How do you think his three elders, the scientist, the preacher, the professor-theologian, each of whom claims knowledge of a certain species of truth, would answer him?
How would you answer him?
(a) Stick with current scientific theory. It is more reliable than religion. Indeed, there may not be any such thing as soul, self, consciousness, and the rest.
(b) God comes first, above all else, therefore above science. Believe in the Bible, and all else follows.
(c) I don’t know the answer. Why don’t you stop complaining and become an anthropologist, a psycholinguist, or a neurobiologist and try to find out for yourself?
(CHECK ONE)
Question (II): The anomaly of objectivism. In view of the proclaimed neutrality of the scientific method toward God and its openness to evidence, how do you account for the objectivist’s dislike of God, even when the possibility of God’s existence is raised by a scientist with the highest credentials?
The following incident occurred at Harvard University, presumably a citadel of objective knowledge. I quote from an article by Charles Krauthammer (The New Republic, July 25, 1981): “Several years ago the great Australian neurobiologist, Sir John Eccles, ended a Harvard lecture on brain organization by admitting that although evolution could account for the brain, it could not, in his view, account for the mind, with its mysterious capacity for consciousness and thought: only something transcendent could account for that. The audience began hissing.”
The anomaly lies in the fact that the Harvard audience, presumably endowed with mind, consciousness, and thought, and presumably with more intellectual curiosity than most, might have been expected to welcome the views of a famous neurobiologist on the subject — particularly in view of the failure of academic psychology even to address itself to these matters.
Why did the Harvard audience hiss Sir John Eccles and not, say, Jane Fonda?
(a) Because God and religion have a bad name, and deservedly so, what with the excesses of the Moral Majority and the fundamentalist attack on science and, especially, the absurdity of “scientific creationism.”
(b) Because, while the scientific method may be officially neutral toward God, scientism, an attitude which extrapolates from the objectivity of the scientific method to an all-construing transcending objectivism, cannot be neutral. There is no room in the Cosmos for an absolutely transcending objective mind and an absolutely transcending God.
(CHECK ONE)
(16) The Lonely Self: Why the Autonomous Self feels so Alone in the Cosmos that it will go to any Length to talk to Chimpanzees, Dolphins, and Humpback Whales
IN RECENT YEARS a tremendous amount of effort and money has been spent by the government and primatologists in the effort to demonstrate that chimpanzees and other apes can learn human language. Chimps were adopted like children and, unlike children, were subjected to years of concentrated lessons in speech. When attempts to teach chimps to speak failed, sign language was substituted. Glowing successes were reported. Some chimps became famous.
Yet the most recent assessments by responsible scientists are that the primatologists have either deluded themselves or at least made exaggerated claims. It now appears that chimps are not using language after all but are, rather, using signs and responses in order to obtain rewards (e.g., bananas). The basic elements of language are missing: symbols, sentences, productivity, cultural transmission. Now even some of the most evangelical primatologists have modified their claims.
In short, it appears that chimps can’t talk, with either their voices or their hands. Or, as Sebeok puts it, animals have communication but not language.
Yet the public perception is that chimps, and perhaps dolphins and the humpback whale, have crossed the language barrier. There are speculations about the mathematical and metaphysical knowledge of dolphins. For example, according to a recent newspaper account, the song of a humpback whale has ten times as many phonemes as does human speech.
Question: Why do people in general want to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak, and why do some scientists in particular want so badly to believe that chimps can speak that they will compromise their own science?
(a) Because anyone who has invested reputation, a great deal of effort, time, and money in an experiment wants it to succeed.
(b) Because the last three hundred years have seen the dethronement of man from what he believed to be his central position in the Cosmos to an insignificant planet (Copernicus, Galileo), from his uniqueness among the species as the only besouled creature and as created by God in His image (Darwin), and even from the sovereignty of his own consciousness (Freud). Only language and other symbolic behavior (art, music) seems to remain as the sole remaining indisputably unique attribute of man. If language can be shown to be within the capability of apes, dolphins, and humpback whales, the dethronement of man will be complete.
(c) Because man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself, feeling himself somehow different from other creatures, both superior and inferior — superior because, after all, he studies other animals and writes scientific articles about them, and other animals don’t study him; inferior because he is not a very good animal, is often stupid, irrational, and self-destructive — and solitary in the Cosmos, like Robinson Crusoe marooned on an island populated by goats. Therefore, he would like to discover his place in the Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk. So anxious, in fact, have some people been to communicate with Washoe, the most famous chimp, that in the attempt to make signs for Washoe three psychologists have had their fingers bitten off for their pains. Alas for man: rebuffed again.
(d) Because a primatologist is competing with other primatologists and therefore feels alone even among his colleagues. If he could converse with his chimpanzee, he would have the best of both worlds: (a) beat other scientists, and (b) have someone to talk to.
If man cannot communicate with other creatures, he is alone with himself. Dr. John Lilly, after claiming all manner of mystical and philosophical knowledge for the dolphin and after spending years trying to communicate with dolphins, changed his profession: to the study of the effect of mind-altering drugs on the individual human consciousness. He jumped from a tank of dolphins into the tank of himself.
Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are the scientist who has at last succeeded in puncturing the last of man’s inflated claims to uniqueness in the Cosmos. Now man is proved beyond doubt to be an organism among other organisms, a species in continuity with other species, a creature existing in interaction with an immanent Cosmos like all other creatures, like all elements, molecules, gaseous clouds, novas, galaxies.