 Ladies and gentlemen, it is my good pleasure to present to you the Bishop of the Minnesota Synod of the Lutheran Church in America, who will introduce our next lecture, Bishop Dr. Herbert Chilstrom, a longtime member of the board of this college, a valued counselor to us, especially in periods of transition, and a friend of this conference. An intelligent and courageous Bishop, we love him dearly. Dr. Chilstrom. Thank you, Chaplain Elvie. It has been an important part of the Nobel tradition to include a theologian among the lecturers at the conference. That design is intentional and without apology. It fits well the philosophy of this college of the church. A chapel at the heart of the campus surrounded by buildings where scores of academic disciplines are pursued tells us that revelation is not limited to a single place. The stage of the theater, the athletic field, the chemistry laboratory, the art studio, the literature classroom, and on and on, yes, the chapel itself, too, all are places for the pursuit of truth. And so, in my mind, Nobel each year becomes a microcosm of what we hope happens here all through the year. We want a dialogue, a continuing dialogue, which includes questions about why and for what purpose. We're fortunate to have as our guest theologian this year, a man who identifies very naturally with the tradition of this college and the Nobel assignment. We learned that our last lecture had to come by second hand by marrying a woman who once attended a conference and by having a good friend who was a Gustavus graduate and by visiting Sweden for a year to study. This man is born of Swedish parents. He's a man who stands very tall among the theologians of our land. J. Robert Nelson is a man for all seasons. Sports Illustrated named him to its silver anniversary, all American football team. He's a clergyman of the United Methodist Church. The Gregorian University in Rome appointed him the first non-Roman Catholic lecture to fill a visiting professor post. At one time or another, he has taught at the premier schools of theology in America, Vanderbilt, Princeton, Oberlin, Claremont, Georgetown, Vancouver, Boston. And his has been no ivory tower career. For four years, he served as executive director of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. He's been a dean administrator at two schools of theology, all through the years very active and ecumenical and community organizations and honored for it time and time again. All the while, he has found time to write and to edit. And among his literary efforts are seven books, including his latest, Human Life, A Biblical Perspective for Bioethics. At the moment, he wears two or three hats at least. He's director of the Institute of Religion at Texas Medical Center. He is clinical professor of community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. And he is adjunct professor of religion and health care at the University of Texas Health Science Center. All three at the same time. You may be tempted to feel sorry for a man who's working for three institutions, but it occurred to me that there could be an advantage in it because two of them are always assuming he's at the third one, and possibly none of them know that he's up here today. Robert, it's a personal privilege of mine to introduce you to this fine group of people. Our paths crossed briefly several years ago. I was just going off the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches as he was coming on. But during the two meetings that we attended together, I learned that he was a man worth listening to. And so, Robert Nelson, welcome to Gustavus and Nobel. We're ready to listen as you expound on the topic, Mechanistic Mischief and Dualistic Dangers in a Scientific Society. Welcome. Thank you very much, Bishop Chilstrom. It was a great surprise and pleasure for me to arrive and find that this friend and a very revered leader of the Lutheran Church in America was going to be the one to introduce me. Also, I was very delighted at lunch today to again be in the company of a fellow traveler in the Ecumenical Movement of many years ago, your former President, Edgar Carlson. Great pleasure to see him again. Let me take a second to express a genuine thanks to all of you here at Gustavus Adolphus College. These days for all of us visitors have been extremely pleasant, due mainly to the thoughtful hospitality of virtually everybody we know. And because of my genetic inheritance, I can perhaps more authentically than Saul Luria say, tak sumikit man yatak. My expectations of Gustavus Adolphus College have certainly been vindicated in these days, and they've been very high expectations. I've always known you have very high taste, as for example, illustrated by the magnificent banners here or by the sculpture of Paul Grandland. I've known you have had serious intellect as a reputation and also Lutheran piety, which is, of course, evident everywhere. I think Daniel Kevles would probably agree that what we have here, strictly speaking, is a very eugenic college. Now, I am the fifth and last speaker. I'm not sure what to make of that. Whether this is the last word of wisdom on the program, or perhaps more accurately, I'm the fifth wheel on the noble mobile that you have here. But I do thank my distinguished predecessors for having expounded and interpreted so ably differing aspects of our general problem from my instruction and also because it gives me less responsibility to deal with certain ones in my present talk. If the wording of this title seems obscure to you, then please do not feel disturbed, because it is obscure. Obscure not only to you, but to a great many right thinking citizens of our land, and as a matter of fact for me also. To tell the truth, I do not know how many people in this scientific society of ours are committed