Reading: Self-Awareness

What is my Mind?
One of the mystifying things about humanity is the capacity of our mind to be self-aware. The
mind is where I rationally attempt to figure out the answers to life’s questions. Yet in the
Scriptures, we often hear of the heart as the source of the motives and aspirations of our lives.
In Proverbs chapter 4 it says,
20My son, be attentive to my words;
incline your ear to my sayings.
21Let them not escape from your sight;
keep them within your heart.
22For they are life to those who find them,
and healing to all theirb flesh.
23Keep your heart with all vigilance,
for from it flow the springs of life.
24Put away from you crooked speech,
and put devious talk far from you.
25Let your eyes look directly forward,
and your gaze be straight before you.
26Ponderc the path of your feet;
then all your ways will be sure.
27Do not swerve to the right or to the left;
turn your foot away from evil.
Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. How is our heart different
from our mind? How is our soul related to our mind? How do we make sense of the way our
minds seem to be separate, yet intimately connected with our physical brain? These are
issues that have challenged philosophers for many generations. They have become more so in
recent decades as we have been able to peek into the functioning of the brain with electronic
brain scanning tools. What does this all have to say to us who are Christians? What about
when we die? What happens to our mind then? That is our topic for this week.
Here is an introduction in a video with Alvin Plantinga

Reading: Advice to Christian Philosophers by Alvin Plantinga

I have already spoken about epistemology; let me mention another example from this area.
Epistemologists sometimes worry about the confluence or lack thereof of epistemic
justification, on the one hand, and truth, or reliability, on the other. Suppose we do the best that
can be expected of us, noetically speaking; suppose we do our intellectual duties and satisfy
our intellectual obligations: what guarantee is there that in so doing we shall arrive at the truth?
Is there even any reason for supposing that if we thus satisfy our obligations, we shall have a
better chance of arriving at the truth than if we brazenly flout them? And where do these
intellectual obligations come from? How does it happen that we have them? Here the theist
has, if not a clear set of answers, at any rate clear suggestions towards a set of answers.
Another example: creative anti-realism is presently popular among philosophers; this is the
view that it is human behavior-in particular, human thought and language-that is somehow
responsible for the fundamental structure of the world and for the fundamental kinds of entities
there are. From a theistic point of view, however, universal creative anti-realism is at best a
mere impertinence, a piece of laughable bravado. For God, of course, owes neither his
existence nor his properties to us and our ways of thinking; the truth is just the reverse. And so
far as the created universe is concerned, while it indeed owes its existence and character to
activity on the part of a person, that person is certainly not a human person.
One final example, this time from philosophy of mathematics. Many who think about sets and
their nature are inclined to accept the following ideas. First, no set is a member of itself.
Second, whereas a property has its extension contingently, a set has its membership
essentially. This means that no set could have existed if one of its members had not, and that
no set could have had fewer or different members from the ones it in fact has. It means,
furthermore, that sets are contingent beings; if Ronald Reagan had not existed, then his unit
set would not have existed. And thirdly, sets form a sort of iterated structure: at the first level
there are sets whose members are non-sets, at the second level sets whose members are
non-sets or first level sets; at the third level, sets whose members are nonsets or sets of the
first two levels, and so on. Many are also inclined, with George Cantor, to regard sets as
collections-as objects whose existence is dependent upon a certain sort of intellectual activity-a
collecting or "thinking together" as Cantor put it. If sets were collections of this sort, that would
explain their displaying the first three features I mentioned. But if the collecting or thinking
together had to be done by human thinkers, or any finite thinkers, there wouldn't be nearly
enough sets-not nearly as many as we think in fact there are.

Reprinted from Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers vol. 1:3,
(253-271), permanently copyrighted October 1984. Used by permission of the Editor. New
preface by author. Journal web site: www.faithandphilosophy.com
COPYRIGHT/REPRODUCTION LIMITATIONS:
This article is the sole property of Faith and Philosophy. It may not be altered or edited in any
way. It may be reproduced only in its entirety for circulation as "freeware," without charge. All
reproductions of this data file must contain this Copyright/Reproduction Limitations notice.
This data file may not be used without the permission of Faith and Philosophy for resale or the
enhancement of any other product sold.

Reading: Who Am I as a Thinking Being?

The article which follows endeavors to describe the shape of the current discussion. In it you
will discover that the delineation of mind, soul, and spirit are not easily done.

