4.2 A Body and Soul? (philosophy series)

My spring philosophy class has been going now for almost eight weeks, so my live sessions have resumed. The idea of this series was to slowly fill in a rough sense of the journey through philosophy that I take semester after of semester. These posts of course go well beyond what we have time to talk about in our live sessions. For example, I am being more forthright here in what I actually think.

This post is in the section on what a human being is. My last post in this stretch was here. See the bottom for the overall shape.
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1. I think it's clear that we human types have a body. I've never met a person yet who didn't. (At least not that I know of.)

I seem to remember my mother resisting the notion that we are animals. I wasn't saying that we are only animals. But this seems difficult to deny short of some grunt of irrationality. I am much more than a mammal, but by every defining characteristic of a mammal, I am one.

My observation of human behavior is that we behave far more like animals than we would like to admit. I have noted that the roosters in my yard seem preoccupied with fighting each other and mounting hens. So it would seem with a quite large portion of the human men in the world. Very little going on upstairs. A lot of fighting and mounting.

When I'm having this train of thought, I sometimes think of the 1968 movie, The Planet of the Apes. Interestingly, that was a time of American history not unlike our own. The movie is of course a parable of humanity. The sentient apes of the movie mirror human society. There are virtuous apes. There are intelligent apes. But they had better watch out because there are militant, violent apes too.

2. As I observe humanity, the difficulty is not seeing that we are animal as well as human. Strictly from observation, the difficulty is in seeing how we are more than animal. So few humans seem self-reflective. Rather, we seem driven and tossed by our urges.

B. F. Skinner long ago demonstrated that we can be manipulated using behavior modification, just like animals. In one episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon humorously trains Penny to stop talking when he offers her a chocolate. Most of us are just as easily manipulated.

What might be defining characteristics of humans that rise above other animals? Is it our self-consciousness? The majority of humans are barely self-aware, it seems to me. We are elephants that go where we want, with our riders rationalizing our actions after the fact. [1]

We are herd animals. We do whatever our tribe does, and say what our tribe says. Nowhere is this clearer at the moment than in politics, where the official line of the government is so obviously false it is excruciatingly painful. And yet a third of the population mindlessly parrots insanities. Ironically (or perhaps revealingly), a predominant part of that third are evangelicals.

Is it our ability to tell the difference between right and wrong? I have long been disabused of any sense that humans come with a universal conscience. I have never found C. S. Lewis' moral argument persuasive. Our consciences seem in large part culturally conditioned and psychologically formed, apart from some basic instincts.

Theologians call what I am describing "Sin." If you were beginning to get nervous, I am simply describing what we Christians call "fallennesss." Our failure was to think that we were somehow immune. Yes, the other side is fallen, but we have our act together. No, we are all human, all too human.

2. Do we have a soul? Is there a spiritual dimension to us as well? From a Christian perspective, we are image-bearers regardless. We are intrinsically valuable one way or another because God says so. [2]

There is a stream of Christian thought that might be described as "non-reductive physicalist." It does not believe in a detachable soul or a true spiritual ontology, but does not believe that humans can merely be described in terms of our bodies. Our minds may be based in our brains, but it would not be adequate merely to equate them with our brains. The mind is "more than" our brains in some sense.

I would put Joel Green in this category. [3] I'm not sure that N. T. Wright exactly fits this category but his work on the resurrection has emphasized that resurrection in Scripture is an embodied existence. [4] These books, which came out around the same time, were pushing back on the popular Christian narrative that "you die and go to heaven or hell" and that's it.

Rather, resurrection in the New Testament is overwhelmingly physical. It involves a body. The tomb is empty because Jesus' resurrection self is in continuity with his body. It was not a merely spiritual resurrection, as so many in the church seem to imagine the afterlife. 1 Corinthians 15 is emphatic about the corporeal nature of resurrection, as we would expect from an ex-Pharisee.

This is not a new observation although popular Christianity is often disconnected from common scholarly knowledge. Oscar Cullmann, while no doubt oversimplifying the categories, pointed out in 1955 that the notion of the immortality of the soul was far more Greek than biblical. [5]

Nevertheless, I believe these scholars have created too sharp a distinction. There are places in the New Testament that use imagery of the soul or spirit as a detachable part of our identity, not least the pre-resurrected souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9. Paul speaks of the "unclothed" dead (2 Cor. 5:3) and to be absent from the body (2 Cor. 5:8). In what way might the thief be with Jesus in Paradise before the resurrection (Luke 23:43)?

It would thus seem easily that many biblical authors had some notion of a disembodied intermediate state between death and resurrection. Despite what we are often told, embodied resurrection was not the only Jewish tradition around the time of Christ. I and others have argued that the Dead Sea Scrolls, which reflect one stream of Jewish thought in the century before Christ, would far more accurately be characterized as looking to a disembodied future existence in the afterlife even if you can find a few fragments that assume a different position. [6]

3. I should emphasize that these are pictures. The Bible gives us incarnated revelation, revelation that comes to us in the clothing of ancient paradigms. It is the reality to which these images point that we are to look. The clothing is ancient, reflective of the categories of the day. The clothing can change even withinn the pages of the Bible itself. 

