Existential crisis over consciousness and the Soul

Faith & Science Conversation
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Well, there’s Jesus in Mark 12:30 referring to Deuteronomy 6:5 when he states the greatest commandment. The Greek word used in Mark cannot be referring to Greek philosophy since it is a translation from the Hebrew in Deuteronomy (or possibly from Jesus’ Aramaic). And it doesn’t matter who did the translating, because the author of Mark certainly would have known of Jesus’ reference and what that meant to the Jews. So I think the assumption should be that the use of the Greek psuches was because it was the best option, not because the authors meant to refer to any Greek concepts.

And then there’s Matthew 10:28. Jesus asserts a distinction between the death of the body and the death of the soul, which sure seems to strongly suggest that the soul has independence from the body. I would interpret Paul through this, and thus argue that 1 Corinthians 15 is not a statement about the structure of body and soul, but rather a statement about post-resurrection existence; that is, that it is material, but since life will be eternal then, without death, this is a materiality not quite like the one we are familiar with.

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Again I completely agree with you about this. Somethings are too profound to be within the remit of language. All of our language evolved for practical use so it isn’t surprising when it comes to such things as you mentioned here we have to bend language a bit to give a sense of what we experience as true. Myth and poetry, both to be found in the Bible, do that. When we try to make what is implicit more explicit it is always at the cost of distortion or a loss of meaning.

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I don’t, Ecclesiastes seems to me to be all about human wisdom, which you gain through doing all sorts of things in the world as Solomon did. I wouldn’t consider Solomon’s views to be the whole truth about the nature of things.

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I think that’s seriously overstating the situation!

And what definition of “eternal” is being used?

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Exactly! But that is why I prefer the word “spirit” for the non-physical aspect of a person to distinguish it from the Greek ideas of a mental soul which isn’t found in the Old Testament at all. The word often translated as soul in the OT doesn’t mean anything like some non-physical animator – it means mind, heart, life, or person, and so it is translated differently depending on the context.

Yes there are many things referring to two different kinds of death in the Bible, for it speaks of people walking around and talking and thus physically alive as being dead – both in the OT and in the words of Jesus also. Though… I would say death of the spirit.

But I don’t agree with the understanding of Matthew 10:28 which makes God into some kind of soul/spirit destroying monster. It isn’t God which is the destroyer but we ourselves, our own sin.

I do not look for some way to change what Paul said into something else. Paul is clear where we find little clarity elsewhere in the Bible. There is no soul animating the body or moving apart from the body like in Greek philosophy and other religions. The spiritual body grows from the physical like a tree from a seed. What Paul speaks of is about what is imperishable and of heaven and it is not the physical/natural body (which belongs to the earth) or the mental soul of the Greeks either. The only thing of us which is eternal is the resurrected spiritual body. And it is in need of resurrection because what most people have (the non-physical part of them) is dead – disconnected from the source of life in God.

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Jesus didn’t say God will destroy the soul, he said God could destroy the soul. How can we destroy our own soul? What in the Bible gives you that idea?

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Hi Mitchell, I appreciate your point of view, but I don’t agree.

Yet, Paul clearly distinguishes between a “natural body” and a “spiritual body.” If material form is essential to the spiritual body, then what is the distinction?

And I think we have to account for a couple of things if we assume that there is no spiritual being independent of material form.

“When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage. Instead, they will be like the angels in heaven.” (Mark 12:25)

Is Jesus here merely comparing people to angels in the sense that angels don’t marry? If that’s the case, why is comparison to angels meaningful? What does it add to the prior statement? Or is Jesus pointing to something much deeper about people when they are resurrected, as with many statements he points to something much deeper than the more limited meaning the text clearly states, much as his parables do?

And then there’s the serpent. If angels, as spiritual beings, can take on various physical forms, then we can accept that the serpent that tempted Eve was Satan taking on the form of a serpent. But if there is no spiritual being separate from a material form, then the serpent could not have been Satan. Okay, you may argue that he didn’t take on the form of the serpent, but merely took control of the serpent’s body and spoke through it. But then you have to explain how this is possible, and the Bible’s only references to anything like that are God putting words in people’s mouths through the Holy Spirit.

