Many things we have learned contradicts much of what we previously thought about the mind.  For example, it is quite common and sensible to believe that we come into the world with minds that are essentially “blank slates,” and that what we know is written on those slates by experience alone.  But that view appears to be wrong.

The human mind consists of a variety of distinct and interacting mental tools, each of which comes pre-loaded with some quite specific content and some processing algorithms.  For example, it is now clearly demonstrated that human beings are naturally endowed with what we might reasonably describe as innate beliefs and innate cognitive processors.

On the belief side, developmental psychologists have identified numerous domains of understanding that are native to us, such as folk physics, folk biology, folk psychology, agency detection tendencies, and so on. What these discoveries seem to show is that our minds are pre-disposed to come to think about the world in very specific ways—ways that are determined by the kinds of minds we have.

So it looks like from birth, or rather through a regular and maturationally natural process, we have dispositions for form beliefs in the following domains.

“Folks Physics”:

• Objects move on inertial paths
• Objects cannot move through other objects
• Objects must move through space
• Objects must be supported

“Folk Psychology”:

• Agents act to satisfy desires
• Agents have beliefs

“Folk Biology”:

• Animals bear young similar to themselves
• Living things need nutrients

In addition to these innate dispositions toward certain kinds of beliefs, we also seem to have cognitive mechanisms that dispose us to crunch sensory inputs in specific ways. We might call these “innate cognitive processors.” Examples of these would include things like contagion avoidance and agency detection.

Contagion avoidance is a natural aversion human beings share to things like dead bodies, animal waste and vomit, rotting food, etc. These things “gross us out” from a very early age.  Indeed, the aversions we have towards them pre-date any data we might come to possess that would lead us to judge them dangerous.  We are also repelled by them in ways that are independent of other aversive stimuli like smell (that is, you can’t explain this aversion by noting that people are scared off because of an unpleasant odor since studies show that the aversions are independent of that).

A second processor is our Agency Detection Device. Here, psychologists have identified a cognitive processor that seems to pre-dispose us to form beliefs in the reality and presence of (sometimes invisible!) agents under certain conditions. In these cases, when we look for the cause of certain events, motions, sounds, or structures, we are disposed to think that it was caused by a someone rather than by a something. Our ADD appears to be hypersensitive.  It is very good at detecting agency, and in fact is more likely to generate false positives than false negatives.  This is often referred to as our hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD), and may be reflected in manifold attributions of ghosts, fairies, forest spirits, and even personalities of machines!

In sum, psychologists have shown that our initial presumption about the contents of our mind was wrong. Our minds are not blank slates, but processing devices that come endowed with a complex operating system.

Many are quick to point out that this should not be surprising.  When we look across times and cultures and find very similar beliefs concerning the nature of physical, biological, and psychological reality, those similarities cry out for some explanation. Since these diverse individuals have a very wide range of experience, something other than, or in addition to, common experience would seem to account for the similarities of belief. And so it is natural to conclude that there is some fundamental similarity among human minds that explains it. And recent empirical evidence has in fact confirmed this conclusion.

One type of belief that is pervasive across times and cultures is religious belief.  One is thus led to wonder whether those sorts of beliefs are among those that we are naturally disposed to believe.  One New Zealand religion scholar, Joseph Bulbulia, argues that the emerging consensus is yes: “The view of mind expressed by Descartes as composed of innate understandings given in advance of any experience has been thoroughly vindicated after sixty years of cognitive psychology. It may be that Descartes will be shown correct on another score, namely that knowledge of the Divinity is imprinted on every mind [as well]”

Bulbulia’s remark invites us to entertain three key questions:

• Is there any evidence that we are naturally disposed to religion?
• How do we explain the origin of these dispositions?
• What are the implications of such explanations for belief itself?

These will be explored in the next post.

Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

The story in Genesis is a story (full of the deepest suggestion) about a magic apple of knowledge; but in the developed doctrine [of the Fall] the inherent magic apple has quite dropped out of sight, and the story is simply one of disobedience. I have the deepest respect even for Pagan myths, still more for myths in Holy Scripture. I therefore do not doubt that the version which emphasises the magic apple, and brings together the trees of life and knowledge, contains a deeper and subtler truth than the version which makes the apple simply and solely a pledge of obedience. But I assume that the Holy Spirit would not have allowed the latter to grow up in the Church and win the assent of great doctors unless it also was true and useful so far as it went. It is this version which I am going to discuss, because, though I suspect the primitive version to be far more profound, I know that I, at any rate, cannot penetrate its profundities.¹

Whatever its theological profundities, though, Lewis is clear that Genesis 2-3 is probably not a straightforward narrative of historical events. “What exactly happened when Man fell, we do not know,” he later writes. “We have no idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory, impossible wish [to be our own masters] found expression. For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.”²

What, then, is of consequence for Lewis, we might ask? The real story of the Fall, says Lewis, is not the surface narrative about “the magic apple,” but rather what he refers to as “the developed doctrine” of the Fall, namely the doctrine of humankind’s depraved condition:

According to [the doctrine of the Fall], man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will. To my mind this is the sole function of the doctrine.³

The “sole function of the doctrine” for Lewis is to name the human condition for what it is, namely, shot through with corruption. Or, as Lewis put it in A Preface to “Paradise Lost,” “The Fall is simply and solely Disobedience—doing what you have been told not to do: and it results from Pride—from being too big for your boots, forgetting your place, thinking that you are God.” You might call this the “Mere Depravity” view of the Fall.

Throughout The Problem of Pain Lewis displays a remarkable degree of comfort with evolutionary theory, not least evolutionary accounts of human origins. A corollary of Lewis’s acceptance of evolutionary theory, of course, is that death pre-existed humanity. Lewis grasps this nettle in chapter IX of the book when he writes,

The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier generations, to the Fall of man—the whole world was infected by the uncreated rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good reason to believe that animals existed long before men. Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity.⁵

Here is not the place to go into Lewis’s postulation that Satan was responsible for animal predation. We need only note that he makes this suggestion precisely in order to show how a broadly Darwinian picture of natural history may be compatible with a broadly Christian view of the world. For some, severing the link between the Fall of man and death’s entry into the world, is anathema. But given Lewis’ mere depravity view of the Fall, this evolutionary understanding of natural history creates no real problem for Christian faith.

Moreover, for Lewis the evolutionary picture of the ascent of humankind presents no real objection to the Christian doctrine of the Fall, either:

Many people think that this proposition [that we are fallen creatures] has been proved false by modern science. “We now know,” it is said, “that so far from having fallen out of a primeval state of virtue and happiness, men have slowly risen from brutality and savagery.” There seems to me to be a complete confusion here…. If by saying that man rose from brutality you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, I have no objection. But it does not follow that the further back you go the more brutal–in the sense of wicked or wretched–you will find man to be.⁶

Lewis goes on to note that the categories of virtue and vice simply do not apply to the animal kingdom–and therefore not to our pre-human ancestors either–because animals as such are not moral agents. Moreover, Prehistoric man is not to be presumed to be altogether reprobate simply on account of using only rudimentary tools, hunting and gathering, and the like. Primitivity ought not to be confused with sinfulness he argues. Thus, for Lewis, the discoveries of modern paleontology and archaeology can tell us nothing about when or whether our ancestors fell from a state of innocence, and so we are free to accept, as Lewis seems to have, man’s physical descent from animals without giving up the Christian doctrine of the Fall.

While Lewis may not have publically argued for the historicity of Adam and Eve, his private opinions might have been another matter. In his recent essay “Darwin in the Dock,” John G. West has argued that, regardless of what he said in print, Lewis privately “embraced the literal existence of Adam and Eve.”⁷ West chiefly bases his argument for Lewis’s private belief in a literal Adam and Eve on an anecdote involving one of Lewis’ Oxford colleagues, Helen Gardner, recounted in A.N. Wilson’s C.S. Lewis: A Biography.⁸ Upon being asked at a dinner party whom he would most like to meet after death, Lewis replied, “Oh, I have no difficulty in deciding…. I want to meet Adam.” Gardner, it is reported, replied by saying that “if there really were, historically, someone whom we could name as ‘the first man’, he would be a Neanderthal ape-like figure, whose conversation she could not conceive of finding interesting.”⁹ Lewis, we are told, gruffly responded, “I see we have a Darwinian in our midst” and never invited Gardner to dinner again.¹⁰

West takes this tense little interaction between Lewis and Gardner to indicate that Lewis’ belief in a literal historical Adam and Eve. However, it should be noted that such a conclusion seems somewhat overhasty in light of what Lewis says in The Problem of Pain, where he articulates a view rather similar to what Gardner said that evening:

I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronised. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.¹¹

Given that Lewis actually believed what he wrote here, the difference between Lewis and Gardner seems not to have been either the question of “whether man is physically descended from animals” (which, as we have seen, Lewis was willing to grant) or the question of whether Paradisal man would be a “naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature,” a “Neanderthal ape-like figure.” Rather they differed over whether “Paradisal man,” as Lewis puts it, would have been someone, however primitive, to be revered, or whether, as Gardner seemed to believe, a mere brute. Taking Lewis’ written statements at face-value, it would appear that his irritation with Gardner owed less to her acceptance of evolution than it did to her dismissive presumption that our forebears were but dull savages.

Finally, it should be noted that Lewis was not even committed to the most basic element of a belief in a literal Adam and Eve, namely, that it was precisely two humans who fell and from whence our species came. He writes, “We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell.”¹² Lewis’s mere depravity view of the Fall and his belief in the mythical character of the Eden story gave him some latitude on the question of whether the Fall consisted of a historic first human pair going wrong at an easily identifiable moment. For Lewis, it was apparently quite possible that whole tribes of “Paradisal” Prehistoric humans could have gone about their business for generations—hunting, gathering, singing around the campfire, rearing children, painting in caves—before the spiritual and scientifically undetectable catastrophe of “the Fall” occurred. In other words, if Lewis were presented with the recent genomic evidence which suggests that our species arose from an initial population of several thousand rather than only two, it is doubtful that it would have flustered him. It simply makes no difference to Lewis’s argument how or how many humans initially “fell.” All that matters for Lewis is that God made humans (perhaps via evolution, perhaps not) and that we humans have gone quite wrong–so wrong, in fact, that it is beyond our powers to repair ourselves. Mere Christianity, for Lewis, does not logically depend on the historicity of the Adam and Eve story, but on the doctrine of our mere depravity.

In tomorrow's concluding post, we turn to C.S. Lewis' views on the compatibility of evolution and Christian faith.

Notes

1. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 63-64, my italics
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, my italics
4. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 70-71
5. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 119
6. Ibid, 64
7. West, “Darwin in the Dock,” in The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2012), 121. West’s volume takes a markedly different view of Lewis and Lewis’s legacy regarding debates about Christianity and evolution. I intend to write a thorough critical review of West’s book in the near future.
8. Ibid
9. A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 210
10. Ibid
11. Ibid
12. Ibid.

This week we feature the third clip from the upcoming documentary “From the Dust”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion, and we feel that this week’s topic, the Fall, is of particular importance for Christians as we think through the ramifications of creation by evolutionary mechanisms.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.

