The Conscious Mind

Interview Transcripts

Nancey Murphy

Interview 3/13/06 by John Rieger

Part One

Professor Murphy, your latest book, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?—what prompted you to write this book?

I got interested in the topic, oh, maybe ten years ago. I have a colleague in our school of psychology who is a neuropsychologist, and he recognized that most ordinary Christians understand human beings to be made up of at least two parts and sometimes three parts—bodies and souls, or bodies souls and spirits—and as the neurosciences are making tremendous progress in explaining all of the capacities that used to be attributed to the soul, he correctly suggested that that was going to lead to conflict between science and religion. And so my interest was to go back to the early texts, to look at the history of development in Christianity, and to investigate whether Christians really needed to be dualists or not. And the best scholarship over the last hundred years has said that early, authentic Christian teaching fits much more closely to what we would now call a physicalist account of the person. The dualism came into Christianity several centuries into its development.

Now you remark right at the beginning of the book that people today hold a variety of radically different and incompatible views of the nature of the human person.

Yes, it’s funny. One of the funny things about this issue is it hasn’t been talked about much, and so you can have a colleague in the office next to you, and not know what his or her position on this issue would be. I even suggest that a lot of married people don’t even know what their spouse thinks about this issue. And so, when I lecture on this topic, for my own personal curiosity, but also to let the audience know what a mixed bag this is, I usually start out with a quiz, and I usually formulate it something like this:

Which of the following accounts of human nature comes closest to your own view?

Option 1: humans are made of three parts, body, soul and spirit.

Option 2: humans are made of two parts, either a body and a soul, or a body and a mind.

Option 3: Humans are made of just one part, if you want to call it a part, that is a physical body.

And then option 4 is “Who cares!”

Now in specialized audiences I would get different results — philosophers, neuroscientists, whatever. But when I speak to a general audience, the first two positions are usually in competition. Sometimes I get more of what we call trichotomists, and other times I get more dualists, but if you put the trichotomists and the dualists together, that would cover about 90 percent of the people in the audience. And very, very few people would choose the physicalist option, and then a few people, just to be, I suppose, different, choose the “who cares” option.

The wise-guys in the audience?

Yeah (laughs).

And which of these options is in your view the biblical view?

Well, I put in that last question as a kind of teaser, because I really do believe that insofar as you can talk about the biblical view, given the rich variety of texts in the Bible, that probably comes closest to the biblical view—“Who cares!”

Who cares?

Yes. If you ask the question about how many parts we’re made of, the biblical authors would largely say, “Who cares.” Let me explain what I mean by that. We are preoccupied by this question of what parts we’re composed of because of our history with Greek philosophy. That was a big topic of discussion around the time that the New Testament was being written. The biblical authors, in contrast, weren’t interested in that question. They were interested in what are the kinds of relationships that human beings can enter into, and what aspects are there that human beings exhibit, and so some very handy terminology that I got from New Testament scholar James Dunne is to distinguish between what he calls “aspective” and “partitive” accounts of the human person.

Aspective and partitive?

Yes. And so the Greeks, and with their legacy we, are interested in how many parts, but the biblical authors were interested in what are the aspects that human beings manifest. And so when human beings are all wrapped up and concerned with their own family and kin, then they’re exhibiting a fleshly aspect. When they are, in sharp contrast, wrapped up with the calling, and the following, and the business of God, then they exhibit a spiritual aspect. And so when the biblical authors talk about body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, these are all terms that refer to people in their various modes of relationship, or their various modes of being. So Jimmy Dunne says that his Scottishness is not a part of him, it’s an aspect of him.

Now contrast this to the legacy of Greek thought.

Well, the Greeks were constantly arguing over questions like, do human beings have souls, what are the souls like, what do the souls do, and in contrast to contemporary thought, where we have a very sharp distinction between the material and the non-material, that sharp contrast had not come into being yet in the Greek and Roman eras, and so one question was, is the soul material, but just made out of a very fine, subtle material, or is it non-material? What happens to it when we die? Does it just die with the body, or is it immortal? If it’s immortal, has it had previous lives, and will it have additional lives afterwards? So these were all very hot issues around the time that the New Testament was being written.