So, the point is that we survive death. We survive death not only when God resurrects us in the future. We survive death immediately. In my opinion, the form of that survival is above our paygrade. The Bible uses ancient images drawn from its world to picture that survival. But those images are not the point. Paul can express these uncertainties: "Whether in the body or out of the body, God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).

4. Even from an empirical perspective, I do believe it is plausible that humans have a spiritual dimension to their identity that "goes beyond" what we can see. Let me use a modern image that is also an attempt to give clothing to a timeless truth.

Science fiction has given us a sense that there may be other "dimensions" to existence beyond the three (or four) that are most obvious to us. In 1884, Edwin Abbott published his novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. In it, a three dimensional creature terrifies a two dimensional one. He seems to be able to walk through walls by simply stepping in and out of the third dimension.

It seems to me that there have been countless instances of events that seem to go beyond what can be observed physically. Someone wakes up in the night with an urge to pray for someone who, at exactly that moment, is undergoing some kind of a crisis. [7] A person seems to effect spiritual power both good and evil.

As a Christian, we nest these sorts of events within a larger spiritual framework--a personal one at that. God and the Devil are personal agents, as are angels and demons.

5. The ontological existence of the soul would be incredibly convenient philosophically. Here are just a few examples:

• It would account for continuity of identity between this life and the next. If God merely recreates us in the resurrection, how is that anything more than cloning some version of our bodies and giving that new person our memories?
• It could anchor human identity at the moment of conception.
• It could ground a notion of human free will outside the cause-effect flow of the material world.
• It might account for human identity beyond the memory and personality functions of the brain.

This last possibility is fascinating. What if, for example, Alzheimer's was an interface problem? What if, the person is in there but unable to connect with us through the brain, like a defunct computer screen on a computer that still works? You can't see what the computer is doing because the screen isn't working, but all the functions are still being performed.

Of course, the advantages of a concept are not in themselves an argument for the truth of the concept. That would be the fallacy of subjectivism--wanting something to be true doesn't make it true. Nevertheless, faith in the existence of a detachable soul would seem to cohere well with Christian faith and biblical faith.

6. The brain does correlate well to many functions we like to attribute to our identity. When a rod blew through Phineas Gage's frontal lobe, his personality changed. The same is of course true for those in the past who were forced to undergo a frontal lobotomy. Alzheimer's involves the tangling of physical neurons in our brains, leading to a loss of memory and self. Biochemistry clearly affects our moods and behavior.

Years ago, a colleague at Indiana Wesleyan University (Michael Boivin) presented a paper showing that certain parts of our brains "light up" when we are undergoing a spiritual experience. That is to say, it is at least theoretically possible that someone could counterfeit religious experiences by targeting those parts of our cerebral cortex.

However, these data points are not proofs that the brain is all there is to human identity. They merely indicate that the brain is significantly involved in human identity. They do not disprove the existence of a soul. 

[1] An image from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012).

[2] I realize my statement borders on incoherence. I am using "intrinsically" in a questionable way. What I am trying to say is that our value cannot be detached or dislodged from us. Yet all created value is derivative. It derives from God. I do not see it as "ontological" in the sense that it inheres in us in some metaphysical way. It is ascribed value--undetachable, inalienable--but solely based on God's assignment. "Good is good because God says so." It is permanent and thus "essential," but it is not truly intrinsic.

[3] Joel Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker, 2008).

[4] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (HarperOne, 2008).

[5] Oscar Cullmann, The Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead (Epworth, 1958).

[6] See John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: Death and Afterlife in the Second Temple Period and in several other works.

[7] It is tempting to invoke some sense of quantum entanglement here, although any literal reference would no doubt expose a quantum incompetence on my part. I am simply wondering if there is such a thing as a "spiritual" quantum entanglement.

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Introduction
1.1 What is philosophy?
1.2 Is philosophy Christian?
1.3 Unexamined assumptions
1.4 Socrates and the Unexamined Life
1.5 The Natural Philosophers 

Logic
2.1 The Structure of Thinking 
2.2 When Thinking Goes Wrong
2.3 Three Tests for Truth
2.4 Knowing the Bible
2.5 Plato and Aristotle
2.6 The Story of Logic 
2.7 Hellenistic Philosophy

Philosophy of Religion
3.1 Faith and Reason
3.2 How can we know that God exists?
3.3 God as First Cause 
3.4 God as Intelligent Designer
3.5 God as Necessary Being (including ontological argument)
3.6 God and Morality
3.7 God and Miracles
3.8 The Problem of Evil
3.9 Augustine and Aquinas

Philosophy of the Person
4.1 What is a human being?
4.2 A Body and a Soul?
4.3 What is the meaning of life? (including existentialism)
4.4 Are we free or fated?

Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy
6.1 How to Structure Government
6.2 Christ and Culture

Epistemology
7.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
7.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
7.3 Reason vs. Experience
7.4 Kant Breaks the Tie
7.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
7.6 Wittgenstein and Language
7.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
7.8 Foucault and Power
7.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology

Metaphysics
8.1 Hard Times for Metaphysics
8.2 A Brief Story of Metaphysics 

8.3 A Plug for Critical Realism 

Biblical words for soul and spirit

1. The typical process of reading the Bible goes like this:

• I see the same English word used throughout the Bible. For example, "soul" or "spirit."
• I assume that word has the same meaning throughout the Bible, since it is the same English word.
• I assume that the meaning of that word is whatever that word means to me in English, which could involve things I've heard from the pulpit or things I've read somewhere.
• Perhaps there is a key verse or passage that drives my understanding of that word, the Archimedian point from which I interpret all other verses or the focal lens through which view all the other verses.

So on a topic like "soul" or "spirit," I may have had someone say that the "biblical" view of a person is that we are made up of a body, a soul, and a spirit, variously defined. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 might be a focal verse: "May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

2. This of course is a pre-modern way of reading the Bible. It is unreflective and completely unaware of how to read the words in historical context. So,

• These were not the same words in Greek and Hebrew.
• The meanings were not the same because the books in which these words were used spanned 1000 years and words change meaning over time in any language.
• The proper dictionary for defining these words is not an English one, but a function of the "dictionary" in use at the time and place where each book was written.
• You cannot use the meaning of a word in one part of Scripture to define a word in another part of Scripture because the meaning of a word is a matter of how it is used at a specific time and place.

3. So if we look at the biblical words for spirit and soul, here's something like how they map out over time.

a. nephesh - a living being of some sort. Genesis 1 calls the living creatures that God creates in the sea, nephesh chayah. So, in Hebrew, these sea creatures were "living souls." C. S. Lewis knew enough to put it this way: "You don't have a soul. You are a soul." Of course that is only the Old Testament way of using the word.

Adam as a living soul is the whole Adam, body and breath (Gen. 2:7). The NIV well translates the phrase here as "living being." There is thus not a single instance in the Old Testament where the word "soul" means a detachable part of a human being.

b. ruach - breath. In Hebrew, "spirit" comes much closer to what we think of when we speak of the soul. But it would be anachronistic to think of spirit in the OT as what we mean by the soul. I personally think it is misleading to translate this word as "spirit" anywhere in the OT. We would be much more accurate to translate the word as "breath."

c. psyche - The Greek word for "soul" both retains the OT sense of nephesh but also occasionally adds the use of the word in some Greek circles. So in 1 Peter 3:20, eight "souls" are saved on the ark. Notice how the NIV, realizing how confusing the word soul would be for an English speaker here, has prudently left the word untranslated. "Soul" here simply means a living being, as in Hebrew.

Psyche can also mean "life," as in Matthew 10:39. Here it is obviously not a part of us that continues to live after death, for it would then make no sense to say that "whoever loses his soul will find it."

So there are really very few places like 1 Thessalonians 5:23 where something like the Greek picture of a bipartite or tripartite person is invoked. In such cases, we are only looking at a picture, a metaphor of human existence. It would be foolhardy in the extreme to treat this as the ultimate secret to understanding human psychology.

In such instances, the soul seems to be something like the meeting point and intersection of body and spirit. It is like the animal part of us. Philo, for example, calls the spirit the "soul's soul." I do not think at any place, however, the NT considers the soul in Platonic fashion to be a detachable part of us that survives death.

d. pneuma - "Spirit" retains its connection to the idea of breath (cf. English derivative pneumonia). However, the NT does seem to draw more consistently on the Greek image of the spirit as a part of the human being that holds the essence of who we are and that can leave our bodies. This is ultimately, I believe, still a metaphor of sorts, not a scientific picture. Although there are significant scholarly voices against me, I still think that Hebrews 12:23 most likely pictures the disembodied spirits of the righteous around the throne in heaven.

C6. God intended us to live forever.

Running late this week. Here is Sunday's post, second to last in the section on Creation in my theology in bullet points series. The previous one is here.
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God intended us to live forever.

The dominant sense Christians have had throughout history is that Adam and Eve were naturally built to live forever before they sinned in the Garden of Eden. They only lost this capacity because of their sin. Now, the default is that humans die. "By the trespass of the one man, death reigned," Paul says (Rom. 5:17).

An alternative way to take the Genesis story, mentioned in our discussion of the goodness of creation, is that Adam and Eve always had needed to eat from the Tree of Life in order to live forever. In this approach, death entered the world as the human default because, from the time of their sin, they could not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.

Whichever interpretation you choose, the Bible indicates that God created humanity with the goal that we would live forever with him. As the Calvinist Westminster Confession puts it, we were created to serve God forever.

Early on in church history, the Greek idea of the soul influenced the way Christians conceptualized the way in which we live forever. Even today, many Christians understand eternal life in terms of an immortal soul within us that lives forever, whether a person be saved or damned. However, we should keep at least a couple important qualifications in mind.

First, while historic Christianity has typically believed that we as humans have a soul, it has also held that the eternal state of humanity is an embodied one. That is to say, Christianity has commonly held that God will give us a glorified body to have for all eternity. So whether or not we formulate eternity in terms of a soul, Christianity has classically seen the ideal human state as an embodied one rather than a spiritual, disembodied one.