to a mechanistic, materialistic view of human identity or of human nature. Neither do I know how many thoroughgoing dualists there are, especially those who believe that the only essence of humanhood is spirit or soul while the material nature of a person is not only finite but possibly evil. Moreover, I am not wise enough nor well enough informed to know all the implications of mechanistic materialism or of anthropological dualism. I cannot doubt that among my very distinguished colleagues of this conference and within this vast auditorium, there are persons who understand mechanism and dualism better than I do. In fact, I will acknowledge a former lecturer of this series, Professor Ian Barber is here and he knows it better than I. But in fact, they may even be identified as one or the other, that is to say materialists or idealists, in which case some of you present may not at all be pleased with the pejorative nouns that I have used to describe these ways of thought, namely mischief and dangers. We may like to believe the familiar characterization of science as purely disinterested. Dr. Luria suggested that in principle it is purely disinterested and free of ideological or religious or moral encumbrances unaffected by value laden concepts or moral principles. After all, some could say, does it make any difference to the nature of a microbiologist's research or that of a physicist or a botanist, whether he or she espouses a certain philosophy about reality in general or humanity in particular. The biologist may be a scientific materialist, the physicist, a Lutheran, preferably an LCA, the, but not for long. The botanist may be an unperturbed agnostic who simply loves to play with green plants, but each of them obviously can be a first rate researcher and teacher in their special field. So who is concerned about these questions? Yet my title disrupts that calm and tolerant assumption by making negative prejudgements about two classes of thinking and philosophy, two kinds of world view or belt on Shaolin. In short, mechanists are mischievous and dualists are dangerous in our manifestly scientific North American society. So this paper of mine can demonstrate one of the three following conclusions. Either the pre-judgment is warranted or it is clearly unwarranted or warranted or not, it doesn't matter very much. But let me qualify what I mean by the two world views by applying adjectives to them. The one is thus materialistic mechanism. The other anthropological or human dualism. So take the first mechanistic mischief. To introduce the consideration of materialistic mechanism, let me draw your attention to the most obvious and visible achievement of many of its adherents. That achievement is science based technology. It is clearly the most pervasive characteristic of American culture today, as well as in West Europe and Japan, as Charles Beard said 50 years ago. How we could live today without the countless technological devices on which we depend is beyond our imagining. Certainly the volume of production of machines, gadgets and synthetic materials is far greater than we need for decent and agreeable living. Yet who can say for sure what an adequate volume would be and what possible effect upon manufacturing, commerce and consumer habits would that person's judgment have. Ours is a scientific society. It is a technological culture. The basic discoveries, applications, inventions and production have multiplied many fold in the past 40 years especially. And technologically speaking, in the words of one of last year's presidential candidates, you ain't seen nothing yet. The point of mentioning this utterly familiar phenomenon is to remind you of two sides of scientific technology. The back and the front, so to speak. Or better perhaps the philosophical presupposition and the pathological consequence. The presupposition is the widely held but not universally affirmed belief that materialism and its mechanistic view of all things are the appropriate world view of scientists and engineers especially. Possibly medical physicians as well. The pathological consequence of modern technology is the damaging of human qualities necessary to authentic personhood. And we need to look critically at each of these dimensions of technology. There is a popular, cheapened use of the word materialism with which we can quickly dispense. It is our inordinate use of material products and material possessions. It means simply that the consumer's appetite is insatiable. That the madness of pre-Christmas shopping or the frenzy of buying at the airport duty-free shop is an acceptable symbol and index of human acquisitiveness. This use of the word materialism indicates a very serious problem of human values but it is not the problem we now have at hand. Materialism as a pervading philosophy or world view goes much deeper than consumerism. Some call it scientific materialism applying it methodologically to the work of research. Others speak of mechanistic materialism. The Marxists speak of dialectical materialism, a total philosophy of dialectical materialism, as set forth incidentally in a brand new book called The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. But whichever the adjective and the variable meaning these uses of materialism have in common one basic belief. The basic belief is that everything in nature everything in the world and the cosmos consists only of atoms. Atoms constituted of electrical charges are the substance of all matter. Molecular molecules are structures of atoms so molecules joined together and arranged mechanically in varying scales of complexity manifest all things material as mechanisms. Thus we have the theories of atomism materialism and mechanism that this view of reality has commended itself to experimental scientists is quite understandable. It