Later this week I’m heading to Poland for the “What is Life: Theology, Science, Philosophy” conference. It will be a chance to connect with my dissertation adviser, meet some new people, and take in some interesting presentations (and, I hope, enjoy some good Polish food and drink!). I’m presenting a version of my paper Towards a Critical Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul. This paper in many ways serves as a sketch of my dissertation project, which I’m sure will change and develop as I proceed. I’ll post portions of it in this series of posts. Below is Part IV, and here are links to Part I, Part II and Part III.
Neurobiology and the Reported Death of the Soul
Neuroscience suggests that “the brain is a physical entity governed by the principles and rules of the physical world”,” and that “brain determines mind.”[1] Contemporary neuroscience thereby claims to elide the soul and the mind – what many neuroscientists call “the ghost in the machine.”[2] All of the faculties attributed in Scholastic Christian theology to the “sensitive soul” (“locomotion, appetite, sensation, and emotion”), as well as the intellectual faculties attributed to the human “rational soul,” can or will be accounted for by brain functions.[3] As Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience & Society puts it, “as neuroscience begins to reveal the mechanisms of personality, character, and even sense of spirituality dualism becomes strained. If these are all features of the machine, why have a ghost at all? By raising questions like this, it seems likely that neuroscience will pose a far more fundamental challenge to religion than evolutionary biology.”[4]
Some contemporary Christian theologians have responded to this challenge by doing away with the soul. Protestant theologian Nancey Murphy, for example, argues for “nonreductive physicalism” over against traditional notions of the soul.[5] Her colleague at Fuller Seminary, Joel Green, agrees with Murphy, and argues that the Biblical witness tends towards anthropological monism rather than dualism.[6]
For Murphy, Green, and other nonreductive physicalists, “mind” emerges from “brain” in a way that allows “mind” to exercise “downward causality” – the traditional category of the “will.”[7] Thus, the human person is dependent upon, but not wholly determined by, the brain. Murphy acknowledges that she attempts this non-reductionist move for “theological reasons” having to do with the importance of free will.[8] She notes the concern that reductionists in the neurosciences threaten to “overthrow cherished elements of our self-conceptions,” including notions of “rationality, free will, and moral accountability.”[9] As to the persistence of the person after death, nonreductive physicalists such as Murphy and Green tend to reject any notion of an “intermediate state” of disembodied “soulish” existence. There is only, to the extent the Christian eschatological hope allows for it, a final resurrection, albeit not one that necessarily involves any continuity with the pre-resurrection body.[10]
Other Christian theologians and philosophers continue to hold to more traditional forms of dualism. For some, such as philosophers J.P. Moreland, Stewart Goetz, and Charles Landesman, this involves old-fashioned Cartesian substance dualism.[11] In a recent book, Keith Ward draws on philosophical idealism and process philosophy to offer an alternate version of Cartesian dualism.[12] For others, including John Cooper, as well as for many Catholic theologians, it is reflected in a softer “holistic dualism.”[13] Holistic dualism is the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”[14] Still others prefer a notion of “dual aspect monism” to suggest that humans are of one substance (the physical) with two different “aspects,” one of which corresponds to the concept of the “soul.”[15] In holistic dualist or dual aspect monist views, the “soul” is intimately involved with the body, and the intermediate state after death and before resurrection is something less than complete.[16]
As this brief survey suggests, Christian theologians and philosophers seeking to grapple with neuroscience must account for a variety of sources in addition to the scientific, including scripture, tradition, and experience. They disagree on whether scripture and the Christian tradition, including the important question of disembodied existence after death and prior to resurrection, require dualism of some sort. They seem to agree, however, that Christian theology requires at least that human beings be understood as possessing some degree of moral agency.
[1] Brent Garland, ed., Neuroscience and the Law: Brain, Mind and the Scales of Justice (Dana Press 2004).
[2] See id.
[3] See Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies (Cambridge Univ. Press 2006), at 55-69.
