What role does the soul play? [Spin-off Old Earth or EC? A new book...]

@Realspiritik @Shawn_Murphy

It looks to me like we are looking at a spectrum in religion between too much emphasis on the physical and too much emphasis on the spiritual.

  1. At the Gnostic end of the spectrum, the physical is an evil creation of the evil Demi-urge and we are originally spiritual beings now trapped in a physical prison.
  2. There are a whole range of approaches that put a little more emphasis on the spirit than the physical such as keeping this idea that we are originally spiritual beings or souls that are spending a time of testing or acquiring a bodily form in the physical universe.
  3. In the middle, there is a recognition since God is spirit, then this represents the more fundamental reality, but the physical is a creation of God for a very good purpose, a womb for the conception and maturation of the human spirit. But the ultimate purpose is the creation of spiritual beings with a living parent-child relationship with God and the physical existence having served its purpose is naturally left behind.
  4. Likewise there is a whole range approaches that put more emphasis on the physical than the spiritual. One of these would be seeing our current physical existence as a distortion of an orginal more perfect physical existence – expecting that the return of Christ will change the universe back into one where there is no death or illness.
  5. At the extreme end of the spectrum in this direction, there is only the physical and the “soul” is nothing more than the essence of life itself or a memory of our physical existence in the mind of God, while “spiritual” is just a word describing our relationship with God. Thus it is expected that life after death only consists of a physical resurrection into this universe but under the rule of Jesus returned as king of the world.

Obviously the spectrum as I have described it, with myself in the middle at 3, shows my bias against the preexistence of the “soul” as something to which I am very much opposed.

Dear Michell,
You place yourself in the middle of list and I would also place myself there with one edit to your statement as noted above. I have said many times that I am not Gnostic.
Best Wishes, Shawn

I agree that there’s a spectrum in religion with regard to the physical and the spiritual. No argument there.

It’s become popular in recent years to believe that only the Gnostics preach a preexistent soul.

Speaking only for myself, I’m as far from Gnosticism as it’s possible to get while still believing in the soul and in the loving, forgiving God Jesus taught us about. I have no interest nor any belief in Gnosticism’s dualistic cosmogonies. In my view, Gnostic cosmogonies have nothing whatsoever to do with God or the soul or Jesus’ teachings on same.

As you no doubt know, various religious trends such as Platonism (and its subsequent incarnations), Jewish Apocalypticism, and apophatic mysticism have had a lot of influence on Gnostic ideas about the soul. But just because some religious thinkers have held paranoid, unloving, dualistic theories about the preexistent soul doesn’t mean that every theory about the preexistent soul must be similarly paranoid, unloving, and dualistic.

The theory that I hold about the soul and about our relationship with God doesn’t appear on your five-point chart, as I’m suggesting a theory that involves a full and holistic and mysterious integration of all aspects of the soul self and physical human self as a temporary – but good! – bundle of selfness that starts and ends with the preexistent soul. (So you can go ahead and infer that I’m no fan of 1 Corinthians 15, either, because I’m not.)

I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree about the possibility of the soul’s preexistence.

God bless.

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That can certainly be a culturally agreed upon understanding of the term as it is for Christians. I naturally understand “soul” in a less supernatural way. For me “soul” refers to something essential about each person. Anyone can at any moment choose to act in a manner that is congruent with that soul or they are free to act out of fear or for some other motive. But I don’t see why we should assume that essence must be immortal, or separate from the body for that matter. If people are not born tabla rasa then there must be something essential about a human being. But I think people are born embodied and ensouled and the degree of importance we attach to each is pretty fluid. Our choices probably feedback on whether we see ourselves as souls with bodies or bodies with souls.

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Hi Jennifer, those are some interesting thoughts. As far as an immaterial soul, I would certainly agree with you, but I try not to speculate much beyond simple dualism. (As to the soul’s pre-existence, I think we’ll have to leave that to special revelation.) I would include rationality, morality, and emotion all under the category of the immaterial soul. The Bible freely interchanges the words for mind, heart, and soul.
As for the relationship with the quantum world I do find that very interesting. Physicist Henry Stapp wrote an excellent book titled Quantum Theory and Free Will in which he argues that quantum mechanics makes it abundantly clear that free will is an immaterial phenomenon.

