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The Conscious MindFeatured AudioNancey Murphy: Christianity, Neuroscience & the Soul
Part One: Most of us are instinctive dualists, maybe even “trichotomists,” but what is the biblical view? Listen | Read Transcript Part Two: How Copernicus, Darwin and modern neuroscience have put us in a dualistic pickle. Listen | Read Transcript Part Three: Physicalism, free will, and the promise of resurrection. Listen | Read Transcript
Contemporary neuroscience seems to hold a knotty problem for Christians. A virtual avalanche of results, from studies of brain-damage patients to brain scans of religious worshipers, show that the activities we customarily attribute to the soul take place in the brain. It is getting very hard to find a role for an immaterial soul, confronting Christians with an apparent choice between science and their faith. In her book, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? Nancey Murphy, professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, sets out to cut this Gordian knot, surveying the history of Christian thought, evolutionary biology and contemporary neuroscience to come to a surprising conclusion: "none of us has a soul, and we all get along perfectly well." For a devout Christian who teaches at a seminary where biblical authority is paramount, this is a jarring note. But Murphy argues that the metaphysical belief that we are immortal souls temporarily housed in physical bodies is not essential to Christian faith, and is, in fact, at variance with much of modern biblical scholarship. It stems in the first place, she argues, from the enduring influence of Hellenistic thought, especially Neo-Platonism, in the (mis-) translation and interpretation of scripture. The rise of a thoroughly materialist physics after Copernicus, and the advent of Darwinism, with its implied continuity between humans and animals, paradoxically reinforced the view that a separate, immaterial soul must be the source of human uniqueness. But for Murphy, an avowed physicalist, dualism is both unscientific and unnecessary. Human beings are highly complex physical organisms. The soul is not an additional, immaterial part inserted into the human organism, it is an aspect, much as Scottishness is an aspect, not a part of a Scot. Humans reveal this aspect of their nature when they exercise free will, make moral judgments, or enter into a relationship with God. Humans are capable of this kind of behavior because they have extremely complex, higher-level traits, such as culture and religion, that can feed back to cause and constrain lower-level functions of the organism. But if the soul is not something separable from the body, what of Christ’s promise of life everlasting? Here Murphy’s thought parallels the liberal tradition in American Protestantism, which emphasizes the resurrection of the body, rather than the immortality of the soul. Just as Christ rose from the dead, Christians will be resurrected at the end of time, and achieve eternal life, no soul required. |
