Life Report

1) Many Christians and Jews believe we are dead until we are
resurrected at the end of the world. That is, our lives are divided into two
episodes. Some believe it is the same body revivified, in which case that body
becomes a person, loses that status, and then regains it. The same can be said
of Jesus’ body; Jesus (for believers) had two episodes of life on earth. So a
discontinuous view of personhood is consistent with, and even central too, much
of received religion.

You don’t profess to know the true answer, so I doubt you
would make fun of this view held by fellow Christians, or reject it outright,
as you do a comparable view about coma held by those who believe that sentience
is central to our identity. In fact sentience, for those who hold this view,
plays much the same role as the soul does for those who believe in it. In each
case, it is the most essential part of what makes us who we are. If it is not
there, we are not.

2) You say, “I don’t believe there’s a period of time
between bodily death and the soul moving on to a different place, so I don’t
think there’s an episodic problem with my worldview.” I presume this “different
place” is not in this physical universe. So to measure its distance from us
would be impossible. What about distance in time? Would that even have any
meaning? That other place is sometimes called eternity, isn’t it? It seems like
a pretty big discontinuity to me: the same person in a different body or no
body, in a different universe or on a different plane of being. It seems like
two radically different episodes to me, separated by some supernatural change.
Why should this be easier to accept than discontinuous episodes of personhood
here on earth in one body?

 So it may be a tenet
of your religion that the soul enters the body at fertilization, but it is just
as possible that, if such a thing as the soul exists, it enters the body at
some other time. We have no way of knowing. So if, in your view, the immaterial
soul is an essential aspect of being a person, then it would be wrong for you to
claim that it is a scientific fact that a person is present from fertilization
onward, because science cannot detect the soul. 

Thanks, Trent, for your response. You seem to believe that
the best defense is a good offence.  But
this is not about my views, which I did not describe. It is about Josh’s. Are
they consistent, or does he hold contradictory beliefs?

In asking my original question, I had a limited goal: I was
trying to get Josh to abandon his use of what he called “the episodic problem”
as an argument against the sentience view. I attempted to do this by confronting
him with a dilemma: either, as a Christian who believes in death followed by
bodily resurrection, you accept an episodic view yourself (so you should not
criticize it in others), or, as a Christian who believes in an immaterial soul
that leaves the body while continuing to be the person, you must abandon the “person
equals organism” view which is at the heart of most of what you do. Josh chose
the second option. Even so, in my points 1) and 2) I pursued the episodic
argument. But in point 4) I returned to the second horn of the dilemma which he
had chosen. It opens a whole can of worms.

Once, in a conversation with Josh, because I was completely
mystified by his conviction that the embryo is a person, I tried to probe
whether this belief of his might be based on belief in a soul. He denied it. It
did not occur to me that his “person equals organism” ideology might actually
be in conflict with his spiritual beliefs. That is the question on the table. You
write, “Even if atheism were true, a philosopher could hold to an “organism”
view … which is essentially the view Josh defends from a secular viewpoint.”
But Josh is not an atheist nor does he have a secular viewpoint. He believes in an eternal, immaterial soul which is the
bearer of personhood into the next life. The question is, can he defend the
organism view from this viewpoint. In
the two paragraphs of my point 4) I was not arguing against Josh’s position on
the soul, which I respect.  Instead I was
pointing to the difficulty of reconciling this belief with the “organism view.”

Here’s the problem:  If you were identical to your body, as Josh’s
arguments seem to assume, then once your body ceased to exist, it logically
follows that you would too. When people say, without thought, as if nothing
could be more obvious, “I was once an embryo,” they are assuming this identity
of self with organism. (“Since the organism I am was once an embryo, I was once
an embryo.”) But this assumption is inconsistent with life after death, unless
it takes the form of resurrection in the very same body. If the soul can leave
your body behind and still be you, it is no longer obvious that you were once
an embryo, since to know that, you would have to know more about the soul’s
peregrinations than anyone can claim to.

This problem is obscured if you make the ancient and very intuitive
assumption that ‘life’ is some kind of spirit inhabiting an organism and
vivifying it, since then you can conclude that, if an organism is alive, it is
ensouled. But this assumption has been shown by modern biology to be misguided.
Life is a physical process, which does not answer to what most people mean by ‘spirit’.
Once you abandon life=spirit=soul, if you believe that personhood is
soul-based, the question arises: when does a living human organism become
ensouled, and thus become a person? Given that the soul is immaterial and
undetectable, there is no non-controversial way to answer this question. My
strong suspicion is that the fabricators of the pro-life “organism view” (also
called “animalism”, a strange choice for Christians) have done so in part in
order to obscure this troubling question, because a theological answer would
not serve their political and propagandistic purposes. It’s much more powerful
to say this is about science, not religion.

I
awaited some reply from either Josh or a colleague to what I took to be a
serious challenge to the training you all devote yourselves to. What at first
seemed a pregnant pause, after a week has become a resounding silence. I am
left to wonder why.

Did I offend you? I hope not. Perhaps I should not have personalized my
questions by using Josh’s name rather than an impersonal pronoun. I did not
mean any disrespect.

Did you not consider the problem I brought up a serious one? If the assumptions
underlying your pro-life arguments – specifically your animalism – contradict
the spiritual beliefs of most Christians (including your own) and also those of
many non-Christians, doesn’t this call at least for some explanation?