The provided questions are just a few of the discussion questions that go with this transcript, and we'd be happy to send them to you to foster further conversation within your church or small group setting. If you’d like to see the questions, or if you have stories from your own small group discussions about the clip, we would love to hear from you at info@biologos.org.

Editor's Note: The full documentary is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. You can order the film here, and learn more about the project here.

“The Fall” Transcript

Dr. Jeff Schloss: “My friends and colleagues, who have concerns about evolutionary theory for theological reasons, are onto something, and one of them involves the Fall, the nature of the Fall, what it is. Even if it is a metaphor, it is a metaphor for something, and what is that something? And how would we make sense of that something in light of evolutionary theory? The other issue on this has been probably the most serious issue that not only Christians, but all theists who believe in a good and providential God have wrestled with, it is the problem of natural evil.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “The problem of evil is a real problem to religious faith. It was certainly the thing for Darwin himself. That is what made him question his faith, and I think rightly so. It does not look like the sort of system that a good and loving and benevolent God would have set up. Now, obviously that raises huge questions because we don’t see any evidence of a world that was harmonious. We only see evidence of a world that was at war with itself, and that obviously is the problem that Christian theologians face. For a long time I used to believe that the Genesis narratives paint a picture of a world completely at peace, completely harmonious until the human fall, and then something goes wrong. When I began to look at it more closely, I began to think that there is more to it than that. There is evidence from the text that things are already dislocated, already out of joint. For one thing, there is the serpent, and however you interpret the serpent, here is a bit of the created order that is actively talking against God, working against God—so there is already something that has gone wrong. Secondly, there is the command to fill the earth and subdue it. There is the suggestion that something needs to be subdued, something is not quite right that needs to be put right and humans beings are called to do that—to put it right. And thirdly, it is a garden. It is almost as if God has said, ‘Here is a little bit I have done for you, here is a little bit of order and harmony that I have done for you. Now you go and spread that order and that harmony throughout the rest of creation.’ The tragedy is, of course, that human beings don’t do that. Rather than put that right, they make it worse.”

Dr. Alister McGrath: “Clearly Scripture distinguishes humanity from the rest of creation by this idea of the image of God. And that is understood in a number of ways—one of which is relational. Human beings have this God-given capacity to be able to relate to God, which is simply not there for the rest of creation. How do we understand that phrase: the image of God? If we accept the narrative of biological evolution, we have to say that at some point humanity became sufficiently distinguished from the rest of the natural world to be able to have this relationship with God.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “If you have a very finely graded gas tap and you begin to turn it on, initially, there is not enough gas in the air for the gas to ignite. So, you turn it up some more, still nothing, a bit more, still nothing, and a bit more, still nothing. At a particular point, there will be enough gas to air ratio for the thing to ignite. So, you can have a completely smooth, upward development, and yet, you can have something decisive happening at a particular moment. You get an increase in that moral capacity and moral awareness; you get an increase in their relational ability, in their social ability. You get an increase in their tool-making ability. You get an increase in their language. At a particular point there is enough of all that. There is enough relational capacity; there is enough social capacity and moral awareness and spiritual awareness for God to deal with us in a new way: ‘They have enough creativity to reflect the fact that I am the creator. They have enough relational capacity to reflect the fact that I am love. This in some way reflects who I am, and I will stamp my image upon them.’”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “As hominids evolved and became more complex, then self-consciousness, in the sense of projecting our minds into the remote future or past began to dawn in them. And that didn’t bring biological death into the world, because obviously it had been there for millions of years beforehand, but it brought into the world what you might call mortality. Because our ancestors were self-conscious, they knew they were going to die. Because they had turned away from God, they had alienated themselves to the only one who was the ground for the hope of a destiny beyond death. And so, mortality, meaning the sadness, the human sadness at transiency and decay dawned in human life. Another very subtle feature of the Genesis 3 story is that it is a fall upwards as people would sometimes say. It is the gaining of some knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, the story says. And so, the dawning of self-consciousness is also the gaining of something that wasn’t there before. What the serpent whispers in Eve’s ear is, ‘eat this fruit, and you will be like God. You won’t need God anymore. You can do it yourself.’ That is the fundamental sin, the fundamental mistake in human life is believing that we can do it on our own, doing it my way, and spiritual death is to deliberately and persistently cut yourself off from that. It doesn’t occur as an angry God giving you a punishment for not falling into line. It is simply that you have punished yourself. You know, preachers sometimes say that the gates of hell are locked from the inside not to keep the creatures in, but to keep God out. And that, I think in the end, is what spiritual death is if you persist in it. But God is always, I am sure, at work, seeking to draw people back into the divine love. I think that is the work that is necessary to understand what Paul is getting at in Romans 5 when he says that death came into the world through one man. The cost of development is a degree of precariousness. The people need the grace of God if we truly are to live fulfilling lives.”

1. We are a world that longs for goodness and beauty, whether we are believers or not.

2. The data from emerging neuroscience and attachment research points us to a world of goodness and beauty.

3. This same data reflects and energizes the biblical narrative. Creation itself points us to the very story God is telling.

4. One of the most integral processes—that helps us get to truth and beauty—involves the changing (and renewal) of our minds. The renewal of our minds is a subset of the renewal of everything. God is on a mission of complete renewal, albeit on his timetable.

In this mission for renewal, one of the most important aspects is the interpersonal experience of being known. We change primarily not by what we know, but by how we are known. We live in a culture that is really good at knowing things, but not so good at being known.

5. Our first reaction is likely to be, “How will knowing this stuff change me?” But the biblical narrative is not just about us as individuals, it is about a world of mercy and justice. In order for us to have mercy and justice, we don’t do it primarily as individuals, we do it as institutions. God’s renewal is not just about changing us, it is about changing everything.

See part 2 for the second half of Dr. Thompson's presentation

Last time I introduced the idea that a Christocentric theology of creation is one of the hallmarks of Theistic Evolution, and I focused on the idea of the “Crucified God.” But the scientist-theologians who write about TE also think about creation and theodicy in terms of divine “kenosis” and eschatology. So today we’ll conclude our “implications” section by returning to creational theology, and then turn to the ways TEs re-think Adam and Eve in light of human evolution.

Kenosis, theodicy and eschatology

John Polkinghorne and others, citing Philippians 2:7, like to speak about divine “kenosis”, God’s choice to “empty himself” in taking on human form; they apply this also to the act of creating the world in a great work of self-sacrificial love. Although Wikipedia gives much information about the roots of this doctrine in Orthodox and Catholic circles, my knowledge is minimal and I cannot confirm what I find there (though it might all be correct). According to a theologian I once consulted, kenosis in soteriology was discussed by Lutherans in the 17th century (if not perhaps even earlier, by others), but was only extended to theology of creation in recent decades. The most I can say with confidence is this: one of the most striking features of Protestant thought about nature, during and since the Scientific Revolution, is the degree to which it is not Christocentric in the sense we are now discussing. In much Protestant and Evangelical literature devoted to the topic of creation, one often looks in vain even for references to Jesus, let alone to Jesus as the suffering servant through whom the world was made,. Only in the latter part of the 20th century do I find a clear emphasis on the idea that nature is the creation of the God who put aside power and was crucified. If this understanding is correct, then I would say that it’s high time, and let’s get on with it!

TEs (especially Polkinghorne) are also in the forefront of those Christian writers who are linking theodicy inextricably with eschatology. Yet another scientist-theologian, Robert Russell, offers this powerful eschatological vision in Cosmology From Alpha to Omega, drawing on all of the main ideas I’ve presented in this section:

[I]n order to move us beyond mere kenosis to genuine eschatology, I believe that both kenotic theology and eschatology must be structured on a trinitarian doctrine of God. The reason here is simple: it is the trinitarian God who will act to bring about the redemption of all of nature since it is this God who is revealed as God in and through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. A kenotic theodicy (that God suffers voluntarily with the world) in and of itself is not redemptive. Eschatology is required, in which the Father who suffers the death of the Son acts anew at Easter to raise Jesus from the dead. In turn, the involuntary suffering of all of nature--each species and each individual creature--must be taken up into the voluntary suffering of Christ on the cross (theopassionism) and through it the voluntary suffering of the Father (patripassionism).(p. 266)

George MacDonald (source)

Because this series is primarily focused on the history of approaches to understanding Science and the Bible, I will not delve more deeply into these important theological issues, but only direct readers to resources such as these. Still, I close this section with a quotation from George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons, the same passage that C. S. Lewis used in abbreviated form as an epigram for The Problem of Pain:

“the Son of God, who, instead of accepting the sacrifice of one of his creatures to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly unto them, and therein to the Father by doing his lovely will; who suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his, and lead them up to his perfection...”

Adam, the fall, and sin

(5) TEs have to confront questions about human origins that are much easier for OECs or YECs to answer: Did Adam and Eve really exist as historical persons? Was the “fall” an actual historical event? If not, what is the origin of sin?

Michelangelo Buonarroti, “The Fall and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” Cappella Sistina, Vatican (1509-10)

My comments here are much briefer, but I don’t mean to imply that the questions are any less important than the one I’ve just dealt with. Polkinghorne does not hold a traditional view of the fall, but he likes Reinhold Niebuhr’s view “that original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine!” (Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 88) This reminds me of G. K. Chesterton, who famously remarked, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved” (Orthodoxy, chap. 2). In other words, anyone who doubts the idea that we are “fallen” creatures simply needs to look around—that is all the evidence of our strong bent to wickedness that you’ll ever need.

There are ways to finesse the fall and evolution in a quasi-concordistic manner, such as the “headship” model advocated by Denis Alexander. Others reject any appeal to Concordism, stressing the principle of divine accommodation. For example, Denis Lamoureux argues that in the revelatory process the Holy Spirit came down to the level of understanding of the ancient Hebrews and used their ancient conception of de novo creation, in which humans were created quickly and completely. Thus, in Genesis chapters 2 and 3, Adam and Eve are ancient vessels that deliver the inerrant spiritual truths that God created us and that we are sinners.

The views that have received the most attention among evangelicals, however, are probably those of biblical scholar Peter Enns, particularly his new book, The Evolution of Adam. Instead of trying to summarize them myself, I’ll link his discussion of “Mistakes in the Adam/Evolution Discussion”, since it parallels some of the content in the book. Also see his replies to some evangelical scholars who have been critical of the book.

One of the most original and thoughtful proposals I have seen comes from philosopher Robin Collins (for bibliographical information on this and the other works cited in the rest of this column, see below). Collins calls his model the “Historical/Ideal” view, because “the original state described in the Garden story represents an ideal state that was never realized,” showing “what an ideal relation with God would be like.” Adam and Eve represent every person who has ever lived, but they also represent “the first hominids, or group of hominids, who had the capacity for free choice and self-consciousness.” Just as the first hominids made sinful choices, so do we now, and original sin involves “the resulting bondage to sin and spiritual darkness that is inherited from our ancestors and generated by our own choices.” I can’t convey the subtlety and thoroughness of this account in a short space, so those who want to know more will have to read for themselves. Conveniently, Collins provides a link to a “near final version” of his paper on his web site. If someone wants to summarize his arguments in a few paragraphs below, it would be a real service to our “course.”

