The Physician: Medical Science and God

In the 11^th century, Christians were not welcome in Persia, so in the film, The Physician (2013), Rob Cole, a Christian, pretends to be Jewish in order to travel from Western Europe to study at the medical school of Ibn Sina, a famous physician in Isfahan. He eventually reveals his religion as that of “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when he is on trial before the local imam. The Jews there doubtlessly feel used and betrayed. As interesting as interreligious controversy can be, I contend that the nature of Cole’s crime is more significant from the standpoint of religion itself. In short, the film illustrates what bad effects are likely to come from committing a category mistake with respect to religion and another domain. Whether conflating distinct domains or erasing the boundary between them, category mistakes had diminished the credibility of religion as being over-reaching by the time that the film was made. As for the matter of interreligious differences, the sheer pettiness by which the three Abrahamic religions that share the same deity have made mole hills into untraversable mountains is hardly worthy of attention, whereas that which makes religion as a domain of phenomena unique and thus distinct from other, even related domains, is in need of further work. The film could have done more in this regard.

The full essay is at "The Physician." 

Overriding Selfishness by Experiencing Awe

As biological animals, we are genetically and even behaviorally programmed to be self-centered, even though we can “self-program” to override this instinctual urge, which is geared to self-preservation. We are naturally economizing beings, oriented like squirrels to store up as any nuts as we can for winter, given the natural conditions of scarcity and uncertainty in the human condition. Yet we eschew selfish people and generally expect some extent of generosity from benevolence (benevolentia), which in turn is based on good will (benevolentia). To be sure, we can take measures not only to hold us back from abject selfishness, but also override the instinctual urge even for self-preservation. One such way has to do with experiencing awe.  

It is easier to accept that self-interest, which can manifest narrowly as selfishness, has a biological basis refined by the process of natural selection in evolution than it is to believe that experiences of awe have biological effects that reduce or even eclipse a self-centered orientation in perception and behavior. According to one researcher, an experience of awe “activates our vagus nerve. That’s ‘the big bundle of nerves starting in the top of your spinal cord that helps you look at people and vocalize’ . . . and it also ‘slows our heart rate, helps with digestion and opens up our bodies to things bigger than us.’”[1] The neurological feature of perceiving (and perhaps even judging) other people is particularly salient in regard to self-centeredness. For as the vagus nerve is being activated from an experience of awe, a region of the brain is deactivated—the default mode network. “That is where all the self-representational processes take place: I’m thinking about myself, my time, my goals, my strivings, my checklist. That quiets down during awe.”[2] As thoughts about oneself become recessive, we would expect the vagus nerve to look at people less fettered by interlarding thoughts about oneself and one’s own interests.

An experience of awe does not necessitate there being a religious experience; “finding awe and wonder” in the world around us “can be as simple as pausing and noticing . . . something as seemingly small as a newly blossomed flower to something as bigas a sunset stretched across the entire sky.”[3] Another source of awe is of a moral sort, as evinced in “witnessing the kindness or goodness or generosity of other people.”[4] I submit that witnessing or being on the receiving end of compassion for a detractor or enemy transcends awe from a virtue to instantiate spiritual awe, especially if God is believed to be love itself, theologically speaking. To be sure, such awe, or moral awe, need not be experienced for the biological processes to kick in; “listening to music, seeing art and contemplating big ideas” may suffice to trigger an experience of awe.[5]

Perhaps regularly having intense experiences of awe can reduce self-referential thoughts to the extent of a person being willing to die for a larger principle than self-preservation. Religious martyrs and warriors who are willing to die for their country (or cause) on a battlefield may thus be so inclined for biological as much as religious/patriotic reasons.

Furthermore, being less self-referential cognitively can, in itself and as this affects how other people are perceived (via the vagus nerve), render a person more moral in terms of being more benevolent, and thus generous, and less selfish. This orientation is in line with Bentham’s utilitarianism, wherein a person should act in line with the greatest good for the greatest number possible of people, and with Kant’s categorical imperative wherein a person should treat other rational beings not merely as means to one’s own interests, but also as ends in themselves. This formulation is in line with the Golden Rule in Christianity: love others as one loves oneself. Though in depressing the latter, loving others becomes more like selfless, or agape, love, which is self-emptying (kenosis) rather than self-aggrandizing. 

That such lofty theological notions may have correlates in biology does not take away from the value of the former as being sacred even if biology is viewed as profane. Even if a religious person is of another world, being in the earthly realm before any after-life cannot be doubted. Even though Augustine held that human love even as directed “upwards” to God is the best that we mere mortals can do, Calvin was more idealistic in viewing us as being capable not merely of Augustinian caritas love, but also of divine-sourced agape love—this species of theological love being much closer to selflessness than is caritas, which is based on garden-variety eros. Ironically, Calvin’s claim may find support from biological processes that are deactivated and activated.

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1. “Scientists Asked People . . .,” The Huffington Post, December 27, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Dorothy Day: Drawing on the Profane to Grasp the Sacred

Rather than spending her adult years in a convent, Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Workers Movement in the twentieth century, could distill religious experience through her activity in the world—the sacred essentially coming up through the profane. This is not to confound these two spheres, just as Christology has held since the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) that the two natures, human and divine, of Christ do not mix within his one essence. In fact, even within the religious sphere, Day could distinguish qualitative differences between God as personified and as impersonal in nature.

