Science and the Person

Science has for centuries haunted the modern soul with hope and fear, fascination and confusion, prosperity and destruction. So, at first glance, the topic of “science and the person” doesn’t promise much novelty. And that invites the question of why write a book with such a title. My answer—or excuse—is to point to the latest technological trends transforming human society, and to my intellectual niche of Christian mimetic anthropology, and to suggest that my study of the topic may offer the reader some newfound clarity in navigating the crisis.

The trends in question are not hard to guess. We are subject to the shocks of the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and related information technology. They threaten unprecedented social disruptions involving the omniscient surveillance state and unhinged cybernetic warfare. Medical and pharmaceutical sciences have led to government overreach during the covid pandemic. They have also led to confusion of the fundamental categories of human biology—gender, reproduction, disease, psychology—and licensed an attempt at their transgression, leading to a global cultural crisis. Technological progress overall has made humanity powerful enough to destroy its natural environment and itself with various forms of weapons of mass destruction. But, yes, it’s important to remember that these things may turn out for the best: such is the logic of the Apocalypse.

Any plague calls desperately for any kind of shaman, sorcerer, magi, sage, prophet, or indeed intellectual or scientist to come and try to end it, to discover the pathogen and offer a cure. The same goes for this plague of “scientism,” of science as fanatical ideology. So, once again, why should I be the right medicine man for the job?

Well, I am but a humble conveyor and a dented vessel of wisdom much greater than I. First and foremost, it is the Christian wisdom that I try to bring to bear upon the topic, and then, secondly and specifically, the insights of René Girard’s mimetic theory and the Christian anthropology that arises from it. My years of studying Girard’s work, in conjunction with years of formal study of science and technology, have germinated in my mind the basic idea that, somehow, personhood was and remains the fundamental stumbling block of scientism.

Scientism always and everywhere assaults and attempts to bury the person. Every world model it builds excludes personhood as a fundamental category, and it does so as a matter of inviolable dogma. Scientism holds to primacy of matter, and so it holds that personhood—with consciousness, free will, moral agency, and often also intelligence—is at best an epiphenomenon of impersonal laws of nature. Meanwhile, René Girard’s mimetic theory places the person at the center of human desire, which is not after objects but after transcendent being. That being can only be modeled in someone possessing it, and it can only be pursued by imitation of that person. The theory aligns with the Christian narrative of the Fall and the Incarnation, which also turns on the imitation of transcendental persons: Satan, or Christ.

Science has neglected the centrality of mimesis throughout its past, and now scientism is outright hostile to the idea of it. The antagonism started when Ancient Greek philosophy, the mother of science, turned away from the problems of archaic violence, and it traces through to the modern scientistic leviathan swallowing the person as an ontological category. Today, the denial of the person, first Divine and then human, has become the problem of utmost importance.

Today, the denial of the person, first Divine and then human, has become the problem of utmost importance.

Such, in short, is my view on the matter, and it is from this view that I have been contemplating cultural issues and casting about for a theory to comprehend them. This book is the product of that intellectual journey, one that took its first shaky steps as online posts—eighteen to be exact—some written at random intervals and some in a consecutive series, over the course of a couple of years. The chapters of this book are those posts, rewritten and polished into a single argument. They are divided into three sections, two big parts and an interlude between them.

Part I, “The Vagaries of Scientism,” is a collection of nine essays of cultural critique. These began as posts not published in sequence. They treat different contemporary issues but arrive at a common essential diagnosis of the problem: scientistic blindness to mimesis. The first one argues that the scientific mindset is sadomasochistic. Lacking a vision of a transcendental person, the scientist seeks transcendence in nature’s laws, but inevitably fails to discover it there. His quest becomes self-defeating, or masochistic, and, like other masochists, he has a tendency to impose his nihilism sadistically upon others, typically in the form of scientifically justified political oppression. Then, there are chapters on how the contemporary obsession with information and complexity is an avoidance strategy. Science cannot, and would rather not, deal with hairy and unpredictable things like human passions, so it likes to think that the problems besetting society are algorithmic rather than moral. Such a stance can promote spiritual and political cuckoldry, as another chapter argues. Yet other chapters present other great social trends as doomed attempts to convert mimetic, interpersonal issues into matters of science. These include autism, racism, innovation, and progress. Finally, Part I ends with two chapters inspired by Stephen C. Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis, and they show how materialist biases lead scientists into denial of manifest, scientific signatures of the Universe’s Creator.

