With All Your Heart, Soul, and Mind
The past few weeks we’ve been talking about the theory of evolution, both the science involved and the theology it affects. Part of the distrust of evolution is a distaste for the idea that humans are purely physical beings. If humans were formed the same way as the earth and the animals, what is special about us? How could we be the image of God if we are just products of random physical processes? There is much theological debate concerning what the image of God (or the Imago Dei) actually is and what makes us different from other creatures and part of that debate involves scientific questions of the human brain and of the human soul.
For those that embrace the idea of a soul, the soul is often thought of as something that definitely exists within us, but in non-physical way. It’s the part of the us that is the “real” us, the part that really matters.
Though the body may change, the soul is the same. More or less.
But because it is not a physical object, science cannot observe or measure a soul. Science typically concerns itself with questions about material reality, not accounting for the non-material. Some might separate science and religion into different spheres and let science handle the physical stuff and religion the non-physical, but for many, religion isn’t a compartmentalized aspect of one’s life. One’s faith or religion guides the spiritual side of life, but may have something to say about the physical, scientific questions as well.
Logically, too, the soul is an example of the intersection between science and religion. If, for example, there were a thinking, feeling, directing soul that tells the body what to do, surely science must account for such a cause and effect. But how can science measure how the nonmaterial affects the material? This tension, arising from a hard separation of science and religion, exists within an inevitable overlap between science and religion, in the space in which we’ve been having the conversations on this blog. Today, we’ll push into that space and take on the conversation concerning the soul.
The Bible and the Soul
Think about the mind, the brain, the soul, and the spirit. If you’re feeling artsy or want a visual, draw a venn diagram showing how they overlap. Are they all separate? What contains what and what goes beyond the others’ influences? A professor asked my class to that once and the results were as you might expect-- everyone had a different opinion and a different definition of each concept. When it comes to the body and the soul, it’s often not clear what is what.
In the Hebrew Bible, the term or concept closest to our idea of soul is the Hebrew word nephesh. The nephesh is what gives life to Adam’s body (Gen. 2:7), though it is not exclusive to humans (Gen. 1:20). It refers to the “whole person” (Ex. 31:14), can feel emotion (Deut. 13:3, Job 3:20), rejoice (Ps. 35:9), be “poured out” (Job 30:16), remember (Lam. 3:20), and be self-aware (1 Sam. 20:3; 25:26). The nephesh is responsible for much of a person’s essence, but for the Hebrew Bible, there is little distinction between the soul and body.
The soul in the New Testament is described by the Greek word psuche. Scholars debate what the differences are between the soul and the spirit (pneuma), but with either idea, there is more of a separation between the idea of soul and body than in the Hebrew Bible. (Think, for example, of Matthew 10:28: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul (psuche)”). [1] This is due in part to the influence of the great philosopher Plato on the Hellenic culture in which the New Testament was written. Plato gives us the concept of dualism, the idea that the soul is a distinct substance from the substance of the body. It is in space, but incorporeal.
You can see these differences in varying Christian views of the soul reflected in two common attitudes toward what happens to a person when they die: does the body die and the soul depart to be with God to be given a new body, or is the body transformed to be with God? Are we immortal or resurrected? Theology is far from univocal when it comes to what the soul is and how it interacts with the body. What is clear, however, is that both the body and soul are important.
Science and the Soul
The brain has been a popular topic as of late as the development of computers have given us an entire new means of thinking about thinking. The brain is an organ made of tissue that uses its billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses to interpret information from and communicate information to the body. These connections are often called a neural network; likewise, in artificial intelligence, the neural network is a pattern used in order to allow computers to make their own connections and conclusions apart from direct input. The difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence is that the brain is more complex than we can currently fully understand and capable of greater sophistication than computers. Humans have a sense of consciousness, an ability to “make up our minds” and to be aware of that process. Computers do not. Though the brain is observable, our experience of it, so far, isn’t. This incorporeal element of self-awareness, our self-consciousness, or our essence, is what some would call our soul.
Though all this may seem to point to a sure existence of the soul, there is another idea, with scientific data that could be used to support it, that the experience of our thoughts and beings is no more than an illusion. This means that we would have no control over our selves but that our brain makes decision as a computer might, without consciousness. In the 1970s, physiologist Benjamin Libet ran experiments that suggested that our brain makes up its own mind, so to speak, before we do. Participants in the study performed the simple task of pushing a button, noting when they first decided to do so. We would think that the study would show that the person would decide to push the button and a signal would be sent from the brain to the finger, but, the results show that the impulses to physically move one’s finger to push the button began milliseconds before the participant became aware or “decided” to push the button. The brain decided before the person.
Is it possible, then, that free will and the experience of making decisions is an illusion?