allows for example it allows no undetectable invisible unquantifiable factor to taunt the sensory faculties of human subjects. In former centuries this has fortunately served to emancipate the scientists from superstition and magic. In the past century materialism has enabled scientists to conceptualize the patterns and interactions of innumerable structures of physical matter both inert and organic. Indeed their findings in research have often led them either first of all to adopt a materialistic philosophy or else they have been led to confirm what they had previously and hypothetically postulated as the nature of reality namely materialism. Materialistic mechanism is by no means to be considered a modern invention of thought however. Do not apply to it the word modernism it is very very old-fashioned. The ancient greek philosopher democratus in the fifth century bc deserves credit for having imagined what an atom is. Swimming against the mainstream of platonic dualism and idealism the materialists of Greece conceived of the tiniest particle of matter which literally could not be cut or split. This irreducible atom was thought to be constitutive not only of visible objects which occupy space but also of the invisible soul itself. Following democratus for centuries later in Rome Lucretius explained that atoms are quote seeds exceedingly round and exceedingly minute and virtually weightless therefore he said even the soul must consist of very small seeds and be in woven through veins and flesh and sinews. Taking a long leap in time we find that in the 17th century in Europe there are philosophers who stand out in the history of western science as being in the time when scientists and philosophers became most fascinated by the analogy of the machine as the structure and the mobile power of all matter. Simple and crude as their machines actually were in the 17th century they nevertheless suggested a similarity between mechanical contrivances and the workings of nature. Whether in animal life or human beings or the movements of wind and ocean tides or the planets and the stars everything appeared to be mechanical. The great thinkers of that century and the next namely Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, G.W. Leibniz and later Emanuel Kant among many others they all accepted the analogy but with differences of intensity and of worldview. The mechanical model of reality could be materialistic only some would say in a monistic way that is to say nothing is immaterial everything is material or else dualism could embrace mechanism as an explanation of the structure of all physical and organic things which nevertheless need the addition of an immaterial soul not the material soul of Lucretius but an immaterial one. To sort out all those thinkers and the shades of their theories is the task of expert historians of science such as Meridro Smith among us and Everett Mendelssohn and Stanley Jockey and some others you may know but what interests me here is the rise and spread of modern mechanistic materialism from that time to the present. Writing at the end of the 17th century an English theologian made this complaint strangely he was writing about baptism but in the context this is what he said but the mechanic philosophy that has lately come in vogue has set some men upon an attempt to frame and hypothesis about the nature of the soul it makes the soul not to be anything really distinct from the body but only such a disposition of the parts of the body as makes it fit to live move and remember and think all which they think may be done by a system of matter provided they're be skill enough in the contriver and then they refer to the infinite art of God some would recognize here a materialistic view of the world but a deistic view of the God who made it all a generation after this man the founder of Methodism John Wesley was himself fancinated by the mechanical analogy of the human body typical I think of the thought of the 18th century he said in one of his sermons how fearfully and wonderfully wrought into innumerable fibers nerves membranes muscles arteries veins vessels of various kinds how amazingly is the dust connected with water with enclosed circulating fluids diversified a thousand ways by a thousand tubes and strainers I don't know what he meant by strainers but there were a thousand of them yay and how wonderfully says Wesley how wonderfully is air impacted into every part solid or fluid of this animal machine this animal machine but all this would not avail he said were not ethereal fire intimately mixed with this earth air and water the clear and categorical difference between these two comments on mechanism and those of the thoroughgoing materialists is I think like the distinction between a metaphor and a definitive statement it is one thing to say that all organisms entities and substances are arranged and operate like machines it is quite another to assert that they are machines and that they are only machines with respect to human beings one can cautiously admit that the religious views of Descartes and Wesley are acceptable to non-materialists because they held dualistic concepts of life for Descartes the body machine requires a soul from the outside after all he was a Catholic believer for Wesley he said an ethereal fire which probably meant the same as the soul later Immanuel Kant's inclination to explain all products and events of nature on mechanical lines nonetheless included the dimension of purpose finality and teleology that was the vexed and debated issue during the 19th century as the accelerating scientific research provided more and more data to confirm the theory of the mechanists is there any purpose for natural organic processes can there be reconciliation between the claims of idealistic philosophy and the