Freewill and the Soul
“Belief in soul creates unnecessary problems” says P. Carr in the 7th issue of Christis.
This is certainly true if we accept the definition of “soul” which has been common in Western culture since the pre-Christian Greek philosophers such as Plato. They believed that human beings are composed of two elements; the material element “the body” and the spiritual element “the soul”. People without their capacity for abstract thinking interpreted this to mean that the soul “inhabited” the body in the way a snail inhabits its shell, or as a Government inhabits Whitehall. This creates the philosopher’s problem of deciding whether the soul lives in the heart, the eyes, the head or the big toe.
It also creates a very serious problem for Christians in that society assumes that life can be split into the “spiritual” side — prayer, worship etc — and the “material” side which includes politics, health and economics. I suspect this is at the root of the problem described by Adrian Derbyshire with his “two kingdoms”. We cannot separate our spiritual health from our physical health or emotions, any more than we can separate love for God from a concern for justice in society.
This “whole-person” approach is gaining ground in the medical profession as doctors realise that there is no point in handing out pills to cure a physical illness that is caused by mental stress. It does not mean that we can blame all our misdeeds on the fact that our freewill was impaired by alcohol or lack of sleep — rather it means that it is part of our Christian duty to take care of our bodies (and, of course, those of other people).
I need the concept of a soul only to think about death. As a Christian I believe that after I die I shall have eternal life with God. I also believe that every atom (every electron, every quark….) in my body will remain where it was when I died and eventually be recycled.
What is it, then, that I think is going to live on? Not merely the “life energy” which is the only thing that is apparently missing from a dead body, but me, myself, the bit that matters, whatever that is.
This is what the Bible means in verses such as “Praise the Lord, O my soul”. Neither the Psalmist nor Mary in her “Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord” was thinking of a spiritual bit of them whose job was to deal with religion while they got on with something else: they meant “I, my whole self, will praise God”.
Perhaps we should not talk of “having” a soul, so much as “being” a soul. This avoids the question of what the soul is “responsible” for: if anything we might say that we are responsible for it, in that the personalities we develop for ourselves in this life are the ones we are going to have to face God with in the next.
Of course our personalities are largely determined by our genes, which are part of our bodies. I have no idea how much of them will stay with us into eternity. Paul says that the relationship between our earthly body and our resurrected one is that of a seed to its plant (1 Cor. 15) — which does not tell us much but does imply that there is some relationship. I wonder whether every “bad” gene might if properly cultivated have its own unique “good” fruit in the resurrection body?
To talk of goodness and badness brings us to the suggestion that our idea of morality may be explained as instincts useful to the survival of the species. It seems odd that there should be so much wickedness around after two million years of evolution: one would have thought that we would have evolved either with less strong feelings on the subject or with a greater capacity for living up to them.
There are also occasional acts of useless goodness — why do we feel it is “wrong” to kill deformed babies to protect the genetic purity of the species, or AIDS sufferers to protect the species from infection? Many animals manage to combine this callous attitude to diseased relatives with compassion not only for members of their own species but also sometimes for other animals who are in pain. I would not call the actions themselves sinful: sin is an attitude of disobedience to God, and we do not know of God giving any commands to the animals of the same nature as those God has given either to humanity as a whole, or to individuals through our consciences.
This ability to choose disobedience is what we mean by freewill. Of course our freewill is limited by the physical constraints of our bodies: this applies to the hormones which make me bad-tempered just as much as to the bone structure which prevents me from flying. Freewill has never meant that we could do precisely what we want. It simply means that we usually (before we get senile dementia) have a choice of some kind.
For one person the choice between good and bad might mean a choice between murdering someone in a fit of rage or stopping after blacking his eye: for someone blessed with a happier nature, an unkind word in the same situation might involve just as much sin. This is why we can never judge the state of anyone’s soul; not because all souls are equally good, but because it is impossible to guess how much badness in a person comes from factors beyond their control.
To quote Paul again: “I don’t do the good that I want to do; instead I do the evil that I do not want to do” (Romans 7:19).
The fact that “brain research is growing fast and shows no signs of stopping” may be extrapolated to mean that scientists will soon be able to find the bit of our brain that controls freewill, but only if we assume that it is there to find.
In the same way it was perfectly logical for medieval thinkers to assume that because sailors were going further and further away, they would one day sail right off the edge of the world. They would have done, had the edge been there for them to fall off.
Researchers are making huge strides in many areas of science, but the more they discover, the more they realise they do not know — even about the physical world. It is not in the nature of science to tell us whether there is any reality apart from science. We know a great deal more about the structure of the universe than our ancestors did, but the question of whether it has a Creator has always been a different type of question.
Brain scientists, just like physicists, are as divided on the question of God and the supernatural as other people are.