PROVO, UTAH - We are so used to the idea that science can give us answers that we rarely even challenge the assumption. But according to Daniel N. Robinson, an Oxford University philosophy professor and author, we need much more than scientific facts to answer the question, "What is a human being?"
Robinson used the shifting attitudes about homosexuality and imaginary visitors from Mars to illustrate how science falls short when explaining human individuals.
"It is more or less taken for granted, by persons facing the moral and social dimensions of life in the modern world, that the surest guide to the right decisions and the right attitudes will be supplied by science," Robinson said at the Truman G. Madsen Eternal Man Lecture, sponsored by BYU's Wheatley Institution.
Robinson demonstrated the problem through an imaginary visitor from Mars who came to find out what types of creatures live here. After consulting with scientists, the visitor returns to Mars to give his report. "A human being is a body that is 50 to 75 percent water. The percentage of water depends on the total amount of fat. On average, each human being is comprised of enough sodium chloride to fill three salt shakers. In the infant stage, the average amount of potassium is between seven and eight grams."
"The question that arises, obviously," Robinson said, "is whether the Martian community, in possession of all these facts, has even the foggiest notion of just what a human being is! Offered as an answer to the question, 'What is a human being?' this body of facts constitutes a deception -- a falsehood. ... these are 'false facts.'"
Only about 30 years ago, an essay by Gerald C. Davison argued that homosexuality should not be treated as a disease. Instead, Davison argued that homosexuality should be treated so patients could achieve more social acceptability. Robinson said that Davison's essay had no assumption that homosexuality was immutable and couldn't be changed.
Today the focus is on whether the homosexual impulse is inborn or even changeable. Robinson pointed to a 1991 article by Simon LeVay that found a difference in the hypothalamus structure between homosexual and heterosexual men.
"I think it is fair to say, that had such a finding been available in the 1950s, it would have been conclusive proof that homosexuality is a pathological condition, as evidenced by the homosexual's 'abnormal' cellular morphology," Robinson said.
Robinson then wondered aloud whether those homosexuals who have embraced a heterosexual lifestyle have also had a concomitant change in their hypothalamus. He asked this question, he said, to illustrate the simplification that scientists apply to the human condition.
"I offer these remarks on the scientific understanding of homosexuality to make clear that the (commonly accepted) 'facts' of science not only carry cultural and political weight -- no matter how carefully concealed -- but very often seem to be shaped and even 'discovered' by way of factors that are themselves ineliminably political," he said.
Human behavior and human values are filtered in the social sciences to serve political ends, according to Robinson. "It is to abandon the mission to understand in favor of the impulse to control."
Reducing explanations to their simplest forms has a purpose in science, but the danger is to take too much away that can explain the human condition. There is an "alphabet of man" according to Robinson -- a collection of the needful things for understanding humanity. Take away a vowel or a consonant and understanding is impossible.
Robinson believes there is more to mankind that mere facts. "All animals provide some form of shelter for themselves, but this surely is not a model of the Acropolis or the Cathedral at Chartres, neither of which was intended for shelter. Patterns of aggression are found throughout the animal kingdom, but only we are prepared to die for a principle, for a belief in something higher and more significant than our individual lives."
There is something in mankind that can't be named, quantified or measured according to Robinson. "If we attempt to hold it in consciousness, it darts away. ... It seems to be repelled by what is merely earthly. Those of its features which we can glimpse more readily in other lives than in our own suggest at once a moral and aesthetic dimension," he said. "When this is sensed or felt, no matter how fleetingly, there seems to be an expansion of the very terms of life itself."
from The Mormon Times
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