materialist philosophy so that the metaphysical power of divine soul or spirit can be discerned even in the ongoing processes of mutation natural selection of species and especially of human life Darwin and Darwinism for all their import for philosophy and theology brought this new factor which compelled idealists and materialist as well as Christian believers and agnostics to take sides in the struggle to redefine humanity today we are still engaged in that struggle but in greatly changed circumstances it is no longer just a limited debate over the creation and the evolving of homo sapiens or from earlier primates or hominids a question which your professor Conrad hires as so ably discussed in his book more than a century after Darwin there is little doubt that a mechanistic understanding of all living organisms prevails to large extent among scientists psychologists physicians and philosophers though of course with numerous exceptions perhaps a majority of them adhere to a materialistic mechanistic worldview as their operational theory if not necessarily in their personal living the other new aspect of our situation today is the scientific society the technological culture in which we all live we must guard against making generalizations i know about the human race as such or even about all americans but most of us live in the technological culture and we take it for granted we belong to it we enjoy its innumerable benefits and only the romantics want to leave it to live on an organic farm or to go to some remote tropical island so it would be unrealistic and dishonest and possibly ill mannered for me to denounce science-based technology altogether which i do not nevertheless many of us share in the spreading sense of anxiety over the pathological consequences of mechanistic materialism let's look briefly and candidly at some evidences of this alleged pathology we concede that the present state of our total scientific society has been attained to a large extent by persons holding the mechanistic worldview can we show that the logic of this view is an uninhibited and rapid growth of technology which is at least as perilous to human well-being as it is promising an immense amount of data would need to be placed upon each pan of the huge scales which weigh all goods and promises against the ills and the perils as if there could be such a cosmic scale and perhaps even then a reading would be inconclusive since we lack the instrumentation to measure what we call human values interesting how the word human values is so widely widely used in all circles today without any clear definition but so we shape our judgments largely by our observations and by our educated intuition now from the wide spectrum of technical achievements in our lifetime i would choose just four recent developments for illustrative consideration some of these have already been capably presented and discussed by my fellow lecturers so i need only offer them as illustrations since i am laboring under the handicap as you are well aware of time and also of being the last speaker but these four areas or questions or dimensions are the following genetic science engineered reproduction artificial organs and computers in passing though just notice how our vernacular vocabulary reveals our collective mentality giving expression to this mechanistic worldview we say for example that genes and reproduction now are engineered genes and our very minds are programmed brains are wired or if that word is too gross and clumsy to be contemporary we say our neurosensory systems are compared to electronic micro circuitry and micro chips we call DNA molecules building blocks the newly fertilized human ova are called blueprints of life and now pain and suffering are somehow managed a bureaucratic term and structure has become a verb and related to everything our mechanisms of thought so we have to ponder do thoughts create vocabulary or does vocabulary inevitably shape our thoughts we think mechanistically but take genetic science here i'm very brash i know even to mention this in the presence of dr luria and others but what do the Lutherans say sin bravely the challenge of molecular biology to traditional humanistic and religious concepts of human life needs to be taken very seriously the challenge of biology of the molecular kind to our understanding of life needs to be taken very seriously not only the nature of life but its purpose and worth are called into question by the rapidly growing knowledge of dna and cellular development if the human organism can ostensibly reduced be reduced to an assortment of proteins and amino acids hardly distinguishable at molecular level from those of all other organisms where is the distinctiveness of human life to be found and if it's found how can it be explained an explicit materialistic reductionist statement was made by carl segan in a serious article it had to be serious because it was in the encyclopedia britannica there he says man is a tribute to the subtlety of matter man is a tribute to the subtlety of matter that is carl segan's profession of faith in matter it is as much a profession of faith in matter as i would make a profession of faith in god it is not a demonstrable thesis but if agreed to and accepted it expresses the mechanistic notion that everything which constitutes the phenomenon of your life your body your mind is already present latent and potential in the chromosomes of the embryo the source of that subtlety of matter however has yet to be discovered although according to a consistent mechanistic theory advanced by sir francis crick for example that research may eventually even reveal the source of what it means to be human from a mechanistic starting point and with concern only to find knowledge of how dna works genetic science inevitably acquires