Most histories of bioethics say that its origins are deeply religious. America’s best-known bioethics commentator, Arthur Caplan, recently told a seminar that when it took shape in the 1960s and 70s, “the overwhelming majority of the people who got interested in bioethical questions were from religious traditions”.

Nowadays bioethics has a rival offshoot, the fledgling field of neuroethics, which even has a journal, Neuroethics, whose bold mission is to transform our notion of what it means to be a thinking being. But unlike their predecessors in bioethics, the leading figures in neuroethics are staunchly agnostic or atheist. Writing in the leading journal Science, neuroscientist Martha J. Farah, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Nancey Murphy, a theologian from Fuller Theological Seminary in California, maintain that “neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions”. Neuroscience, they say, is on the brink of proving that “all aspects of a person can be explained by the functioning of a material system”.

This means that philosophical dualism, the notion that there can be another mode of being which is not bounded by quantity, is obsolete. Personality, love, morality and spirituality all have physical correlates in the brain. Farah and Murphy believe that neuroscience has all but exorcised the ghost in the machine.

Despite their self-confident assertions, it may be a bit early to crow “mission accomplished”. In concluding their article, they acknowledge that it may take more than a century “to understand why certain material systems give rise to consciousness”. ~ Science, Feb 27