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.

What does it mean for humanity to be created “from the dust of the ground?”

In many ancient Mesopotamian creation stories, human beings were depicted as deriving from some physical part of the gods. Often this was the result of conflict: humans arose from the blood, flesh or tears of gods slain by other gods. Humans created in this fashion were supposed to serve the gods by performing menial work that the gods had tired of doing themselves. The lot of humanity, then, was one of violence and servitude.

In the Israelite creation stories reflected in Genesis 1 and 2, however, humans are made from the ordinary material of creation: “dust.” Humans are made of earth-stuff, not god-stuff.

At first glance, it may seem that this lowers the status of the human creature. We might ask the question raised by Eliphaz in the book of Job:

Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?
If God places no trust in his servants,
if he charges his angels with error,
how much more those who live in houses of clay,
whose foundations are in the dust, who are crushed more readily than a moth! (Job 4:17-19)

Indeed, our humble origins ought to remind us of the fragility of our lives. As the Psalmist says,

You turn people back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.

The elements of which our bodies are made are ordinary and abundant. Science tells us that approximately ninety-three per cent of the mass in a living human body is comprised of elements first formed through nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. Through almost unimaginably vast and ancient cycles of stellar formation and supernova explosions, this “stardust” of elements has been spread throughout the universe. It is as though God scattered the stars across space and time to seed the universe for life, including your life and mine. And we are thereby inseparably connected to each other, to the air we breathe, to the ground we tread, to all the creatures that fill the skies and crawl upon the earth and teem in the seas, to the depths of all the heavens. We are not transcendent of creation. We are creatures.

Yet we are creatures into which God breathed the “breath of life.” We are stardust and more than stardust. We are not reducible to our constituent chemicals. A “man” or a “woman” is not just a gooey sack of water, carbon and trace elements. Hydrogen, oxygen and carbon are not aware of their own existence. These elements cannot reason or pray or love or write poems. Conjunctions of these elements cannot carry any persistent identity across time. They do not exercise will or intentionality or agency. They are not “selves.”

Most of the cells in a human body are in constant flux: aging, dividing, dying, being replaced. The surface layer of human skin is renewed completely about every two weeks. An adult’s skeleton is entirely remade over approximately ten year periods. It may be that only the neurons of the cerebral cortex and a few other types of cells persist throughout the lifetime of a human body. And eventually, it all does return to “dust.”

Yet we think of ourselves as persisting over time, as comprising an “identity,” a “self.” Perhaps the cerebral cortex provides the stable biological platform for identity and selfhood, but something new emerges from the chemical-electrical soup, new patterns of organization, a different level of causation. We can even make choices that reshape ourselves, both physically and psychologically. The very wiring of our brains changes when we make conscious choices. Mind is both shaped by matter and supervenes on matter.

Materialists who wish to collapse all of human identity into brain chemistry overstep the bounds of “science.” A fundamental principle of scientific practice is testability: is it possible to demonstrate empirically whether a proposition is false ? As Saint Augustine observed many centuries ago, the fact that I acknowledge I could be “wrong” about something means that I am a “self” who is capable of making real choices about things that are in fact true or false. “Si fallor, sum” Augustine said – if I can doubt, if I can be wrong, then I must exist. One who is a true materialist “all the way down” cannot test his or her materialism. There is no possibility of “being” right or wrong, indeed no possibility of “being” – there is nothing but chemistry.

Spiritualists who wish to degrade matter in favor of the soul or spirit likewise are not expressing a Christian anthropology. Indeed, one of the first heresies that encountered the early Christian church was Gnosticism. A core belief of Gnosticism was that matter, including the human body, was essentially evil. Salvation for the Gnostics involved the soul’s escape from the prison of embodiment and materiality. The Gnostics treated the body either with disdain – engaging in extreme ascetic practices – or with antinomian abandon – engaging in extreme sexual license. Either way, their practices were rooted in the belief that matter and the body were unimportant. It’s easy to see how this view continually creeps into both our popular culture and our Church cultures.