But God’s being is, according the Bible, totally independent of material existence, of any fixed form at all. God can assume any material form he likes.

And we are created in God’s image. If God has no fixed form, than would could that mean, except that we are in essence spirit, non-material, just as God is?

I have a very hard time understanding Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 to be saying that a spiritual body is simply another physical body, but without sin.

If he is saying that, then what does he mean by vs 37-38?

“And what you sow is not the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or something else. 38But God gives it a body as He has designed, and to each kind of seed He gives its own body.”

Remember that in vs. 35-46 he is answering the questions: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?”

Thus, all his assertions about the material and spiritual bodies are tailored to those questions. And neither of those questions has anything to do with the structure of our being, but rather with the nature of our existence after we are resurrected. For according to the Bible, all resurrections will happen at the same time, which means that there is a huge gap of time between the death of many people and their resurrection. If they don’t get their spiritual body until they are resurrected, in what form do they exist during that time? You may say that they are dormant, or something, but if that’s the case, how did Jesus speak to Moses and did Moses have a material form at that time? (Matthew 17)

There’s also the malleability of matter demonstrated by all the miracles. Doesn’t this imply that matter is not the solid thing, in adherence to the physical laws of the universe, that we perceive it to be?

For me, it seems quite overwhelmingly clear that we are, in essence, what God is, pure spirit; that God did make confined to a material form, but that we must have material form to exist in and part of a material universe. And we know that God thought the material universe he created was good, and that he will recreate it after evil and death have been defeated. Thus, doesn’t it follow that God wants us—who are in essence like him—to be in and enjoy this material universe, and thus, what Paul is talking about is not the structure of our being, but the distinction between the material dimension of our being in this world and the material dimension of our resurrected being in the new world God creates?

This is why I don’t interpret 1 Corinthians 15 as you do.

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The spiritual body is “pure spirit” just like God to be with God where God is in heaven. And this spiritual body is our essence – a product of our own choices in life. That is why it is in need of resurrection. It is not simply given by God. It is dead because it is our own creation and sin brings death to it.

Material form is no part of what Paul said. The spiritual body is a body but Paul says it is not of the stuff of the earth – so it is not matter which has its being in the laws of nature. It is certainly not material in that sense. If it has substance, then Paul says it is of heaven and not the earth.

Clearly not, because this is contrary to what it says in Genesis 1. They were made physical in the image of God. And the meaning is certainly not that we are the same as God in every way but only that there is a reflection of creator in us and we are meant to be His children (which is what it always means when any living thing makes something in its own image). I think it also means our infinite potential is a reflection of God’s infinite actuality because we are made for an eternal parent-child relationship where there is no end to what God can give to us and no end to what we can receive from Him.

I have a hard time understanding where you are even getting such this idea of the spiritual body being just another physical body. Paul describes all the differences between the physical/natural body and the spiritual body. The physical/natural body is weak, perishable, and of the earth – i.e. a product of the laws of nature and bound by them. The spiritual body is powerful, imperishable, and of heaven – i.e. not a product of the laws of nature or bound by them, but growing from the physical body like a tree from a seed. And sin is not something in the body but things we do – self destructive habits of thought and behavior which kill the spiritual body.

And this part about God giving the spiritual body is just like all the rest of the Bible where it says God gives us everything we eat and wear. It does not mean Paul is wrong and the spiritual body doesn’t grow from the physical any more than this means we don’t grow our food and make our clothes.

No the earth is not heaven. No the spiritual body is not of the stuff of the earth. Paul denies this, saying it is not of the earth but of heaven. Thus the spiritual body goes to be with Jesus and God in heaven not to remain on the earth any more than Jesus did. Yes there will be a new restored earth but only to serve the same purpose it does now for the birth of new children. The essence of the physical universe is limitation because like the womb those limitations are necessary for the infant to grow in preparation for a much greater world without those limitations. That is why it always says a new heaven and a new earth. They are not the same thing at all.