Problems with historicity

(6) Questions about the historicity of Adam & Eve are underscored by evolution, but they would still come up even if Darwin had never existed and no one had ever proposed that humans and other animals have common ancestors. The Bible places Adam & Eve in a Neolithic world, with cities and agriculture, whereas non-biological scientific evidence shows that humans existed for a very long time before cities or agriculture came into existence.

Read that again. It’s a crucial point. Far too many people believe—erroneously—that evolution is responsible for undermining the historicity of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden. In fact, the relevant science here is almost entirely from anthropology, not biology, and it involves human antiquity, not common ancestry. Since the mid-nineteenth century, evidence has been building that creatures anatomically and behaviorally identical to us have been on this planet for a very long time, far longer than the biblical 6,000 years. We could leave Darwin and evolution entirely out of the picture, and we would still be having a conversation about the historicity of Genesis 2 and 3. The same issues pertain to any OEC scenario. Most proponents of ID can’t duck this, either, even though they get to say “officially” that ID isn’t about the Bible. Because most ID proponents are not YECs, they accept the general validity of the methods used to date rocks and fossils, and so (by implication) this is their problem, too, whether or not it’s acknowledged.

To illustrate my point historically, let me introduce readers to George Frederick Wright (read more here and here). Ronald Numbers, the leading historian of American religion and science, wrote a clear, detailed article about this (see the reference below) that I strongly recommend to anyone who’s interest has been piqued. An influential Congregationalist clergyman and theologian, Wright was mentored by Harvard botanist Asa Gray, served briefly under Thomas C. Chamberlin on the U. S. Geological Survey, and even contributed articles on early humans and the ice age—his specialty—to scientific journals. During the 1870s, he worked closely with Gray to promote what is usually seen as a type of Theistic Evolution. By the early twentieth century, however, he appeared in some of his writings to have almost completely reversed his views on evolution. He even contributed an essay on “The Passing of Evolution” to the famous pamphlets, The Fundamentals, that later gave its name to that movement.

In other writings, however, Wright seemed to remain convinced of evolution, at one point saying that, “it is difficult to resist the conclusion that, so far as his physical organism is concerned, man is genetically connected with the highest order of the Mammalia.” Whatever he really thought about common ancestry—whether he was really a TE, an OEC, or an ID (one could make a good case for each)—the question of human antiquity dogged Wright for decades, as he sought ways to reconcile the genealogies in Genesis with accumulating evidence that humans have existed much longer than 6,000 years. Fortunately for Wright’s Christian faith, which probably hung in the balance, the famous Princeton theologian Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield, together with the conservative biblical scholar William Henry Green, managed to persuade Wright that the Genesis genealogies had plenty of wiggle room. Anyone wanting to see the crucial details should read Green’s paper on “Primeval Chronology” at this point. Note Warfield’s own conclusion (same URL): “There is no reason inherent in the nature of the Scriptural genealogies why a genealogy of ten recorded links, as each of those in Genesis v. and xi. is, may not represent an actual descent of a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand links.”

Can this really be true, without straining the whole idea of historicity? Davis Young’s skepticism seems appropriate here. How far back can we place Adam and Eve and still have contact with the biblical period? In my opinion, a clear and convincing picture of an historical Adam and Eve, reconciling the biblical picture with human antiquity, has not yet been produced, and I am doubtful that we will ever have one. Those who want more information about the possibilities and the difficulties are invited to consult the articles (cited below) by anthropologist James Hurd, evolutionary biologist David Wilcox, and anthropologist Dean Arnold. To the best of my knowledge, Hurd and Wilcox are TEs, while Arnold is an OEC. It’s up to you, my “students,” to consult these sources and place summaries and comments below. I’ve done enough already.

Looking Ahead

In about two weeks, I’ll conclude with a short history of Theistic Evolution. There’s plenty to think about in the interval. Please follow some of these links, borrow some of these books, and add your views to mine.

Citations

Dean Arnold, “How Do Scientific Views on Human Origins Relate to the Bible?” in Not Just Science, edited by Dorothy F. Chappell & E. David Cook (Zondervan, 2005), 129-40.

Robin Collins, “Evolution and Original Sin,” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, edited by Keith B. Miller (Eerdmans, 2003), 469-501.

James P. Hurd, “Hominids in the Garden?” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, 208-33.

Ronald L. Numbers, “George Frederick Wright: From Christian Darwinist to Fundamentalist,” Isis 79 (1988): 624–45.

David Wilcox, “Finding Adam: The Genetics of Human Origins,” in Perspectives on an Evolving Creation, 234-53.

Let me be clear. I do not reject dualism on account of any kind of philosophical or other kind of argument. In fact, I find many arguments against dualism—philosophical and otherwise—to be pretty weak specimens. I’m what a friend calls an antecedent materialist. In other words, I come to the discussion assuming I am a physical object, since that is what I have always seemed to myself to be for as long as I can remember. A non-physical soul doesn’t explain anything about consciousness that cannot be explained without it, and it is furthermore a wholly unnecessary hypothesis for many religious doctrines, despite intuitions to the contrary by many religious believers. For example, belief in an afterlife, belief in the peculiarly Christian idea of the incarnation of Christ, as well as the belief that we human beings bear the image of God—none requires belief in a non-physical soul in order to be made sense of. So until I am confronted with some knock-down, drag-out argument to the contrary, or until I am presented with some phenomena that cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms or, yet again, until I have something resembling a conversion experience that forces me to renounce my physicalism, I'm sticking with it.

To go a bit further, let’s consider several theological doctrines that seem to cut against a physicalist conception of human personhood. These constitute perhaps the three most common objections Christian physicalists receive to their physicalism. After I address these objections, I will say a little more about the content of my own physicalist conception of human persons, The Constitution View. Perhaps in a future post I can say a little bit about the science of consciousness itself and address some of the most common objections to physicalism based on that mysterious phenomenon.

Theological Objections to Physicalism about Humans

The Incarnation of Christ

The doctrine of the incarnation of Christ is a central tenet of Christianity, and it may seem that the doctrine is inconsistent with a physicalist conception of human personhood. Yet I believe a physicalist view of human persons—like my own—actually makes better sense of the incarnation than does dualism. Let me explain.

The putative problem for the physicalist is this: if God (or the second person of the Trinity in particular) is essentially a non-physical being, then how could such a being become purely physical without losing an essential property? And if the second person of the Trinity loses an essential property, then wouldn’t he not simply cease to be fully God but simply cease to exist? (An essential property is a property a thing has and can’t lack without ceasing to exist. For example, my dog has the property of being a canine. He can’t lose that property without ceasing to exist—he is essentially a canine.)

Well, according to the Chalcedonian formulation, the incarnate Christ is one Person with two natures, a fully divine nature (that of the Second Person of the Trinity) and a fully human nature (that of Jesus from Nazareth). The Constitution View I hold divides things just where one would expect—between the human nature and the divine nature of the single person. And keep in mind, by the way, that the person of Christ is not human; he is divine, being the second person of the Trinity. But this one person, in the incarnation, had two natures--human and divine. In this understanding of the dual natures, Christ is wholly non-physical in his divine nature and wholly physical in his human nature. Now consider the somewhat-awkward cleavage Substance Dualists must offer. According to Substance Dualism, Christ is wholly non-physical in his divine nature and partly physical and partly non-physical in his human nature. Not especially elegant. To my mind, far from being unable to accommodate the doctrine of the incarnation, my physicalist view of human persons is actually better able to explain the doctrine than is dualism.

Notice that if what I said above is true, the way this objection is often put contains an important mistake in assuming that the second person of the Trinity ceased to be something he was apart from the incarnation. Indeed, the second person of the Trinity did not become purely physical (or even partly physical!). The second person of the Trinity did not give up non-physicality in the incarnation. Remember: one person (Divine and non-physical) with not one but (in the incarnation) two natures—one non-physical, the other physical. How can that be? I don’t have the slightest idea; but, the mystery of the incarnation is not explained away by any account, be it dualist or physicalist.

The Imago Dei

Now, what of the imago Dei or image of God? If it’s true that we human persons are wholly physical beings—as any version of physicalism must claim—then what does it now mean to say that we have been created in God’s image? Doesn’t having been created in the image of God just mean having a non-physical soul and the features of intellect, will and emotion that characterize soul? I do not believe that our having been created in the image of God means that we are non-physical as God is non-physical. What then does it mean?

Well, there are many ways of understanding the claim that we human beings image God. One might mean that we image God when we care for Creation and contribute to the terrestrial flourishing of the Created order. This, after all, is what the Bible means when it speaks of our having been given “dominion”. We are God’s vice-regents, as it were. To have dominion is to care for others, including non-human “others” like oceans and streams, octopus and salamander; in other words to have dominion is tend to the well being of all the earth. Second, one might mean that we image God when we live in loving relation to other human beings and invest ourselves in their flourishing and well being. For we are essentially persons-in-relation. Since God is a Trinity, it is not surprising that we should image God in virtue of our essentially social nature. The tenor of the relation between the three persons of the trinity is one of a harmonious and free exchange of love and joy. So engaging in acts of mercy, hospitality, love, kindness, etc. is to act like God. In fact, we image God when we image Jesus, who welcomed the outcast, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, hated evil and delighted in doing the work of the Father. Finally, one might claim that we image God in our suffering. God is love. To love is to open oneself up to suffering. And suffering love is God-love.

Now of course none of these ways that I have mentioned that we image God rules out the possibility that we are wholly or partly non-physical beings; but it doesn’t imply it either. The fact that we have been created in the image of God is perfectly compatible with the claim that we are wholly physical beings. Indeed, there is nothing in the doctrine of the imago Dei, rightly understood, that entails a dualist view of human nature.

But even if neither the doctrine of the incarnation nor the doctrine of humanity as reflecting the imago Dei require that we be at least partially non-physical beings, what about the issue of life after death? I’ll address that third challenge to a Christian physicalism tomorrow.

Yet it doesn’t follow that we are mere animals, and our rationality is what sets us apart from the rest of the genus. Indeed, for Aristotle, and for Aquinas after him, rationality is unlike our other capacities in having an essentially immaterial and non-bodily aspect. The reason has to do with our capacity to form abstract concepts, which underlies all our other distinctively rational activities. It is because you can grasp what it is to be a man -- not just this particular man or that one, but any possible man, man as a universal -- that you can go on to form judgments like the judgment that all men are mortal, can reason from that judgment together with the judgment that Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal, and so forth.

There are several arguments that establish that this capacity for abstract thought cannot in principle be reduced to or otherwise entirely explained in terms of brain activity, even if brain activity is part of the story. The arguments have their roots in Plato and Aristotle and have been defended in recent years by Aristotelian philosophers like Mortimer Adler, John Haldane, David Oderberg, and James Ross.¹ Answering the various objections to (and misunderstandings of) these arguments takes some work, but the basic idea can be set out fairly simply.²

Let us take as an example the thought that triangles have three sides. For that thought (or any other) plausibly to be material, it would have to be identifiable with something like a symbol or set of symbols encoded in the brain -- something analogous to the symbols encoded in the electronic circuitry of a computer. But there is no way a thought could be entirely reducible to that sort of thing. For no material symbol could possibly have the determinate or unambiguous content that at least many of our concepts have; and no material symbol could possibly have the universal reference that our concepts have.