Christian theology asserts that humans are spiritual creatures, a unity of body and spirit or “soul,” integrated, not reducible downwards to mere matter or upwards to mere spirit. Perhaps there is no better way to bring these themes together than with a Psalm — here is Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Psalm 139 in The Message:

God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say
before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
then up ahead and you’re there, too—
your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful—
I can’t take it all in!

Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit?
to be out of your sight?
If I climb to the sky, you’re there!
If I go underground, you’re there!
If I flew on morning’s wings
to the far western horizon,
You’d find me in a minute—
you’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!
At night I’m immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;
night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I’d even lived one day.

Transitional Fossils

Some time ago, the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin commented on the human origins exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, suggesting that palaeoanthropologists use evolutionary theory to describe the progression of the human lineage even when they don’t have transitional fossils with which to work. He writes:

What's ironic, however, is that if you ask the question How Do We Know Humans Evolved? the answer you’re given is, “Fossils like the ones shown in our Human Fossils Gallery provide evidence that modern humans evolved from earlier humans.” So whether you find fossils or you don’t, that’s evidence for evolution.

Indeed, it has become an article of faith for those espousing both the young earth creation (hereafter YEC) model and many who hold to the intelligent design model that transitional fossils do not exist and therefore evolution has not taken place. Support for this position usually entails attacking the weak areas of the fossil record, where burial processes have left us little with which to work, or the creation of straw men arguments in which transitional fossils are defined in such a way that none could ever be found. Often this centers on the concept of “missing link,” a term that is habitually used in the popular press and young earth creation and intelligent design literature when referring to fossil remains but which has little to no meaning for biologists or palaeontologists. As Ahlberg and Clack (Ahlberg and Clack 2006) write:

But the concept has become freighted with unfounded notions of evolutionary ‘progress’ and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transitions. Much of the importance of transitional fossils actually lies in how they resemble and differ from their nearest neighbours in the phylogenetic tree, and in the picture of change that emerges from this pattern.

Contrary to common misconceptions, the fossil record does not record one single lineage for any family of organisms but rather a series of branches, with many related species coexisting synchronously. Darwin hypothesized that the evolutionary record reflected this bushiness and drew such a diagram in his journal. At the time, though, he had little in the way of fossil evidence to back up this position. Much has changed since his day.

An analogy for understanding this “bushiness” was best described by Prothero and Buell (Prothero and Buell 2007). They suggest that the reader consider his or her own genealogy. You and your siblings are the direct descendents of your parents and, while you are similar to them, each of you has different characteristics not shared with them as well as characteristics that you do share. Your parents have siblings as well (your aunts and uncles), and your grandparents are their last common ancestors. These siblings have their own children (your cousins), who have different and similar traits relative to their parents. They are broadly recognizable as being related to you (“oh, I see you have Aunt Edna’s nose”) but three or four generations out, they will become less and less so. These are the “nearest neighbours” that Ahlberg and Clack describe. In this analogy, each of these cousins represents a transitional form from what was (your grandparents) to what will be down the road.

For example, no one would confuse a frog with a salamander but if you trace the fossil record of each back in time, eventually you encounter a fossil, Gerobatrachus hottoni which was recently discovered (Anderson et al. 2008) that is best described as a “frogamander,” having the basal characteristics of both frogs and salamanders. Had we seen such an animal at the time, it is likely we would not have found it remarkable because it would have resembled the species around it. One lineage eventually diverged into frogs, salamanders and other amphibians. Most (just like Darwin proposed in his tree diagram with the little hatch marks at the tip of many branches) went extinct.

Taxonomy and the Beginnings of Human Origins

All life is classified based on a system devised by Carolus Linneaus in 1735 in his remarkable work Systema Naturae. This system gives all recognized species an individual place based on a system of hierarchy. The study of classification is known as taxonomy. A taxonomic ranking for humans would be this:

When a fossil is excavated, the first thing that the palaeontologist does is make a taxonomic assessment of where it fits in a sequence of known fossils. Traits that are shared with other like species or genera are referred to as primitive traits. Examples of this in humans are five fingers and the presence of three arm bones. We share this with all mammals. Traits that are new or are not shared with other like species are referred to as derived traits. Examples of this in humans are the skeletal changes in the pelvis and the foot to allow for walking upright. We do not share these with any other primates.