And that is why it says…

Yes, because the earth and physical universe is necessary for children – that is why God created it. The passage certainly does not mean there will be no love or relationships between people, let alone that husbands and wives must be parted from each other.

No it does not. No. I do not believe that God violates the laws of nature He created. He created them because they are what make life possible. Logical coherence is the difference between dream and reality. And if you reduce God’s omnipotence to that of a dreamer then He is no more powerful than any child who can do anything in his dreams. What makes a miracle is that it is the work of God NOT that it is a violation of the laws of nature God created. The miracles of Jesus were simply a matter of Jesus being able to see what the Father was doing and NOT Him having super-human powers. Thus Jesus said that we would do all the things He did and more. Jesus was 100% human with all the same limitations we have everyday. It was never about magic. Yes far more is possible than we think, but not because God will break the laws of nature at our request.

Yes 1 Cor 15 is about the resurrection. But Paul says if there is a physical body then there is a spiritual body (1 Cor 15:44). But before the resurrection it is dead. And I think a lot of what you are saying is mired in the concept of absolute time. Scientists have discarded this. The time we experience in the physical world is property of the physical world having nothing to do with spiritual things including the spiritual body and the resurrection.

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My conjecture is that it refers to the set of laws governing the body: the natural body is subject to all natural law and so it gets sick, ages, and eventually decays, while the spiritual body – while still physical – is subject to ‘heavenly law’ and thus experiences none of those things.

How far that goes – well, we aren’t told. We can deduce some things from how Jesus’ resurrected body functioned, such as still being able to eat and to enter rooms without using door or window, but there are so many things we don’t know, such as will hair and fingernails still grow and need trimming, will we still sweat (and suffer from the resultant body odor), can bones be broken, etc.

One difference I presume is that our muscles will be always supremely fit, since muscles getting out of shape is a deterioration due to natural law – so we won’t need to go to the gym, run, swim, row, or whatever to maintain fitness; instead we’ll be able to do all those things for the sake of enjoyment, no longer as a chore.

I’ll add one from a college friend – he maintained that we’ll be able to eat all the pizza we want without gaining weight or any other detrimental side effects. :grin:

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“Spiritual being separate from a material form” is pretty much what an elohim is in ancient Hebrew; it covers Yahweh, His divine council, angels, and dead humans – and probably demons as well but there isn’t much demonology in the OT.

Don’t forget Balaam’s donkey! and for that matter, demon possession in the Gospels.

Personally I consider that the two meanings of the Hebrew נָחָשׁ (nakhash), “serpent” and “shining one”, are both meant; the trouble is that we pretty much have to pick one or the other when translating. A “shining one” is a heavenly being, so taking both possible renditions at once – along with the “beast of the field” reference – we get an actual serpent in physical form but which is at the same time a heavenly being.

The question arises from a bad understanding of “in”. One German theologian noted that the preposition “in” isn’t necessarily referring to form: we say “in ecstasy”, “in anger”, which refer to conditions/states we can experience, but we also say “in office”, e.g. “He was in office three years” – and it’s the latter meaning that we should take in Genesis 1. “The image of God” is thus an office, like that of a chief executive, comprised of duties, tasks, and responsibilities that are not limited by hours on the clock but pertain continuously – a status, like being a prophet or a king.

This case is made stronger by the fact that the Hebrew prefix ב (bayt) can also be rendered with the English preposition “as”, which makes the statement say “So God created man as His own image . . . .”

So asking about form sort of misses the point: “the image of God” is an office we hold, a status, a responsibility.

[Interestingly this yields a different definition of sin than the usual: sin is thus a matter of not properly “imaging” God.]

I compare it to falling into a black hole: to an outside observer, someone falling into a black hole never actually crosses the event horizon, while to the person falling in things proceed normally and he just falls right on through. So as we “fall” into death, from our perspective we just die, but from the heavenly perspective everyone arrives at the same time.

To use the analogy above, God isn’t stuck to either version of the flow of time; He can pull things or people out of the normal flow as He wishes.

I.e. He wants us in an Edenic situation, material yet capable of interacting with the spiritual world.

