Book Review: In Search of the Soul

I picked up this book from the CCU bookstore in hopes of finding some sort of answer to a question I’ve asked for quite some time now: how can the immaterial soul interact with the material body? The book did not answer my question. Later I’ll deal with my current view on the question. For now I’ll do a brief introduction of each of the four views represented and the challenges and triumphs of each. I will skip all the nonsense about various people being introspectively aware of themselves as essentially material or immaterial because, in the words of Clark Gable, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Substance Dualism (Stewart Goetz)
All forms of dualism assert that humans have both an immaterial soul/mind and a physical body. In substance dualism, the mind is created separately from the body and can exist apart from it. Some substance dualisms assert that the mind is what makes the body human; others say that both are required for full human-ness.

Strengths:

• Dualism is implied in scripture.
• The doctrine of physical resurrection is easily dealt with.
• It’s completely compatible with free will.
• Fetuses, mentally deficient people, and people in vegetative states still count as humans.

Weaknesses:

• It may be possible to account for all psychological phenomena without assuming the existence of a soul.
• Subconscious thought is eschewed if all thought happens in the substantively simple soul.
• If the person is considered just a soul and not a soul-body composite, then we can’t truly be said to do physical things (to use Hasker's illustration, “you” can’t kiss anyone, since “you” are merely a soul inhabiting a body).

Emergent Dualism (William Hasker)
Emergent dualism is like substance dualism in that it claims that humans have distinct bodies and souls, but it differs in its explanation of their origin. According to emergent dualism, the proper combination of brain structures gives rise to a distinct new substance – the mind/soul.

Strengths:

• Dualism is implied in scripture.
• It’s completely compatible with free will.
• Souls don’t need to be individually created by God.
• Other kinds of emergence are evident in nature (ex: water and its properties emerge from the combination of two atoms of hydrogen and an atom of oxygen).
• Animals can have less fully-endowed souls.

Weaknesses:

• At the resurrection, you either end up with a new soul or the old soul re-established…like it would have been established in the first place in substance dualism.
• If a person’s brain isn’t fully-functioning, they aren’t considered fully human.
• It’s a large (and possibly unmerited) step from the kind of emergence we see in nature and math to this emergent dualism.

Nonreductive Physicalism (Nancey Murphy)
Physicalists don’t believe in souls. Nonreductive physicalists believe that you can avoid reduction to micro-physical determinism even without a soul. They believe that consciousness and all other psychological phenomena can be explained by a combination of neurobiology, social relations, culture, and (for Christians) God’s interaction with people (although the author never addresses this dimension of humans in her essay in the book). On this view, a meta-network of neurons gives rise to consciousness and allows downward causation, thus escaping determinism.

Strengths

• It’s a material explanation, and, when more plausible, those are preferred.
• Explains without the shadow of a doubt why higher functions and brain functions are so integrally tied together.

Weaknesses

• Dualism is strongly implied in scripture.
• It doesn’t escape determinism, despite its claim.
• Conservation of identity at the resurrection is a problem unless the resurrected body is numerically identical to the one that died.
• Unity of consciousness is somewhat of a challenge if the brain is all you have to work with.

Constitutional View of Persons (Kevin Corcoran)
This is another view that denies a soul, but it is not nonreductive physicalism. It falls somewhere between nonreductive physicalism and emergent dualism. For the defender of this view, a person is not identical to their body in the same way that a statue is not identical to the material that forms it. It’s a sort of emergentism, but instead of a new substance emerging, it’s just the identity that emerges. Causal connection is cited as what allows identity to persist.

Strengths

• It can account for the doctrine of resurrection better than the nonreductive physicalist view.
• It’s a material explanation, and, when more plausible, those are preferred.

Weaknesses

• It has the same problems with qualifications for personhood that emergent dualism and nonreductive physicalism have.
• It does not satisfactorily fulfill the doctrine of resurrection.
• His causes are "spooky": they can do an awful lot that they shouldn't be able to do (I don't know how to concisely explain it any better).
• (He didn’t address much of anything aside from resurrection, so I can’t criticize any other points of this view.)

Here are a few additional questions I would like to see each view answer before I can reach my personal conclusion:

• When does a person become a person?
• How did the incarnation of Jesus work?
• How does the Holy Spirit dwell within us?

I currently lean the most toward some sort of substance dualism. All others have problems with the doctrine of resurrection as well as giving a good definition of when a person becomes a person. However, I have not yet looked into different types of substance dualism enough to decide which of those I think is most right. That will be my next task in my quest to build up a sound doctrine of the soul. I will also take the time to go through all the Bible passages that teach on human nature and constitution to make sure that my view of the soul is not only philosophically coherent but also biblically accurate.

Now I return to my original question of interaction between the material and immaterial. I’ve come to realize that I will probably never in this life get a good answer to that question. However, as I was told by a friend some time ago when I asked him this question, the fact that I can’t describe how the body and soul interact doesn’t mean that they don’t interact. If we are to believe Christian doctrine, interaction between the material and immaterial happens all over the place, not just within humans. The resurrection of Jesus is a prime example. This miracle (and, of course, all others) requires that the immaterial and omnipotent God intervene with the material world. How did this happen? We can’t answer that apart from saying that it was an act of God. Does this discredit belief that this event took place? Not at all. Looking at the arguments for the historical reliability of the resurrection accounts leaves no other sensible option than that Jesus did in fact die and return to life thanks to the immaterial acting on the material in some way. We see a similar sort of thing happening in science all the time. For centuries (perhaps even millennia), we knew that plants somehow used energy from the sun to grow. Just because the workings of this process were not known until relatively recently in human history didn’t mean that people before that point had any reason to doubt the apparent truth that the plants were somehow using the energy to grow. With that, I lay to rest my question of interaction for the time being. If anything comes to light on the subject, I will be ready to take it up again, but it seems to me like this is the sort of thing that we won’t really understand on this earth, if it is something we will ever understand.

Book Information:
Title: In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem
Editors: Joel B. Green, Stuart L. Palmer
Contributors: Kevin Corcoran, Stewart Goetz, William Hasker, Nancey Murphy
Year Published: 2005