I am not talking about a literal interpretation. Any reasonably interpretation that kind of fits the story as written (agriculture, metal working, etc.). Not, for instance, an interpretation that moves A&E back to 5 million years ago (which has been proposed here). Looking forward to your answer.
Now, now, this is a public forum and sticking noses in is to be expected.
Knowledge increases but that does not mean that humanity becomes something better.
There have happened positive changes in attitudes and practices. For example, there are ethical rules for warfare, the laws have progressed towards the direction of admitting that people have human rights, and people in Europe do not anymore burn or drown those who they think are ‘heretics’.
Despite all the positive changes, the civilized humane behaviour is a thin layer on top of the basic human nature. In bad conditions, people may too easily regress back to the violent and cruel habits that prevailed a millennia or two ago.
True. A fairly large proportion of so called Christians are nominal Christians. They have the name and may even attend to church activities, at least to baptisms, weddings and funerals, but their life does not wittness of being followers of Christ. This is especially true for many in the denominations where membership is not dependent on a personal decision. Being born in a Christian family does not make the person a believer.
I think you’re speaking as if the soul were some kind of physical object placed somewhere inside the body, but that’s not really the classical Christian view.
The soul is not “inside” the body in the way the heart, brain, or lungs are inside the body, they soul is the form and life-principle of the body. In other words, it’s what makes a living body a living body, so asking where the soul “sits” is, in my view, a category mistake ( a bit like asking where the meaning of a sentence is located on the paper),
As for animals: yes, animals have a “soul” in the broad Aristotelian sense, because they are living beings with sensation, appetite, memory, and movement, but they don’t have a rational, spiritual, immortal soul in the way human beings do, their soul is a sensitive animal soul, not a rational one.
Do animals have a mind? That depends on what you mean by “mind”. They clearly have sensory awareness, memory, imagination, and a kind of instinctive intelligence, but they don’t have intellect in the strict philosophical sense (the capacity to grasp universal truths, reason abstractly, make moral judgments, or know God).
So I would put it this way: the intellect, or mind in the higher sense, is a power of the rational soulc and in human beings the soul is spiritual and rational; in animals, it is neither rational nor immortal.
Also, the soul is not “added after the mind,” as though God first made a mind and then inserted a soul somewhere into the body. As I said the human person is one unified being composed of body and rational soul, which means that the souls is the life-principle of the whole living person.
My point was that if consciousness were proven to be totally and exhaustively reducible to matter, then the Christian doctrine of the immortal soul would become basically impossible to maintain.
For example brain damage can seriously affect memory, language, personality, perception, and the outward expression of consciousness, but that only shows that the brain is necessary for the normal phenomenal manifestation of consciousness in embodied life, it doesn’t, by itself, prove that consciousness, intellect, will, and personal identity are nothing but brain activity.
To make an example, if a damaged brain prevents a person from speaking, remembering, reasoning outwardly, or expressing awareness, that may show that the instrument through which consciousness is expressed has been damaged, but it doesn’t automatically prove that the deeper principle of consciousness is inextricably linked to, and originated by, matter.
This is also why phenomena such as terminal or paradoxical lucidity are relevant. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but there are reported cases in which people with severe dementia or serious cognitive decline unexpectedly recover clarity, recognition, communication, or memory shortly before death. I’m not saying this scientifically proves the soul, but it does challenge the simplistic idea that the observable condition of the brain always maps perfectly onto the presence or absence of conscious personal capacities.
So, to be clear, the brain matters as Christianity sees the human person as a unity of body and soul (the soul can subsist after bodily death, but that separated state is incomplete and unnatural, which is precisely why Jesus has taught not only the immortality of the soul, but also the resurrection of the body), but dependence on the brain for ordinary embodied expression isn’t the same as total ontological reduction to the brain.
If strict materialism were actually demonstrated ( meaning that intellect, will, personal identity, and consciousness are entirely and solely produced by matter, and therefore necessarily cease at death ) then the immortality of the soul would be disproven.
Sure. I never respond to anyone that way. I replied to Roy like that because he tends to get caught up in nitpicking ( this Your thoughts on punishment or rehabilitation and whether there are any truly bad people - #188 by 1Cor15.54 is exactly what I mean: he focused on a single term without taking the broader context into account), which ends up wasting a lot of time.
Sure, have a read Your thoughts on punishment or rehabilitation and whether there are any truly bad people - #163 by 1Cor15.54
This is where the rabbit hole began. I was asking for an example of something which science can actually address. And you responded.
OK we were talking about the soul and mind and now you throw in consciousness. How does consciousness relate to the mind and soul? My point was simply science might address the question of the mind but is incapable of addressing the soul.
