In an interview reported by a leading British newspaper in 1997, Dr Robert White, a devout Catholic member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and co-founder of "the John Paul II committee on medical ethics", spoke of his success in transplanting heads. Heads of monkeys so far, but he believes what he prefers to call a "total body transplant" for humans is perfectly feasible, once the technical difficulty of reconnecting the spinal cord is overcome, as it will be. "The Holy Father has never voiced any objection," he adds. "As far as I know, there isn't a problem with the operation from a theological or ethical point of view." Another Catholic medical ethicist is quoted as saying, "The religious objections are essentially practical. They centre on things such as the effects on the donor's relatives of his body being attached to a different head."

Imagine all those hours of research, cutting off the heads of perfectly healthy monkeys and sewing them onto other bodies. Is there not something cruel and unwholesome about this macabre procedure? Would I be prepared to accept my wife's head on someone else's body, if it was the only way to save her life? Would she? In England we call it the "Yuk Factor", and it seems to be the only thing standing in the way of research which many scientists would advocate with enthusiasm. Year by year, our resistance is eroded, and what once seemed grotesque or bizarre is accepted as normal. But is there more than a subjective basis for our instinctive reaction of horror? This is where philosophy comes in. Philosophy may originate with philosophers, but it soon percolates through to street level. What we call "common sense" is often only the impacted sedimentary layer of generations of unexamined ideas, ideas that fall from the air to be absorbed by anyone who lacks a proper defence against them. "I think everyone accepts," says Dr White, "that personality lies in the brain. That's where your memory, your character, your individuality, lies."

In the same newspaper, the same day (NOT April 1st), Prof. Igor Aleksander of Imperial College, London, speaks about the world's first "conscious" machine - a laptop computer with "free will", unveiled at the Science Museum on 17 December 1996. The computer's name is Magnus, and it is the result of six years' research into "neural networks". Instead of being programmed to solve problems, Magnus was taught to learn by example, its networks hooked up together like neurons in the human brain and let loose to explore simulated worlds. It behaves as if it was consciously choosing between alternatives, and solves problems not previously encountered. Is it conscious? Shall we ask it?

Future Shock

Imagine a world only a few years into our future, in which diseases and disability incurable today can be eliminated by microengineering techniques applied to the human embryo, egg or sperm. The trade in sperm and its genetic "enhancement" will have become a massive industry. Children, conceived outside the human body, can be gestated in surrogate wombs. Recently a woman in England gave birth to her own grand-daughter, to a flurry of amused reaction in the press. But forget grandmothers: when the first artifical womb goes on sale, what is to stop men becoming mothers? Who will deny them the right?

Thousands of unwanted frozen embryos are destroyed each year in Britain: soon it will be millions. In this nearest of futures, to have a child, with or without a partner, and to have a particular kind of child (boy or girl, tall or short, good at music or basketball) will be a matter of choice - for the rich. Detached from reproduction, sex is already beginning to evolve in virtual reality. Soon human bodies will be wired in such a way as to enable anyone to enter an amusement arcade and experience "perfect sex" with a variety of partners.

Widen the focus slightly. A few years hence, foodstuffs will mostly have been genetically engineered to provide predictable quality, resistance to decay and disease, and an exotic variety of flavours. They may also be enhanced with chemicals to improve human performance. Advertisements will proclaim that a particular brand of soup improves your memory. Other human skills such as arithmetic or physical coordination may be improved by the implantation of bioelectric chips in the brain. Access to the World Wide Web will be direct: no need for a keyboard, just a plug in the brain. Increasingly, human beings are living in entirely artificial environments. For many, "home sweet home" is already little more than an enclosed entertainment and communication system. Outside, as this trend continues, environmental destruction by warfare, industrial accident, uncontrolled consumerism or sheer bad planning continues. As the environment degenerates, a whole generation will begin to take seriously the idea of discarding the natural world altogether and emigrating to cyberspace, in a kind of parody of Gnostic liberation.

Meanwhile, of course, the poor in our own society and elsewhere will continue to reproduce and be born in the old way. Physical handicap, ugliness or other "imperfections" will be read as a sign of poverty. It will be generally accepted that the old, the incurably sick and the infirm should permit us to take their lives (painlessly, of course) in order to relieve economic pressures on the young and the fit. To compensate for the successful eradication of many diseases, we may expect new plagues. And, of course, high-tech terrorism needs a transnational police force to combat growing social anarchy. It will become impossible to evade surveillance from satellites and sensors. Every transaction will be recorded, every human exchange monitored.

The nightmare is almost upon us. We are told, for example, that ordinary doctors, medical researchers and parents cannot now avoid practising eugenics, simply by virtue of the fact that they know too much about the likely consequences of allowing one child rather than another to come to term. Just as physicists lost their innocence at the explosion of the first atomic bomb (as Oppenheimer put it, "we have known sin"), so the biologists have lost theirs with the Human Genome Project. But how did we get ourselves into this situation? The history of scientific endeavour is popularly presented as a triumphant (and inevitable) progression from the darkness of superstition to the full light of rational inquiry. A cursory glance might reveal a rather different and more complex picture. Today no less than yesterday, scientific inquiry is partly channelled and directed by social conditions and by largely unconscious motivations. We get the science we deserve. At the simplest level, merely because scientists require to be paid, patronage has played a role no less important in the history of science than in that of the arts, helping to determine what will be studied and what kinds of technology will be developed.

