Book Review

Emotion and reason: finding the link

The Sacred Neuron: extraordinary new discoveries linking science and religion

John Bowker’s latest book, arising from his Henson lectures in Oxford, is one of the most important and enjoyable I have read for some time. He writes with elegance, subtlety and wit, and is able to draw on an enviably rich range of illustrations, citations and anecdotes to support his unfolding argument.

The core question with which he deals is how to defend rationality and avoid a complete collapse into relativism, in a culture in which simplistic appeals to incontrovertible objectivity are no longer tenable. His response to that problem is highly original in that it draws on recent research in cognitive neuroscience. The project of examining the implications of cognitive neuroscience for issues that are often handled purely philosophically deserves to be more widely pursued.

In the first couple of chapters, he sets up the problem with reference to Hensley Henson’s belief in rationality as an appeal to incontrovertible historical facts. Such a rationality now fails, Bowker claims, because people no longer imagine that there is any context-independent history. Nevertheless, he is not disposed to abandon rationality and seeks a new defence of it.

In Chapter Three he turns to aesthetics, one of the areas in which we are often told that objectivity has been destroyed. It is here that he sets out his two core arguments, based on cognitive neuroscience. One is that there is no sharp dichotomy between reason and emotion. On the contrary, “our responses are often psychosomatic in an integrated way, and not always in a sequence of emotional perception followed by a rational evaluation”. Second, even though there are no objective properties of beauty that would be recognised as such in all contexts by all people, and which lead inexorably to an aesthetic response, works of art have properties that are conducive to aesthetic responses.

The way in which reason and emotion are intertwined has been one of the most important insights of cognitive psychology of the last 25 years (and led me to found the scientific journal Cognition and Emotion). Cognitive processes such as attention and memory play a crucial role in influencing emotional responses, and thoughts and assumptions are in turn profoundly influenced by emotions. In what seems to have been an independent development, philosophers have also recently been emphasising the rationality of emotions. All this renders completely implausible any suggestion that aesthetic responses are simply responses of feeling. On the contrary, as Bowker argues, the way the human mind is organised makes it inevitable that aesthetic responses will arise from the integrated operation of cognition and emotion.

The second core assumption is that there is no arbitrary relationship between the properties of a work of art and aesthetic responses to it. On the contrary, great art is endowed with “conducive” properties that are likely to lead to a particular aesthetic response. Such responses will not be universal or context-independent, but that does not make them arbitrary. We are dealing here with what the sociobiologists Lumsden and Wilson have called “epigenetic rules” (work that Bowker himself expounded to good effect in his Is God a Virus?). The way in which conducive properties operate is dependent on culture, as Bowker illustrates in relation to Chinese art, but there is still a recognisable universality based on the common mode of operation of the human brain.

With this general approach securely established, Bowker then proceeds in Chapter Four to apply it to morality. He sees no future in an approach to morality that assumes it to be purely “objective”, because it takes no account of how human judgements actually operate. For example, the encyclical Veritatis Splendor claims an objective approach to morality. However, as Bowker points out, that approach to ethics is no longer self-evidently correct, and the argument for its objectivity depends on human acceptance. There is also a more subtle problem, Bowker indicates, of taking context-dependent applications of this approach to ethics and turning them into context-independent commands, something that can lead to “non-negotiable bigotry and hatred”. Despite these problems, Bowker sees no need to go to the opposite extreme, represented by Don Cupitt, who dismisses the idea that there are objective facts from which more judgements arise.

In steering a path between those two extremes, Bowker charts a path that is exactly parallel to his approach to aesthetics. First, he argues that we can indeed make moral judgements, and that these arise from “conducive” properties that play a role similar to the one they play in aesthetic judgements. Moral judgements are not the inexorable result of purely objective properties, but neither are they arbitrary. Second, moral judgements are neither purely emotional nor purely cognitive, but arise from an integration of the two. Values do not need to be derived from facts because, given the way the human mind operates, they are never dissociated from them in the first place.

In the final pair of chapters, Bowker picks up the implications of this general approach for religion, and again makes use of the notion of conducive properties “that lie within scripture and within the worlds that humans inhabit which evoke and sustain that union with God”. Moreover, this leads to a view of religious faith in which reason and emotion are integrated; there is no question of one being primary to the other because the human constitution ensures that they are never dissociated. Bowker’s concept of conducive properties indicates how the project of “natural theology” can be rehabilitated, though he does not use that term.

In the last chapter, he turns to the religious approach to sex, the subject that is currently giving rise to more disunity in Christendom than any other. One of his key insights here is that, hitherto, a key function of religion has been to “protect and to enhance the probability of gene replication”. Religion is no longer needed for that purpose, though there is a strong temptation for religion to continue, for its own internal reasons, with an approach that serves that function. However, it leaves religion with a “recalcitrant defence of the indefensible”, and turns sexual morality into context- independent commands that can be justified only within the “closed circles of coherence” of a faith tradition. The result is “to drive schism into the human community”. It is enormously helpful, in the present context, to have a contribution to the current church debates on sexual morality that does not simply argue the case one way or the other, but tries to shed light on how those debates arise.

This is an enormously rich and important book that deserves to be widely read, and contains much more than I have been able to indicate here. I can only hope that it will have an influence commensurate with its wisdom.

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