While most people throughout history have believed that we are both physical and spiritual beings, the rise of science has called into question the existence of the soul. Many now argue that neurophysiology demonstrates the radical dependence, indeed, identity, between mind and brain. Advances in genetics and in mapping human DNA, some say, show there is no need for the hypothesis of body-soul dualism. Even many Christian intellectuals have come to view the soul as a false Greek concept that is outdated and unbiblical. Concurrent with the demise of dualism has been the rise of advanced medical technologies that have brought to the fore difficult issues at both edges of life. Central to questions about abortion, fetal research, reproductive technologies, cloning and euthanasia is our understanding of the nature of human personhood, the reality of life after death and the value of ethical or religious knowledge as compared to scientific knowledge. In this careful treatment, J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae argue that the rise of these problems alongside the demise of Christian dualism is no coincidence. They therefore employ a theological realism to meet these pressing issues, and to present a reasonable and biblical depiction of human nature as it impinges upon critical ethical concerns. This vigorous philosophical and ethical defense of human nature as body and soul, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees, will be for all a touchstone for debate and discussion for years to come.

Table of Contents

• • Acknowledgments    6
  • Introduction    7
• Pt. 1    Metaphysical Reflections on Human Personhood
  • 1    Establishing a Framework for Approaching Human Personhood    17
  • 2    Human Persons as Substances or Property-Things    49
  • 3    Human Persons in Naturalist & Complementarian Perspectives    87
  • 4    Substance Dualism & the Human Person: Free Agency    121
  • 5    Substance Dualism & the Human Person: Personal Identity    157
  • 6    Substance Dualism & the Body: Heredity, DNA & the Soul    199
• Pt. 2    Ethical Reflections on Human Personhood
  • 7    The Moral & Metaphysical Status of the Unborn: Abortion & Fetal Research    231
  • 8    Reproductive Technologies in Substance-Dualist Perspective    263
  • 9    Genetic Technologies & Human Cloning    287
  • 10    Euthanasia, Physician-Assisted Suicide & Care of Persons at the End of Life    315
  • Conclusion    343
  • Notes    346
  • Index    380

Chapter One

Establishing a Framework for Approaching Human Personhood

It is safe to say that throughout human history, the vast majority of people, educated and uneducated alike, have been dualists,at least in the sense that they have taken a human to be the sortof being that could enter life after death while one’s corpse was left behind — for example, one could enter life after death as the very same individual or as some sort of spiritual entity that merges with the All.Some form of dualism appears to be the natural response to what we seem to know about ourselves through introspection and in other ways. Many philosophers who deny dualism admit that it is the commonsense view.

When we turn to an investigation of church history, we see the same thing. For two thousand years, the vast majority of Christian thinkers have believed in the souls of men and beasts, as it used to be put. Animals and humans are composed of an immaterial entity—a soul, a life principle,a ground of sentience — and a body. More specifically, a human being is a unity of two distinct entities—body and soul. The human soul, while not by nature immortal, is capable of entering an intermediate disembodied state upon death, however incomplete and unnatural this state may be,and of eventually being reunited with a resurrected body. Augustine says,”But the soul is present as a whole not only in the entire mass of a body,but also in every least part of the body at the same time.” Similarly,Thomas Aquinas claims “we now proceed to treat of man, who is composed of a spiritual and corporeal substance.”

Today, things have changed. For many, the rise of modern science has called into question the viability of dualism. In popular and intellectual cultures alike, many argue that neurophysiology demonstrates the radical dependence and, in fact, identity between mind and brain, that genetics has shown genes and DNA are all that are needed to explain the development of living things, that advances in artificial intelligence make likely the suggestion that humans are just complicated computers and that cloning seems to reduce us to mere structured aggregates of physical parts.

Interestingly, among contemporary Christian intellectuals there is a widespread loathing for dualism as well. We are often told that biblical revelation depicts the human person as a holistic unity whereas dualism is a Greek concept falsely read into the Bible by many throughout the history of the church. Christians, we are told, are committed to monism and the resurrection of the body, not to dualism and the immortality of the soul. In short, dualism is outdated, unbiblical and incorrect.