Consider the most unambiguous symbol of triangularity there could be -- a picture of a triangle, such as the one to the right. Now, does this picture represent triangles in general? Or only isosceles triangles? Or only small isosceles triangles drawn in black ink? Or does it really even represent triangles in the first place? Why not take it instead to represent a dinner bell, or an arrowhead? There is nothing in the picture itself that can possibly tell you. Nor would any other picture be any better. Any picture would be susceptible of various interpretations, and so too would anything you might add to the picture in order to explain what the original picture was supposed to represent. In particular, there is nothing in the picture in question or in any other picture that entails any determinate, unambiguous content. And even in the best case there is nothing that could make it a representation of triangles in general as opposed to a representation merely of small, black, isosceles triangles specifically. For the picture, like all pictures, has certain particularizing features -- a specific size and location, black lines as opposed to blue or green ones, an isosceles as opposed to scalene or equilateral shape -- that other things do not have.

Now what is true of this “best case” sort of symbol is even more true of linguistic symbols. There is nothing in the word “triangle” that determines that it refers to all triangles or to any triangles at all. Its meaning is entirely conventional; that that particular set of shapes (or the sounds we associate with them) have the significance they do is an accident of the history of the English language. But something similar could be said of any material symbols whatever. Even if we regarded them as somehow having a built-in meaning or content, they would not have the universality or determinate content of our concepts, any more than the physical marks making up the word “triangle” or a picture of a triangle do. But then the having of a concept cannot merely be a matter of having a certain material symbol encoded in the brain, even if that is part of what it involves. Nor can it merely be a matter of having a set of material symbols, or a set of material symbols together with certain causal relations to objects and events in the world beyond the brain. For just as with any picture or set of pictures, any set of material elements will be susceptible in principle of alternative interpretations; while at least in many case, our thoughts are not indeterminate in this way.

We might understand the point by analogy with sentences. If you are going to use the English sentence “Snow is white,” you are typically going to have to express it via some material medium -- ink marks, pixels, sound waves, or what have you. All the same, the meaning of that sentence cannot be accounted for in terms of any of the physical properties of those media. There is nothing in the shapes of the letters that make up the words of the sentence, or the chemistry of the ink in which they are written, or the physics of the compression waves in the air that you generate when uttering them, that makes them refer to snow or to whiteness or indeed to anything at all. A sentence is a seamless unity of the material and the immaterial, and it is created by another seamless unity of the material and immaterial -- a human being.

At this point there will no doubt be those who object that positing ectoplasm or spook stuff is hardly a better explanation of thought than an appeal to brain activity is. And that is quite true. But then, I said nothing about ectoplasm or spook stuff in the first place. When a mathematician points out that it is just muddleheaded to speak of the square root of 25 as if it were a kind of physical object, it would be silly to accuse him of believing that the square root of 25 is made out of ectoplasm or spook stuff. If your picture of reality cannot accommodate numbers alongside physical objects, that is your problem, not his. Mathematics simply provides a powerful example of a body of truths that cannot be captured in the language of physics, chemistry, neuroscience, and the like.

Similarly, to point out that whatever a thought is, it cannot in principle be reduced to the physical properties of brain activity, is simply to provide another example of an aspect of reality that cannot be entirely captured in such language. Only if we assume that all of reality must be so captured will this sound odd, but that we should not assume this is, of course, precisely the point. And if we do assume it, we are doing so in the face of the evidence, and not on the basis of the evidence. For it is precisely what we know about thought from our everyday familiarity with it -- such as the fact that it sometimes has a determinate content, and a universal reference -- that tells us that it cannot be entirely material, just as it is what we know about numbers from our everyday familiarity with them that tells us that they cannot be physical objects.

But doesn’t neuroscience show that there is a tight correlation between our thoughts and brain activity? It does indeed. So what? If you smudge the ink you’ve used to write out a sentence or muffle the sounds you make when you speak it, it may be difficult or impossible for the reader or listener to grasp its meaning. It does not follow that the meaning is reducible to the physical or chemical properties of the sentence. Similarly, the fact that brain damage will seriously impair a person’s capacity for thought does not entail that his thoughts are entirely explicable in terms of brain activity.

Aristotle and Aquinas, though they regarded the human intellect as immaterial, would not have been surprised in the least by the findings of modern neuroscience. Indeed, they would have been surprised had neuroscience not turned up the correlations it has. This will sound surprising if you take Descartes as your paradigm of a philosopher who affirms the immateriality of the human mind. But defending Descartes is exactly the reverse of what I have been doing. For it was Descartes who substituted the real, concrete human being -- a seamless unity of the physical and the mental, the bodily and the immaterial -- with a bizarre patchwork of abstractions of his own devising. Materialists have followed him ever since. Materialism is just a riff on Cartesianism, not its opposite. Tomorrow, I’ll explain exactly what I mean.

Notes

1. See Mortimer Adler, Intellect: Mind Over Matter (New York: Collier Books, 1990); J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 96-109; David S. Oderberg, “Hylemorphic Dualism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2005); and James Ross, “Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992).
2. I provide an exposition and defense of such arguments in chapter 7 of my book Philosophy of Mind and chapter 4 of my book Aquinas. An especially detailed exposition and defense can be found in my article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” forthcoming in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.

What Is at Stake?

What does it mean to be human? In what ways, if any, is our essential humanity tied to body and soul, mind and brain? This is not the stuff of mere curiosity. A host of pressing issues are at stake:

• Is there anything about humans that our mechanical creations, our innovations in Artificial Intelligence, will be unable to duplicate?
• What view of the human person helps us to find what we want to know about ourselves theologically — about sin, for example, as well as moral responsibility, repentance, and growth in grace?
• Am I free to do what I want? Given what we have learned about brain functioning, how might we understand the “free” in “free will”?
• What portrait of the human person is capable of casting a canopy of sacred worth over human beings, so that we have what is necessary for discourse concerning morality and for ethical practices?
• If humans, like sheep, can be cloned, will the resulting life form be a “person”?
• How should we understand “salvation”? Does salvation entail a denial of the world and embodied life, focusing instead on my “inner person” and on the life to come?
• How ought the church to be extending itself in mission? Mission to what? The spiritual or soulish needs of persons? Society-at-large? The cosmos?
• What happens when we die? What view(s) of the human person is consistent with Christian belief in life-after-death?

For many, and not least for many Christians, what makes a human genuinely human is the identification of the human person with his or her soul. From the second century on, theologians debated the origin of the soul: Are souls created by God ex nihilo at the moment of their infusion into the body? Are body and soul formed together? Are souls preexistent? Indeed, in the late-second century it was clear to many, as the Letter to Diognetus puts it, that “the soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body” (1.27). Traditionally, systematic theology has discussed the uniqueness of humanity in two theological loci: human creation in the divine image and the human possession of a soul. Often these two are reduced to one, with the soul understood as the particular consequence of creation in God’s image.

For persons of faith — Christians included, but many others besides — the idea of a soul separable from the body is not only intuitive but necessary. We have regularly appealed to the soul as proof that humans are not mere animals, and so as a foundation for our views of the sacredness of human life. Moreover, Christians generally have derived from belief in the existence of the soul their affirmation of the human capacity to choose between good and ill. Further, the existence of a nonphysical soul, distinct and separable from the body, is typically regarded as the means by which human identity can cross over the bridge from this life to the next. Indeed, traditional Christian thought has tended to regard the body as frail and finite, the soul as immortal.

But it is the human possession of a “soul” that science now questions. When, as neurobiology and evolutionary psychology increasingly urge, the attributes and capacities traditionally allocated to the human soul are conditioned at point after point by biological processes, on what basis can belief in a soul be maintained? If science is generating “a radically new understanding of what it means to be human,”³ then those of us in the church must prepare ourselves for searching questions about the propriety of Scripture and traditional Christian thought in our talk about humanity, salvation, the end time, and more.

Before we engage too much in worried hand-wringing, however, we should ask whether our situation is so dire. Do these innovations in our understanding of personhood in fact call into question our deepest beliefs as Christians? Interdisciplinary study — with contributions from neuroscience, but also from biblical studies, theological studies, ethics, and philosophy (see “Further Reading,” below) — are demonstrating that emerging scientific portraits of the human person are neither as novel as we might imagine, nor as threatening to the essential tenets of Christian faith.

Biblical Contributions

In the context of current discussion on the nature of the human person, the Christian Scriptures have two primary contributions. First, taken as a whole, the biblical witness is fully congruent with a view of the person that affirms the human being as bio-psycho-spiritual unity. Neurobiological evidence and/or philosophical arguments favoring some form of monism are not at all hostile to the witness of Scripture. Second, we must recognize that the Old and New Testaments do not define the human person in essentialist but above all in relational terms. Put differently, the Bible’s witness to the nature of human life is at once naive and profound. It is naive not in the sense of gullibility or primitiveness, but because it has not worked out in what we may regard as a philosophically satisfying way the nature of embodied existence in life, death, and afterlife. It is profound in its presentation of the human person fundamentally in relational terms, and its assessment of the human being as genuinely human and alive only within the family of humans brought into being by Yahweh and in relation to the God who gives life-giving breath. This non-negotiable biblical insight is being recovered by some scientists today — e.g., by J. Polkinghorne and W.S. Brown, each of whom has urged that the notion of “soul” be recast in relational terms.⁴

We can press further. First, Scripture outlines a series of qualities of the human person that contrast sharply with the “modern self” derived from dualistic portraits. In his Sources of the Self, C. Taylor finds that, for modern folk, personal identity has come to be shaped by such assumptions as self-sufficiency, self-determination, and self-referentiality (“I am who I am”); that persons have an inner self, which is the authentic self; and that self-autonomy and self-legislation are basic to authentic personhood (Harvard University Press, 1989). Without majoring on the notion of a metaphysical entity of the “soul,” Taylor’s analysis nonetheless intimates how modern, personal identity has been cultivated in the garden of anthropological dualism.

In Scripture, however, we find such emphases as the following: the construction of the self as deeply embedded in social relationships and thus the importance of dependence/interdependence for human identity; a premium on the integrity of the community and thus the contribution of individuals to that integrity; the assumption that a person is one’s behavior; an emphasis on external authority — that is, the call to holiness is a call to a human vocation drawn from a vision of Yahweh’s “difference”; and the reality of dualism vis-à-vis good/evil, resident in and manifest both outside and inside a person. The line from a substance dualism that locates personal essence in the “soul” to this vision of personal identity is not easily drawn.

The point is that the construction of personal identity that pervades modernity is at odds with biblical anthropology at almost every turn, while the witness of Scripture and the findings of neuroscience are converging at significant points.