a moral character dr luria may well be right that in principle it has no more moral character but inevitably it acquires it the same materialist who claims to see human life only mechanistically becomes whether he wants to or not a party to providing benefits for human health and economics preventing and curing diseases reducing suffering and as winston brill has shown producing food for these reasons his research is warmly welcomed as an enhancer of life's goodness however its promises ought not seduce people into believing that by eugenic programs human beings can be so controlled and manipulated as to become perfect specimens of physical form intelligence and health and i think daniel kevles has demonstrated that yesterday so i pass on quickly to engineered reproduction by the way reproduction is another one of those words which mechanistic thinking has made current in our speech instead of the word procreation we produce babies we don't procreate them the acquiring of knowledge about the procreation of human beings is likewise rushing ahead of our capacity to reach informed positions on some inherent moral issues remember that the first person born after in vitro fertilization louise joy brown that person is only seven years old but already there are hundreds of other babies and growing children whose individual existence began in a glass whether darkly or perhaps in light we don't know but no procedure affecting the very nature of human life can seem to be more mechanistic and materialistic than the technique of assisted reproduction the in vitro technique requires the collaboration of experts in the exacting scientific disciplines of endocrinology embryology and gynecology at least if the technique is so mechanical does it require of its technicians a mechanistic philosophy of human life as well no it is not a requirement i know that firsthand i know on a friendly basis dr howard and georgiana jones in norfolk virginia and back in 1979 already became acquainted with the protocols of their efforts to establish a clinic for in vitro fertilization and not only are they not mechanistic materialists i can bear witness that they are methodists a most thoughtful and thorough study of artificial aids to fertilization was made at the behest of her majesty's government by the warlock commission in its report of july 1984 this committee made recommendations to the british government for policy and legislation which would cover most of the possible techniques for engineering human reproduction those techniques some of them beyond our understanding our artificial insemination in vitro fertilization ovum donation harvesting as they say another technical word harvesting of embryos by lavage embryo freezing ovum freezing embryo research hybridization and surrogate motherhood what seems clear from this report is that the committee operated on the assumption that many researchers and physicians would have no scruple against using all organic tissue as though it were material for constructing a machine called a baby otherwise the report would not be so guarded i think about the uses of the embryo and also so protective of the values of natural motherhood fatherhood and familial relations the report gives the initial judgment that infertility in women is a medical indication and should therefore be treated by proper means under the national health service not just an inconvenience or disappointment but infertility a medical indication no doubt most researchers physicians and others who work to correct the infertility do so with the right intention only to assist the couple in having a baby what the warlock report seems to fear is that some will disregard valued human factors in that process and therefore a licensing authority should be established by legislation to oversee and regulate the whole range of possible procedures something with which we are very much in debate at the present time in this country with regard to governmental overseeing of a biological micro biological science but a i d artificial insemination by the husband a i h or by the so-called donor i say so-called donor because the so-called donors are actually vendors of that most precious human commodity namely germplasm but a i d is approved by this warlock commission but subject to hygienic and genetic conditions which they specify ivf is also approved incidentally some might be confused here by initials we've become such an initialized society this does not mean of a id that a woman becomes pregnant by the administration for international development nor can she become a mother through the inner varsity fellowship of ivf or intravenous feeding but nevertheless we use the words ivf and this is also approved including the use and here's a very debated point including the use of frozen embryos australian style but embryos may not be kept alive without being implanted in a woman the mother they may not be kept alive for more than 14 days and none may be used for research another disputed point and then implanted later if you catch the connection there the technique of embryo transfer by lavage which is used extensively as you may know with livestock especially with cattle that's technically possible easily possible they say with women but it's prohibited as is also according to this report a typically british word surrogacy that is the use of surrogate mothers i saw an ad in the paper in boston a few months ago three by five ad in the paper at offering $50,000 to any woman who would give her services to rent her womb presumably as a surrogate mother if that were the case in britain under proposed legislation everyone connected with that ad would be criminally indicted so strong as their feeling as expected the report has been severely criticized for being either too permissive or too restrictive depending