The Soul and Its Enemies

FOR 2,000 years, Christians have believed that man has a spiritual soul and is therefore unique among terrestrial creatures—that there is, in the words of Pope John Paul II, an “ontological discontinuity” between human beings and other animals. This belief is now under attack, and not only by atheists. Some theologians dismiss the idea of an “immortal soul” as an unbiblical bit of Greek metaphysics grafted onto the Gospel by the early Church Fathers. Some even go so far as to call themselves “Christian materialists.”

These are symptoms of a loss of confidence in the face of a materialist critique that many think unanswerable. A whole series of advances in human knowledge have been seen as supporting a physicalist reductionism that would explain man entirely in terms of matter and thereby erase the line between human and animal, and even between human and machine. Long ago, it was shown that “animate” and “inanimate” things are made up of the same chemical elements interacting by the same basic laws. The tracing of human evolution, gene sequencing, and studies of animal intelligence have increasingly revealed continuity between man and lower animals. Neuroscience and studies of the brain have found the physiological bases of many mental faculties and feelings, even ones associated with our moral life. Growing attention to the beginning and end of human life, and to ambiguous conditions that complicate the definition of death, has led many to wonder when precisely the soul arrives and departs, or if it does. Computer technology has shown that a purely physical system, indeed an inanimate one, can perform many “mental” tasks, such as acquiring and processing information, storing it in memory, retrieving it, and using it to make decisions. Indeed, computer programs have reached parity with human beings in that most intellectual of games, chess.

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Stephen M. Barr

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FOR 2,000 years, Christians have believed that man has a spiritual soul and is therefore unique among terrestrial creatures—that there is, in the words of Pope John Paul II, an “ontological discontinuity” between human beings and other animals. This belief is now under attack, and not only by atheists. Some theologians dismiss the idea of an “immortal soul” as an unbiblical bit of Greek metaphysics grafted onto the Gospel by the early Church Fathers. Some even go so far as to call themselves “Christian materialists.”

These are symptoms of a loss of confidence in the face of a materialist critique that many think unanswerable. A whole series of advances in human knowledge have been seen as supporting a physicalist reductionism that would explain man entirely in terms of matter and thereby erase the line between human and animal, and even between human and machine. Long ago, it was shown that “animate” and “inanimate” things are made up of the same chemical elements interacting by the same basic laws. The tracing of human evolution, gene sequencing, and studies of animal intelligence have increasingly revealed continuity between man and lower animals. Neuroscience and studies of the brain have found the physiological bases of many mental faculties and feelings, even ones associated with our moral life. Growing attention to the beginning and end of human life, and to ambiguous conditions that complicate the definition of death, has led many to wonder when precisely the soul arrives and departs, or if it does. Computer technology has shown that a purely physical system, indeed an inanimate one, can perform many “mental” tasks, such as acquiring and processing information, storing it in memory, retrieving it, and using it to make decisions. Indeed, computer programs have reached parity with human beings in that most intellectual of games, chess.