Concurrent with the alleged demise of dualism is the rise of advanced medical technologies that have made prominent a number of very important and difficult issues about ethics at both edges of life. Central to these issues are questions about the nature of human personhood, about the reality of life after death and about the existence, nature, accessibility and degree of justification of ethical or religious knowledge as compared to scientific knowledge. It is not too dramatic to say that we are facing a contemporary crisis in ethics, a crisis that has lead to a good deal of moral confusion, chaos and fragmentation.

In our opinion the concurrence of the demise of dualism (specifically a Christian form of dualism) and the ethical and religious crisis just mentioned is no accident. We believe that what is needed is a more careful formulation and defense of Christian dualism—a defense that renders intelligible a solid Christian anthropology and that shows the relative importance and specific roles science, theology and philosophy have in the integrative task of developing a model of human personhood that is adequate to what we know or justifiably believe from all the relevant disciplines.Such a task requires a multidisciplinary effort, and even if we were able to take on such a work (which we are not), a fully developed Christian anthropology would be impossible to complete in a single volume. Given these limitations, we shall offer what we hope will be an adequate defense of the most reasonable and biblically accurate depiction of human personhood, and we hope to relate that depiction to crucial ethical concerns that affect us all. This task is important for some of the reasons just mentioned. But it is also relevant because of the general human curiosity and angst about what persons are and wherein lies their destiny. As Blaise Pascal once put it, “The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.”

In this chapter we shall look at a taxonomy of versions of dualism,investigate the Christian understanding of a human person as it has been traditionally conceived and discuss the broad contours of what a proper approach to human personhood should look like.

What Is Dualism?

As does any broad philosophical and theological notion, dualism comes in several varieties. At its root, dualism simply means “two-ism,” and it expresses a commitment to the proposition that two items in question are, in fact, two different entities or kinds of entities instead of being identical to one another. Cosmic dualism is the view that reality in general is composed of two different entities (e.g., individuals, properties, realms of reality) that cannot be reduced to each other. Cosmic dualists sometimes go beyond this and accept the claim either that these two entities are both metaphysically ultimate—that is, one did not come from or is not dependent on the other for its existence—or that one entity is inferior in value to the other. For example, Zoroastrianism teaches that Ahura-Mazda (the good, wise Lord) and Angra Mainyu (the spirit of evil) are opposites locked in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. In Taoism the yin and the yang are bipolar forces (good-evil, male-female, light-dark, etc.) that constantly react to and with each other in governing all of reality. Gnostic dualism implies that spirit and matter are different and that the latter is of little value compared to the former.

Is Christianity a form of cosmic dualism? The answer is no and yes.Christianity does not affirm that there are two ultimate, independent realities.Everything besides God owes its existence to him in some way or another. Nor does Christianity teach that spirit is good and matter is evil.Yet there are clear cosmic dualities presupposed by and taught in Holy Scripture: God-creation, good-evil, truth-falsity, immaterial-material world,being-becoming and, we believe, soul-body.

In addition to cosmic dualisms, there are various forms of dualism regarding the constitution of human persons (and animals, though we will focus here only on human persons). These anthropological dualisms may be divided into three categories: metaphysical, eschatological and axiological.Let us take these in order.

Metaphysical.

The metaphysical category of anthropological dualism centers on the question of the constitutional nature of human persons.This version of dualism is the chief focus of this book. Property-event dualism is the idea that mental and physical properties or events are genuinely different kinds of entities. Thoughts, sensations, beliefs, desires, volitions and so on are mental events in which mental properties are embedded(e.g., they have intentionality—the property of being of or about something—or the property of being self-presenting); various brain events with physical properties are nonidentical to mental events. The rival to property-event dualism (indeed, to any form of anthropological dualism)is strict physicalism, or monism, the view that all properties, events, relations,individuals and so on are strictly physical entities. Monists believe that there may be an irreducible duality of language: for example, an event that is caused by a pin stick can be described by the two nonsynonymous terms pain and C fiber firing pattern. Nevertheless, monists insist that these two terms have the same referent and that the referent is a physical state.

Substance dualism is the view that the soul—I, self, mind—is an immaterial substance different from the body to which it is related. In order to adequately understand substance dualism, one must get clear on the nature of a substance, and we shall look at this topic in chapter two. But for now, suffice it to say that the substance dualist is committed to the claim that the soul is an immaterial entity that could, in principle, survive death and ground personal identity in the afterlife.