The Need for a New Cosmology

Some years ago I stood with a mixed group from many European nations at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, in Poland. It dawned on me there that it was the progeny of the 14^th-century nominalist philosophers that had shaped that camp, and twisted the minds of those who worked there. With the nominalists, a God who creates freely but according to an intelligible order gave way to a God who creates freely but arbitrarily. This, of course, is precisely the God in whose image modern man has fashioned himself. The effect of nominalism was to eliminate the entire "vertical" or "interior" dimension of reality - the dimension of metaphysical form, final causality and divine providence. If Jews could be perceived and treated as less than human, it was partly the result of a contraction of what "humanity" had come to mean to the European mind. It seems to me that an analogous reduction of our humanity - in this case to a mere meaningless flux of successive states of matter - is seen in today's acceptance by once civilized nations of the practices of euthanasia, abortion and experimentation on human embryos. The child in the womb is become a mere "blob of cells", a human person only when wanted, when integrated within society. There is no longer any human being to worry about. To anyone who has, consciously or unconsciously, accepted nominalist assumptions this appears irrefutable. Nominalism, in a certain sense, is at the root of the culture of death. Maybe, therefore, philosophical arguments are more important than most of us realize. Maybe it is in departments of philosophy that the battle for the soul of our civilization is being fought - and the outcome, at least in the short term, is uncertain.

Historically, we have arrived at a moment of choice: the choice between a culture of life and a culture of death. The former is a culture that, however far it may fall short, is at least turned towards God; the latter is a culture where man tries to take God's place, and in so doing dissolves the very foundations of love. With the elimination of natural purposes and providential design from the universe it becomes our role to supply the goals and provide the design for nature. That includes, of course, the nature of our children. In a culture of death, the only question is how quickly the choice of what kind of child we want can be placed entirely in the hands of the "consumer" - that is, the parent. For it is by placing responsibility for selection on the parent, and thus diffusing it throughout the market, that any inconvenient or emotive association between the new eugenics and the Nazi death camps can best be avoided.

C.S. Lewis long ago saw it coming - the temptation to take control of evolution ourselves. "It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's power to treat himself as a mere 'natural object' and his own judgments of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real objection is that if a man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners."

(C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man).

"Modernity", historically speaking, derives from Christianity. Perhaps, then, it is Christians who, among all the believers in meaning (and in alliance with them) have the greatest responsibility to turn modernity into something more like a culture of life. This is not a matter of "turning the clock back". It is not a question of rejecting but of transforming science. As Christians we know that the form of Christ's self-giving love undergirds the existence of every created thing; that love alone opens the interior of one being to another; that created being reveals its true meaning, and even its ultimate structure, only to the eyes of love. We will always fail to understand a thing by breaking it down into parts. It can only be understood in terms of the whole, and the whole can only be understood in terms of the relationships in which it participates. Reductionism is false, utterly false; for no object can be known exhaustively if it retains an intrinsic relation to the transcendent Source of being.

Partly what needs to be recovered is the notion of final cause. The causation investigated by science is temporal or "horizontal" causation. But there is also such a thing as supra-temporal or "vertical" causation. Order unfolds through time in a systematic way governed by the laws of science; but the source of that order, the purpose of those laws and that unfolding, is from above (or within). Think of the order in our own lives. In the random pattern of chance events (each of which, no doubt, has its own "scientific" explanation) we can come to see a sequence and even a message that speaks of divine Providence. The fact that there is no conflict between vertical and horizontal does not mean that religion and science can proceed indefinitely along separate tracks. They proceed not in parallel to each other but at right angles: which means that there must be a point where they meet. The transformation of modern science must therefore be possible. It can be integrated within a worldview that allows for other levels of reality. (The "implicate order" of physicist David Bohm was an attempt to achieve such an integration. Bohm saw the "explicate" ordering of the world we see around us as an unfolding of the unity that subsists at another level, the quantum level of reality.)

We know the importance in all our lives of modern discoveries in the field of high-energy physics. What the world needs now is some equally high-energy metaphysics. It needs the opening-up of philosophy to metaphysical cognition and sacred cosmology. Nothing else will serve as the basis for the sciences of the future. The new physics has not, therefore, eliminated the need for religion. It has merely prepared the ground for the next stage of religious consciousness. In his wonderful book The Discovery of God (Wm Eerdmans and T&T Clark), Henri de Lubac writes: "To think that people can convince themselves that 'metaphysical anxiety' is a thing of the past! 'We are cured of our obsession' they tell us, 'cured of our folly: of our obsession with God, with being and with nothingness, of the searing burn of the unknown in the heart of the known, and of the other whom we pursued in our dreams.' We are no longer 'haunted by the absolute' they tell us, for we have shaken off the burden of 'eternal truths'.... Poor mutilated wretches who think they have achieved freedom, and celebrate the most lamentable abdication as a 'tremendous victory'. They had better sing their hymn of victory while there is time. For even in them the mutilation is not final and they do not realize that man cannot abdicate. A sudden awakening can put everything in doubt, and a single spark can relight the fire that seemed to have died out. The soul comes to life again though we think we have killed it. Then he realizes with terror that he bears it within him:

"Not like a satisfied cow ruminating on its feet,
But like the virgin mare, its mouth still burning from the salt
it has taken from its master's hand,
How can he keep back and restrain that huge and terrible thing
that rears and cries out in the narrow stall of its personal will,
When the smell of the grass comes in through the cracks in the door
with the wind at dawn?"

(Paul Claudel)

This piece appeared in the ‘Second Spring’ section of Catholic World Report, March 1997.