explained all this and has moved on. That’s why biology has progressed, and spiritual teachers are still stuck in their dumbed-down version of the science of the 1600s.
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Posted by Yakaru