After Part I comes the Interlude, titled “Newton contra Athanasius.” It bridges Parts I and II in theme and register. It presents Isaac Newton’s anti-Trinitarianism as a foundational example of scientism’s blindness to personhood—in Newton’s case, to the Divine Persons of the Trinity. On the other hand, its chapter on St. Athanasius of Alexandria introduces the concepts of theology and metaphysics that will be front and center in the systematic study that is Part II: “Mimetic Theory and Metaphysics.” The diptych that forms the Interlude was inspired by my conversations with Dr. E. Michael Jones, who wrote a controversial, polemical book on science and Christianity (Logos Rising). I was struck to learn that Isaac Newton, a figure whom I admired as a father of the Scientific Revolution, bore a vitriolic grudge against St. Athanasius of Alexandria, a man whom I also admired as a savior of orthodox Christianity. As I researched the subject, I saw the clash between the two great men as the embodiment of the general clash of science and the person.

Whereas Part I reveals the cultural pattern, Part II offers a theory to explain it. Where does the scientific blindness to mimesis come from? The starting clue to answering this question comes from several remarks Girard made on Plato. Girard saw in Plato’s work a preoccupation with imitation, yet also a calculated ignorance of its acquisitive and thus violent aspects. Academia ever since, argues Girard, inherits that ignorance. It was left to religion and the arts, and literature in particular, to deal with it. And it was ultimately left to Girard himself to formulate the problem in scientific terms. Yet, Girard was never more than tangential on the topic; he never wrote a study of any depth on classical philosophy’s exact relation to mimesis. This gap is only beginning to be tackled by scholars, and it is tackled by the second part of this book.

Part II begins with the Ancient Greek philosophy’s turning away from archaic violence and establishing itself as a sacrificial economy alternative to that of archaic priestcraft. The argument is comfortably Girardian. But then, it turns its attention to Aristotle as the critical figure, and one Girard never considered within this context. In my view, Aristotle not only accomplishes the decisive turn of philosophy into science proper, something that is widely acknowledged, but with it also the decisive loss of imitation as a fundamental concept. The move is well known, though in different terms: it is his rejection of Plato’s cosmology of participation (methexis), which he himself ties to imitation (mimesis), in favor of his own metaphysics of act and potency. Where things in Plato’s cosmos imitate transcendent ideal Forms they can only copy imperfectly, Aristotle makes form intrinsic to the thing, which then actualizes its own potential toward its natural end, or telos. That move from transcendence to immanence demotes the model, the other, and with it imitation, from the means of acquiring being to the means of acquiring knowledge.

Here begins science proper, the field that limits itself to the observable universe and foregoes what would later be termed “spiritual” questions. Christian Scholasticism, the Medieval rehabilitation of Aristotle, inherits the method and with it the blindness. I argue that Medieval Christianity trivializes mimesis, or participatory cosmology, or personhood—these are engaged or ignored as a bundle—and that this is due to its Aristotelian methodology, which forces discussion to focus on immanent essences at the cost of any personal or mimetic-participatory dynamics.

The inherited ignorance of mimesis would lead to theological crises like the condemnation of Aristotelianism by the Bishop of Paris in 1277, and then the split between Realists and Nominalists. This in turn would cause a crisis that would birth the modern Scientific Revolution in the works of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, among others. Modern science itself would sink ever further from an appreciation of mimesis and personhood. Realism and Nominalism would lead to Rationalism and Empiricism, both of which would ultimately lead to the familiar modern forms of materialism, or atheism, or nihilism—all different terms for a worldview devoid of personhood as a fundamental category of reality.

Finally, Part II contrasts the excesses of Aristotelian theology with a mimetic exegesis of Scripture and with Patristic theology. Some of this was already done in the Interlude, in the chapter on St. Athanasius of Alexandria. In the middle of Part II, there is a chapter interpreting the Fall of Adam and Eve as deviated mimetic desire. At the end of the book, I bring up the theology of St. Gregory Palamas as a corrective to what theologians like Vladimir Lossky have described as the error of essentialism in Western Christianity.