Transitional fossils in the human fossil record are distinguished at both the genus and species level. This group includes the extinct genera Ardipithecus and Australopithecus and the current genus Homo. All species except Homo sapiens are extinct. Much of the recent study of early humans focuses on the transition from Ardipithecus (‘Ardi’) to Australopithecus (‘Lucy’ and similar fossils) and from Australopithecus to Homo, the genus that led eventually to us. While each of the australopithecine species identified in the fossil record has derived characteristics that separate them from their ancestors and from each other, only one led to the genus Homo.

In future posts, I will describe the evidence for human evolution and why this evidence is compelling. It suggests that we have had a long, varied history filled with great leaps of change, crushing defeat, and eventual expansion into all areas of the globe.

Notes

Ahlberg, P. & J. Clack (2006) A firm step from water to land. Nature, 440.

Anderson, J. S., R. R. Reisz, D. Scott, N. B. Frobisch & S. S. Sumida (2008) A stem batrachian from the Early Permian of Texas and the origin of frogs and salamanders. Nature, 453, 515-518.

Prothero, D. & C. Buell. 2007. Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters. Columbia Univ Pr.

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

The Denisovans, an extinct hominid group that interbred with modern humans, made the news again lately with the publication of a more detailed study of their genome. One of the many interesting findings was that the Denisovans share the same chromosome 2 fusion that modern humans have. In this post, I review what we know about the origins of human chromosome 2, and then discuss the new Denisovan findings and their implications.

The origins of human chromosome 2: a brief review

Though I have discussed the evidence for a fusion event leading to human chromosome 2 before, perhaps a brief review of the evidence is in order. The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes (for a total of 46 chromosomes). This makes us something of an oddity among living great apes, all the rest of whom have 24 pairs of chromosomes (for a total of 48). Given that there are many independent lines of evidence that support the conclusion that we share a common ancestor with other great apes, this poses something of a conundrum: how is it that our species arrived at this specific chromosome number? If we were to represent this “problem” on a phylogeny, or tree of relatedness, it would look something like this (not to scale):

Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, both have 48 chromosomes, as do all other great apes such as gorillas and orangutans. This pattern has one of two explanations, one of which is much more likely than the other. Either the common ancestor to these species had 48 chromosomes, and there was an event that reduced that number to 46 specifically on the lineage leading to humans (option A), or the common ancestor species had 46 chromosomes, and there were independent, repeated events that increased chromosome number in all other great ape species (option B). We can compare these options by placing the required event(s) on the phylogeny (again, not to scale):

It should be obvious that the option that requires the fewest events is the more likely one – in this case option A with an event that reduces chromosome number in the lineage leading to humans. The other option, that of repeated, independent events to increase chromosome number, remains a formal, but unlikely, possibility. Events that reduce chromosome number are not frequent occurrences, so Option A is more likely than Option B.

We can also find further support for Option A, because it predicts a specific type of event, namely one that reduces chromosome number. Since loss of a large amount of chromosomal material is almost always detrimental, we need an event that reduces chromosome number without losing information. One way for this to happen is for two chromosomes to fuse together and become one. Initially, this event would produce an individual with 47 chromosomes, where two different chromosomes get stuck together. Contrary to what is often assumed, this individual would be fertile and able to interbreed with the others in his or her population (who continue to have 48 chromosomes). In a small population, over time, two relatives who both have one copy of the fusion chromosome may mate and produce some progeny with two copies of the fused chromosome, or the first individuals with 46 chromosomes. Since either a 48-pair set or a 46-pair set is preferable for ease of cell division, this population will either eventually get rid of the fusion variant (the most likely outcome), or by chance will switch over completely to the “new” form, with everyone bearing 46 chromosome pairs. While not overly likely, this type of event is not especially rare in mammals, and we have observed this sort of thing happening within recorded human history in other species. Some mammalian species even maintain distinct populations in the wild with differing chromosome numbers due to fusions, and these populations retain the ability to interbreed.