A second thing to keep in mind is that the soul does not play a major role in the biblical portraits of what a human is or in how we live forever. The immortal soul, while compatible with biblical teaching, comes more from the influence of Greek philosophy on early Christianity than from the Bible itself. The Bible itself gives us more than one picture of human identity.

For example, in Hebrew, a soul is a living being consisting of both body and breath. God takes the dust of the earth (body). God breathes into it (spirit). "And the man became a living being" or, as the King James Version puts it, "a living soul" (Gen. 2:7). The Hebrew word nephesh (soul) thus did not refer to a detachable part of a person but to a whole, living being. [1]We find traces of this use of the word in the Greek of 1 Peter 3:20, which speaks of eight "souls" (or persons, as the NIV puts it) being saved on the ark.

In the New Testament, the Greek word psyche can simply refer to the life of a person. Matthew 10:39 indicates that, "Whoever finds their life [psyche] will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." Clearly it would not work to translate the word as "soul" here--"whoever loses their soul will find it"?

So arguably it is only in a couple of places where it is possible that the New Testament is thinking of the soul in some way similar to how we think of it today. For example, there is 1 Thessalonians 5:23, where Paul distinguishes between body, soul, and spirit. Hebrews 4:12 seems to distinguish between soul and spirit in some way. But these are oblique references, hardly enough to base a theology on.

So the picture of the soul works as one picture of human immortality, but it is just one biblical picture. It is a true picture from the outside looking on rather than from the inside looking out. Most of the functions that we would have associated with the soul in an earlier day would now be attributed, at least in large part, to the brain.

Memories go when the ganglia of the brain get tangled with Alzheimer's disease. Phineas Gage is a well-known story of a man whose personality fundamentally changed when a rod blew through the frontal lobe of his brain. We even know which part of your brain "lights up" when you are having a religious experience.

None of these observations disprove the existence of a soul. Indeed, the existence of a soul might indicate how we can have any free will at all amid the flood of determinism that is so much of what we know about the cause and effect of brain chemistry, genetics, and environment.

But God can also perform miracles. God can empower human freedom from the outside. God could recreate our bodies from complete scratch or give an immortal soul a recreated body.

The bottom line is that God created us for eternity. How he works out the details is hardly a challenge to him, even though it is a mystery to us.

Next Sunday the last post on creation: C7. All humanity is of equal value to God--all nations, every social status, both male and female.

[1] Such "living souls" need not even be human. Genesis 1:21 speaks of the living souls in the waters, that is, sea creatures.

Genesis 2:7 in Hebrew

Do you like these?  (Read the second line from right to left)

וַיִּיצֶר יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים
    God       YHWH   and formed

"And YHWH God formed..."

אֶת־הָֽאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה
the ground    from   dust     the man    [direct object marker]

"... the man [from] the dust of the ground..."

וַיִּפַּח   בְּאַפָּיו  נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים 
   life         breath of    his nostrils in    and he breathed

"And he breathed in his nostrils the breath of life..."

וַֽיְהִי הָֽאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּֽה
living  soul [a] to   the man   and he was

"... and the man became a living soul."

The Soul (IWU Coffee Talk)

A couple of the books some of us read in the 00s had to do with the brain and the soul.  A Monday lunch reading group read Joel Green's Body, Soul, and Life. And at another time we read How God Changes Your Brain.  Some basic points, neither of them particularly new or shocking, seemed clear from those discussions.

The first is that who we are--even spiritually--has an awful lot to do with our brains.  As simple as this sounds, I suspect the word on the street doesn't quite get it.  You look at a host of movies and popular church banter and there is this sense that most of who we are is in our spirit or detachable soul.  When I taught philosophy, students seemed very attracted to the idea that an Alzheimer's patient was really in there somewhere but the brain was making it difficult for them to get through.

I suspect that one's sense of such things changes drastically when one knows even a little about the brain.  It does not disprove anything about the Holy Spirit to recognize that a doctor could induce a religious experience by applying a little electricity to a certain part of your brain.  Alter my brain's physical structure and you alter my memories, my personality, and my spirituality.

A second realization is of course that it is difficult to know whether our Christian language of the soul is metaphorical or literal.  I'm not sure how we could decide, frankly, even as Christians.  The idea of a detachable soul is very convenient, mind you, and this is certainly the way Christians have talked for centuries.  Some parts of the Bible talk this way as well--although not as consistently as you might think.

For example, the Old Testament in no instance speaks of the soul as a detachable part of a human that contains our personality, memories, etc.  It does not talk of the human spirit in this way either.  In the New Testament, only a small part uses this language of a part of me that might survive death.  The focus is on bodily resurrection in the afterlife, not some disembodied afterlife.  N. T. Wright has of course emphasized this as well (maybe too much, even).

So is our language of the soul metaphorical or literal?  This is a question I don't think we can be dogmatic about if we actually know the issues.  It was fun to be part of a group at IWU that was discussing these issues right along with everyone else when it was the big topic in the 00s.

Descartes Summary

René Descartes (1596-1650; pronounced “day-CART”) is rightly considered the “father” of modern philosophy. But he also had a massive impact on mathematics, inventing the Cartesian coordinate system of x’s and y’s that every high school student learns. He was a devout Roman Catholic, although the church of his day condemned his physics and philosophy. He was French but did most of his work in the Netherlands, most importantly a work called, Discourse on Method. At the time of his death he was a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden.

