Life Down to Our Roots

I keep reading so I don’t shrivel up and become a blob sitting in my chair watching television all day.  It is hard to imagine Jesus doing that.  And if I somehow want to claim being a follower, I have to do better than blob-living!  Some of the reading I do is not directed to some specific end.  Generally, I want to be more informed.  I want some ideas to provoke me to think, ponder and see where it takes me.  And so recently I ran across an article in the periodical, Aeon.  This is more scientifically based, so it challenges and keeps me mentally engaged.

The article was entitled, “Cognition all the way down.”  It was by two Tufts University professors who are rather big names among scholars.  I loved their subtitle: “Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones)”  “Oh boy,” I thought as I dived in.  It began by admitting that biologists were “properly scientific behaviourists” who ‘Identify causal mechanisms” that typically don’t require explanations like free will and the things most of us take for granted. The image that emerges here is our bodies are like machines.

Now I know much of me happens without thinking about it.  My heart beat even when I am preoccupied with other things.  But I also think I have some choices---some freedoms.  The list goes on.  I realize that most of us are content to live in a kind of dual world.  The way I get this duality is to borrow from the late University of Chicago theologian, Langdon Gilkey, who talked about polarities.  Two such poles are freedom and destiny.  All of us are operating from both poles.  On one hand, there is some of life that unfolds as a matter of destiny.  Things such as our DNA and other aspects of physicality are givens.  But I also have freedoms.  I can choose to overeat and become much heavier than my body should be bearing.

Freedom becomes such a big issue when we consider our own intentionality---our choosing something for a goal and then working toward it.  Obviously, humans have the capacity to imagine a future.  Somehow we form pictures of “something out there,” something we want to come true.  We know our future is simply imagination, hopes, goals, etc.  In one sense, they are not real.  But we believe they can be!  And we believe we can probably do some things to make that come true.  To this extent, we are agents.  As the scientists would say, we have agency---that is, we have the ability to make things happen.  We are not simply reacting to stimuli in the environment.

It is with this background that I jumped into the Aeon article.  I was intrigued what the biologists would tell me about cells and molecules.  I smiled when the two authors said that biologists are reluctant to say that there is intentionality or chosen purpose at the level of cells and molecules.  Apparently, they do not have agency.  To quote the authors, “These little biological mechanisms weren’t really agents with agendas…”  I actually think the authors hoped we would smile and find this a bit funny.  It is almost as if we could create a comic that pictures a little cell with a mini-briefcase saying to another cell, “Well, I am off to do my job.  I am going to make something happen today!”

And then I came to what can pass as the authors’ definition of a human being.  “We’re all just physical mechanisms made of physical mechanisms obeying the laws of physics and chemistry.”  There you have it, in case you wondered who you really are!  I agree there is not much comfort in seeing myself in this light.  I am just a physical mechanism?  I feel like so much more!  But the authors don’t want to be off-putting.  They actually are aiming at something more profound.  

It is amazing what scientists have been able to do---all the way to genetic manipulation.  What the authors are driving at is a recognition that even at the cellular level, there may be some degree of acting like we do as a whole human being.  For example, they say, “Treating cells like dumb bricks to be micromanaged is playing the game with our hands tied behind our backs…”  Instead following the lead of other scientists, what they suggest is “thinking of parts of organisms as agents, detecting opportunities and trying to accomplish missions is risky,” but they argue this is the way to make progress.

Clearly, this can get very deep.  In many ways I am in over my head!  But what is at stake is an important and exciting possibility for all of us who have some kind of faith.  It needs to be said this is not where the authors are going.  At least one of the two is an avowed atheist.  But if we want to see God as the energy or spirit of the universe and if God is love, then that will be true at the cellular level as much as it is in my sense of myself as one, whole person.

In my freedom God has given me agency---the ability to see opportunities and to go after them.  In effect, I can co-create my life.  I can see this possibility even at the most micro level within myself, too.  All the cells in my body have some capacity to work toward us all having a really good life.  Of course, they can be derailed, like I can.  Cancer or Covid can attack them and sin or whatever can get me.

But there is a Love out there and in here working and aiming us all in the direction that life at our roots already knows.