Interesting. @heddle do you have thoughts on quantum theory and free will? Thanks.

Oh I’m not clever enough to have my own thoughts on anything quantum :grin:

Me neither! I thought it was really interesting. I will try to look that up too. Thanks for the suggestion. I am really interested in what free will could be.

Just my opinion, butI don’t believe QM and free will are related. Free will from quantum indeterminacy would at some level be a “random” will, for which we would not be morally culpable. I think the only view of free will compatible with moral culpability is a supernatural free will with actual free choices that really do change the universe’s future timeline. I don’t believe there is and scientifically explainable free will, and all attempts to do so (e.g., Dennett) come across, to me, as woo clothed in sciency language.

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Of course they are related. Without QM, the physical world is determined by natural law alone and free will is nothing but an illusion. Your objection only has bearing on the question of whether QM is sufficient to explain free will. For the incompatibilist who will not swallow the illusory free will of the compatibilists, QM is necessary but not sufficient. Furthermore QM is random only with regards to the verifiable methodology of science. It can only determine that there are no hidden variables within the presumptions of the scientific worldview and not that there is no cause for these events outside those presumptions. Furthermore, it is well known that the QM is not completely random but only within a distribution and thus it certainly cannot claim that there are no cumulative over-all effects which are non-random in specific instances.

That is the incompatibilist view and it is ONLY viable because of QM. With QM scientists have to accept that 100% of the causality of physical events are not traceable to physical causes. The compatibilist can say that anything else is just random with no cause at all, while you can say that something outside of natural law (something “supernatural” if you like) is involved.

It will not support the spirit/soul as puppeteer idea, but it makes it impossible to rule out the idea that some non-physical interaction is involved at some seminal point of key choices we make. But your appeal to the supernatural does not resolve the logical problems with free will either. I think the only thing that really works is a challenge to the presumption that causality is exclusively of the time-ordered variety. But that is where an appeal to the something outside the space-time structure of the physical universe is not without some small advantages.

Yes that is true for the incompatibilist view of free will anyway.

Perhaps it is just me, but I grow weary of you stating your opinions as if they were demonstrable facts. Maybe I just received different training, but I try my best to differentiate between my opinion and “fact” where a working definition of fact includes “scientific consensus.”

Not at all. I do not see how it has any role at all. No matter how you inject QM into the question, you cannot, in my opinion, arrive at moral culpability, which is a consequence of one thing and only one thing: a free will. And without moral culpability the whole Christian story is rendered meaningless. In understanding free will, I do not see QM as necessary but not sufficient. I see it as a distraction.

That is not well known. It is (in the Copenhagen view) as random as a coin toss. You can compute expectation values with high accuracy, but to any given event you can only assign a probability.

I think it does, and furthermore I think it is necessary for moral culpability. Whether it is just the universe time-stepping through its differential equation–or that plus a bit of quantum determinacy through which some unknown mechanism arrives at a macroscopic coherency–we are, absent a supernatural component, slaves to physical laws and therefore have no moral culpability. Moral culpability implies, to me, that we can make choices that supernaturally alter the current conditions and change the path of the universe’s diffy Q. I base that as a Christian on the believe that we are judged by a just God as free moral agents.


EDIT: typos

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Good point. At some point there has to be responsibility. By the way, I was reading through your blog, ( http://helives.blogspot.com/ ) and found it thought provoking and entertaining. After reading the entire article on science being the trophy wife of religion, I found the analogy convincing.

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Well if you want to make the discussion personal like this, then I will say it is hilarious how you object with such bluster and then say the same thing in different words. But I am an advocate of keeping these personal comments out of the discussion and sticking to the issue itself.

LOL yeah… LOL like I said QM is not sufficient to explain free will. LOL

LOL yeah… LOL like I said , QM is only random within a distribution. LOL

And yet you don’t even address the logical problems I referred to. Maybe you should have asked, “what logical problems?” The logical problem put in simplest terms is this: if choices are not determined by anything then how are they an exercise of will but if they are determined then how are they free? Moving the cause somewhere else does absolutely nothing to address this problem. And moving it to some supernatural entity created by God and inserted into people certainly doesn’t do anything for moral culpability.