Or is it that you simply have no answer, and it would not serve the pro-life
cause to acknowledge this inconvenient truth?

I hope I am simply being too impatient, and that someone is even now working on
a reply.

Thanks,
Josh, for replying to me. I know you’re busy. I get a little excited when I get
what seems to me like a new idea, or I seem to see something in a new light.
It’s too much to expect others, who come at things from a very different angle,
to share my excitement, or even to understand what I’m trying to say on a first
pass. So I’ll try to clarify.

You say, “I don’t know enough about the scientific research you referenced that
goes against the idea of ensoulment at fertilization, but I’m open to hearing
more about it.” I’ll try to explain.

There is no scientific research on ensoulment. There was once a theory called
“vitalism” whose central claim was that physics and chemistry were inadequate
to explain living things, so something beyond the physical was thought to be
responsible for life. For instance, how could a tiny speck of protoplasm “know”
what to develop into? Something must guide development which knew the goal for
that species, and perhaps even for that individual. That “something beyond the
physical” could have been the soul.

For all anyone knew a hundred years ago, vitalism could have been true. If it
had turned out that way, there might now be scientific research on the soul. The
moment of ensoulment would be an object of study. Maybe we could watch parts of
cells being moved around by an unseen force, a force that could explain growth
and healing and heredity, a force that was irreducibly alive. It would be like
a séance, but conducted by scientists in a laboratory peering through
microscopes. Vitalists tended also to be spiritualists. They attended séances,
collected ghost stories and founded psychic research laboratories. A new age in
which science confirmed spiritual beliefs seemed right around the corner.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead the central claim of vitalism was
shown to be false. Physics and chemistry turned out to be perfectly adequate to
explain biological life. Information plays a central role, but it is thoroughly
embodied. For instance, vast amounts of it are encoded digitally in DNA
molecules. No spooky entities were needed to explain life, nor were they ever
found. Eventually we discovered that apparently formless “protoplasm” was made
of myriads of ultramicroscopic molecular “machines” operating according to known
physical laws, interacting with each other in vastly complex and tangled
networks. Ordered behavior emerges unguided out of this complexity; it is not
imposed on the parts by some knowing Unity. The field that studies all this is
called molecular biology. Its subject matter – this whole level of reality – was
unimagined when vitalism beckoned with a very different kind of answer.

The upshot of all this is that (1) if there is an immaterial soul,
science has not detected it, but (2) science can say one thing definitively about
the soul: the soul is not life, nor does it cause life. Because we know what
life (in the scientific, biological sense) is: it is an interlocking ensemble
of physical processes which take place in organisms. These processes are
carried out by the organism’s parts just by obeying the laws of physics. All such
processes eventually suffer dissolution. They are not eternal. Nor do they slip
in and out of bodies like ghosts. So life is not the soul.

Another way of saying this is that, as far as biological life goes, materialism
won. This doesn’t mean there is no soul, or that there is nothing that might be
called “spiritual life”. But it does mean that the presence of life provides no
scientific evidence for ensoulment. Philosophers and theologians have differing
views on the soul, but they cannot call on science to settle the matter, unless
they are willing to be satisfied with a methodological dictum, namely Occam’s
razor: science has no need for the soul hypothesis.

Now let’s go back to the little thought experiment I suggested, in the
paragraph beginning “Try this…” You believe, you have said, that the soul
enters the body at fertilization. I have just claimed that you cannot know this
on the basis of science. So it is either philosophy and/or religion you rely
on. But religions and philosophies differ on this, so you cannot know for sure.
I suggested that you just imagine, for the sake of argument, that you are
mistaken, and that the soul enters the body later. I needn’t claim this is
true, or even probable. I did not cite any scientific evidence for it – there
is none. (I can cite you theologians, if you are interested.) The point is that
your argument that the zygote is fully human and of equal value with an adult
would fall apart if it turned out that an adult was ensouled but a zygote wasn’t,
because then you would have to argue that something with an eternal human soul
was morally equivalent to something that lacked any soul at all. How could you
do that? Therefore your argument for equal value relies covertly on an
assumption you have not defended and cannot defend scientifically: that
ensoulment occurs at fertilization.

I’m sure you’re aware that it is very easy to accept an invalid argument when
it proves what you already believe. Under your spiritual worldview, but without
the assumption that ensoulment occurs at fertilization, the argument for moral
equivalence of adult and zygote seems to fail. If you’re determined to defend
the pro-life position, this should make the claim of ensoulment at
fertilization very attractive. But to conclude, because it validates the full
humanity of the zygote, that the zygote must be ensouled, and because it is
ensouled it is fully human, would be to argue in a circle.

I was just listening to some of Scott Klusendorf’s lectures at Biola. He says
the issue is, “What is the unborn?” But if the question is, “Is the unborn one
of us?” then there is another, prior issue that must be addressed: “What are
we?” To merely say we are human animals, organisms, members of the human
species, is an inadequate answer both for you and for me, though for different
(but in-a-way similar) reasons. For you, the answer is something like: “We are
eternal human souls inhabiting mortal human bodies for the time being.” For me,
it is something like: “We are human minds inhabiting human bodies as long as
our brains allow us to.” For neither of us are we identical to the organisms we
inhabit. Once this is made clear, there is no logical reason to believe that
the history of the organism we inhabit and our history are one and the same.