Second, negatively, we err when we imagine that it is the “soul” that distinguishes humanity from non-human creatures. Aristotle is closer to the biblical tradition in his view that the soul is that in virtue of which an organism is alive (On the Soul 2.1 §§412a-413a10). Given this conceptualization, there is no particular reason to limit the idea of “soul” to the human person. Within the Old Testament, “soul” (Hebrew: nepheš) refers to life and vitality — not life in general, but life as instantiated in human persons and animals. Nepheš is not a thing to have but a way to be. To speak of loving God with all of one’s “soul,” then, is to elevate the intensity of involvement of one’s whole being. Accordingly, the Common English Bible gets it right when it translates “the first and greatest commandment” in this way: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). Morever, in the creation accounts of Genesis 1-2, the Hebrew term used of human beings in 2:7, nepheš, is also used with reference to all sorts of wildlife, to everything “in which there is life (nepheš)” (1:30). This demonstrates incontrovertibly that “soul” (nepheš) is not, under this accounting, a unique characteristic of the human person. Accordingly, one might better translate Genesis 2:7 with reference to the divine gift of life: “the human being became a living person” — or, to quote again from the Common English Bible: “The human came to life.”

Third, thinking still of Genesis 2, it is instructive that the same texts that are silent on the infusion of a human soul into a dust-created body nevertheless distinguish by their use of the term nepheš between a being that has life and lifelessness. This speaks against any dualism that deprecates the body in favor of the soul and against any conceptualization of disembodied human existence in this life or the next. It also contravenes the widely held view that the quality of human life is vested in some thing or quality intrinsic to the individual person and that, in order to speak meaningfully of an afterlife, this “thing” must survive death. The soul does not distinguish human life as human or of particular value, but the graciousness of God does. Scripture situates the human family within the grand narrative of God’s doing; this narrative places a premium on human relatedness to God, humanity, and the cosmos because it is determined by God’s own character; and it is precisely within this narrative that the human creature draws both its value and its reason for being.

Hence, from a vantage point within the biblical narrative, avenues determined by autonomous individualism, interior psychic and/or mental processes, or the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells are mistaken, however well-worn they may have become. Although each of these accounts might appear to support a workable portrait of the human person and of human health, none of these carry us far in our concern to address our deepest human questions about what it means to be fully human.

What does it mean to be human? From a perspective within the biblical narrative, the way forward is marked by an account that rejects the necessity of a separate, metaphysical entity such as a soul to account for human capacities and distinctives; that underscores the material location of the human person in relation to the created order; that refuses to reduce personal identity to our neural equipment but rather emphasizes the personal contribution and relatedness of human beings to the human family and the cosmos; and thus that has as its primary point of beginning and orientation the human in a partnering relationship with God.

Further Reading

• W.S. Brown et al., eds., Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Fortress, 1998)
• J.B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008)
• J.B. Green, ed., What about the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology (Abingdon, 2004)
• M.A. Jeeves, ed., Rethinking Human Nature: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Eerdmans, 2011).

Notes

1. P. Churchland, Brain-Wise. MIT Press, 2002: 2
2. S. Blakeselee, “Humanity? Maybe It’s All in the Wiring,” New York Times, 9 December 2003, F1
3. T. Metzinger, “Consciousness Research at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. ed. T. Metzinger; MIT Press, 2000: p. 6
4. See J. Polkinghorne, “Eschatology: Some Questions and Some Insights from Science,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God. ed. J. Polkinghorne and M. Welker. Trinity Press International, 2000: 29-41 and W. S. Brown, “Cognitive Contributions to Soul,” in Whatever Happened to the Soul? ed. W.S. Brown et al.; Fortress, 1998: 99-125.

I am glad to have the opportunity to dialogue with Dr. John Hammett. In addition to our shared Christian faith and our shared lack of expertise in evolutionary science, we have in common one of our teaching and scholarly foci: the nature of human persons. Dr. Hammett approaches this topic as a trained theologian, whereas I approach it as a philosopher. However, on a topic such as this one, those disciplinary boundaries can get smudged a bit when the discussants approach the matter from the standpoint of a biblically-rooted Christian faith. Indeed the issue is of such importance and complexity that I would welcome continued conversation with Dr. Hammett beyond this initial exchange.

The Christian Scriptures teach that we human beings have been created in God’s image. What does that mean? I am in substantial agreement with Dr. Hammett on this question. While I think that bearing God’s image involves our having or having a potentiality for certain basic psychological capacities that we associate with the term “person”, it has to do even more profoundly with our specific capacity for relationship with God. Indeed, I would go further and say that it is not just our having this capacity that makes us divine ikons, it is also the fact that God has activated this capacity—He has given the precious gift of His self-disclosure to us. Further still, it has an eschatological dimension, based on the revealed promise of a future development and perfection of each of us, and so by implication, of human nature itself, by almighty God. We are in the process of becoming fully human: beyond a descriptive biological or even psychological notion of human nature lies a teleological one—not a telos of nature but of God's loving purposes for us. Despite our unequally born deficits—physical, cognitive, emotional, and moral/spiritual—we are destined for a fuller, supernatural realization of our common nature.

That we are in these ways God’s image bearers is a (wonderful!) teaching of our faith. The Scriptures also speak in various places of the human “soul.” The idea of the soul seems clearly connected to the idea that we are divine ikons. But here we should tread carefully. It is of course not unique to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures to use some such singular term to refer to that which is most distinctively human and that by virtue of which we are able to survive the death and decay of our bodies. But it is one thing to use the term as a kind of placeholder for whatever it is about us that enables us to be, feel, and act in distinctively human ways in this life and to survive death into the next; it is another thing to link the term to a specific metaphysical account of the matter, such as might say whether the soul is a kind of thing or substance, what kind of thing it is, and exactly how “it” relates to the human “body.”

It is (and always has been) very common for Christians to invest the term “soul” as it used in Scripture with such a metaphysical account. As these fellow Christians understand it, when the Bible speaks of my soul, it is referring to an immaterial substance that is, in the final analysis, the thing that I am. I have my body (by interacting directly with it and only with it among physical objects), but I am my soul. Many will add that, after my death and prior to the resurrection of the dead, I will exist in a completely disembodied state—a naked soul, as it were.

However, I believe it is a mistake to interpret Scripture as teaching or implying any such metaphysical account of the underpinnings of our distinctively human personal attributes or our capacity for surviving death. Now, after reflecting on the matter, we might conclude that the only way these Scriptural teachings could be true is for such a metaphysical account to be true, as well—an account in which we are immaterial substances, entirely separate from our bodies. Indeed, many have thought hard about it and have drawn just such a conclusion, and it is not hard to see why they find it tempting to do so. But to do so is to make a disputable philosophical inference; it is not a teaching of the faith.

The general perspective of BioLogos, which I embrace, is that theorizing about the underlying nature of the soul is best done by trying to read God’s Two Books (His Word and His Works) in tandem. Both Books have a great deal to say about us, and, as common products of an infinitely wise and loving Creator, what they say must ultimately be in harmony. As with any attempt to understand something deep and wondrous in God’s Creation, we should proceed with humility and carefulness and be prepared to rethink familiar and received ideas.

Spelling it out just a bit, the common Christian understanding of what it is to have a soul involves the yoking of two radically different things, a functioning human (wholly material) body and an immaterial mental thing that is the direct bearer of psychological properties such as self-awareness, emotions, and thoughts, and is that which chooses in accordance with desires and purposes. In short, a complex biological machine and a pure subject/purposive agent which interface in the brain. I want to acknowledge that this is a very natural perspective to have, quite apart from Christian revelation (hence its popularity among humans generally). It is very natural because our psychological abilities seem, introspectively, to be plainly something more than mere resultants of impersonal physical particle interactions, however numerous and complex these are within the human brain.

We can design highly sophisticated computers that process complex bodies of information with extraordinary speed, but no computer is a subject, or has a point of view. As philosophers of mind like to say, there is nothing “it is like” to be a computer in the way that there is something “it is like” to be a conscious subject. Put another way, no mere computer is a conscious, experiencing subject, having a point of view from which it regards and interacts with its environment. Neither do computers make autonomous choices in the face of competing moral and self-interested motivations, and so on. It seems but a short step from this observation to the conclusion that human persons (and thinking/desiring/choosing things more generally) must be fundamentally different sorts of things: fundamentally distinct capacities must reside in fundamentally distinct kinds of substances (mental and spiritual substances as opposed to physical substances, however complex).

I have just described how matters appear from the ‘first-person perspective’ of conscious experience and self-awareness. Let me be clear that I take such evidence very seriously: I know my own conscious thoughts and experiences better than I know any scientific theory,—even a very well-attested one—as all of our theories are at bottom built on information we derive from our experiences. So awareness of the distinctive character of conscious experience is part of what is given to us in the Book of God’s Works, since we are a part of that Book.

But alongside that ‘first-person’ data, we have had an explosion of relevant information coming from the ‘third-person’ perspective of the natural sciences, specifically evolutionary and developmental biology and cognitive neuroscience. This information, while still incomplete and only imperfectly understood, sheds light on the deep natural history of humans and present-day animals; the processes by which individual organisms of any species develop from inception to maturity; function-specific neural structures and processes that sustain and help regulate the unfolding first-person perspective of conscious agents; and finally, observed correlations between increasing complexity of neural structures and increased psychological complexity. This last correlation between structural and cognitive complexity is evident both when examining individuals as they develop, and when making comparisons across sentient species.

I suggest that this third-personal scientific information does not comport well with the two-substance or dualist metaphysical account of human persons. The fundamental problem is that our sciences point to continuous processes of increasing complexity, but the two-substance account requires the supposition of abrupt discontinuity. The “coming to be” at a particular point in time of a new substance with a suite of novel psychological capacities would seem to be a highly discontinuous development, both in large-scale bio-geological time and within the development of individual organisms.

Since souls as purely immaterial things would lack parts, we cannot make sense of the accumulation or diminishment of capacities by proposing increased or decreased structural complexity within the bearer of such capacities. And it just seems implausible to suppose that all the necessary basic capacities for, say, calculus problem-solving are there in the soul from the beginning, awaiting only physical maturation in the body in order to become activated, but still not directly dependent on that maturation. It seems rather that psychological capacities arise and develop in tandem with the development of the brain and nervous system.

Of course, it is possible for the soul-body dualist to retrench: we might offload to the brain ‘side’ of the divide some of the psychological functioning that, prior to the advent of neuroscience, we might have mistakenly thought belonged to the soul. But that tack risks (as neuroscience progresses) reducing the soul to a simple, immaterial object that is radically incomplete, merely a “bearer of consciousness” that enables personal identity over time and through death.

Despite the fact that such future retrenchment would seem to be required, this kind of dualism remains tempting for the Christian thinker. Why? The obvious answer is that it can seem to be the only way to accommodate our specifically Christian data that human beings are not mere machines: our thoughts, emotions, goals, and intentions are deep, not superficial features of ourselves; they confer a dignity upon us that makes us suitable bearers of the divine image such that human beings, after our skin has been destroyed, will yet see God. (Job 19:26). But is it true that the coherence of Christian theology requires this account? And if coherence of Christian theology does not require this account, which account might be the best one?