In all three cases, the reader will find that the neglected person comes to the foreground. St. Athanasius elaborates on the salvific role of Jesus Christ as the supreme role model and blueprint of a fading mankind. In Genesis, Adam and Eve turn away from God to Satan as the transcendental other they imitate. Last, St. Gregory Palamas employs the Cappadocian theology of each Divine Person of the Trinity as the hypostasis, or the who that cannot be reduced to a what (essence) or grasped by reason, and he extends that definition to human persons, who are created in the image and likeness of God. Both saints employ the Christian Platonic notion of participation, according to which man is called to sanctification, or theosis, which is to say to partaking in Divine Life through God’s grace bestowed upon those who relate to Him rightly. As we shall see, in the Hesychast Controversy between Barlaam and Palamas we have arguably the first conflict of “science versus faith,” and at the heart of it the theological question of personhood.

Despite its title—“Mimetic Theory and Metaphysics”—the reader need not worry that Part II will drag him into abstruse metaphysics. I don’t mean to suggest that I hold that field in disregard; on the contrary, my respect for it is rising as I continue to study it. Rather, my mimetic-theory approach is to study what one may call the historical, cultural, and psychological factors that formed science and the ideology of scientism. For example, you will find that I psychologize Aristotle’s turn to immanent teleology: I argue that he was spoiled by so many exceptional role models, not least of which was his teacher Plato, that he could not appreciate the importance of imitation in the formation of the soul. As another example, I argue that Scholastic philosophy was influenced by the spirit of competition, first with Islamic Aristotelians, and then amongst European universities themselves. Social and psychological factors also play a big role in the chapter on Isaac Newton in the Interlude: the scientist’s rough childhood produced in him a fear of personal relationship that he carried into his theology, philosophy of nature, and politics.

The theory developed in Part II reflects back on Part I, whose cultural diagnoses acquire depth and unity in the light of it. We can now see that the sadomasochism and nihilism haunting the modern scientist are the last stage of a long turning away from a pious relationship with a loving and beneficent God. We see how a universe composed of rationalized essences has no room for the “mystery of the person,” in the words of Pope Leo XIV, and how technocrats who believe in such a universe cannot think of social problems as anything other than problems in data collection and analysis. In such a universe, relationship problems that lead to mental illness or hatred are matters of algorithmic optimization. Moral concepts like justice lose their fundamental status, and science becomes a pretext for the abuse of political power, a pretext couched in terms like innovation and progress, the sacred idols of scientism.

I had studied science and the history of science formally and privately for many years before studying the writings of René Girard. That provided a basis of conventional knowledge, but not much critical insight. Popular historians of science are mostly godless nerds writing triumphalist paeans. Besides religion, which obviously rejects materialism, serious critique of science is to be found in the great philosophical and artistic movements of modernity, like Romanticism, Existentialism, and twentieth-century philosophers, postmodern or Christian—figures like Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, or Jacques Ellul. Yet it was Girard’s theories that promised to explain something that was still missing.

Girard famously argued that we didn’t stop burning witches because we started doing science, but that we started doing science because we stopped burning witches. His argument was that science did not end religion, but rather that religion birthed all culture, and that Christian religion with its non-violent Gospel enabled the birth of science. Hence, he argued that since science has failed to explain religion, we ought to reverse the process and see if religion can explain science. This whole idea struck me from the moment I encountered it and has tantalized me ever since. It inspired the writings of this book, which is essentially doing what Girard said: trying to explain science with religion—Christianity of course—but also with his own mimetic theory.

When philosophy and then science turned away from the problem of human conflict to theorize on the harmonies of the cosmos, they bought their undeniable and tremendous success at a price: ignorance and incompetence about conflict itself. They are paying it still. Now that science has grown powerful enough, technologically and ideologically, to threaten humanity’s very existence, that ignorance of how mimesis works between persons could prove catastrophic. Apocalyptic, even. Thus, the rediscovery of the person, first Divine and then human, is the task of utmost urgency.