January Issue of The Worldview Bulletin-Pt. 2

Why We Should Care About the Soul | Tony Versus Bart, Part 8

Contents

Part Two

1. J. P. Moreland on Why We Should Care About the Soul

   by Paul M. Gould

2. Tony Versus Bart, Part 8

   by David Baggett

3. News and Links

4. Book Deals and Resources

---

J. P. Moreland on Why We Should Care About the Soul

By Paul M. Gould

I’m convinced that reality is a kind of story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. All things come from God (“In the beginning”), and one day all things will return to God (the sudden turn, the happy and joyous unending ending of the afterlife). Moreover, I’m convinced that we enter this life with the sense that we are part of this ongoing story. Human persons are on a quest to discover their true names, and their identities. In my book A Good and True Story, I claim “You cannot answer the question of identity until you answer the question of story.”[1] I go on to note the following:

The philosopher Hannah Arendt has pointed out, “the moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type of ‘character’ in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us.” Arendt says the only way to escape this is through story: “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero—his biography, in other words; everything else we know of him, including the work he may have produced and left behind, tell us only what he is or was.” Discover the story you inhabit and you’ll find yourself too.[2] 

I think that Arendt is correct. In order to discover who we are, we must discover the true story of the world. But this doesn’t mean it is not important to understand what we are. What we are helps us discover who we are too. It is (as philosophers like to say) necessary but not sufficient for discovering our true identity. In this month’s Worldview Bulletin essay, I want to explore the “what” question: What kind of beings are we and why does it matter? I explore this by interacting with J. P. Moreland’s views on why belief in the soul is important. Let’s start with some basics.

Let’s keep it simple. There are two basic views on the nature of human persons: physicalism and dualism (the more complicated story would detail fine-grained instances of each of these views). According to the physicalist, human persons are physical things and mental events or states reduce or identify or supervene in some way on physical things, events, and states (again, keeping things simple). According to the dualist, humans are in some sense composed or constituted by two kinds of things or substances: a physical substance or thing and a non-physical or immaterial substance or thing. With this distinction between physicalism and dualism in mind, the philosopher J. P. Moreland notes in his book The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters the following three facts about people’s thinking, including the Christian tradition, on the nature of human persons.[3]

(1)   The vast majority of people throughout history have been dualists

(2)   Dualism is the commonsense view of human anthropology (for the man or woman on the streets)

(3)   Dualism has been the constant teaching of the Christian church since its beginning.

However, it is widely thought today that science somehow makes belief in souls unnecessary and/or unjustified. But, as Moreland argues in his book, science does not establish that we have no need for a soul or mind. Rather, all neuroscience shows is a correlation between brain activity and mental activity, not that our mental lives are wholly or totally dependent on our brain activity. Still, there is incredible sociological pressure to think that humans are just physical things, and many Christians might feel this pressure, even if not fully aware. For that reason, I think it is helpful to review J. P.’s four reasons why we should care about souls.

First, he says, “The Bible seems to teach that consciousness and the soul are immaterial and we need to regard this teaching as genuine knowledge and not as faith commitments that we merely hope are true.”[4] This first point is a claim about the Bible and a claim about religious knowledge. Moreland thinks, and I agree with him, that the clear teachings of Scripture endorse the view that humans are not merely physical things. For one of the best books exploring this biblical data, I’d encourage you to read John Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting (Eerdmans, 2000). Rather, humans are some kind of composite of a body and soul. Moreover, the Bible delivers knowledge claims. We learn things about reality from Scripture. Religious claims are knowledge claims, and not mere beliefs or subjective feelings. The basic idea is that, as Christians, we need to do our philosophizing with Scripture in one hand and the so-called book of nature in the other. And what we learn from the book of Scripture is that souls exist.

Second, “the reality of the soul is important to various ethical issues that crucially involve an understanding of human persons.”[5] Moreland argues that there is a deep connection between the reality of the human soul and our view of the intrinsic value of human persons. This is relevant to debates at the beginning of life (abortion) and end of life (euthanasia). Moreover, J. P. thinks that the physicalist has a hard time justifying the intrinsic value of human persons insofar as they are material things. I’ll just report here that I think this all depends. If we are talking about Christian physicalism, then it seems one could consistently hold together the thesis that humans are physical things and humans (i.e., physical things) are intrinsically valuable in virtue of the fact that all things created by God are intrinsically valuable. Given this, I’m inclined to think that the question of value is primarily answered at a more global level related to cosmology or ultimate reality: if there is no God, then it is more difficult to ground objective value, but if there is a God, then even the physicalist can help herself to value. The question then will become, of course, is Christian physicalism plausible. And to that, J. P. thinks the answer is clearly “no” given the clear teachings of Scripture as well as due to many philosophical concerns.

Third, “the loss of belief in life after death is related to a commitment to the authority of science above theology, along with a conviction that belief in the soul is scientifically discredited.”[6] I think that Moreland is right here. There is a connection between belief in the afterlife and belief in the soul. If we are just our bodies and do not survive the death of our bodies, it is hard to make sense of some kind of afterlife. Moreland is also correct to note that the dominant epistemology today is some version of scientism and that Christians are in danger of uncritically adopting this theory of knowledge. Weak scientism, the view that our best knowledge comes from science, is a problematic epistemology, on my view. Yes, of course, we should have a healthy respect for scientific knowledge, but it is not the only or best means of knowledge today. There are many sources of knowledge and we ought to pull from all of them in developing our mature theories (from e.g., history, mathematics, Scripture, philosophy, and more, in addition to the sciences). 

Finally, Moreland argues that “understanding the immaterial nature of the human spirit is crucial to grasping the essence of spiritual growth.” This is one of the main lessons we’ve learned from Dallas Willard. In order to understand how we grow in Christ, it is important to understand what kind of thing we are and the nature of our mental and spiritual lives. It will be important, as Willard details in books like The Renovation of the Heart, to understand the role of thoughts, sensations, feelings, purposing, and will in spiritual formation. All of these concepts relate to the soul in various ways and if we want to grow in our relationship with Christ, it is important to know how all things fit together and contribute to character formation (or deformation).

I think there are good reasons to endorse some version of dualism. I endorse a version of what my colleague at Palm Beach Atlantic University Brandon Rickabaugh calls the bodily soul view. On this view, I am a bodily soul, a tightly integrated soul with a body. This view is consistent with the historic Christian teachings on the nature of the human person and defensible philosophically and scientifically.

Notes

[1] Paul Gould, A Good and True Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2022), 2.

[2] Ibid.

[3] J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014), 9-10.

[4] Ibid., 12.

[5] Ibid., 15.

[6] Ibid., 17.

— Paul M. Gould is an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Director of the M.A. Philosophy of Religion program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is the author or editor of ten scholarly and popular-level books including Cultural Apologetics, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction, and The Story of the Cosmos. He has been a visiting scholar at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s Henry Center, working on the intersection of science and faith, and is the founder and president of the Two Tasks Institute. You can find out more about Dr. Gould and his work at Paul Gould.com and the Two Tasks Institute. He is married to Ethel and has four children.

Image by Artie_Navarre from Pixabay