Sounds good to me!

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How are those not in contradiction?

We have to interpret Paul by the resurrected body of Jesus: same body as far as being material and in appearance, definitely not limited by the material. It’s not a difference in form but in nature: the material body has all the limitations of the material world, the spiritual body has only heavenly limitations.
An analogy: the material body is akin to a bicycle, the spiritual body is akin to an Iron Man armor set. They’re both made from ordinary matter, they both make it possible to travel, but the bicycle rider is limited to surface travel and by muscle power and weather while the one wearing Iron Man armor can travel on the surface he is not limited to that nor by his own muscles or the weather.

Yes – in Genesis 1 terms, sin is a failure to properly image God. There’s a terrible irony and tragedy in Genesis 3, then: the Adversary assured Eve that eating the fruit would make her “like God”, yet the act of eating it made her unlike God.

Whoa – there’s some serious science fiction!

Eden is a good measuring tool here: we were made for a material world, and thus the new Earth, but an Earth where heavenly types come and go freely. Yet we were also made for more than merely a material world, and thus the new Heavens, where we will be able to come and go freely,

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Because made in God’s image was never to mean we are exactly like God. The differences are many. We are a finite image of an infinite God. How? Our infinite potential reflects God’s infinite actuality. We are a physical living organism growing from a single cell. How is this made in the image of God? We become a spirit like God.

You mean we have to interpret Paul by amaterish interpretations and things we choose to make up about the story of the resurrected Jesus? No. That makes no sense at all. The story doesn’t explain how things happened. Paul is giving an actual explanation and interpretations of a story is a poor reason for dismissing that explanation. In general, I very much agree with making the WORDS of Jesus a lens through which everyone else is understood. But in this case we are not talking about any words of Jesus to explain anything. Yes Jesus says He is not the thing which they fear, a spirit of the dead, which is only something to fear because is dead – a spirit which is not like the living spirit of God. And to be sure the resurrected Jesus is not that. So Paul explains, “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Completely different. But no I do not think the story told of Jesus’ resurrection means that Paul got it wrong.

A comic book version, eh? No I don’t believe in that.

There was a right way and a wrong way to “become like God.” And taking on God’s authority to dictate good and evil was definitely not the right way. The right way was to learn what is good from God and thus to follow God’s way of doing good and opposing evil. It was a devious temptation, but they had the answer to it in the words of God to them. Jesus demonstrated this in the three temptations - each time following the words of God in answer to the adversary’s temptation.

Whoa – there’s some serious science fiction!

The Earth as we experience it is a better measuring tool here than how you choose to interpret a story of Eden. Yes Adam and Eve walked with God, but I do not believe the change was some alteration of the earth like the creationists believe. The alteration was in Adam and Eve in their perception of the Earth in which they lived. Yes we were made for more than the material world. And that more is the Heavens of scripture in which God resides. Thus it BOTH heaven and earth which is remade to work like it was supposed to work in the beginning without the distortions of sin, and CLEARLY it is NOT to do away with this division of earth from heaven!

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We are in God’s image right now, we don’t have to “become” anything.

No, by what the Gospels have to say about the resurrected body of Jesus. It’s rather sparse, but it’s enough to know that a resurrected body can be touched, can eat, and somehow can get into a room without need of a door or window.

So? We know it happened, and we know things about that body – “how” is not relevant to that.

What interpretation? We know He could be touched, we know He could eat, and we know that He could get into a room without need of door or window. There’s no interpretation involved, just reading the text.

The other option is that we won’t be able to come and go freely, which would be very strange.

I have no idea where you pulled that from.

Where is that in the text?

That’s what I said.

I can’t figure out where you got that, either; it certainly has no relation to what I wrote!

Paul describes a change. Jesus’ actions show us some results of that change.

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That reminds me: Time for my annual visual exam by my ophthalmologist.

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I started writing a response, but then I realized I was essentially just repeating myself which is pointless. IF we disagree nothing you have said has changed anything. Some of the differences may be semantics but others not. Perhaps clarifying these differences would help. I shall summarize the principle points.