It’s interesting: the views that you attribute to the Geeks are the ones that I associate with medieval Christian philosophy, not the views that you attribute to the biblical authors.

That’s right. To paint it in very broad strokes, very early in the development of Christian theology, theologians got interested in Platonic philosophy—the works of Plato, and then later followers who developed quasi-religious systems out of Plato’s philosophy—and they were very much interested in the nature and the development of the soul, and so Christian spirituality and theology took on board that body/soul dualism, and changed its understanding of life after death, from the early position that emphasized resurrection of the body, to a position that emphasized that we have immortal souls that simply continue to live when the body dies.

Now there was an interesting change in the late middle ages, and this was due to the Muslim conquests of Europe. The Muslim scholars had preserved texts from Aristotle. Aristotle was Plato’s student, so these texts go back almost as far, but a lot of them had been lost in European scholarship. So here was a brand new system with a different understanding of body and soul that really caught on in Christian circles. Thomas Aquinas is the most significant medieval theologian, because he managed to work out a very smooth synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology. And so we lose the Platonic emphasis on this very independent, separable, eternal soul in favor of a system that’s kind of hard to explain. It’s an understanding of the nature of all material things as being composed of both “matter” and what was called “form,” and we just don’t have any equivalent of the concept “form” in contemporary thought.

So when we use the word “form” we really don’t mean the same thing by it that the Aristotelian system of thought meant?

Right. I think the closest I can come to saying what form meant in those days is it’s a non-material, active principle that gives each entity its typical characteristics, and so if you could take pure matter (which doesn’t ever really exist) you can add the form of the mineral emerald to it, and that’s what makes the emerald green. You take material and you add the form of a sunflower to it, and that’s what makes it grow up tall and have yellow blossoms, etc. So inorganic things, plants, animals, and human beings all get their primary characteristics from their form, and the forms of all living things are called “souls.” So plants have souls, animals have souls, and humans have souls. So there, it was absolutely no problem to understand how body and soul relate in a human being. The soul is what makes us what we are, it’s what gives us our characteristic powers, abilities, etc.

But the soul, understood as the form of the body, is not something that is separable, that can live on without its body.

Well that’s one point where Thomas had to monkey with the Aristotelian system. For Aristotle, the soul just disintegrates with the body, but for Christian reasons he needed to have a soul that would survive the death of the body, and by means of a very tortured and not highly respected argument, he argued that the human soul would survive the death of the body, although it wouldn’t really be, shall we say, fully functional until it was reunited with the body at the point of the general resurrection.

Does this view still prevail in Christian thought today?

There are some Catholic theologians that still hold that view. The ones that are more, I guess you would say, orthodox would continue to speak in those terms, and then the more liberal Catholic theologians would be more likely to have rejected that way of talking and to have picked up other contemporary points of view.

But there was another challenge to this account of the person on the horizon in the form of the scientific revolution.

Absolutely! Copernicus is always thought of as having really thrown Christianity for a loop because of displacing us from the center of the solar system, but he had a much more important contribution to the dissolution of that medieval world view via physics.

Listen to the audio >>

top

Part Two

Now if I may just interject here, we’re all taught about the Copernican Revolution in school, and how it displaced us from the center of the universe, and how this was a blow to our view of ourselves, and I’ve never really quite understood that. I’ve never understood why we had to be in the center instead of a little bit off to one side. I’ve never really got that picture. This is something in your book that I think becomes much clearer.

Yes, it’s the Aristotelian physics. For Aristotle, material stuff, it’s all composed of four elements—earth, air, fire and water—and each of those elements has a tendency to seek its own natural place, and the natural place for something that’s composed primarily of the element earth, or its natural motion, is to go downward towards the surface of the earth. Water’s natural place is to go on top of the earth. Air’s natural place is to go on top of the water, and fire’s natural motion is to go up. And so in any compound, depending on whether it’s more earthy, watery, airy or fiery, the predominant element will determine its direction of motion. So this was basically Aristotle’s account of why heavy bodies fall when you drop them.