Every philosopher to some extent gives expression to the struggles and spirit (Zeitgeist) of their time. The most famous thinkers are those whose expressions and solutions most resonate with their age or some later one. That to which Descartes gave expression was a sense of uncertainty and a thirst for something solid and true. The Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance had generally eroded the assumptions of a thousand years; in particular, that the things Christians had heard and believed through the Church were correct. Those who were convinced that charismatic leaders like Martin Luther, John Calvin, or Huldrych Zwingli had correctly interpreted the Bible might simply switch the source of their certainty. But what had been an unquestioned assumption (Christian belief is self-evident and universally agreed) now had to be argued for.

The beginnings of the scientific revolution would become yet another source of questioning assumptions. We discussed Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in chapter 8 and his attempts to place the quest for knowledge on an experimental basis. One gathers evidence and tabulates the data, eventually drawing the conclusion that best fits the evidence. Again, he represents a move from assumption of truth to the need to justify it.

In this context, Descartes begins to look for a place of absolute certainty from which to establish a firm basis for truth. Unlike Bacon, he is a rationalist (see chapter 4). He searches for truth first in reason. He questions everything he can question and finds he can doubt everything except for the fact that he is doubting. His conclusion is, cogito ergo sum, “I think; therefore, I am.” From this point of certainty, he then proceeds to try to reconstruct certainty on all the things people of his day took for granted, including the existence of God.

Despite how certain Descartes himself might be of his conclusions, he has sowed a doubt that had not been there before, much as the Reformation did. All the ordinary truths about the world—that I am really sitting somewhere reading this book—now have a question mark over them that was not there before. He creates a new sort of human identity. “I” am the most certain thing I can know, and the rest of the world is the object of my knowledge. I may still believe in God, but it is I who is doing the deciding and believing. The order of the world, all the truths that I had once assumed without question, are now truth claims that I am forced to make decisions about. Even faith becomes an inevitable choice I have to make as an individual, instead of an assumption. The shift seems inevitable. I can still believe everything I believed before about God, faith, and the world, and I can believe them ferociously. But I am now keenly aware that I am the one doing the believing.

The impact of this shift, this turn of focus of truth from something “out there” inherent in the world to something I have to make judgments on inside my head, has been far beyond massive. This sense of a human individual as a rational being that makes decisions about what is true has empowered everything from the scientific revolution to the birth of capitalism to the notion of social contracts between individuals, the basis for the United States system of government. Descartes inadvertently gives birth to the “autonomous individual,” a sense of a human person as someone who can make objective decisions about the quite distinct world outside of herself.

Descartes’ sense of nature and of the soul fit hand in glove with his other ideas. He makes a sharp distinction between the natural world and now the super-natural world. Nature is no longer everything that God created, but only now the physical, material part of it. Descartes does not include things of God, angels, or spirits, or things having to do with the mind in what he calls "nature." These now "immaterial" things are far more certain to him than what would become the world of science. He thus inadvertently prepared the way for Deism, which saw the world as a machine God created but with which He need no longer be involved.

Descartes also shifts the soul from being the life principle of a person to become the immaterial container in which the human self resides. It is where the “I” can think about the world in a detached and objective fashion. It is where the human will is located. It is the part of the person that survives death, like an escape pod.

The current climate is rather negative toward Descartes, and clearly we can point out any number of extremes in his thinking. Martin Heidegger (1886-1976), more than anyone, has shown that we cannot detach ourselves from the world around us. Almost everyone today would recognize the impossibility of complete objectivity. Nevertheless, we should not forget that most of the greatest cultural developments in the Western world these last few centuries can be traced back to Descartes more than to any other single individual.

Descartes and the Soul 2

I seem insufferably unable to write something on Descartes and the soul. I don't know what's wrong with me.

Here is an attempt.
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Our current understanding of the soul probably has as much to do with René Descartes, the “father” of modern philosophy, as with the Bible or historic Christianity. Prior to Descartes, the soul was principally the seat of life, the life force. However, after Descartes the soul principally becomes the center of our thinking. The soul becomes the part of us where my “I” most truly resides. It becomes like a little escape pod with the real me in it, the part of me that detaches from my body at death and survives with my personality and memories intact.

We mentioned back in chapter 7 that people in the sixteen hundreds increasingly viewed the world as a machine that ran on its own according to natural laws. Before this time, people often saw the spiritual world as a material world like the physical world—only made up of much thinner material like ether or fire. So Descartes practically invented the distinction between the natural and the supernatural when he wrote the following:

"I am talking about 'nature' in a narrower sense than when it means the total of everything God has given me. In that meaning, nature includes things that only have to do with the mind (and I am not including those things when I use the word 'nature'). Descartes, Meditations 4 (2nd ed.)

Nature for him did not include the things of the mind or the soul, only the “narrower” sense of the machine of the world, governed by laws God had built into the world. The supernatural thus referred not to these sorts of material things but to immaterial things like God, angels, and the soul.