on the views of the critics all i wish to convey here is the evidence of sensitivity on the part of this very secular committee to the excesses to which a purely mechanistic view of life could and possibly may lead say a word about artificial organs especially hearts to be more literal and accurate the artificial heart would better be called the cardiac machine it is a machine not a heart it is plastic not flesh in what sense then are the current experiments justified i use that word experiment very advisedly because even dr allen lansing of the humana corporation told us in the conference last spring quite candidly that he does not regard the artificial hearts implanted at the humana hospital as therapy for patients they are clearly experiments do they exemplify a mechanistic materialism both of those questions i think are ambiguous and difficult to answer but the inventors of cardiac machines the surgeons the physicians who implant them and the patients who desperately accept them are all witnesses to the basic human desire to remain alive and to help others live this altruistic intent to devise a therapy for end-stage heart disease is i think as laudable as the creative intelligence needed to achieve it those few men who have pioneered in this bold venture have already earned a place therefore in the history of medicine but if one judges from the perspective of thousands of sufferers from advanced heart disease or defect those who are unable to secure human heart transplants the research and the experimentation on cardiac machines seems to be not only justifiable but they would say very urgent that is a theoretical view commended as though this were just one more instance of medical research however since the first implanting of the jarvik seven in the thoracic cavity of dr barney clark in utah to the present cases in louisville stockholm and took Tucson many questions have been raised about the legitimacy of this whole enterprise one question may sound to some to be just sentimental but for many people it's a very real matter it concerns the natural integrity of the human body is there not a givenness in creation they ask and a givenness about the integrity of the whole person the whole body already there have been most remarkable procedures developed by plastic and prosthetic surgeons to replace faulty parts of flesh and bone with artificial ones made of metal and plastic that is joints for knees and hips pacemakers to regulate the heartbeat electronic implants to aid hearing to say nothing of the familial devices like artificial legs and gold teeth but where does this stop before we produce what are called cyborgs combinations of human and machine who more and more approximate machines than they do humans there is a virtually universal symbolism about the heart a mystique a religious veneration about which many pages and pages of poetry could be written such symbolism though is not insignificant just try substituting liver or pancreas for our colloquial expressions about the heart when one lover says to the sweetheart here is my liver take it or again think of my John Wesley's famous conversion if he had said my gallbladder was strangely warmed in biblical terms the ancient Hebrews perceived the fault of greek dualism and they asserted the unity of the body and the soul of the head and the heart indeed the hebrew word lib for heart designates not so much this great metronomic muscle in the chest as it means something like the reasoning mind or the whole person therefore i could say very honestly and categorically to dr luria my heart is in italy where he comes from but my genes are from sweden makes a difference does religious teaching does biblical teaching forbid surgical invasion and transplants some believe it but i say no certainly not ah they say but the heart the heart's different isn't that the limit for example when michael drummond out in tusan recently received a human heart transplant to replace the temporarily implanted artificial heart he said he was thankful now quote to have a christian heart he might equally i think have given thanks for a texas heart from that recently deceased texan from whom it was taken in any case we personalize the heart and it seems clear now that the cardiac machine along with transplants is shattering the traditional non-medical romantic biblical religious meaning of the word heart and maybe we'll have to live with that after all how many of you here have recently heard anyone swear by the bowels of christ another and more important question about materialism and the experimentation with cardiac machines is of a threefold nature that is social economic and political in my judgment the best informed and most perceptive writer about artificial hearts is dr laurence k altman of the new york times he predicts this quote it will take hundreds more mr schroeders to determine if artificial hearts can overcome the hurdle of delivering a reasonable quality of life and find their way into standard medical practice the cardiac machine promises the forestalling of death to be sure but only for the few and only for a short time all the publicity stimulated and orchestrated by the humana corporation in louisville with willing cooperation of the mass media has upgraded the optimism and the expectation of an ever more credulous public and pressures remain on the federal government to continue financing the program in spite of much expert view to that to the contrary all of which i would submit to you is reflective of a mechanistic view of the experimental subjects themselves and a materialistic perception of the economic profits to be garnered if after colossal expense and much human pain the procedure can become routinized now let me share my categorical and psychopathic wisdom about computers i can't even make my word