Further evidence for a fusion event in the lineage leading to modern humans comes from comparing synteny, or gene locations and orders on chromosomes within modern great apes – an issue we have discussed here before. In brief, what we see in human chromosome 2 is exactly what we would predict for a fusion event. When compared to other great apes, we see the genes on human chromosome 2 match up, in order, with two smaller ape chromosomes. We also see that sequences used at the tips of chromosomes are present at the proposed fusion site, and that human chromosome 2 has not one but two sites for the cell cytoskeleton to attach to for cell division – but that one of the sites is mutated and not functional, though it lines up precisely with the location of this site on the appropriate ape chromosome. Together, this evidence consistently supports both common ancestry for humans and great apes, and specifically that the difference we see in our chromosome numbers arose due to a single fusion event. I briefly discussed this evidence in my last post where I describe how I teach some of this material and the compelling impact it has on students exploring the evolution question for the first time.

Enter the Denisovans

With that as background, we are now prepared to appreciate a new finding that comes from genomics work done on the Denisovan hominids, an archaic species that is more closely related to Neanderthals than to us, but that nonetheless interbred with some anatomically modern humans as they migrated out of Africa and populated the globe. (For those not familiar with the Denisovans, or the evidence for our interbreeding with them, both Darrel Falk and I have written on this previously, here and here). Recently, a more detailed understanding of the Denisovan genome was published, and nested in the new information is the discovery that the Denisovans share the 46 chromosome set with the same fusion that we have. This strongly supports the hypothesis that the fusion event predates the separation of our species. If we were to represent this on a phylogeny, we can now place this event with more accuracy than before (as before, the phylogeny is not to scale):

Despite this new information, one obvious question remains. Did the Neanderthals also have the 46-pair set? From looking at the phylogeny above, we can see that the most likely answer is that they did, since the fact that the Denisovans had it strongly implies that the last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals / Denisovans had it as well, and the Neanderthal-Denisovan split comes later. While the Denisovan DNA samples are of high enough quality to make this assessment, we do not yet have Neanderthal DNA of high enough quality to do the same analysis with current methods (though one additional feature of the new work on the Denisovan genome is developing more sensitive DNA sequencing techniques that may resolve this question in the future).

In other words, this fusion seems to be an ancient one, predating our species by several hundred thousand years. Present estimates of the last common ancestor between humans and Neanderthals / Denisovans range at about 800,000 years ago.

Implications for understanding our “becoming human”

The main implication from this work is that it places the fusion event well before the advent of our species. I’ve often chatted informally with Christians about evolution, and at times some have thought that this fusion event was what “started” our species, or made our species unable to interbreed with other groups. Some have even suggested that perhaps the fusion event was what produced the first human (i.e. Adam).

Note that thinking this way suggests a misunderstanding of how chromosome fusions occur and what effect they have on their hosts. A fusion does not precipitate a speciation event, but rather the individual with the fusion remains a part of his or her population, and able to interbreed, even if with reduced fertility. Also, there is no necessary biological effect or change that the fusion produces on the appearance of the organism. These misunderstandings aside, however,what this new evidence shows is that this fusion event took place long before modern humans arose at around 200,000 years ago. Indeed, the 800,000 years ago date for the last human - Denisovan common ancestor means that this is the most recent date possible for the fusion. While it is an interesting piece of our evolutionary history, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we came to acquire the traits that set us apart from, and ultimately outcompete, other similar species.

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.

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For more, be sure to read our FAQs How are the ages of the Earth and universe calculated? and What scientific evidence do we have about the first humans?, as well as our recent infographic How Do We Know the Earth is Old?.