Tomorrow, in Part 2, I will address this question.

I’d like to suggest that this argument is in significant ways misplaced. The participants in this debate all seem to agree that what makes us “human” can be defined by genes and population studies. There is a pressing need for them to conform theology to population genetics, or to conform population genetics to theology, because the story of our genes is implicitly equated with the story of what it means to be “human.” The hypothesis that there was a “first human” – a capital-A “Adam” – can be tested in our genes.

But “genes” do not make us “human.” What makes us “human” is the irreducible phenomena of all of our material and immaterial being as persons.

Nothing we observe in the universe is flat. By “flat” I mean having only one aspect or “layer.” Consider, for example, an apple. What is it? Is it the fruit of an apple tree? The seed-carrier – the potentiality – of new apple trees? Beautiful and delicious? Skin, flesh, and core? Water and organic molecules? Caloric energy and roughage? Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon? Physical laws? All of these things comprise some of what we mean by “apple,” but none of them are what an “apple” is. The reality that is “apple” cannot be reduced to any one of its aspects or layers.

It is possible to think of these aspects or layers hierarchically, with “higher” layers that emerge from “lower” ones. Physical laws emerge from quantum probabilities; molecules emerge from physical laws; seeds, skin, flesh and core emerge from complex arrangements of molecules; beauty and delight emerge from the connection of skin, flesh and core to human sense perception;¹ “apple” emerges from all of this (and more) combined with the human cultural experience of this thing we call “apple.”

Notice that some “layers” can impinge or “supervene” on lower ones – for example, human sense perception and cultural experience do something to this thing confronting the subject in order for it to become “apple.” But notice also that “apple” is not merely a cultural construction. The word or signifier “apple,” of course, could be arbitrary, but there is an objective reality to the thing signified. The layer of human sense perception and cultural experience supervenes upon, but does not create, the lower-order reality from which it emerges.

Sociologist Christian Smith draws these strands together in a critical realist framework in his excellent book What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. In a critically realist approach to culture and human personhood, Smith suggests, “[h]uman beings do have an identifiable nature that is rooted in the natural world, although the character of human nature is such that it gives rise to capacities to construct variable meanings and identities….” Culture is a social construction, but it is not merely a social construction. Human beings are social, but they are not subsumed by the social. The reality we inhabit is “stratified”: it includes both the reality of individual conscious human agents and the reality of the social structures that emerge from the cultures created by those agents. These “personal” and “cultural” layers of the world interact with each other dynamically, each continually informing and changing the other.

Smith’s approach is helpful, but perhaps it does not go far enough. For Smith, as for critical realists in general, the phenomena of human culture remain subject to some degree of granular disaggregation, at least analytically. A phenomenological approach suggests that no “thing” can be broken into components and still comprise that “thing” – the genes that encode for apple trees are not apple seeds, apple seeds are not apple trees, and apple trees are not apples. The critical realist framework of stratification, emergence, and supervenience functions as a very useful heuristic device, but to describe what an apple is, we must approach the phenomenon of “apple” in its fullness. To know whether something falls into the kind “apple,” we must hold an ideal of everything an apple is, and compare the subject to the ideal.

And because of the transcendence of the ideal concept of “apple,” we can begin to speak of the relative excellence of particular instantiations of apples. What is an “excellent” apple? What distinguishes the excellent apple from a poor one? We can only ask such questions if “apple” means something more than the particular physical specimen in hand, whether firm, sweet and tart, or bruised and sour.

The same is true of human “persons.” We can say almost nothing about a “person” merely by observing genes, because genes are not “persons.” Populations genetics studies can provide models of the dispersion of genes through groups of biological entities, but they can tell us nothing whatsoever about when the first “human person” emerged. Indeed, for population genetics qua population genetics, there simply are no “persons” – for this is a science of the movement of genes, not a philosophical, sociological, or theological description of “persons.”

So what of “Adam?” It is often suggested that in Romans 5:12 Adam is a type of Christ. But, in fact, in Paul’s thought, as well as for the early Church Fathers, Christ is the type, the typos, a notion derived from the “stamp” or “seal” on an official document. There is a hint in Romans 5 of a truth that would only become clarified later in Christian theology – that the pre-incarnate Christ, the second person of the Trinity, always was. Whereas Arius declared that “there was a time when he [Christ] was not,” Nicea established the orthodox Christology of Christ’s eternal sonship. Thus Christ is and was the Redeemer, the one for whom creation was made and in whose death and resurrection creation always finds its fulfillment. Adam’s failure was that he went against type – he did not conform to Christ but rather tried to become something else, and thereby the true nature of humanity was broken.

Is the typos of Christ reducible to a set of genes? Surely not. It resides not in genes or in any other created thing but rather in the Triune life of God Himself. We might speak, in a roughly analogical way, of ideas we hold in our minds – say, the idea of a perfect Bordeaux, ruby-red, silky, smoky, plummy, luxurious. We could labor to instantiate that idea, combining genes and terroir and water and light and care, and perhaps we might achieve it, to the point where upon taking a sip we exclaim, “this – this – is Bordeaux. Nothing else is worthy of that name.”

This is what God said of Adam, when he gave him breath and a name. It is not something that God said of any other creature, even apparently some creatures that a modern population geneticist or paleoanthropologist might designate as ancestrally human based on genes or bones. Yet that Adam, and each of us in that Adam, fail to participate fully and unreservedly in the true nature of the true human, the nature of Christ. And so Pontius Pilot, an unwitting prophet, said of Christ: “behold, the man” (John 19:5, KJV). And so also Paul invites us to see: the sinful man, the broken seal, the first created Adam; and the true type, the seal of humanity’s future, the perfect Adam, the Christ. None of this is about the definitions and categories of modern science, as helpful and important as they may be for the progress of scientific thought. It is, rather, about the fullness of what it means to be human.

Notes

1. Human sense perception, of course, is an emergent property of an even more complex set of relations that give rise to the human “person.”

The song entitled “The Fall” by Gungor is from the artists’ latest album Ghosts Upon the Earth. The lyrics begin by painting a picture of the Fall as something in which each person has participated as indicated by the assertion that “the fruit (of the Fall of man) is seen in every eye and every hand.” After reflecting on the words, consider the discussion questions below.

“The Fall” by Gungor

The Fall, the Fall, Oh God, the Fall of man,
The fruit is found in every eye and every hand,
Nothing, there is nothing yet in truest form,
We walk like ghosts upon the Earth,
The ground it groans.

How long? How long will you wait?
How long? How long till you save us all, save us all?

Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.
Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.

The light, the light, the morning light is gone,
And all that is left is fragile breath and failing lungs.
The night, the night, the guiding night has come,
Uniting lover with his bride more precious than the dawn.

How long? How long must we wait?

Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.
Turn your face to me; turn your face to me.

Questions

1. By focusing only on the Fall as a historical event, have we consciously or unconsciously simplified it—almost removing ourselves from the story?

2. Besides Genesis 3, what other Scripture has inspired the opening lines of this song? Does the feeling evoked by these opening lines personalize that passage for you?

3. Have you ever felt: “the light, the light, the morning light is gone?” Have you experienced night as “guiding?” Who is the lover? What Scripture informs these lines?

4. Have you ever asked, “How long? How long?” Have you heard the answer, “Turn your face to me. Turn your face to me?”

5. Do you agree that the story of Adam and Eve is your story, except for one important difference? What is that difference for you?

Michael Gungor has also served as a pastor at the Bloom Church in Denver, Colorado. Below we post an excerpt from a sermon he has given on his own personal journey and his views about science and Scripture.

(To hear the entire sermon go to this link and scroll to sermon of March 8, 2009—“What Can We Learn About Jesus from Science?”)

Humanity is marked by the biological capacity for musicality. Every known culture has something like music. Understanding how we experience and create music in the present gives us clues to why and how music emerged as one of the defining features of human culture (and, therefore, of humanness itself) in the past. But thinking carefully about music and evolution can also help us reassess how we use music now: in the wider culture, collectively as the church, and even within our own homes. In a nutshell, then, this essay will examine how views on evolution impact how one assesses music’s effects and meaning. In many cases, problematic views about evolution and artistic creativity result in problematic views about music, but my argument is that an appropriate evolutionary view of music—one that looks at how music becomes meaningful within social relationships—is a view that actually enriches our appreciation of this most human endeavor, rather than trivializing it. In this first part I explore common discourses about the meaning of music and their relationship to ideas of creation. In part two next week, I suggest that understanding the role that music played in our biocultural evolution helps correct some of the myths that have made their way into popular discourse, especially with the growing popularity of trying to understand music via neuroscience.

Let’s begin by looking at a couple of popular ways of answering the question, “Where does musical meaning come from?” beginning with the idea that “music is in the ear of the beholder.” One thing that is clear from years of teaching classes of first-year university students is that they are musical relativists. They have ‘their’ music that they enjoy and even use to demark their identities, but are perfectly willing to allow others to like other music. After all, music is all about enjoyment, right? Historically, this cultural trope developed out of the post-Kantian argument of musical autonomy, the often-fashionable argument that music’s meaning is strictly musical and does not relate to other parts of the world. It is also reflected in Steven Pinker’s argument that music is ‘auditory cheesecake’. For Pinker, music used to be useful for things like attracting mates, but now we have evolved out of needing music: it’s not necessary, but is a nice extra. I might like cheesecake, but you might prefer ice cream. Either way, it won’t change the survival of the species, so we can enjoy what we like. This argument may have a harder time standing up when music is used as a means of torture at Guantanamo Bay, but it remains popular none-the-less. Like many ideas of creation and the arts, the idea of music as primarily pleasure (determined by individual taste) is a post-Enlightenment development.

This musical relativism takes a slightly more exacting form in another popular idea, that meaning is embedded within the ‘music itself’ not in the taste of the listener. This view of meaning is the starting point of Plato and Aristotle’s disagreement about the effect of certain modes, the disagreements in the early church about the usage of certain musical instruments, and the arguments of the detrimental moral impact of certain forms of popular music (which, by the way, is an argument not just limited to the 20th or now 21st centuries). It is also the foundation of the statement from one of my former conductors that if we played well enough, we would summon up the ‘spirit of Haydn’. In other words, ‘proper’ participation can reveal the meaning of the work—be that the composer’s meaning or another idealized meaning.

Musical autonomy in this case refers to the view that music stands apart and has no relations or meaning outside of itself. Many philosophers and musicologists rely on this view in an unreflective way, represented by Peter Kivy’s statement that music “is a quasi-syntactical structure of sound understandable solely in musical terms and having no semantic or representational content, no meaning, and making no reference to anything beyond itself”¹. For Kivy, the heart of the autonomy argument is that music is completely self-contained. Such a view is possible because of the historical development of ‘absolute music’, referring to music without a text or narrative, typified by the development of the symphonic form in the late 18th century. It is no accident that between 1750-1850, the form of the symphony developed, Kant theorized the idea of genius, and Schopenhauer claimed music to be “pure will.” In the 19th century, music came to be considered the highest of the arts, and even at the turn of the 20th century Kandinsky claimed that all art should try to achieve the autonomy and abstraction of music.