The core elements of Descartes’ understanding of the soul probably look very familiar, even though they are largely foreign to the Bible. For him the soul is the part of me that is truly me, the part that thinks, has my personality, holds my memories, and that survives death. Other aspects of Descartes’ view will seem a little more bizarre. For example, he thought the soul largely engaged the body at a little gland in the brain called the pineal gland. It was not truly attached there and Descartes struggled to figure out how it could so influence the body when it was not really connected.

However, as our understanding of the brain has advanced, we have found a physical basis for every element in Descartes’ soul. Anyone who has known someone with Alzheimer’s disease has witnessed how closely connected memory is with the physical ganglia of our brains. Tangle those neurons and the memory goes away. Most psychology courses at some time also mention Phineas Gage (1823-60) as an example of how closely related the front part of our brain is related to our personalities. Gage was apparently a hardworking and responsible individual prior to an accident in which a rod blew through the front of his brain. Afterwards, he was rude and used profanity, showing little self-control.

In other words, brain research can identify various parts of the brain involved in everything from emotions, to choices, to memories, to thinking, indeed to religious experiences. Of course the fact that these parts of the brain are involved in such things does not necessarily mean that we do not have a soul. It is simply to say that it is not clear that we need to resort to a soul to explain these things. Further, we know that messing with the brain also messes with our thinking, feeling, choosing and so forth. What role a soul might play in these functions is unclear. In the final section of this chapter we will discuss what a Christian perspective on a human being might look like with and without recourse to us having a soul.

Descartes and the Soul 1

I don't want to take the time to write it up this morning but maybe I can at least get my juices going by jotting down some thoughts on Descartes and the soul.

1. First, there is the shift from viewing the soul as material to viewing it as immaterial. This shift goes along with the invention, so to speak, of nature by Descartes. This is the dividing up of the world into natural and supernatural, the material and the immaterial. Before creation was more of a continuous spectrum from embodied to thin, disembodied material (cf. Dale Martin).

2. Descartes letters to the princess of Holland, where she takes him to task--how can the immaterial have an effect on the material? He suggests maybe it is something like gravity. He locates the soul in the pineal gland. The body is a machine (Treatise of Man, Passions of the Soul). Thoughts are formed in the pineal gland:

Even though the soul is joined to the whole body, "nevertheless there is a certain part of the body where it exercises its functions more particularly than in all the others... The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain's substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain's anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities. The slightest movements on the part of this gland may alter very greatly the course of these spirits, and conversely any change, however slight, taking place in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of the gland" (Passions of the Soul).

3. Passions can affect the soul. Prior to him only the soul affected the body, not the other way as well.

4. Soul is simple and indivisible, potentially infallible in its detachment from the material world, able to look on objectively.

5. Descartes represents a shift from seeing the soul as the principal of life to the principal of thought. The soul becomes the seat of the "I." This leads to an introspective trajectory for Western culture.

I may add more notes today as thoughts occur...

9.4 A Soul in a Body, Part 3

This is the third part of a second in a chapter called "What is a Human Being?" This section is called A Soul in a Body and the previous parts of the section are

Part 1
Part 2

And now the section continues...
__________
...Nevertheless, a number of New Testament authors do seem to use either “soul” or more often “spirit” in relation to a part inside us that is separable from our bodies. In 2 Corinthians 12:2-3 Paul is unsure whether he has had an “out of the body” experience or not. Paul so strongly assumes that we will have a resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15 that it is probably hard for him to imagine life without a body. [1] But he seems at least open to the possibility in 2 Corinthians 12. Philippians 1:23 also seems to imply continued existence at death in heaven in some way, prior to the resurrection (cf. Phil. 3:11). Revelation 6:9 speaks of the “souls” under the altar of heaven. These are individuals who were martyred, perhaps beheaded, while they were alive (Rev. 20:4). They apparently receive resurrection bodies and return to the living at the first resurrection (Rev. 20:6).

Because the Bible gives us varied pictures of human psychology and of the afterlife, we probably should not consider any of these pictures absolute. Clearly the New Testament teaches that believers will continue to exist in eternity, and several passages even point to continued existence immediately at death. The Gospel of Luke, for example, has its Parable of the Rich Man, who awakes in torment after death. His brothers are still alive, so he has not awakened after the resurrection. [2] He has not risen from the dead like Jesus, for Abraham denies him that possibility (Luke 16:31). He is thus conscious in an “intermediate state” between death and resurrection. But the rich man does not apparently have a resurrection body—a body that Luke pictures having flesh and bones (cf. Luke 24:39). We should probably infer the same state for Jesus and the thief on the cross between their deaths and resurrection (cf. Luke 23:43).

But it is not clear to what extent these are pictures, put in the categories of the ancients so that the original audiences of these texts could understand them. The books of the Bible give us differing images of human make-up and the particulars of the afterlife. These things relate to another world, another dimension, another universe. And just as Christians have not generally speculated what God is made of in His substance, what “Spirit” really is, probably we should sit loosely to our language of soul and spirit as pictures and metaphors of something that we probably could not literally understand while we are this side of death...