Author's Note from Joy Walters

As I mentioned in my first post, I grew up skeptical of the whole idea of evolution. One contributor to my disbelief was the lengthy timescale for the “tree of life” that was presented with the theory. I would hear, for example, that dinosaurs lived hundreds of millions of years ago, but there was no explanation of why this was true; it was just given as a fact. No one explained the methods of dating, and so I thought biologists simply estimated the ages of species to fit their preconceived notions of how long it would take for one species to emerge from another. It also seemed like the ages were periodically revised and extended farther back in time, and I figured scientists needed to manipulate numbers to make evolution plausible. This, in my mind, made the theory both unbelievable and dismissible.

Once I learned about the techniques used to date fossils, I realized that my first impressions were wrong; the ancient ages of species are scientific determinations rather than scholarly conjectures. However, I have found in recent conversations that Christians remain skeptical of old ages and the evolutionary time scale. For this reason, I wanted the videocast to address the process of fossil dating (what the methods are and why they are accurate) while focusing on cases where hominid fossils were discovered and dated using these very methods. My hope is that Believers would be informed about the evidence for human evolution and its scientific grounding.

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.

Many posts on this Forum have suggested that the cosmological narrative in Genesis 1 is best read as being primarily about God’s identity and agency, rather than about the physical make-up or material history of the natural world. Similarly, we demonstrate our highest regard for Genesis 2’s account of the creation of Eve—the second fully human being—by looking to its meaning in terms of spiritual and interpersonal relationships, rather than genetic ones. While the specific “how” of our being made into the image of God will probably always remain a mystery, the Bible and creeds are clear on the “why” of our creation: we were made to worship the Lord, and be in relation with Him and each other. That intimate, conscious and deeply symbolic knowledge of our maker and fellow human beings is a profound difference that sets us apart from the other creatures.

I have frequently argued that poets are often the most clear on some of the important issues of our faith, including this one. Today we feature a work by Robert Siegel, who identifies the imagination as the faculty by which we recognize and name those spiritual relationships. As he says, “It's the imagination, hence language and art, that establishes the connections”; it is the imagination that allows us to conceive of and name the links between ourselves and creation, ourselves and each other, ourselves and the Creator God.

Though we often focus on Adam’s naming of the animals, and then even of Eve, Siegel helps us remember that it was in hearing his own name that Adam’s whole humanity came into being: he experienced the richness of being called by God to bear His likeness, but also of being called to by one that was profoundly “like him.” Put another way, we are speakers, but also equally hearers. May we, too, be awakened to ourselves and our image-bearing identity by a still, soft voice saying our name. May we, too, in gratitude and delight, call upon the name of the one, Jesus, who is both our God and our fellow man.

“Adam’s Dream”

by Robert Siegel

The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream:
he awoke and found it truth. --Keats

He saw the garden spreading past the trees
he'd been warned to avoid (yet keep a special eye on).
He'd learned by scents, transported by the breeze,
myriads of roses and how, by hand, the scion

of one to graft on another--and what was edible:
whole families of legumes, grasses, roots,
melons, peaches, apples, pears. Incredible,
the variety of tastes just from the fruits!

But it wasn't enough. Even the breathing animals
with friendly grunt or sigh, silken warm side,
and large affectionate eye were not able
to speak. When he named them, none replied:

His words fell dead on the air--though he said
them everywhere, walking or running to each place:
to the mountain, which echoed back the sounds he made,
or the still pool, returning his own gaze.

But no one answered him until one night in a dream
he woke and heard a soft voice speak his name.

“Adam’s Dream” first appeared in issue 3 of Stonework, the literary journal of Houghton College. © 2001 Robert Siegel

Robert Siegel is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, most recently A Pentecost of Finches: New and Selected Poems. He has received prizes and awards from Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Transatlantic Review, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His fiction includes Alpha Centauri and the Whalesong trilogy, which received the Golden Archer and Matson awards. With degrees from Wheaton, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, Siegel has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Goethe University in Frankfurt, and for twenty-three years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he directed the graduate creative writing program and is currently professor emeritus of English. He is married to Ann Hill Siegel, a photographer, and lives on the coast of Maine.