The idea of musical meaning somehow residing within the musical work is based on an assumption that the more one can isolate and analyze something, the more can be known about it. We can certainly learn much about a rock or plant by isolating it and putting it under a microscope, and those who take music to be autonomous believe that music can also be known most thoroughly by placing it ‘under the microscope’ through close analysis of a score or recording, or through close listening. It is through such pseudo-scientific analytical acts that knowledge about music is thought to be accessed. This is also the guiding ideology of ‘music appreciation.’ But while much can be gained by close examination of rocks or music, much more can be gained by studying how a rock or (especially) music is used by people—a central point to which we will return.

It is more than a little ironic, then, that a further example of the belief in an intrinsic musical meaning is the argument that music is ‘universal’; that is, that at least some music can cross cultural barriers and mean the same thing to all people. Often this view assumes a primacy of the Western canon, as it is believed that Mozart has a universal meaning but Chinese qin (zither) music does not. In a globalized world where many cultures listen to and value Mozart, people who do not share a common language or view of the world may find Mozart a common point of contact. But finding Mozart a point of contact is not caused by the music having a universal meaning. Rather, it is an example of the way music can become a shared space where people enter into a relationship via art. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a project of Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said) is an example of music being a common ground where people from different views of the world can connect, not an example of universalized meanings of music.

Indeed, there are many situations when music’s meanings are not shared, showing that meaning is most definitely not universal. Martin Lodge recounts the encounter of Dutch explorers and the Maori people of New Zealand in 1642. When the parties got close enough to see (and hear) each other, each group signalled with trumpets. The Dutch, thinking they were successful in making contact, sent a boat of unarmed sailors to shore. The boat was met by Maori warriors who killed more than half of the sailors. This misunderstanding was caused by not sharing a musical meaning: “The Maori trumpeting in this case was the music of war, an invitation to fight. On the other hand the Dutch trumpets played a variety of tunes intended to be welcoming.”² Musical meanings are often shared, but are not universal or ‘in the music’.

As we have begun to see, considering music as culturally embedded lets us recognize something quite different from the arguments that musical meaning is either subjective or encoded within the music itself. Music does allow for subjective response, but not truly autonomous response—our experience of music occurs within the bounds of cultural norms. Since music’s significance cannot be abstracted from it’s embeddedness within social relationships, an attention to culture and human intentionality (not just a reductionist sense of biology) must inform the ways that music is studied, whether in contemporary culture, in neuroscience, and with reference to human evolution. Unfortunately even many Christian views of music have relied upon some of these problematic views of musical meaning, aligning ideas like individual artistic genius and the “meaning in the music” concept with theologies of creation ex nihilo. As Bruce Ellis Benson discusses in an essay in the journal Verge (and in a shortened version here at BioLogos), this combination or paralleling of genius and ex nihilo creation complicates the church’s understanding not only of music, but also about the Creator God, downplaying the essential element of community and interpersonal relationship inherent to both.

Next week, we’ll look at a similar tendency to abstract and quantify the way music makes meaning in the burgeoning field of neuroscience (from the “Mozart Effect” to fMRI scans), and return to the way that thinking about music within the evolution of human culture might give us a deeper appreciation of music—even of worship—within the church. In the meantime, here are some questions to consider:

How do my own assumptions of the way music is meaningful affect the ways I conceive of and use music?

Are there negative consequences stemming from these assumptions?

How have problematic views of musical meaning affected the use of music as personal identity? Or in the church? Or in the media? Or in popularized science?

Notes

1. Kivy, Peter (1990) Music Alone (Cornell University Press: Ithica, NY): p. 202.

2. Lodge, Martin (2009) 'Music Historiography in New Zealand' in ed. Zdravko Blazekovic, Music's Intellectual History (RILM: New York): p. 627.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

Video transcript

I think there are sometimes a couple of biblical images we struggle to lay hold of. In the New Testament we find when we talk about life, we have the idea of living or ‘bios’. In other words, we talk about how we are alive. But Jesus talks about the fact of “coming to life “ when we know him. That doesn’t suddenly mean that our heart starts beating. It means that there is this whole side to us which was dead… which wasn’t alive and is now… that has actually sprung to life. And we run into complications maybe if we reduce all of these things into exactly the same categories. Now you can have the same issues with ‘death’ too. That word is used in many ways, and different words are used to try and signify various different things.

Now what is interesting is that if you go back into the Genesis account, it says “now do not eat this [apple] or you will surely die”. There is a whole chain of events that happens when Adam and Eve decide they want to walk away from God. The first thing that happens is that they cover themselves up. There’s like a psychological alienation that comes. They are no longer happy with the way they are. The next thing that happens is God steps into the garden, they run and hide. There is spiritual alienation. The voice that was once welcoming where they went, they now find themselves cut off from that. Then there is a social alienation that comes as a result of turning away from God. They start blaming each other. There is a vocational alienation that comes as a result of, of course, judgment. That which was meant to be home for them, all work become labor, and we could keep going.

So when we talk about “death” the picture, to me, seems to be much bigger, much fuller. I can’t think of a more comprehensive view of possibly what it could mean. And so I think we need to again break away from a straight forward, in fact, mechanistic understanding. In no way do I think that impoverishes either or understanding of the gospel or of the cross. As a matter of fact, it enhances it. It makes the work of the cross even more incredible and it makes the idea that God is looking for redemption from us more complete. We are not talking simply about the idea of physically living forever because that’s clearly not what it means. We know that we are going to physically die. All of us. But when you think about it in terms of what that means psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, socially, vocationally and so on it becomes a huge picture. The text is teaching us something which is real, which is true, which is there. I think we just need a bigger more sophisticated handling of the text, than a reductionist one that I think actually impoverishes or understanding of The Fall, the cross, redemption, the ‘coming again’ and so on.

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Rev. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Click above to hear an excerpt. Below, is a brief summary written by BioLogos editorial staff. The full sermon, which we highly recommend can be purchased from Redeemer’s sermon store. Finally, if you know a sermon or podcast related to science and faith that has especially spoken to you, please let us know.

In tracing the fluid storyline of the Bible, Dr. Keller has first focused on the early chapters of Genesis, emphasizing both the ordained purpose of creation and the great Fall of humanity. The latter addresses the pressing question: what is wrong with the world? Scripture explains that Sin is responsible for the seen destruction and chaos. Through a close reading of the story of Cain and Able in Genesis 4: 1-10, Keller draws attention to the significant aspects of Sin—its potency and subtlety—as well as to the text’s foreshadow to the coming Messiah who will conquer Sin, once and for all.

Foremost, God’s description of Sin stresses its deadly power. In this story, Cain becomes angry when the Lord is not pleased with his offering. Then, the Lord comes to him, and tells him, “But if you do not do what is right, Sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is to have you, but you must master it.” This image characterizes Sin as a predatory animal lurking in the shadows, eagerly waiting to kill its prey at the opportune time. It seems from this verse that Sin is an abiding, growing presence. A person is not overcome by it in a single action, but in a series of actions through which sin gains dominance in one’s life. In a quote from Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis suggests that the “bigness or the smallness of the sin seen from the outside is not what really matters,” but it is the “twist in the central self” that dooms a man to destruction. Reflecting on this thought, Dr. Keller explains that first “you do sin, but then sin does you,” unless one turns to God in repentance. This picture of sin “crouching” also points to its hidden nature. It does not pounce on a person in plain sight, but stalks about in the darkness, in the places where vision is obscured. This is evident in the way one seeks to rationalize his or her shortcomings. When ignored, this force will overtake and kill a person; it should not be taken lightly.

Next, this narrative highlights the subtlety of Sin. The account clearly states that God looks upon Abel and his offering with favor, but does not look upon Cain and his offering with approval. This suggests that God prospers one, but not the other. Yet, no explanation is offered as to why God is displeased with Cain. Outwardly, they appear nearly identical—both present sacrifices before the Lord. Looking carefully at different verses, Dr. Keller explains that it’s a hidden issue of Cain’s heart. While Abel brought the firstborn of his flock, Cain brought forth some fruits of the soil. Since he cannot be sure of the increase of his flock without new offspring, offering a firstborn lamb demonstrated great faith on Abel’s part. However, Cain needs little faith to bring forth only a portion from his plentiful produce. In God’s eyes, Abel expresses gratitude and trust, while Cain seeks to earn his favor.

Then, when Cain murders Abel, God comes asking questions of Cain saying, “Where is your brother Abel” and “What have you done?” This is not to gain insight but to reveal to Cain his own heart. God, in his grace, has come to counsel him. However, God says in Genesis 4:10b (NASB), “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground.” In other words, God, being just, cannot ignore sin. In this case, it is the shedding of innocent blood. The Lord’s response demonstrates his gracious and just character.

Finally, triumph over Sin comes through Jesus Christ, the ultimate Abel figure. Jesus appears to a people filled with Cain hearts. They outwardly follow religious practices in the name of God, offering sacrifices and observing the Law, but inwardly breed corruption. They see Jesus’ loving spirit, and they despise him. They condemn Jesus to death, but he goes willingly for the sake of destroying all sin and death in the world. According to the book of Hebrews, it is now his sprinkled blood that “speaks better than the blood of Able” over humanity. Since Jesus paid the full price for every sin committed, God can no longer condemn those who have received the blood of his Son. His justice is now offering grace and love and life everlasting to all.

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Rev. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Click above to hear an excerpt. Below, is a brief summary written by BioLogos editorial staff. The full sermon, which we highly recommend can be purchased from Redeemer’s sermon store. Finally, if you know a sermon or podcast related to science and faith that has especially spoken to you, please let us know.

In order to understand the very nature of humanity, one needs a firm grasp on the doctrine of original Sin. Dr. Keller makes several important points concerning Genesis 3: 8-24 as he looks at the response of God as well as Adam and Eve to the great act of disobedience. The aftermath of the Fall reveals sin’s heart, breadth, depth, and end.

Getting to the heart of sin, Dr. Keller defines it as a willingness to justify oneself at the expense of others. This is clearly demonstrated by Adam and Eve. When God walks into the Garden and asks whether they have eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they both shift the blame to another—the man to the woman and the woman to the serpent. Thus, because sin has entered the human heart, people will “throw anyone else under the bus” to detract from their own “nakedness.”

He next examines the breadth of sin according to the Genesis account. One finds that neither Adam nor Eve is more sinful; just as one does, the other does as well. This indicates that they both are equally ashamed, equally guilty. Furthermore, God banishes both humans from the Garden. This, Dr. Keller believes, shows that all humans are innately sinful and selfish. Looking at the implications of this truth on one’s societal views, he logically concludes that no specific group can be demonized or blamed. Whether the elite or the common, sin is in all, and all are responsible for the problems in society.