[1] Some (but not most) scholars even suggest that Paul underwent a development on his thinking on this subject. They suggest that Paul started in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15 with a strong sense that we sleep until a point at the end of history where we are re-embodiment as part of the resurrection. Then they suggest that he switched to see us being re-embodied immediately at death in 2 Corinthians 5. Perhaps the most famous exponent of this interpretation was F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free

[2] I have often heard the ingenious suggestion that eternity is outside the time of our current universe and thus that the rich man could have been raised at the resurrection and still be “now” in relation to human time. He would thus be raised much later in regard to human time, but resurrected already in relation to otherworldly time. This suggestion is ingenious, but hardly something that the author of Luke would have been thinking.

9.5 A Soul in a Body, Part 2

The first part of this section of the chapter is here. I would love to finish this chapter finally this weekend. We'll see. I'm doing this section in bits to hold my interest...

Part 2: A Soul in a Body
At the time of Christ, most people in the world did not believe in much of a meaningful, personal afterlife for individuals. If the abbreviation R.I.P is somewhat well known today (“Rest in peace”), a common Roman epitaph translates as “I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.” When we read the ancient Greek epics of Homer and the Latin Aeneid, we primarily find an underworld where shadows wander mindlessly, lacking the flesh and blood necessary for them to have much of a meaningful or thoughtful existence. This is presumably the same sense of the afterlife we find in the Old Testament when we read statements like, “But when people die, they lose all strength. They breathe their last, and then where are they? … people lie down and do not rise again. Until the heavens are no more, they will not wake up nor be roused from their sleep… They never know if their sons grow up in honor or sink to insignificance” (Job 14:10, 12, 21).

Nevertheless, even in Homer’s Iliad we find hints of a place among the dead for very special people, the Elysian Fields. The idea that the dead might return to the living in some way seems to have begun to emerge in the 500s BC. One of the oldest known Greek philosophers to think something of this sort was Pythagoras (ca. 520BC), who is best known for the Pythagorean Theorem in geometry. He believed in some form of reincarnation. A famous anecdote in Xenophanes says of him that “once when he passed a dog being mistreated, Pythagoras pitied the animal and told the person, ‘Stop! Don’t beat him! He is the soul of a friend I recognized immediately when I heard his voice.’”

Plato also held to the transmigration of the soul, a little over a century later. For Plato there are a fixed number of souls in existence, and they make their ways into various human bodies. While Plato did not think the body was evil, he thought of it as a “prison house” or tomb of the soul, from which the soul was freed at death. At death we drink from the river of forgetfulness (Lethe) and eventually our souls return to enter different bodies of various animals.

However, for most Greek thinkers, the soul was not completely distinguishable from the more animal part of a person, particularly whatever life force keeps us alive. For example, Democritus (ca.460-ca.370BC) taught that a person’s soul was made up of “soul atoms” that disintegrated with the body at death. He believed in a soul, but he did not believe in an afterlife! The soul was simply that which gave your body life, and it dissolved at death like the rest of you. It was material that blended back into the elements of the world just like your skin or hair does after death.

Democritus highlights a very important realization—just because the Bible or some other ancient source uses the word soul does not mean it is talking about exactly the same thing we are today. Indeed, the Old Testament in particular does not use its word for soul (nephesh) in the sense we do. “Soul” in Hebrew never refers to a detachable part of us. It refers to a living being in its entirety, both body and breath of life within it. So Adam becomes a “living soul” when God breathes into the dust (Gen. 2:7).

So Genesis uses the same word of the “living souls” in the water in Genesis 1:20. And even though the Old Testament speaks of the breath (ruach) inside living things, it never thinks of this spirit as the container of our personhood. It is simply the breath of life within us, and animals have the same breath we do (cf. Eccl. 3:19). In general, the Old Testament has little sense of a meaningful, personal afterlife. Indeed, Daniel 12:2-3 is the only passage in the Old Testament about which we would find general agreement among scholars that it actually refers to a meaningful life after death.

The New Testament also can use the word soul in this way. 1 Peter 3:20 uses the Greek word for soul (psyche) when it speaks of “eight souls in all” being saved on the ark. Translations usually translate the word as “eight people” or “eight persons” so we do not get confused. Jesus uses this word in Matthew 16:25 when he says that whoever “loses his soul will find it.” English translations rightly translate the verse as “loses his life.”

We cannot at all assume, therefore, that the word soul in our English translations of the New Testament always has the same thing in mind as we do when we use the word soul. And when New Testament authors did use the word similarly to the way we do (e.g., Matt. 10:28), they may not have had as much invested in the language as we do. I can talk of “being on cloud 9” without literally believing clouds are numbered.

Joel Green quote (Body, Soul, and Human Life)

"Libet found that conscious awareness occurred temporally after the onset of brain activity setting in motion the voluntary movement though before the movement itself. This led Libet to argue against "free will" in favor of "free won't" -- that is, that even though we do not consciously cause an action like a voluntary finger movement, we are capable of stopping it before it happens."

Interesting...

