There Is No Physiology of Spirit
Written By Matthew Sabatine
Image credits belong to: geralt | Pixabay
The trillions of cells in your complex makeup, staring back at you in the mirror, grew from a single fertilized egg. Your un-specialized cells developed into specialized arrangements and activities suited for a specific nature. This is a process called differentiation.
Is a spirit or soul found amongst any of this? I still have yet to find any cellular or developmental biologists reporting on a spirit/soul as they study single cells differentiating into complexity.
Where else could we find the spirit/soul? Think of the differences between a structural cell in the skin and a nerve cell.
A structural skin cell may be squamous or flat-shaped and have a short lifespan before getting removed. These squamous skin cells are arranged in rows and sheets to serve as a protection for everything lying beneath.
However, a nerve cell may be star-shaped, living for an entire lifetime, and expeditiously sending out meter-long messages to communicate with other cells to inform the organism about its environment.
Does this betoken a spirit or soul? Perhaps some would like to assume that an Intelligent Designer had optimized all of these forms and structures for specific functions.
As homeostasis (i.e., the dynamic state of balance to keep everything compatible with life) is the goal, everything is too optimized, specific, and functional for there to not be an Intelligent Designer or Creator. Right?
To survive, living cells must have a water-based environment with mechanisms that keep everything moist. Hence, a lack of homeostasis (e.g., too high or low blood pressure or blood oxygen) can lead to illness, disease, or death. The Designer must be keeping everything in balance instead of homeostasis alone doing the work. Right?
Maybe it just seems that way, as everything appears to be too majestic and coincidental to be of this world. But appearances can be deceiving. Just “seeming that way” is not enough for us to jump to the conclusion that it is essentially supernatural.
I have heard about some dubious mystical talk related to those signals and electrical activity in our cells that help to keep everything moving and stable. Perhaps Intelligent Design proponents would be delighted to know that people, long before them, were already trying to use science to find the supernatural in the human brain and body.
Too much conjecture and insufficient experimental evidence plagued brain scientists in the 18th Century. Ancient Greek ideas still influenced 18th Century scientists’ understanding of the physiology of nerves.
Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (130 - 201 BC) was able to realize that the nervous system was the central region of the organism, that the brain governed all other organs, and that different levels of the spinal cord governed the muscles through nerve networks.
Considering what Galen realized about the nervous system, it is hard to imagine how or why he would believe that food consumption and digestion leads to the production of natural spirits in the liver. Then, they are channeled to the right side of the heart to be converted into vital spirits before being transported by the blood to the cerebral ventricles where they are converted into animal spirits. For 1,500 years, this was used to explain what we understand to be nerve transmission, today.
Appreciation for electricity grew in the 18th Century when electricity-storage devices, known as friction machines and Leyden jars, were used as brilliant exhibitions during social engagements. Electricity was found to be an effective stimulation for paralyzed limbs, then. The shocks of the electric ray or fish revealed that electricity can exist within an animal’s nervous system. A hypothesis about electricity would soon supplant the animal spirit hypothesis, which could not be experimentally corroborated in the 18th Century.
Luigui Galvani, who taught anatomy at the University of Bologna, contributed to the field of electricity on muscular motion with his in-home experiments on frogs.
One experiment involved touching a frog’s nerves with a metal scalpel while an electrical machine discharged a spark, making the frog’s legs contract and convulse.
No physiology of spirit had been found in those experiments of that time nor the experiments of today. Not to my knowledge, anyway. But we shall see what more I can discover as time goes on.
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