Then, Dr. Keller sheds light on the depth of sin: every relationship a human has—with God, with oneself, with another person, and with the environment—is now broken and tarnished by sin. The creation account shows that people are meant to be relational beings. In verse 8, God comes “walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” This word walking is an idiom in the ancient Hebrew language that indicates friendship; the Lord was seeking companionship in spite of their sin. Unfortunately, humanity continues to hide, rather than confess and return to God’s grace. A person’s relationship to oneself is tainted as well. When God calls out to Adam, the man says that he hid because of his nakedness. Humans have the desire to cover themselves because of the shame of their sin. This obscures their identity, and they no longer see themselves correctly. Similarly, it damaged the bonds between people. Adam and Eve immediately conceal themselves from each other after trespassing God’s commandment. Dr. Keller explains it like this: “We cannot really bear to have other people really know who we are—we have to control what other people see about us….” Humanity even clashes with the physical world as seen in the struggle against death, disease, and natural disasters. Overall, sin is a “malignant tumor that destroys a person’s ability to conduct relationships” properly.

Finally, the end of sin lies in the mercy of God. The Lord does not come to Adam and Eve declaring their sin. Rather, he questions them, inviting them to admit their wrongdoing. He desires to discuss the problem, and restore the friendship. This shows his love for the sinner. Furthermore, God fashions suitable garments for them from animal hide to conceal their nakedness. This is an amazing foreshadow that indicates humanity’s need for the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to cover its shame. Last of all, Dr. Keller highlights the flaming sword that guards the Garden of Eden, explaining that Jesus allowed this very sword to slay him. Going before all people, Jesus provided a way into the presence and friendship of God once again. In receiving this merciful love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, one’s nakedness is clothed forever.

Each Saturday, we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Kevin Kim, campus minister of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church's Open Door Church San Mateo. The full sermon can be found on Menlo Park Presbyterian Church's website.

In his sermon “The Great Invitation”, Kevin Kim raises a question that all Christians should address: what’s so great about the gospel anyway? In Philippians chapter 3, Paul hints at an answer, saying, “but our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.” But why are we eagerly waiting? And why do we need a savior at all? To expand, Kim delves into an explanation of three “chapters” of human history: our initial brokenness, our need for a savior, and the redemption provided by Jesus Christ.

In the very beginning, Adam and Eve, created to be stewards of God’s good creation, lived in a paradise free of death, shame and unhappiness. God “walked” and “talked” with Adam and Eve in this perfect garden, but he gave them a single command: do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. When Adam and Eve disobey this command, Kim explains, there is a massive reversal: Adam and Eve take on the role of God and brokenness enters the world. This, the pastor says, is the first chapter in this gospel narrative. Adam and Eve, rather than walking in harmony with God, now hide from him in shame because of their rebellion. Their relationships with God, with each other and with creation have been broken by sin. For this reason, all of creation is “groaning”—it is broken and is in desperate need of healing.

The next chapter of the story is that story of hope and healing that comes when God answers the groaning of creation. According to the book of John, the same “Word” that created the world in Genesis 1, “became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” Sin and brokenness came into the world when humankind adopted God’s unique role. To save the world from its brokenness, then, God took on the role of man and came to live on earth. Jesus’ miracles reflect his role as savior of mankind and healer of brokenness. As Kim explains, his miracles are “the only natural things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.” This is because Jesus’ miraculous acts provide sight to the blind, health to the sick, and food to the hungry. In other words, they restore creation to its intended unbroken state.

The final chapter in the gospel story, Kim says, describes the redemption provided by Christ. In Genesis, sin came into the world when Adam and Eve “took” and “ate” of the forbidden fruit. To redeem the world of its sin, Jesus broke the bread, his body, and commanded that his disciples “take” and “eat” for the forgiveness of their sins. While Adam and Eve disobeyed God, Jesus accepted his Father’s command to die on the Christ. Through this death, crucifixion on a cross, He took our shame, alienation and brokenness on himself; through the resurrection, He defeated sin. Kim explains, “Sin came when man took the place of God…but sin was defeated when God took the place of man.”

Genesis Two Rewrites

Genesis 2 is about as well known as any Bible story ever told – the wondrous story of the creation of Adam and Eve. We know well that God formed man out of the dust of the earth, placed him in a garden, said it wasn’t good for man to be alone, decided to make a “suitable helper” for man, and eventually made woman from his rib. We know this creation story is also a marriage story from the commentary within it: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother, cling to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked and felt no shame.” (Gen 2:24-25) One other thing we know all too well from the story: the LORD God told man not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that was in the center of the garden, for the fruit of that tree would surely bring death.

Anyone who knows Genesis 2 cannot keep their minds from Genesis 3. The woman is deceived. The man is irresponsibly silent. They both eat of the forbidden tree, and their eyes are suddenly opened and they hide – from each other and from God. Trusting the serpent creature instead of the Creator LORD God brings great disruption to all of the relationships established in Genesis 2, from the ground to the man and woman to the LORD God. The man and the woman are expelled from the garden – the tree of life will now be off limits. Death becomes a certainty.

The LORD God’s rationale for removing humanity from the garden is surprising: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” It is surprising because the serpent had told the woman that God knew that when they (you plural) ate their eyes would be opened and that they would be “like God, knowing good and evil.” Thus, according to God, the serpent was at least partially truthful – humanity became like God knowing good and evil.

How are we to understand this tree that produces deadly fruit? In what way does eating from this tree actually make us like God? What does it mean to know good and evil? Why, after knowing good and evil, would God banish humanity from the tree of life?

While there are various responses to these questions, only one vein will be explored here, a vein that attempts to take seriously that we have really become like God, knowing good and evil, and that such knowledge is deadly and worthy of banishment from the garden.

In this vein, the knowledge of good and evil is not simply the experience of good and evil so that one can distinguish between the two, perhaps better appreciating the good as the result of now having tasted the bad. No, the knowledge of good and evil refers to moral wisdom, but again, not in the sense of being able to discern between good and bad. True, disobeying the LORD God brought humanity into the experience of sin, but this can hardly be what it means to be like God, knowing good and evil, unless we are persuaded that God knew good and evil because God sinned. Knowing good and evil must be different than the understanding of good and evil that is attained through committing evil.

Knowing good and evil is therefore different than experiencing sin and righteousness. Rather, it has to do with the capacity of determining good and evil, the capacity of creating moral order. The LORD God knows good and evil in that the LORD God created an ordered universe. The LORD God constructed morality within the creation of the world and all its relationships. To relate within the LORD God’s ordering is good. To relate in such a way to disrupt that ordering is evil.

Having eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humanity (already created in the image of God according to Genesis 1:26) becomes like God, knowing good and evil. Humanity, with this act of disobedience, has gained the ability to create moral order, the ability to re-order the LORD God’s ordered creation. Humanity is no longer bound to the subservient position of bearing God’s image to the rest of the earth. Instead, humanity now has the ability to “self-determine” good and evil, the ability to construct its own moral universe, to put forth its own image as the creator of relational order.

There is one problem with humanity’s gain of this knowledge, this power to order good and evil: eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was an act of disorder. It put humanity sideways with the God-created orderliness and goodness of creation. This is why the LORD God told the man that death would surely come with the devouring of this fruit. To live “out-of-order” is to destroy one’s place and one’s self. It is to transgress one’s life-receiving place with the LORD God.

But cannot newly empowered humanity simply re-order good and evil in such a way that death is nullified? Try as we might, the answer is a resounding no. To re-order good and evil from a place of disorder is to create even greater chaos and death. Humanity can construct its own systems of moral order, but to the degree that these systems are sideways with God’s ordering of creation they will simply result in greater disorder and greater death. Sometimes we even try to sign God’s name on our own re-ordering efforts. The results are the same, and often worse. (For example, consider the damage done and the lives lost under “manifest destiny.”)

It is no wonder that the LORD God banishes humanity from the garden so that there is no longer access to the tree of life. This is the LORD God saving humanity and creation from the plight of “eternal disordering.” In other words, God is mercifully interceding to limit the amount of disordering that humanity, individually and collectively, can accomplish. We will not be allowed to disrupt and re-order in ever-increasing deathly ways forever. In the next post, we examine the ramifications.

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Rev. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Click above to hear an excerpt. Below, is a brief summary written by BioLogos editorial staff. The full sermon, which we highly recommend can be purchased from Redeemer’s sermon store. Finally, if you know a sermon or podcast related to science and faith that has especially spoken to you, please let us know.

Selfishness and violence, corruption and greed, wars and atrocities—for all time, this one question has been pondered: what went wrong in humanity? Through his sermon on Genesis 3:1-7, Dr. Keller sheds light on this mystery. With careful examination, four critical points concerning the Fall are uncovered in this text. In this event, there was a sneer, a lie, a tree, and a call.

The problem begins in this passage the moment that the serpent (Satan) sneers at God’s commandment given to Adam and Eve. In the Garden, the snake says to Eve, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” This question is not asked for the sake of information, but rather, the snake is openly mocking the words of God in order to alter her attitude toward the command. So often, Dr. Keller points out, “we lose God not through an argument, but through an atmosphere” that hardens one’s heart toward him. The serpentine attitude is expressed in the particular humor that seeks to discredit and crush another.

Next, the serpent puts forth this lie: “You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” In this statement, Satan convinces Adam and Eve that God is holding them back, and it causes them to doubt his goodness. Indeed, this is the lie that entered the very heart of humanity: one cannot trust God and his love because he does not have one’s best interest in mind. Consequently, humans have constantly struggled throughout history to obey God for fear that they will lack the goodness of life.

Then, from this place of mistrust and deception, Eve takes the fruit and eats of it. Likewise, Adam takes and eats. Now, God gave them the command to not eat of the fruit, but why didn’t he provide an explanation? According to Dr. Keller, it is because an explanation would allow them to make a cost/benefit analysis. Then, their decision would be made out of love for themselves, rather than obedience to God. However, the Lord’s desire is for children who trust and obey him as God. Everything that is wrong in the world, Keller explains, results because people are constantly mistrusting God, and choosing to take the place of their very Creator. Whether murder or anxiety, both are symptoms of a people who have taken the position of God. So, how does one truly allow God to be God in one’s life? Well, Keller offers a moving story as an example. It is of a bright Yale graduate named William Borden, a wealthy man with a great inheritance. When he felt the call of God to enter the mission field, however, he freely gave away all his inheritance, and moved to Cairo to learn Arabic. He quickly contracted spinal meningitis and died. Written on a piece of paper that was found with him were these words: “No reserve, no retreat, no regrets.” This narrative calls Christians to have this same attitude of absolute surrender and whole-hearted trust of God’s will in their lives.

Finally, the Lord God comes into the Garden after their disobedient act, and they hide from his presence. He knows of their rebellion, yet he desires to seek them. He calls to them, “Where are you?” He knows of their rebellion, yet he desires to seek them. Since then, people have continued to hide from God, but he has never ceased to chase after humanity in love. His pursuit of us finds its ultimate expression in Jesus, who took on the form of a man and dealt with the consequences of our sin. Adam and Eve disobeyed, but Christ obeyed. They believed a lie that God was not trustworthy, but Christ trusted until the end. By becoming obedient to God in dying on the Cross, Jesus transformed the tree that brought humanity death into a tree of life by his blood.