processor work so i shouldn't be speaking about this but anyway thomas b sheridan professor of mechanical engineering at mit in a 1979 lecture on that campus spoke of the four great insults to human self-confidence and sufficiency these insults were and are today the devastating effects of the achievement of four great scientists and many would say what scientists insult humanity well first was copernicus whose unintended insult was to show that the realm of humanity is not discontinuous from the rest of the physical universe the second was darwin who demonstrated that man does not enjoy a clear dust discontinuity from animals Freud was the third because he argued that humans are not above and free from their basic and base instincts and drives and now the fourth insult says professor sheridan is the computer developed also at mit by professor norbert weiner who was likewise by the way conscious of the nervous question of whether man is ultimately any more or better than a machine to these four insults a fifth should be added i believe and that is linked with the name of sir francis quick and dr luria's former student james watson who revealed the nature of the dna molecule and thereby led to the questioning of human discontinuity from all living matter it is easy to say that computers are merely tools and that they are designed to do only what men women and even children tell them to do my five-year-old great nephew is able to operate an apple very nicely but if tools like scalpels and spades extend the work of the hands then computers extend the work of the mind so we're told this consoling word applies fitly to a great number of ways computers are employed and if we are at all content with life in our scientific society we can be grateful for the computer's power to save us from confusion error and excessive working time imagine if you will you travelers going back 20 years or so to the manner of the agents checking on reservations on the worldwide airline networks by using telephone calls and manual typewriters or returning to the adding machines and the written notes used in accounting and banking and big business today as computer science and technical application keep running far ahead of our information and our understanding and even ahead of our imagination we can describe the progress in terms of mystification amazement and miracle but what confronts us now though in this discussion is not just the word processor or the calculator or the automatic pilot on jet planes norbert weiner's golem he wrote about is now giving us automated industries robots and factories and the diagnostic and supervisory competence of computers with artificial intelligence as dr smith described this morning the neurologic question then is not whether computers are simply the most prodigious and efficient of all tools ever invented by man the question is quite seriously whether millions of human beings are destined to lose their sense of competitive competence lose their jobs and even lose their civil freedoms because of computers these are the genuine problems which professor shared and foresaw six years ago and for which he offered only general resolutions but in that same lecture series at mit his colleague the eminent computer scientist professor joseph whitesenbaum was much more reluctant to suggest a solution to the inevitable increase in the computerization of our society and the decrease in human self-esteem and responsibility whitesenbaum spoke rather in almost apocalyptic terms of the coming time when human beings accept one another as machines as merely symbol manipulators and information processors he says more optimistically sheridan believe that it's possible quote to make evident and celebrate what people are that computers are not and to educate people in ways to live in a computerized world without losing their humanity but i'm sorry to say the details of that noble and awesome task remain undefined again and again we hear of the depersonalizing effects of computerized technology we are being depersonalized now those allegations may or may not be exaggerated whatever their truth however we are asking here whether the many pressures exerted upon human beings to conform to machines are the consequence of the mechanistic mentality expressing itself in invention development production and deployment of computerized machines which have this effect certainly the computer is the most fitting analogy or example of what the mechanistic human looks like according to a materialistic conception now turning from mechanism let us look for a much shorter time i promise you at dualism what is dualism how is it related to science technology in human life and how in the world can such a complicated concept as dualism be called dangerous in a scientific society prior to dualism there are numerous obvious dualities it is inevitable for us humans to perceive the dualities of nature and to include these perceptions in our normal thought patterns and our speech you can think of lots of them i'm sure the most obvious dualities are light and dark day and night heat and cold some of these dualities are in opposition such as good and evil life and death others are complementary such as male and female left brain and right brain subject and object memory and hope but philosophers and psychologists argue with some passion over the question of complementarity of these dual entities or especially about the relation of mind and body or mind and brain and those of you who have been attending these nobel conferences know that these questions keep coming up again and again other aspects of dualism the chinese the ancient chinese saw all of reality to consist of the relatedness of parts of the cosmic duality which they call yang and yin and thus i believe they invented sweet and sour pork but