Well, if the earth is not the center of the universe, then you can no longer explain why heavy bodies fall to the earth, because their natural motion had been to seek the center—that is, to fall to the earth. So a whole new physics was needed. And what happened is the whole Aristotelian system was thrown out, and it was replaced by Galileo and Descartes and later physicists with another equally ancient account of matter, atomism.

Now, when Aristotelian physics took this body blow from the discoveries of Copernicus and others, it didn’t just change physical science, it really undermined the Aristotelian account of the nature of the soul, right?

Yes it did, exactly. In the new physics you have atoms or corpuscles or whatever you want to call them, and nothing else. There simply is no room in the physical/metaphysical system anymore for the concept of form. And that’s why it’s so difficult to explain to students today what it used to mean, because we just don’t have any equivalent for it.

Well, if we’ve gotten rid of the idea of forms, then what gives things their character under this new system of atomism?

Well, it’s taken the whole of modern science to replace the Aristotelian system. You know, we had to discover genetics in order to understand why dogs give birth to puppies instead of kittens, etc., and we’re still working on understanding why human beings have the capacities they do, and the neurosciences are aiding considerably in that task. We had to develop the science of chemistry to explain why the various chemical elements have the characteristics they have, and why they would bond with some other chemicals and not others, etc. So, basically, you could describe the whole of modern science, from the fifteenth-sixteenth century up till today, as our still trying to come up with adequate replacements for Aristotle’s concept of form.

Now Atomism is another ancient Greek contribution to human thought, which holds that the universe is composed of certain indivisible, fundamental particles or atoms, and that the character of all things around us derives from the character of those fundamental particles in combination with each other?

Exactly.

I see. And that contrasts with Aristotle’s view, which is that it is these immaterial forms which act as causes to shape some kind of underlying prime matter to give things their character?

Exactly, very well said.

So atomism does indeed sound very familiar to us, and we now live in a world where we believe that underlying everything we see are hidden, tiny particles that give everything their characteristics.

Yes. And of course the quest goes on to find out what the ultimate atoms are in that sense of being the undivisible ones.

Now how did this atomist revolution in science land us in the dualistic pickle we find ourselves in today?

Well, there were two ways to go, and I’m talking about the sixteenth century. You could either say, okay, we’re going to explain human beings and their behavior all in terms of the behavior of atoms—attraction, repulsion, movement, etc.—and that was the route chosen by English philosopher Thomas Hobbes; or, the other route was chosen by René Descartes, and that was to go back to Plato, all the way back to fourth or fifth century BC, and resuscitate a Platonic notion of the soul, which is simply inserted into the body and not intermingled with it in the way an Aristotelian soul would be. So this creates a very radical dualism of body and soul, material and non-material.

Now let’s just look at these two options again. Hobbes thought that the human being, including all of our inner life and inner experiences, could be attributed to tiny little particles bumping into each other and moving around?

Yes. Thinking is “movements about the head.” Emotions are “movements about the heart.”

Um-hmm… It sounds both preposterous and in certain ways very much like contemporary neuroscience.

Yes (laughs), he is really the father of contemporary physicalism.

Very interesting, but Descartes went the other way, and… why?

For theological motives, I believe, but also to preserve human freedom. If we are purely physical, and if the laws of physics determine the behavior of all of our parts, then it must be the case that the behavior of the whole person is simply determined by the laws of physics. So we have no free will. Hobbes was willing to simply bite the bullet and say, yeah, that’s true, but Descartes wanted to hold out for human freedom and responsibility, and I do believe it was for largely theological motives.

Descartes’ view has been tremendously influential?

Yes, and in fact we have a hard time even understanding how different concepts of the soul have been in the past, given that we’ve been so influenced by Descartes.

Unfortunately, it appears that Descartes in certain respects just postponed by 400 years the inevitable.

Um-hmm.

Because by sequestering the soul from the body he put it in a very problematic position.

