Do you speak science?

It's a question worth asking anyone who believes that only the material world is real - like Richard Dawkins.

Even if you don't know Richard Dawkins, you might know someone who agrees with him. I don't want to hand out ammo for a gunfight, but I hope this article will give you something substantive to discuss with someone you love.

Freddie Sayers (FS) hosted a fascinating interview with Richard Dawkins (RD) at Unherd. Here's an important excerpt:

FS: Hearing you talk about a Yeats poem, you don't sound that different to religious people. Just as when you talk about the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of science — although you might not use the word "miracle" — it feels as though you're moved by that. Perhaps the difference between you is more a question of language?

RD: I think there's something wrong with that idea. According to supernaturalism — which is what I take to mean religiousness — there is something beyond physics, beyond the material world, which I do not believe. I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you're in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.

As a human being, when contemplating the Milky Way, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There's nothing supernatural about that, it's something in my nervous system. That's not to demean it — it feels real to me. But it's not truth in the scientific sense, which really is actually physically true about the material world.

Dawkins' position raises an interesting question. To summarize, he states:

1. There is nothing beyond the material world

2. Love is a non-supernatural human reaction

Dawkins would disagree, naturally, with the idea that "God is love" (1 John 4:8). Rather, love is a material reality. If or when we have a complete scientific description of the natural world, then physics can provide a full description of love.

For now, the specific links between physics and love are unknown. So we need to utilize the concepts and vocabulary of chemistry and biology.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, at the University of Pennsylvania, researches the biological components of love. Her faculty page states she is "among the most highly cited scholars in psychology." How would she describe love? As one article summarizes,​

Fredrickson's theory is love boils down to biology. More specifically, she chalks feelings of love up to mirror neurons, oxytocin, and vagal tone. We might consider this trio of responses to be the Big Three of love.​

When two people connect, Fredrickson told us via email, "people's neural firings come into synchrony across widespread areas of the brain; minutes later, they show synchrony in surges of oxytocin, the neuropeptide implicated in bonding."

If Dawkins is correct, then Fredrickson's theory, or a successor theory that more fully describes the biological processes that comprise love, is a full explanation of love. Love is a physical reality and no more.

In this case, biological categories are the most intelligent and responsible language to describe love. The poetic flourishes are an unenlightened folk language. When Shakespeare wrote, "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds," he had no idea how love is constantly in flux. Every moment there are alterations in the state of our mirror neurons, oxytocin levels, and vagal tone (the activity in the vagus nerve).

This raises the question: do you speak science?

If Dawkins' materialism is correct, a scientifically precise husband will avoid the romance of poetry. He would tell his wife, "My oxytocin levels are surging." I concede that, in all likelihood, the poetic flourishes are advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. I doubt that raising the topic of vagal tone enhances your chances of finding or keeping a mate. But the point is that, strictly speaking, poetry fails to be accurate.

Or consider Dawkins' explanation of looking at the Milky Way galaxy. He says he gets "a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There's nothing supernatural about that, it's something in my nervous system." More precise language is available. The paper "The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe" provides insights from an fMRI study "into the key brain networks involved in the experience of awe." If their research is accurate, we could say that when we behold the Milky Way, "key regions of my brain's fronto‐parietal network are strongly activated" and "my brain is doing 'reduced self‐referential processing." By contrast, the rudimentary language, "this is awesome!" is a pre-scientific, or unscientific, way of speaking.

So again: do you speak science?

I suspect that most of us won't take this route. But why? We won't stop using words like "love" and "awe" because we sense these experiences are not reducible to biological processes. Or, for that matter, they cannot be adequately expressed by describing quarks.

These words, unscientific as they are, accurately describe another part of reality: a transcendent one. The reductionistic descriptions of brain states and processes fail to communicate what matters about these human experiences.

For instance, "love" describes a person selflessly acting in another person's best interests. It isn't merely oxytocin. "Awe" is a response to what's "awesome" - often the majesty and beauty of Creation. It isn't merely the activation of the fronto-parietal network but our conscious awareness of glory.

We lose what makes us human when we eliminate transcendence from our language. Biological burps in response to meaningless stimuli describe the reactions in a test tube. But consistently applying that framework to our hearts and minds is to walk towards nihilism.

So Dawkins faces a dilemma. Either he can be consistent and describe his experiences in the language of what he says is real - that of activity in his nervous system. As science advances, he can discuss love with the language of physics.

Or he can be inconsistent and connect with the transcendence of life - the reality of immaterial persons (souls) consciously experiencing life (not merely processing electrical and chemical signals) with their intangible beliefs, longings, and hopes.

Do you speak science?

Original photo by Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash (I slightly modified it)