The Horror of Thinking Meat:

Trinity Sunday to the Rescue

Sermon by The Rev. David R. Anderson

Matthew 28:16-20

 

 

Let’s start with this. When you feel love for someone, where does that feeling of love come from? Does it come from your mind? From your spirit? Or is it just a neuron firing in your brain?

These days, if you imagine that your thoughts and feelings—indeed your human consciousness—in some way transcends the purely physical, material realm, sophisticated people will snicker at you. If you were au courant in neuroscience you’d know that every thought or feeling, every imagination, every dream can all be explained by a scientist looking at a hot spot in your brain. Ultimate experiences we used to consider as evidence of the transcendent nature of human consciousness, we are now obliged to see as purely biological blips. It’s called mental materialism: there’s only your brain.
I start with that question today because it’s Trinity Sunday—which may not seem relevant, but stick with me.

Though the Bible never speaks of the “Trinity,” the early church quickly developed what seemed like an irrational declaration: There were in the Godhead three distinct persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and yet there was only one God. Now, that paradox wouldn’t be such a problem if they had said, “Well, those three ‘Persons’ are sort of three different sides of one reality.” (And you may know from church history, plenty of people tried this!) But they ruled out that kind of fudging: They were, they insisted, three absolutely separate and equal Persons.

And, on the other hand, if you tried to finesse the unity by saying, “Well, these three separate Persons are united in one sort of divine confederation,” they said, “Thank you, but no. There is only one, absolutely one.” For people who like things rational and reasonable, this is like checkmate. The Church Fathers left no wiggle room.
Those early Christians deliberately painted themselves into a philosophical corner. If “3 = 1 and 1=3” makes your brain revolt, you’re right where the 4th century Greek Fathers want you. They want to confound your head; they want to cross the wires in your brain and short out your sweet little rational circuits.

This didn’t go down well with people like Isaac Newton, at the height of the Enlightenment—that stunning moment in history when the scientific method was changing everything, insisting that only what we could see and verify with our five senses was real and true. Isaac Newton, who wanted to be a good Christian considered the notion of Trinity in Unity, and promptly said: "Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part, I can make none. . . . It is the temper of the hot and superstitious art of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least.”

Newton was a brilliant man, but he was on a fool’s errand, trying to “make sense of” the Trinity. He didn’t seem to understand that the Church Fathers had deliberately fashioned this doctrine so that it could not be grasped by reason. We know this style of spiritual wisdom better in the Eastern form of the Zen koan—the story, the pithy statement or question—like the classic, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” It’s meant to force you out of your mind, into a deeper level of knowledge—a class of knowing which can be grasped but never explained. You can’t “figure out” or “solve” a koan; no master can “explain it to you.” Either enlightenment breaks on your whole being or it doesn’t.

And I’ve got to tell you: Sir Isaac was not even amused by the Trinity koan. The great scientist wanted his religion, like everything else, to be rational, to be something he could figure out with his mind—something he could comprehend. But what if you’re trying to comprehend the incomprehensible?

Unwittingly, Newton and the other luminaries of the Enlightenment were leading the world into a gradually narrowing funnel. The only true things are the things we can know scientifically. That funnel felt so wide at the opening, and it led to an amazing explosion of knowledge and legions of beneficial technologies. But that one authorized way of knowing—the rational way of the mind—is awfully limited. It denies all other ways of knowledge and experience, and centuries later the funnel just keeps getting narrower and narrower. And so the elevation of Reason that promised to free us from the enslavement of superstition and gullible religion, has led us into its own kind of bondage: the denial of anything beyond material existence.

Which brings me back to that opening question. If you feel love or compassion for someone, where does that thought or feeling come from? The mental materialists have ruled out any appeal to what we might call the “mind”—as somehow rising metaphysically above mere brain tissue—to say nothing of the “spirit,” that sense of human capacity and identity that transcends the bodily sum of our parts. As B. F. Skinner was heard to say, “Even your most noble thoughts may be nothing more than chemical secretions.”

There is only the brain, the mental materialists assure us. And if we ask how brain tissue can give rise to something so unlike itself (consciousness), and why kidney tissue can’t, we just don’t get it.

There’s a wry science fiction story by Terry Bisson that wonderfully illustrates this point. An alien space explorer, just back from a trip to earth, is reporting to his commander:
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”  . . .
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from the machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s what we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat?”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the Orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you have any idea of the life span of meat?”
“Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddelei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!”
“So . .  . what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes. Thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat! Dreaming meat! The meat is the whole deal!”*

            This is the narrow terminus of that Rationalist funnel. There is no spiritual realm, there is no God, no soul, no heaven. There is no higher being—we are only matter. That we can imagine worlds upon worlds, that we can actually experience union with God in that place where all things are one—is easily explained: we are thinking meat.
In the old days, I always thought of Trinity Sunday as the day when rectors ask seminarians to preach, to see if the latest young hot shot can “explain” the inexplicable. But in this age, now that we have been shunted into this dark funnel, I think of Trinity Sunday as a feast of defiance. We stand apart from the regnant culture and say, No—not in here. In here we love the inexplicable, we embrace paradox, we’re fine with not knowing some things. In fact, we might even say with the poet Wendell Berry, “Praise ignorance. For what man/ has not encountered he has not destroyed.”

In one moment we will stand and confess: “We believe in one God.” And then we will go on to make some supra-rational declarations about the three separate Persons who, in loving community, make up this one God. It’s the kind of thing that makes the materialists sigh and groan.

Don’t you love it?

 

* Quoted in Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith (Harper San Francisco, pp. 183-184).