I suspect that what is really going on here is some woo woo hand waving which amounts to “supernatural” = magically making all your claims coherent because supernatural like God can do anything you say in whatever way you care to dictate.

Nope. Slavery to physical laws would mean that physical laws determine the outcome and it is demonstrable that because of QM they do not. And throwing in a supernatural variable, with your magical woo woo hand-waving aside, only changes it to non-physical determinism which is no more free will than the physical determinism.

Well like all incompatibilists I certainly believe that we can make choices which alter the course of physical events and this is possible because at the bottom QM shows that events are not determined by any hidden variables within the premises of the scientific worldview. But while I think the involvement of something non-physical makes sense, I am quite sure that it cannot be established by this alone as either necessary or sufficient for free will.

And my conclusions come from my belief as a Christian constrained by my knowledge as a physicist and informed by my graduate studies of the philosophical and theological issues. And my belief is that while we are only correctly judged by God, that this judicial imagery of God is metaphor only and that God doesn’t really do things that way. Instead I think our moral culpability plays out in the natural logical consequences of our actions without any divine judicial interference other than the mercy of grace when we open ourselves to that with faith.

Thank you, but don’t go back too far. To first order I either disagree with or am embarrassed by (or both) anything I wrote that is older than about two months.

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Reminds me of this:
“I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.” George H. W. Bush

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Yes! It is a good blog. Interesting passage here, by the way…

He Lives: I'll take that literal passage metaphorically, if you don't mind!

I just listened to a Skye Jethani podcast which illustrated the plethora of opinions we can get–a German was saying “In Germany, we are either Catholic or Protestant; but I moved to the Netherlands, where I learned there are lots of Protestant churches–so many that if you meet 2 Dutchmen, you could be finding 3 churches!” I think I’m a bit of a Dutchman.

I do find that quandary about the possibilities of free choice confusing. When I was in high school (homeschooled through the public University of Nebraska, which taught missionary and ambassador kids), the book remarked that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle could be a basis for the concept of free will. In some ways, it seems that having God keep us morally responsible for choices we make increases the concept of free will–which in turn, is a very adaptive concept (I’m not sure if animals have that concept of responsibility or not). Yet, there are so many influences I realize that shaped my decision making that I 'm not sure what exactly the concept “I” constitutes, sometimes. Richard Mouw said that the concept of responsibility, especially to God and His law, is what lends us identity; so does responsibility form our identity?
Sorry–this is kind of a tangent.

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I agree. To look to QM to ‘power’ free will is to look at life and especially consciousness in far too mechanistic a manner for my taste.

But then I don’t think we have a radically free will. It may be highly conditional but at least on occasion we find an option amongst those that occur to us which appeals. Could be worse.

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Dear @mattconnally and @Realspiritik,
The pre-existence of the soul was declared anathema by a most questionable authority, the emperor of Rome. It is a fact recognized by the founders of science and philosophy, but denied by the pagan rulers. It is valid to question this judgement and examine it in the light of the day. The term ‘old soul’ is part of many cultures and it implies pre-existence.

For me, a good God would allow all His children to have access to the same teachings. If you can only get to heaven through Jesus, then it would only make sense that Jewish, Moslem, Hindu and Buddhist peoples would one day get the chance to be raised in Christian environment.

I don’t think Stapp suggests that QM “powers” free will. He just shows where an immaterial free will enters into the equations. As I understand it (which isn’t saying much!) he shows that it’s not mind over matter (how does something nonphysical “push” something physical?) but rather mind before matter. The scientific establishment won’t tolerate such interpretations because they cannot tolerate the possibility of any immaterial phenomena existing. So they will relentlessly restate such interpretations in a materialistic view–turning them straw men.

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I was responding to a suggestion originally made by Mr Mitchell and disputed by Mr Heddle. I’m not sure who Stapp is or how he figures into this, but I didn’t come in at the very beginning of this discussion.