Nature or Nurture?

Still more from Charles Barber (see last post):

"Psychiatric disorders are almost certainly the product of an infinitely complex dialogue between genes and the environment."

"Psychiatry used to be brainless, it's said by some in the field, and now it's mindless." 

Where biopsychiatry lands on the debate about whether nature or nurture is a more significant determiner of who we are is not in doubt.  Barber offers some honest criticism of those who see us as just biology, just a bunch of atoms bouncing around randomly.  Nurture is important alongside our genetic makeup.  And as Dr. David Powlison has powerfully spoken of in print and in public, while nature and nurture are important variables, they are not the only ones, not even the most important. 

For example, the heart, the core of a person, which Scripture says no one except God can understand (Jer. 17:9), is almost bottomless.  Powlison pictures this aspect of the complex psychology of humans at the center of concentric circles.  Nature and nurture then are two additional rings around the heart.  Moving out farther, there is Satan, and then on the outermost ring is God, sovereign over all of it. 

Here I will reproduce Powlison's analysis of the "five-fold complexity in the springs of human action":    

Yale psychiatrist Charles Barber has argued eloquently against overselling the current cultural obsession with neurophysiology and genetics. He assembles evidence why the dream of explaining human choices by brain biology will always fail. Barber describes an “infinitely complex dialogue between genes and the environment . . . an intricate, infinite, dialectical dance between experience and biology." Each of these partners is incomprehensibly deep, and the dialogue and dance between them is incomprehensibility squared. But notice, Barber has considered only nature and nurture, the two most accessible factors. He rightly reckons that human beings are physically embodied and situationally embedded. But the full dance is at least three orders of magnitude more complex. The other three partners in the dance are even less accessible and even more decisive than nature and nurture.

First, the intricate, unsearchable motives of the human heart obviously make human life a three-way dance, infinitely complicating the infinite complication which rightly humbles Barber. The person cannot be reduced to biological factors plus social factors. He misses the obvious here. Nature-nurture only describes some of what influences a person, not the final cause of the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The heart is deep water. With reasonable accuracy we might sometimes describe what motivates ourselves or another. But we can’t explain why any of us would be self-righteous, or self-seeking, or self-deceived. Why are people obsessed with being liked? Why do people compulsively attempt to control other people? Why do hopeless schemes for earthly joy consume us and destroy us? Why on earth does a person go snowblind to God and obsessively lurch after lusts, lies, idols and fantasies? Similarly, we can’t explain why on earth a human being awakens to God and begins to love. The mystery of godliness, like the mystery of iniquity, is deep water.

Second, comprehensive understanding must factor in the inworking and outer working of the Evil One. The old black preacher, speaking of sin and of the sin-inducer: “First it blinds, then it binds, then it grinds.” The Liar, Slavemaster and Murderer operates beyond human observation, knowledge and evaluation. How does one quantify the fog of war? How exactly does Satan affect psychological functioning and interpersonal relations? How is he an agent in an individual’s culpable blindness, unbelief, wayward cravings, chaotic fears, false hopes? How do his schemes work to divide, alienate and antagonize our closest relationships? For that matter, how does the agency of one with power to kill affect the actual breakdowns and disabilities operative in our physiology (e.g., the physiology of Job’s boils, of those from whom Jesus cast demons, of Paul’s thorn in the flesh)? But just how does the agency of the author of lies actually shape and misshape the sociocultural voices that deceive us all? There’s more than meets the eye even in nature and nurture. Barber sees far, but he hasn’t named the half of it. So it’s a four-way dance, and this fourth partner is more inaccessible than the other three.

Third, to all this we must add the purposes and workings of the Living God – in our bodies; in our situational/social experience; in our hearts; the strategies, impediments, beguilements of the evil one. How can we ever quantify the purposes of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will? How can mere clay pot ever comprehend the gaze and intentions of the potter? How does one ever weigh the operations of the Holy Spirit. How does He indwell, influence and master an individual? How does He indwell, influence and master a community of people? This final-cause God uses Satan as an instrument of his judgment and a foil for his salvation. This God softens or hardens the hearts of the children of men. This God arranges familial, historical, social, cultural, economic, political, educational . . . even meteorological circumstances in which each person lives. This God makes and sustains our bodies with every variable of endowment, temperament, disability, medical condition; he kills our bodies (Mt. 10:28); and he will raise our bodies on the last day.

The whole of Powlison's notes may be found at CCEF.  The notes are actually a follow-up from a lecture he gave at Bryan College.