[4] University of Pennsylvania Center for Neuroscience & Society website, available at http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/section-blog/28-articles/72-science-and-the-soul (last visited March 10, 2010).
[5] Murphy, supra Note 50.
[6] Joel B. Green, Body, Soul and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic 2008).
[7] Murphy, supra Note 50, at 71-109. Murphy summarizes here thesis as follows: “I shall argue that bottom-up causal factors often provide only a partial account of how things work. One also needs to consider holistic properties of the entity, as well as the interaction between the entity and its environment. Thus, I shall argue for top-down or downward causation; this is the thesis that factors at a higher level of complexity have causal influences on the entity’s constituents.” Id. at 73.
[8] Id. at 72.
[9] Nancey Murphy, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford Univ. Press 2009), at p. 2.
[10] See id. at 140-45. Murphy’s proposal sounds much like a form of eschatological reincarnation:
[A]ll of the personal characteristics as we know them in this life are supported by bodily characteristics and capacities and these bodily capacities happen to belong to a spatio-temporally continuous material object, but there is no reason in principle why a body that is numerically distinct but similar in all relevant respects could not support the same personal characteristics. . . . My proposal regarding the construal of the ‘same body’ also allows for the possibility of a temporal interval between decay of the earthly body and what is then essentially the recreation of a new body out of different ‘stuff.’
Id. at 141-42. Green seems to head more in the direction of the Eastern Christian notion of theosis by construing the “intermediate state” between death and resurrection as a kind of direct participation in Christ’s being:
How, then is personal identity sustained from this world to the world-to-come? On the one hand, Paul locates the answer to this problem under the category of ‘mystery’ (1 Cor 15:51-57). On the other hand, he hints at a relational ontology — that is, the preservation of our personhood, ‘you’ and ‘me,’ in relational terms: with Christ, in Christ. This suggests that the relationality and narrativity that contitute who I am are able to exist apart from neural correlates and embodiment only insofar as they are preserved in God’s own being, in anticipation of new creation.
Green, supra Note 53, at 180.
[11] See J.P. Moreland, Love Your God With All Your Mind: The role of Reason in the Life of the Soul (NavPress 1997); Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Eerdmans 2008); Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford Univ. Press 1986); Charles Landesman, Leibniz’s Mill: A Challenge to Materialism (Univ. of Notre Dame Press 2011).
[12] Keith Ward, More than Matter: What Humans Really Are (Lion Hudson 2010).
[13] See, e.g., John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Deabate (Eerdmans 2nd ed. 2000); Sherlock, supra Note 47. Many of these holistic dualists echo, if not explicitly refer to, the Thomistic concept of the soul as the “form of the body.” Lutheran ethicist Gilbert Meileander summarizes this perspective as follows:
The human person — neither beast nor god — is a real union of body (that ties us to the beasts) and soul (that directs us toward God). When, however, we try to atriculate what this means (especially in religious terms), we may picture the human person as a composite of two things that are in principle separable, that are temporarily glued together in this life, that will (by God’s grace) be separated in such a way that the person continues to live even after the body has died, and that will one day be reunited (in a resurrected life). That picture, as appealing as it has been at different times and places, is more dualism than duality. It does not fully capture our in-betweenness, which is not simply a composite of two essentially different things (such as a horse and rider). . . . Instead of a horse and rider, think of a centaur.
Meileander, Neither Beast Nor God (New Atlantis Books 2009), at 24-25.
[14] Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, ¶ 365.
[15] N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne 2008) , at 28, 199 (stating “[w]e are not saved as souls but as wholes”); John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale, Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions About God, Science and Belief (Westminster John Knox 2009), at 74-77 (stating that “the soul is something logically distinct from our physical bodies, but not a separable physical entity”); Polkinhorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (Yale Univ. Press 2002), at 103-107.
[16] See, e.g., Wright, supra Note 61; Polkinghorne, The God of Hope, supra Note 61, at 107 (proposing that “a human being could e held in the divine memory after that person’s death.”).