Philosophy and the Soul
Such a critical conclusion is characteristic of a school of thought called reductionism, the theory that we are nothing but our physical cells. This includes Laplace’s Demon (which we talked about before), the idea that the future could be accurately predicted if we had information of every cell and physical object. In other words, our experience of life may be reduced to the physics of cause and effect. We have no selves other than our physical bodies, no decision-making center to identify as our soul. We’ve proved Plato, and any thought system that depends on him, wrong.
This philosophy presents another problem for Christians that might not be so readily apparent: it eliminates the possibility of relationship with God. Reductionism argues that we do not choose to sin or to follow Christ, we only do what our bodies will do. There is no immortal soul that may commune with God. Our experience of choice and love is an illusion generated by our brains. In fact, God may be an illusion as well-- fMRIs and PET scans that indicate particular parts of our brains are stimulated when we pray could be taken to further suggest that when we experience God, we are really just experiencing a change in brain state.
But reductionism is not the only philosophical conclusion that one may draw from tests like Libet’s. Some say the results rather reflect a delay of articulating decision, that the differences in blood flow in the brain used to take measurements is more complex than we currently understand, or that our measurements may not be sufficiently precise.
Still others, like theologian Nancey Murphy, take results like these and redefine rather than deny free will. She says:
"Free will is usually treated as an all-or-nothing affair; an act is or is not free. It is more helpful, I believe, to see human actions as more or less free...one should not want to act entirely independently of biology and social conditioning. Both our biology and our social institutions have developed in order to promote our survival and flourishing." [2]
In other words, freedom of will has never meant freedom from the body. We are our bodies. Murphy says, "biblical studies and neuroscience are both pointing in the same direction: toward a physicalist account of the person. Humans are not hybrids of matter and something else, they are purely physical organisms." [3]
And yet, Murphy also believes that we are not “just” our bodies. She is not a dualist, she does not believe that the soul is a non-physical object within our bodies, but she does believe that we are more than just machines. Murphy lays out a philosophy of nonreductive physicalism using the theory of emergence, the idea that the whole of our selves is greater than the sum of our parts. It’s a vague theory often criticized for being too unspecific, but the idea is that our cells come together to form a whole that is capable of much more than just the combined abilities of all its parts. We see this in nature and technology all the time-- counter to Laplace’s demon, our world is not entirely predictable, with unexpected results arising from combinations of physical substances. Thinking this way, we might conceive of the soul the way some might think of the mind as a product of the brain, a self that the brain and body make possible. It’s not that we don’t have souls, it’s that the soul is emergent from the body, and inextricably linked to it.
This small distinction could be important for several reasons. The complete rejection of the body in favor of the spiritual can lead to an abuse of the earth, the body, and a neglect of the physical needs of ourselves and others, so it may be that we don’t need to be threatened when science posits that the soul may be a product of the brain. Biblically, this may very well make sense, especially if we think back to our discussions around the end of the world.
Nonreductive physicalism also touches on the problem of how it is that the mind can affect matter. If the soul/mind or God is not material, than how can it affect physical objects? How does something incorporeal “break” into the physical world and yet leave no indication that anything but physical cause and effect has happened? While the perspective may not yet be completely and robustly formulated, theories like emergence may offer a way to understand this, giving us new ways to consider what it means to be physical beings.
Conclusion
While the theory of emergence may not offer all the answers, and there is certainly a lot more to it than mentioned here, it is important to work toward theories of dialogue instead of conflict. We’ve talked about the problem of the “God of the gaps,” the problem that happens when the supernatural power of God is used to explain the unexplainable. This is a way of thinking that sets up conflict when science finds a perfectly good explanation for the phenomena and God is left looking irrelevant and unnecessary. This is the problem that Murphy’s nonreductive physicalism attempts to address.
At the same time, this kind of emergent thinking leads some theologians to theorize that perhaps God likewise is not a completely different substance but is instead emergent from the universe. God could be thought of panentheistically, that is, that God is in nature but not contained by it. This emergent God differs from the traditional Christian theology upon which the church and doctrine is built, but it is a way of thinking about the supernatural without going against what we have found to be true about how the world works from empirical exploration.
While it allows for the acceptance of evolution and a more corporeal soul, many Christians may not be willing to take the line of nonreductive physicalism a step further to adopt this view of God. If science cannot prove that the supernatural doesn’t exist, how can we say that there are no true “gaps” for the supernatural to fill? Is there a world beyond the reach of science? How does that relate to ideas and beliefs that Christians could or should profess? These are the questions that strain the peace between science and religion, in the case of the soul and in cases like it, and questions that we’ll take a stab at in next week’s post.
[1] Because transliterations are tricky and biblical interpretation from the original languages is complex, let us direct you to a complication of concordances around psuche.
[2] Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (2006), p. 107.
[3] Ibid., p. 69.