That’s right, there has never been a satisfactory explanation for how a soul that is defined as non-material could ever have a causal impact on a material system, which by definition only responds to material causation.

Now have theologians been also troubled by this?

Some have been, but I think that there are two fairly independent streams of thought. There’s the theological/biblical stream that began questioning dualism on biblical grounds, and on grounds of studying changes in church history, and this was at the beginning of the 20th century, and by the middle of the 20th century many seminary educated people had already decided that physicalism was the appropriate Christian position.

Now does this intellectual movement have a name?

No (laughs).

Oh, well, that’s refreshing!

It’s just something that has happened in over the last hundred years, and if you’ve gotten an education in a liberal theological seminary you will know about it, and if you haven’t you probably won’t know about it.

Now “liberal” is a key word there?

Yes. It’s only now that moderately conservative Christians are wrestling with the issue, and quite conservative Christians are just barely getting interested in investigating it.

What’s provoking this new wrestlemania?

Um, to some extent it’s the book that my colleague Warren Brown and I wrote (laughs)

Congratulations!

He really wanted to write a book and get it out there before the conservatives started getting hot under the collar about these issues, because he knew that the developments in neuroscience were going to provoke discussion, and so what we wanted to do was not argue people out of their dualism, but just say, look, here’s a different position from yours, but let us show you that it’s equally compatible with the rest of Christian teaching. And we’ve been very pleased at the reception of that book. People from quite conservative Christian institutions wanting us to come and talk with their faculty and students about it. And it’s been a very charitable, non-acrimonious discussion. So it’s been great fun to feel like maybe we’ve made a little bit of a difference in the world.

I can imagine. What is the name of that book by the way?

That’s called Whatever Happened to the Soul?

Now atomism was not the only point of inflection at which developing scientific thought had impact on theological views. You mention, of course, Charles Darwin.

Yes. That was an interesting piece in the history. One of the things that happened with Descartes is that, while the Aristotelian synthesis claimed that plants, animals and humans have souls, for Descartes, only human beings have souls, and so that had come to be the accepted view between 1650 and 1850. And so Darwin comes along and points out this huge amount of continuity between humans and animals. Well, if animals don’t have souls, one line of reasoning goes, then why should we think humans must have them? And so on the one hand there was a strong movement towards physicalism on the basis of that argument. But on the other side people would say, oh, if Darwin is showing all of this continuity between humans and animals, how are we going to make it clear that there are major distinctions between us and the animals? And one common strategy was to say, well, we have souls and they don’t.

This appears, if I may say, to be still animating much of the controversy over evolution today.

Yes, I think it does. These issues are all interestingly entangled.

Now how has the rise of modern neuroscience brought down the third shoe, as you might say?

I was first impressed by localization studies. You look at a victim of a stroke, you can find where the brain damage is, and then you look at the particular loss of competence that that patient exhibits, and it might be something as specific as one tiny brain region damaged, and nothing lost except the ability to remember color terms. And so it looks like there is a very tight, one-to-one correlation between what certain parts of the brain do, and certain very, very fine-scale cognitive capacities. So you can always say that, “Oh well, it’s the soul that’s doing it, but the soul can only act through the brain, and soul actions are just peculiarly correlated with acting through particular bits of the brain,” but there’s no explanation as to why it should be that way. So it just gets to be a bigger and bigger and bigger stretch to say, it’s the soul that’s doing it, but the brain is just somehow involved as a middle man. It just becomes so much simpler to say, we’ve just got to admit that it’s the brain that’s doing this.

Listen to the audio >>

top

Part Three

Well, that certainly leads us to a whole host of new problems, and maybe best brought to light by Francis Crick’s comment that he has “falsified” Christianity by proving there is no soul?

Well, if he had done his homework, he would know about the Christian theologians and biblical scholars who have been saying for 50 to 100 years that Christians don’t have souls, never needed them, and Christianity would be much better off if we never had thought we had them.

I recall a very amusing remark that you made at a conference last fall where you introduced yourself as someone who teaches at a graduate theological seminary and spends her time telling her students that they have no souls.