Which places the soul firmly outside the realm of science and is therefore not falsifiable.
Given science can not address “the immortality of the soul” it is safe.
I thread I have not been following. While you say what your theory isn’t, it is hard to tell what your theory actually is.
Given behavioral modernity in Homo sapiens is generally dated to roughly 100,000 years ago this is definitely not any kind of fit for the Genesis narration.
I agree with you that science cannot address the soul directly as if the soul were a physical object, as the soul is not something one could locate, weigh, scan, or measure like an organ.
But science can still be relevant indirectly, because the soul is not unrelated to mind and consciousness. In the classical Christian view, the soul is the principle of life and, in human beings, the root of rational powers such as intellect and will. The mind refers to those cognitive powers, and consciousness is the lived, experiential manifestation of mental activity.
So consciousness is not identical with the soul, but it isn’t irrelevant to the soul either.
If science only shows that our ordinary conscious life depends on the brain, that doesn’t refute the soul. Christianity already sees the human person as embodied, so it is not surprising that brain damage can affect memory, language, personality, perception, and the outward expression of consciousness.
But if it were proven that consciousness, intellect, will, personal identity, and rational thought are entirely and exhaustively reducible to matter (meaning they are nothing but brain processes and necessarily cease when the brain dies) then yes, the Christian doctrine of the immortal soul would become extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain.
So my point is not that neuroscience can directly detect or disprove the soul, my point is that a strong materialist account of the mind would have philosophical consequences for belief in an immortal rational soul.
In other words, brain-dependence does not refute the soul. Total material reduction, if proven, would (or better yet: it would destroy any reasonable credibility for belief in the immortal soul).
You don’t have to tell me that, tell them to the many who believe that the belief in an immortal soul is completely irrational and disproven by neuroscience.
Yes my claim is far more modest that theirs if you have read what I wrote. So I really don’t put much stock into them.
Fair enough, let me state the positive view more clearly.
I am not defending a biological bottleneck-of-two theory, nor am i claiming that all present human genetic diversity derives from only two recent individuals.
The view I’m defending is a genealogical original-pair model.
On this model, there was a real historical original pair, traditionally called Adam and Eve, they didn’t need to be the only biological humans alive at the time, and they didn’t need to be the sole genetic source of all present-day humans.
What makes them “original” is not that the entire human genome passed uniquely through them, but that they were the first humans in the relevant theological or metaphysical sense: the first bearers of the special human vocation, original justice, covenantal headship, rational-spiritual status, or however one formulates that doctrine.
Their descendants could then have interbred with the wider biological population. Over time, because genealogical ancestry spreads much faster than genetic ancestry, that original pair could become ancestors of all later historical humans without every living person today carrying a detectable genetic contribution from them.
In other words, a real original couple is compatible with population genetics, provided we distinguish genetic ancestry from genealogical ancestry and don’t require a recent genetic bottleneck of two.
This model also has limits, because it must place the original pair early enough that all historically known human populations already belong to the same human family. It isn’t a theory of recent “soulless races,” and it isn’t a theory in which some historical peoples were fully human while others were not.
Tl;dr: I’m defending the possibility of a real historical original pair who became universal genealogical ancestors of later humanity, not the claim that humanity passed through a recent genetic bottleneck of two individuals. This certainly contradicts neither science nor doctrine, so in my view it is far preferable to merely symbolic interpretations, which are extremely difficult (to put it mildly) to reconcile with orthodoxy.
My problem is if you are falling back on a genealogical relationship to A&E to understand how original sin propagates (which I think you are) to get around the disconnect between science and Genesis, then why should lines on a piece of paper, which is all genealogical relationships amount to, matter?
And, for what it is worth, I think the NT authors considered biological and genealogical relationships to be of equal importance.
I agree with that. I just don’t believe that the Church = Rome.
Good point.
What if what we call the mind is the phenomenon that results when soul interfaces with brain?
BTW, why does it require a locus?
Depends on what you want to define as “mind”. Animals, other than us, have been shown to have a mind.
I don’t think it does. If my memory is correct, @1Cor15.54 wants to argue souls get added in at some point.
The mental image this brought was an angel with a hypodermic injecting “soul stuff” into fetuses.
Not far from the mark.
But evidently only for those individuals that can trace their family history back to a historic A&E. I guess God is the original author of Ancestry.com.
And only for people who aren’t monozygotic twins.
Another bit of science fiction pushed onto the scriptures.
Objection! That’s not science fiction. It’s not even space opera.
Sustained.
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