  1. Being made in the image of God does not mean we have one of these mental souls from Greek philosophy and other religions needed for making our bodies alive or for making them a person. Being made in the image of God does not mean we are the same as God, but we rather that we are made for an eternal parent-child relationship.

  2. Jesus’ resurrection shows that the spiritual body is more powerful rather than incapable of anything we can do, but also shows that it does not belong to the Earth because Jesus left and does not participate in the objective reality of the Earth.

  3. You envision a future Earth which is somehow different. I think the only difference is a change in human beings and not an alteration of the objective reality of the Earth which is based on the laws of nature.

  4. It says there will be both a new heaven and a new earth, so both serve a different purpose which remains. I think the purpose of the earth is as it always has been as a place where new children of God come into being. And that is why it says in heaven none are “given in marriage,” not because nobody can have husband-wife relationships but because the earth necessary for children to grow and develop.

I suggest you clarify how your position is different and not keep repeating arguments which I don’t agree with.

P.S. I thought I should also make the observation that the above is compatible with many aspects of the preterist view that we already have the new heaven and new earth. Clearly evil is not gone from the earth, but perhaps it is in the process of being overcome. The preterist view appeals because I am not interested in these eschatologies which sound too much like fantasy and science fiction to me.

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There isnt much point responding to a reference without evidence St Roymond…i didnt write what you are responding to, i quoted it.

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The first is actually part of what I’ve said. The second has nothing to do with being in the image of God; the image was the last item installed in a temple, and instead of a statue God put us in His “cosmic temple”.

Of course it belongs to this Earth – He was solid, still had the wounds, ate, sat on the ground, etc.; it just isn’t restricted to the Earth.

Huh? I can’t think of anything I wrote that would suggest this.

This is sheer speculation, with no basis in the text at all – it’s got less behind it than the idea that Genesis 1:2 tells us that the original Earth was ruined and God was starting over. The Eden story makes it clear that Earth was intended to be our home, and nothing has abrogated that. But it also makes clear that Eden was a sort of interface between the two realms since YHWH-Elohim walked in the Garden. And when Revelation uses the symbolism of a (cubical!) New Jerusalem, that’s a return to the Edenic condition.

Preterism is a clumsy view that runs roughshod over a variety of themes in the New Testament and requires believing a substantial number of silly things before breakfast. Just for two examples, it contradicts Paul’s teaching that Satan is still an active foe along with “spiritual powers of the air” and his use of the then-standard terms referring to a hierarchy of demonic forces, and it contradicts Peter’s assertion that the cosmos will be consumed by fire and be replaced

I presume you’re referring to John’s Apocalypse. It doesn’t require preterism to see that the book isn’t about a series of future cataclysms, it just requires looking at the book’s status as far as canonization: the primary reason it ended up – after vigorous controversy – being accepted was that Christians who read it saw that it was describing what was happening around them; that should be made clear up front in any study of the book because it is part of the context, something critical to the historical-grammatical method so many literalists claim to employ.

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Evidence? Metaphysics has nothing to do with “examin[ing] the basic structure of reality”, examining the basic structure of reality is what particle physicists do. That doesn’t need a reference, it’s just the truth. If metaphysics examined the basic structure of reality, it would be bringing us scientific breakthroughs or at least insight.

I think jammycakes had a good comment:

I think that what @St.Roymond is talking about here is the tendency of modern philosophers to add a layer of what appears to be complete crackpottery on top of the rigorous analytical core.

Not according to your post – there, what you quoted was this:

inquiry into the conceptual schemes that underlie human thought and experience.

If you’re quoting, use the quote function!

Besides which, are you proposing people shouldn’t respond to things others quote?

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Well here we go again :grinning:

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I wouldn’t be so harsh. @adamjedgar is using the Wiki definition which isn’t that bad. In this definition, the basic structure of reality is the part of reality that underlies physics.

The analogy of the child who keeps asking “Why?” might be a good analogy. When we hit a “Why?” question with no real answer or evidence, that’s where metaphysics begins.