(Laughs) I do get their attention (big laugh). And I have a running debate with the president of the seminary, who is a dualist himself—he says primarily on philosophical grounds—but when I first started preaching physicalism, he would stop when we were singing hymns that had soul language in it, and he would tell me I was not allowed to sing those hymns (laughs).

Well, I know you’re using the word “preaching” figuratively when you say “preaching physicalism,” but it does seem to me that physicalism poses some very serious problems. Once you acknowledge that the brain is what’s doing it, you get back to some very serious stakes for Christians, do you not?

Yes. And serious stakes for the whole human race. It’s the problem that Descartes and Hobbes already recognized: if human bodies are controlled by the laws governing their parts, then everything that a human being does must be controlled by the laws of the natural sciences, and if that’s the case, then not only do we not have free will, not only do we not have moral responsibility, but we can’t even have rationality. And so if what you and I are saying is simply the product of the outworking of the laws of neurobiology inside our heads, then there’s nothing rational about what we’re doing: we’re just making noises.

Well, if I thought determinism was true I wouldn’t have spent so long preparing for this interview.

That’s right, you would have known that it was either going to come out well or badly!

Exactly! But how do we get out of this now? This is a tough spot.

I believe that, in contrast to Hobbes’ day, we are in a position right now where we can begin to unravel the knot. We have this image of the way the world is constructed, and an image about how the major sciences relate to one another, that I will call the “hierarchy of the sciences” with the corresponding “hierarchy of complex systems.” So we think that everything is made of subatomic particles, whatever the physicists say they are this decade, and atoms are composed of those, chemical compounds are composed of those, biochemicals are composed of vast complexes of those simpler molecules, and now you’re getting into the range of biology. You can start talking about cell walls and variously more complex tissues, and then organs, and then organisms, and then you can move to ecology to talk about the large systems in which the organisms live, or you can move to psychology and the social sciences to talk about the complex relations among human beings. It seems to me that the major assumption throughout the whole of the modern world view has been that the parts of any of these complex entities unilaterally determine the behavior of the whole. This makes sense in some kinds of systems. If you think of an ordinary mechanical watch, it’s just almost undeniable that the behavior of the parts of the watch determine the behavior of the whole.

And this is something that’s often called “bottom-up” causality.

Exactly. And in fact, if your watch doesn’t work that way, you throw it out and get another one. But we’ve also got lots of different kinds of different systems in our world that don’t work that way. For instance, if you look at a system like an ant colony, you find that the very character of the ants in the colony is shaped by their relationships to the other ants around them. They’re all genetically identical, but one ant will become a forager, and another ant will become a nest builder, and this depends on frequency of running into ants of the various sorts as it’s running around doing its business. And so the same little ant body is made into a forager, or a nest builder, or some other functional kind of ant in the system depending on how the system as a whole affects its experiences.

What we’re looking for here is higher-level ordering that is in some sense causally autonomous, or not “reducible,” whatever that means?

Yes, and so the ant colony is an example. You’ve got the genetic level, you’ve got the level of the organism as a whole—the ant—you’ve got the colony itself, and then you’ve got the wider environment, and so you’ve got four levels of complexity there, and so what you find when you get systems complex enough, with enough causal levels, the system as a whole will have holistic system qualities not manifest by any of its parts. For instance, colonies last about the same length of time as the queen does, and in some subspecies that’s about 15 years. If you find a young colony, the ants in it are going to be more aggressive and less predictable. If you find an older colony, the ants are less aggressive and much more predictable. The worker ants are replaced I think maybe once every year, so it’s not that you’re training the same ants. It’s that the system as a whole is going through a developmental phase that shapes the parts themselves and the roles that they play.

Now our goal in this intellectual endeavor is not just to understand ant colonies, but to give a sense of the human person, and some of the phenomena that we associate with being one, like subjectivity, a sense of having the ability to choose, of having free will, the sense of being responsible for our actions, of being moral agents, and of course, very importantly, the ability to have a relationship with God or the divine. So how do we get there from this?