Two major variants of substance dualism will be the focus of attention in chapter six: Cartesian and Aristotelian/Thomistic dualism. (Hereafter, the former will be referred to simply as Thomistic dualism.) Cartesian dualism explicates the philosophy of René Descartes. On this view, the mind is a substance externally related by a causal relation to the body, a corporeal substance that is merely physical. For a Cartesian the mind is an immaterial ego that contains the capacities for mental functioning.

By contrast, Thomistic dualism focuses on the soul, not the mind. The mind is a faculty of the soul, but the latter goes beyond mental functioning and serves as the integrative ground and developer of the body it animates and makes alive. For the Thomistic dualist the soul contains capacities for biological as well as mental functioning. Thus the soul is related to the body more intimately and fully than by way of an external causal connection, as Cartesians would have it. Some Thomistic dualists identify the person with the whole body-soul composite whereas others identify the person with the soul, which contains a natural exigency for embodiment even while disembodied. As we will see in the next section,at a minimum a Christian should hold that the human person can sustain identity in a disembodied intermediate state and after the reception of anew resurrection body.

Both versions of substance dualism are consistent with functional holism but not with ontological holism. According to functional holism,while the soul (mind) is in the body, the body-soul complex is a deeply integrated unity with a vastly complicated, intricate array of mutual functional dependence and causal connection. But functional holism allows for the possibility that the soul (mind) may exist independent of the body with which it is currently functionally integrated or in a disembodied state altogether. It is a serious mistake to take substance dualism as being inconsistent with functional holism.

Ontological holism is the view that the mental constituents of a human person—the mental property-instances, states, relational complexes, fields or self—are inseparable entities (although the self may be identified as some sort of unity of the mental entities just mentioned or as a more substantial, though emergent and dependent, entity).The mental constituents are ontologically dependent upon a properly functioning physical body or brain, and thus disembodiment is not possible. Ontological holism is consistent with property dualism but not with substance dualism in either form.

Eschatological. 

Besides the metaphysical versions of anthropological dualism, there are versions of eschatological and axiological dualism. Eschatological dualism categorizes versions of dualism according to their view about the immortality of the soul. Platonic dualism held that the soul had a natural immortality. Plato’s version of dualism is quite sophisticated in its totality, and much of what Plato taught is very much at home in a Christian worldview, though some of his ideas are clearly not compatible with Christianity. Only an issue-by-issue investigation can determine whether Plato’s dualism is compatible with Christian teaching. However,this aspect of Plato’s thought is obviously inconsistent with the Bible,which teaches that God alone is immortal and that all human persons owe their moment-by-moment existence to the sustaining power of God,whether before death, during the intermediate state or after the final resurrection.

Does a rejection of Platonic eschatological dualism entail that there is no sense in which the soul is immortal according to Christian theology?No, it does not. In fact the most natural way to take the Scriptures — indeed,the way most thinkers in the history of the church have taken them—is to view the soul as immortal in this sense: the individual soul comes into existence at a point in time; it is sustained in existence by God throughout its existence, including a time of temporary disembodiment in the intermediate state; and there will never be a time in which it will cease to be after its creation. In the next section we will look at the biblical support for this view and compare it to two rival depictions of the soul and the intermediate state.

Axiological.

Finally, axiological dualism divides anthropological positions according to the relative value placed on the soul and body.According to Gnostic and (on a traditional interpretation) Platonic dualism, the body is inferior to the soul in value, and more generally the material world is inferior to the immaterial world. Indeed, some versions of axiological dualism have claimed that matter, including the body, is evil. Some advocates of this form of dualism have used it to depreciate the value of physical labor, sexuality, physical health and so forth. It should be apparent that these versions of axiological dualism are inadequate and that Christians affirm the value of both the body and the soul and both the material and immaterial world.

This completes our brief survey of varieties of dualism. At this point we must ask the question, does the Bible teach some form of anthropological dualism that ought to be affirmed by Christian intellectuals and integrated into their intellectual work and practical lives? In spite of the fact that a growing number of Christian thinkers would answer this question in the negative, we think the answer is clearly yes.