The moderator of the panel discussion Communicating Science in a Religious America at the recent AAAS meeting, David Goldston, has published a column in the latest edition of Nature entitled The Scientist Delusion. (FYI, Corie Lok has already blogged her thoughts on this panel discussion.)

Goldston argues that although the interaction of religion and evolutionary biology still prompts all sorts of problematic responses from all sorts of people (particularly in America), there are potentially much bigger issues on the horizon. Near the end of the column, Goldston discusses two “facets of the way science and religious attitudes intersect” that the AAAS “panel failed to grapple with”. He writes of the second:

“[T]he panellists tiptoed around the fact that scientific discovery can genuinely undermine religious beliefs. The focus of the panel was on teaching evolution, but discoveries in genetics and neuroscience are likely to be far more problematic in the long run. The two fields are verging on drawing the ultimate materialist picture of human nature — humans as nothing more than proteins and electrical impulses, all machine and no ghost, to play off Descartes’ formulation. This view will challenge not only fundamentalist views about the soul, but more widely held notions about what it means to be a person. That will further complicate age-old questions about the nature of individual responsibility and morality.” (emphasis added)

I can’t help thinking that Goldston is conflating scientific findings with a particular philosophical position (materialism) here. What scientific experiment could one conduct that would demonstrate that humans are nothing more than proteins and electrical impulses? What does this claim mean, precisely, anyway?

Whatever one’s philosophical proclivities may be, Goldston’s column reminded me of an article in The Times that I read a few days ago, written by Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. In that article, Sacks contrasts what it meant to be human to a figure from the Italian Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola, to what the International Academy of Humanism believe it means to be human (according to a 1997 statement, whose signatories “included distinguished scientists, philosophers and novelists”).

In Oration on the Dignity of Man, della Mirandola imagines God addressing the first human:

“We have placed you at the world’s centre so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

500 years later, the International Academy of Humanism says much the same thing as Goldston (although perhaps with a little more humility):

“As far as the scientific enterprise can determine, Homo sapiens is a member of the animal kingdom. Human capabilities appear to differ in degree, not in kind, from those found among the higher animals. Humankind’s rich repertoire of thoughts, feelings, aspirations and hopes seems to arise from electrochemical brain processes, not from an immaterial soul that operates in ways no instrument can discover.”

Commenting on the difference between the two accounts, Sacks writes:

“What is striking is the sheer loss of the sense of grandeur and possibility that drove Renaissance humanism.”

Now I’ll be the first to admit that these are not straightforward issues that Goldston and Sacks are dealing with. And whether or not God should be brought into the conversation is the topic for another day.

But the question of what science can teach us about what it means to be human – and whether this is all that we can say about what it means to be human – is clearly an important one to ponder for the future.