Day wrote of her pre-Catholic religious “idea of God as a tremendous Force, a frightening impersonal God, a Voice, a Hand stretched out to seize me, His child, and not in love. Christ was the Saviour, meek and humble of heart, Jesus, the Good shepherd. But I did not think of Jesus as God.”[1] That she was reading Imitation of Christ at the time says a lot about how she situated Jesus as an exemplar. Whether viewed as a holy man or as the Son of God beyond nominally so in the Gospel story, Jesus is distinguished from the idea of God as impersonal. This resonates with the relation between loving devotion to Jesus as evinced by spiritual nuns, and viewing God as impersonal resonates with both Shankara, the ninth-century Hindu theologian who claimed that deities are merely manifestations of the all-pervading, impersonal Brahman, and Pseudo-Dionysius, the sixth-century Christian theologian who emphasized that God goes beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion (i.e., sensibility). The latter applies especially to Day’s statement, “I made up my mind to accept what I did not understand, trusting light to come, as it sometimes did, in a blinding flash of exultation and realization.”[2] This can be interpreted as meaning that divine revelation lies beyond human understanding, and yet it is sad just how many people claim to know God’s will.

It was said of Day that she was too religious to be a Communist. This is ironic because her need for God was in the midst of her activities, political and even biological. The risk here was in committing the category mistake of conflating the religious sphere with others even though her religious experiences came when she was in the midst of activity in other domains. We can keep the religious domain as distinct and unique in some ways by interpreting her as being able to perceive her activities as analogies to dynamics in the spiritual domain that are qualitatively different from activities within Creation.

Relating herself birthing a child to God as Creator, Day wrote, “God is the Creator, and the very fact that we [i.e., she and the baby’s father] were begetting a child made me have a sense that we were made in the image and likeness of God, co-creators with him.”[3] Although the episode evinces that she could see something in nature (i.e., giving birth) as in some way being similar, and thus analogical, to a theological point, referring to herself as a co-creator ignores the qualitative difference between propagation in the world and God creating existence and all that is within it.

She was on firmer ground in thinking about how vegetable seeds grow “into flowers and radishes and beans,” she wrote, “It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it.”[4] The word miracle is distinctly religious, so its application sans God to a biological process itself should be resisted. So too, by the way, the word evil is distinctly religious, and thus ethicists who define it as grave injustice miss the mark. Day’s use of the word, miracle, should thus be taken as analogical only, even if the meant something more by it. The distinctly religious meaning to be grasped is that the divine transcends the limits of human cognition and thus is at least in part inherently mysterious to us. Unlike not understanding how a seed eventually grows so, producing even flowers and vegetables that hardly resemble the original seeds and yet are their final causes (Aristotle), not understanding God is inherent to God being uniquely transcendent as it extends beyond Creation; vegetables do not. Religion is distinct from the biological (scientific) domain. This holds in relation to other domains too, including that of ethics.

Ironically because she founded the Catholic workers’ movement, Day, like Kierkegaard, situated religious experience above the sphere of morality.  Of morality, Day said, “I saw them wrestling with moral problems, with the principles by which they lived, and this made them noble in my eyes.”[5] Lest this be presumed to be the highest form of nobility to Day, while she watching a woman kneel at her bed to pray, Day was convinced “that worship, adoration, thanksgiving, supplication” are “the noblest acts of which [a person is] capable in this life.”[6] Nobility in a religious sense is more noble than is ethical nobility In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard situates the divine decree made only to Abraham that he sacrifice his only son, Isaac, above the universally-accessible ethical stance that the sacrifice would actually be murder, for which Abraham would be culpable.

Although Dorothy Day illustrates that it is possible to have religious experience in the midst of our daily activities in the world rather than spending years in a monastery being necessary—and in this way she would side with Mahayana over Theravada Buddhism—her way of viewing the profane in a religious way risks conflating the two, as if the sacred and profane were co-creators rather than the profane being created by God. In general, this category mistake ignores the qualitative difference between the religious domain and other domains, such as science and even morality. Ultimately, conflating the heavenly and earthly cities risks putting humanity, and thus oneself, rather than a transcendent reference point, at the center.

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1. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (New York: Curtis Books, 1956), p. 20.
2.  Ibid., p. 163.
3. Ibid., p. 153.
4. Ibid., p. 152.
5. Ibid., p. 123.
6. Ibid., p. 123.

Theology Applied to Evolution: An Overreaching Category Mistake

I think there's a danger in applying theology to evolution (and

the formation of the Milky Way). Namely, the application can be

viewed as an overreach of theology onto another domain. Rather 

than overreaching, theologians might try to focus on what is

distinctly theological (rather than extending it onto other domains). 

I submit that a better question is: How is theology/religion distinct 

from other realms of human experience and the world? Ethically, 

over-reaching is not a good thing because it involves encroaching 

and a category mistake. At the very least, the practice dilutes the

theological by infusing it in other domains--often times at the 

expense of what is unique to those domains and theology itself!