Well, we are like the ant colony. We are complex systems with holistic characteristics. Some of those holistic characteristics are able to exert downward effects on lower level parts, and much of this is what’s going on in our cognitive systems. I have the ability to perform what I call self-transcendence. For instance, I find myself angry at a student, and I can then move to a level of evaluation and ask, “Why am I angry at that student? Should I be angry or should I not be angry?” and make a judgment about that. And if I think I should not have been angry, then I can go back and try to redesign my cognitive processes so I’m not so likely to be upset about students doing those sorts of things.

And when we get to the point where we can reflect on those higher order reflections in light of moral concepts provided by our culture, we’re at the level that we can become morally responsible agents. So I can decide that I was perfectly justified in being angry at the student. I treat the student badly as a result. But then I reflect on whether that was a Christian way to interact with the student, and Jesus’ enemy-love comes to mind, and I think, “Oh, whoops! I failed morally.” So we have to have these multilevel capacities for self-transcendence and self-evaluation. We have to have the cultural resources of moral evaluative language, and that is what gives us the capacity to be moral thinkers. Of course the capacity to make ourselves carry out what we decide is the moral thing to do, that’s a discussion for another whole day.

Now it does appear to me that some of our older notions of causality and the causality of the will are going to have to be reexamined here, because it doesn’t sound to me like the will is going to turn out to be some kind of “uncaused cause.” Right. But, also one has to wonder, if the self, the mind, the soul is just a manifestation of very complex meta-levels of organization of a physical system, then what happens to immortality? What happens to life after death?

Well, the Christian view, the early Christian view, and some scholars say the only suitable view for Jews also, is the view of the resurrection of the body. Jesus simply died. There was no soul going off to heaven. But three days later his body was, not just resuscitated, but raised in a transformed manner, suitable for some other world than this crass material world that we live in. And so what Christian preachers need to do is to reemphasize the resurrection at the end of time, rather than the sermons that say your loved-one’s soul has flown to God and is at peace in heaven and all that sort of stuff. And I think that’s much more authentically Christian than the souls-flying-away kind of image.

I must ask this skeptical question: why is it that the physical sciences and neuroscience have been able to chip away at dualism, whereas the seeming improbability of bodies being brought back to life is accepted? (That was a very poorly worded question!)

(Laughter) Well, actually there are a lot of Christians who accept pretty much all of the Christian teaching except resurrection. You can ask scholars, is there enough historical evidence available, and there is a small but strong minority of Christian scholars who say that we’ve got adequate evidence to conclude that something really strange happened on that third day. It was such a powerful event that it totally changed the lives of the disciples, who’d been hiding—turned them into fearless evangelists. We would all say that we can’t describe exactly what it was like. It’s not a ghost, it’s not a resuscitated corpse, it’s like nothing anybody has ever seen. But to be a Christian, Saint Paul would say, “If Christ be not raised then our hope is in vain.” So it’s a part of the package of being a Christian, and even if there isn’t enough historical evidence for it to stand on its own legs apart from the whole system, you have to ask is there enough reason to believe in the Christian system as a whole. And I could go on for ten days straight about why I think there is.

Well, I suppose my question really is, where do you draw the line? What aspects of your theology have to accommodate themselves to contemporary science, and what aspects remain matters, inviolable matters of faith?

Well, belief in God and God’s doings in the history of his people are not really the sorts of things that science could ever disprove. And I really want to emphasize again that, on this matter of the soul, although it’s been taken to be central to Christian thought for many centuries, I was convinced prior to looking at the science that physicalism was a perfectly okay understanding, and even a better understanding of the original biblical teaching. So biblical scholars beat the neuroscientists to this conclusion by almost a hundred years.

Well… right on!

(Laughter) But I would be really upset if I found some aspect of what I see as central to my Christian belief-set to be in radical conflict with science, and couldn’t find any way to resolve the conflict.

Professor Nancey Murphy, thank you very much.

Thank you very much. It’s been a delight.

Listen to the audio >>

top