indian philosophy is also dualistic but it sees the ultimate reconciling of divided dualities as the coincidence of opposites in christianity the central doctrine of incarnation and the person of jesus christ asserts the unity of the fully divine nature with the fully human nature in the one person of christ thus overcoming the ultimate duality of creator and creature or the duality of body and soul or the duality of the finite and the infinite although this theological doctrine of incarnation may appear to be utterly remote from modern science it is i believe a clue to understanding the nature of human life in a non-dualistic unitary way such as the bible advises us by this i mean the concept of a person which does not keep body and soul or spirit divided and which does not allow the integral unity of body and soul to collapse into either materialism of the body on the one side or spiritualism of the soul on the other throughout history from the greek philosophy of plato and the ancient hinduism there have been extremely compelling dispositions to think of human life dualistically human life consists of a finite body and an immortal soul in a disjunctive relationships it is said but body and soul matter and spirit are in an unstable unstable equilibrium according to this kind of dualism so it maximizes the estimate or the value of the soul to the point where the physical body is of minimal importance the body is then seen as inert and passive unless it receives an infusion of the soul from an external source such as god or brahma or the eternal over soul of emerson the classic illustration of such unstable dualism was illustrated by Michelangelo in his famous sistine chapel fresco of the creation of adam i'm sure we can all visualize that so i don't need the slides here but here you know is the body of adam in heroic proportions like mr. universe or arnold schwarzenegger and there is the finger of this heavenly grandfather god the finger of creation stuck forward vigorously to the impart the divine power of life to adam's lax and recumbent body now Michelangelo i was reading recently was schooled in the reborn dualistic platenism of the 15th century renaissance florence his god is an olympian form from the greek mythology rather than the creative god of the bible his adam is a heroic demigod like hercules rather than the bible's authentic man who unites body and soul into one integrated person namely as we would say today the psychosomatic person this is exactly how numerous men and women think of human beings today whether they are believing jews or christians or agnostics it seems not to matter as far as their dualism is concerned and their inclination is to spiritualize the life of humans by a reductionism to the pure spirit just as radically and as wrongly as mechanistic materialists reduce all human life to what segan called the subtlety of matter so when such words as spirituality and spiritual values are generally honored and respected how can it be claimed as i do that a one-sided spiritualizing of life is dangerous in our scientific society if people believe that matter doesn't matter that only what is spiritual or of the soul matters what are the practical consequences well we see them all around us in our culture but now to conclude let me only suggest six examples which i won't discuss of dualism when it is collapsed into a spiritualized worldview first of all i believe this leads to indifference to scientific progress rejection of technology and a desire to escape from it all a kind of romanticism related to that secondly aspirations of other worldliness through mystical experience and occult knowledge third pursuit of esoteric religious cults springing either from christianity or from hindu and buddhist traditions and a new kind of apocalypticism very ironically in the fourth place for some it means resorting to a life of abandonment hedonism and sensuality including drug addiction and alcoholism and deliberate abuses of the body in its health fifthly a lack of a sense of moral responsibility for social justice and well-being for all persons in society a solipsism a personal individual selfishness which says count me out and at the last a trivialized attitude toward death including the legitimizing of suicide and euthanasia and also ironically this disposition towards death coincides with the view legitimized by materialistic mechanism wherein death is merely the cessation of organic life of this machine in other words it is the coincidence of opposites whether you are unduly mechanistic or unduly spiritualistic death becomes trivial i know that it would be unscientific and intellectually improper for me to press the consequences of both mechanism and dualism too far there are exceptions to what i've described and the issues are as complex as human experience itself which is why i don't understand them all but i conclude with a plea for severely critical examination of both of these philosophies and world views in relation to the good human life we all seek and i urge you to reflect on the ancient yet contemporary and perennial view of human life which we find in the hebrew and christian scriptures a life which is neither materialistic nor idealized or spiritualized but is the integrated life of human wholeness the unity of the soul and body as made by our creator and thank you very much for your tentative thank you dr nelson for your thoughtful and witty remarks i would like to break from the normal format our next session at 3 30 is scheduled to be a panel so i would for just as soon that we come back and about 50 minutes for the music in about 60 minutes for a panel discussion we will be at that point discuss professor nelson's paper as well as some of the questions that you have handed in over the course of the two-day lecture thank you