9.4 A Soul in a Body, Part 1

The earlier parts of this chapter were:

9.1 Biological Machines
9.2 Socially-Constructed Identity
9.3 Existentialism and Identity

A Soul in a Body, Part 1:
When we who are Christians affirm the “Apostle’s Creed,” we confess our belief in the “forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” Popular Christianity often misses the meaning of Christian faith in “the resurrection of the body.” It is an affirmation that, one day in the future, God will transform our dead corpses (or whatever is left of them) into new bodies, and we will come back from the dead, possibly on an equally transformed earth. The “resurrection of the body” is thus something distinct from the “immortality of the soul,” even if the two ideas do not necessarily contradict each other. The idea that “you die and go to heaven or hell” is thus slightly different from what most Christians in the past have believed. It would be more accurate to say that most Christians in history have traditionally believed that you die and go to a place of reward or torment to wait for the final resurrection and judgment, after which you will go either to eternal life or condemnation.

So where does the idea of the soul come in? As we will see, we do find some language in the New Testament that seems to relate to “disembodied” existence between our deaths and our resurrections—whether for eternal life or death. But we ironically find very little language in the Bible that speaks of “souls” in this way. The idea that we have a detachable soul, which comes into existence at least at our conception and continues to exist forever, arguably came into Christian tradition more from the influence of Greek philosophy than from the Bible itself.[i]

Nevertheless, it became the consensus of Christendom, not only that at some point in the future we will receive resurrection bodies, but that we have immortal souls. When the vast majority of Christians have believed something for so long, we must surely be very cautious about drawing a different conclusion. Those of us who are Protestants have room for “reformation,” particularly when the majority seems to have deviated from the founding principles and practices of earliest Christianity. But some developments from New Testament times seem like appropriate extensions or refinements of first principles and practices, even clarifications of tensions or ambiguities within the earliest church. So it would seem we can neither dismiss common elements of historic Christianity easily nor completely affirm them without the possibility of reformation or development.

At the same time, no human being can remove their thinking completely from the categories of their times and places. You could argue that it is not so much the existence of the soul that is the important consensus but rather what language of the soul was really about. We could argue that belief in the soul has primarily been about our continued existence after death. The soul also provides potential mechanisms to explain our individual identity or even free will. For others, the existence of a soul at conception might provide an argument against abortion when as yet an embryo not only has no blood or breath—the biblical images of life—but has no nerves to feel pain, let alone has thought. You could at least argue that what is important is that we can affirm these things—continued existence, continued identity—rather than a particular version of human psychology...

[i] The church father Origen (AD185-254) believed that God created all the souls of humankind when He made the world. He thus believed that our souls pre-existed our conception. He also believed that, since all souls were good, all humans would be good after they were freed of their bodies. He is thus the earliest known Christian “universalist,” someone who believes everyone will be saved in the end. For this reason he was posthumously excommunicated several centuries after his death.

Reading (12-8-09): Green on Soul

Finally got back to the second half of Joel Green's second chapter in Body, Soul, and Human Life. In this half, he talks about some of the factors that confuse the issue. Whether you agree fully with him or not, he is almost completely right in his correction of some oversimplified understandings.

The first is to make a stark distinction between Greek and Hebrew thinking, where it is assumed that the Greeks were dualists of body and soul while the Hebrew Bible sees a person as a single whole. He notes that Bible scholars have caught up since Hengel forty years ago with the fact that Judaism had been under the influence of Hellenism for two hundred years before Christ. What scholars have not as much realized is that Greco-Roman thought itself was not nearly as dualistic as often assumed, indeed that the soul was generally thought of as material to ancient philosophers. The book that first turned me on to this was Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body.

Similarly, Green points out the language fallacies that often accompany such discussions. In particular, there is the assumption that words always mean the same things, such that the word psyche in itself might mean "soul" in some Cartesian sense. I'm not fully convinced that 1 Peter is not dualistic between flesh and spirit in 4:6, as well as in 3:18-19. But in general, Green successfully shows that the Bible is not nearly as dualistic as it might seem when we simply invest these words with our meanings.

The last part of the chapter deals with the meaning of humanity being "in the image of God." I feel like Green sees a little more theology in Genesis than its author might have but he's right, I think, to start off with a kind of "governmental" understanding of the image in Genesis 1. Humanity is in the image of God in Genesis as the ruler of the creation, like God is ruler of all. Green takes it a little further to the image being primarily relational and covenantal, and I don't really see this in Genesis' use of the expression.

As I said the NT often does in a controversial post, the New Testament then understands "image of God" in its own way in the New Testament, without placing any real emphasis on the governmental element that dominates (ha) Genesis 1, in my opinion. In the NT, it seems to me that the phrase image of God is more emotive and leans more toward humanity as a honor reflection/representation of God, much as a father might be proud of his son if he is a "chip off the old block." Christ is also a reflection of God in a more prominent and Sonship kind of way.

A good chapter...

Nijay's Interview of Joel Green: Part 2

Here is the second half of Nijay Gupta's interview with Joel Green on his recent book, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible.

Nijay Gupta interviews Joel Green...

Nijay begins his interview with Joel Green on his new book today, Body, Soul, and Human Life. I have the book but won't read it till I get to my philosophy chapter on the soul. Green argues, I believe, that the body-soul dualism we are used to is not to be taken as a literal picture of human psychology but a way of presenting the truth about us in the categories of various people in the past. He is a (nonreductive) monist, I believe, rather than a dualist.