Retrieved from https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/On_The_Soul

On The Soul
Mark Goldblatt gets animated about his self.
“The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is
unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain, occur
simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the
organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from the one phenomenon to
the other.” John Tyndall, 1868
The nature of the human soul has been the subject of religious belief and scientific
investigation for millennia. We feel as though definitive answers should be at hand since each
of us seems to have relevant experiential insights. But certainty remains elusive. The
proposition that the soul does not exist, that what’s called the soul is actually no more than a
neurological phenomenon, a trick the brain plays on its owner, is altogether plausible. But so
too is the converse – the proposition that the soul is indeed an immaterial essence which
somehow animates human beings.
We must begin, however, by clarifying the term. The word ‘soul’ can refer to a number of
different things. Many of us intuitively think of the voice inside our head as our soul – a
definition that is consistent with a materialist perspective. That is, if the soul is in fact merely a
neurological phenomenon, merely an activity of the brain, then the voice-inside-our-head
definition, perhaps enlarged to include the impulses and sensations which coalesce around the
voice, would work. Consciousness, in that case, equals soul. Which is another way of saying
that the soul is to the brain what digestion is to the stomach. It’s what the brain does.
If, on the other hand, the soul is an immaterial essence, rather than the outcome of a material
process, then the definition becomes more complicated because neurological science has
demonstrated that the voice inside our head has a material component. That much is certain.
We now know, for instance, that if the brain is grievously injured, the voice inside our head is
often irreparably altered. Brain trauma can affect memory formation, language skills, even
mood swings. So it must be the case that the brain itself is directly involved in consciousness.
What used to be called the mind-body problem has been solved, at least to that limited extent.
Consciousness, as the word is traditionally understood, cannot be wholly severed from brain
activity.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s no such thing as an immaterial soul. What it
means is that the incidentals that make up our inner lives are rooted in the workings of our
brains. If you whack me across the skull hard enough to rattle my brain, but not kill me outright,
you might well alter what I remember about my life, which friends I’m able to recognize, what
words I’m able to form, whether I’m able to count to ten, what food I like to eat, what juice I like
to drink, what position I like to play in softball – in sum, the very characteristics that come to
mind when I think of myself.
It’s tempting to conclude that, minus those characteristics, I would no longer be me. But in
truth, that’s all I would be. The human soul, if it exists in an immaterial form, must be the me-
ness of me, the sense of first personhood on which the rest of my conscious experiences hang.
It’s the rooting interest each one of us has in himself, in his own existence, stripped of
language and memory, stripped of thought and disposition; it’s the unified presence by which I
differentiate myself from whatever I encounter. I am not the thing I encounter; I am the thing
doing the encountering.
The soul, in other words, is not your consciousness – unless you are a materialist. If you are
not a materialist, however, then the soul is what’s underneath your consciousness, the platform
upon which your consciousness is constructed. The distinction is critical. Consciousness is the
thing that emerges from sense data, the thing that comes to consist of memory and language.
But sense data, memory and language have material components; they’re rooted in the
workings of brain. The last half century of neuroscience has established that beyond a
reasonable doubt. The stuff of consciousness is definitively brain-based. It relies on physical
matter. So if the soul is indeed immaterial, it must be more basic than consciousness. The
word ‘self’ gets closer to the point – though I think ‘me-ness’ gets still closer. It’s the gathering
principle of sensation, memory and language; the immeasurable, imperceptible, inexplicable
filament that draws them together into consciousness.
Think of consciousness as cotton candy. The soul, in that case, is the cone around which the
cotton candy is wound – except, of course, and here the metaphor breaks down, it’s an
immaterial cone.
If the soul is indeed immaterial, then it must consist of the me-ness of me, the thing that
encounters other things. But the word ‘encounter’ also requires clarification. For example, I’ve
got a robotic vacuum cleaner in my apartment that seems to encounter other things. It even
adjusts to them. It goes around things that get in its way. Does the vacuum cleaner therefore
possess a soul? Clearly not.
It’s thus necessary to differentiate between encountering something and responding
to something. Even a run-of-the-mill computer nowadays, like the one found in a robotic
vacuum cleaner, can be programmed to respond to things. But it cannot be programmed to
encounter them. My vacuum cleaner doesn’t differentiate between itself and, say, the edge of
my sofa – which would be the essence of an ‘encounter’. It strikes the edge of my sofa and
cannot move forward; its sensors detect an inability to move forward and send a signal to the
processor inside to reverse direction. It has no interest in reversing direction. If its program
were altered, it would keep careening into the edge of my sofa until its battery ran down.
So, too, with computers that play chess – even the ones that play at grandmaster level. Such a
computer can be programmed to read the situation of a chess board, run through the billions of
possible scenarios that might follow from the next move and calculate which scenario yields
the highest numerical probability of taking the adversary’s king. But it cannot be programmed
to care whether it wins or loses the game. It has no first-person interest in the outcome of the
game. The software that underlies artificial intelligence cannot, for the time being, give rise to
that sense of me-ness that is the foundation of human consciousness. I suspect (though of
course don’t know for sure) that it will never be able to do so, regardless of how powerful the
hardware, or how much more sophisticated the programming.
Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose two rival software companies designed chess programs
to compete against one another. Suppose, further, that each program contained instructions
that, in the event of its defeat, would slightly jigger the probabilities on which it based its
moves, then erase the old scheme under which it had previously operated. Each game
between the two rivals might take mere moments to complete, since the moves would be
almost instantaneous. The winner of each game would then have to wait several seconds for
the loser to tweak its algorithms, and then the next game would commence.
It would be a deadly dull sport to watch. The point, however, is that the two systems
are evolving, in a sense, under conditions that resemble survival-of-the-fittest. Each winner
continues on to the next game intact; each loser perishes and leaves behind an offspring to try
its own hand at chess survival.
Now the critical question: At what point would either system develop a rooting interest in
whether it wins or loses? At what point would either system care, in even the most rudimentary
way, about the outcome of a game?
To be sure, the case of chess-playing computers leaves out the crucial evolutionary element of
bio-feedback. What if the software programs making the chess moves were also picking up
sense data, encountering sights and sounds as they were playing?
Except encountering presupposes a me-ness capable of doing the encountering. In other
words, it presupposes a rooting interest. Sights and sounds, in themselves, would surely
produce more data than the mere playing out of chess games would – data which could then
be stored in the form of binary codes within the memory of each operating system. But the
accumulation of data does not address the problem. What interaction of circuit board and
binary codes will ever give rise to a self? How does information become will? How does me-
ness enter into the system?
Thinking about the peculiarity of consciousness arising in a contraption of electronic circuitry
and binary codes puts the problem in especially stark relief. But even if the system consists of
flesh and blood, the problem remains unchanged. Sensations like sights and sounds are just
electrochemical surges. There’s nothing mystical about them. They course through the body,
carrying charges to and from the neuromagnetic cluster that operates in the brain, adding more
and more data to the system. So you’ve got electrical signals. You’ve got magnetic fields.
You’ve got living matter, organic cells in which the electrical signals and magnetic fields gather.
Below that, you’ve got carbon atoms. You’ve got water molecules. In other words, you’ve got
goop and soup, stimuli and response. That’s the totality of it, from the materialist perspective.
So I ask again: How does this add up to me-ness?
The origin of me-ness is the great mystery of the human condition. Let me confess, therefore,
that I have no clue how me-ness can emerge, or even be accounted for, by materialism. That
doesn’t mean the explanation doesn’t exist. Only that I cannot imagine it.
If, on the other hand, the materialist perspective is rejected, then at least two possible
explanations present themselves. (These are no more than guesses, however. That should be
borne in mind.) The first is that me-ness is a kind of transmission, something akin to a radio
signal, that emanates from a Source and is picked up by the circuitry of the brain. If the brain
circuitry is in good working order, then the transmission is stable enough to form the basis of a
continuous, recognizable consciousness. But if the brain is damaged, if the circuitry breaks
down, the signal becomes scrambled. The signal is still being picked up, but the circuitry
cannot do with it what it’s designed to do. That’s how the incidentals of memory and language
are lost. But of course all of what I’ve just described is only a metaphor. To think of me-ness as
a radio signal is to think of it as a wave – which is a measurable thing. If me-ness is
measurable, then it’s no longer immaterial.
The radio-signal metaphor is a Platonic down-from-on-high explanation. So the alternative
would be a more Aristotelian ground-upwards account in which me-ness becomes the end to
which matter is directed. Me-ness isn’t something the brain happens to produce; it’s what the
brain is designed to do, its ‘final cause’, the reason it exists in the first place – and the brain, in
turn, is what the human being is designed to sustain. The flesh and blood of man evolved, in
other words, as a means to generate the soul… and the material world itself as a means to
generate the flesh and blood of man. Me-ness is the immaterial potential that justifies the
existence of matter, the Little Bang insinuated into the Big Bang, the why of thewhat. But all of
this is mere speculation. What’s not speculation is that the most dramatic moment in all of our
lives is one that none of us can recall, the moment in the womb when the self awakens, without
language, without thoughts, when the light switches on, when that sense of me-ness dawns.
Regardless of where it comes from, regardless of who or what turns the switch, the miracle of
that moment is undeniable.
Again, however, I’m not arguing that the soul must be immaterial, that it cannot be accounted
for by the accidental functioning of the brain. My gut instinct tells me that the soul is not a
material phenomenon. But I acknowledge that the reverse is possible – that the soul is what
the brain does and nothing more. The fact that I cannot imagine how me-ness would ever
accidentally and spontaneously arise out of organic matter and physical processes doesn’t
mean that it didn’t happen.

Reading: N.T. Wright Reviews The Biblical Material

Biblical Theologian NT Wright addresses a philosophical issue from his point of view
Retrieved from http://ntwrightpage.com/Wright_SCP_MindSpiritSoulBody.htm
Society of Christian Philosophers: Regional Meeting, Fordham University
March 2011
 Main Paper, Friday March 18

‘Mind, Spirit, Soul and Body: All for One and One for All
Reflections on Paul’s Anthropology in his Complex Contexts’

By the Rt Revd Prof N. T. Wright

University of St Andrews

An exegete among philosophers! I don’t know whether that is more like a Daniel among the
lions or like a bull in a china shop. We shall see.

When I was teaching in Oxford twenty years ago, I had a student who wanted to study
Buddhism; so I sent her to Professor Gombrich for tutorials. After a week or two he asked her
to compare the Buddhist view of the soul with the Christian view. She replied that she
didn’t know what the Christian view was. He wrote me a sharp little letter, saying, in effect,
‘You’ve been teaching this young woman theology for a whole year and she doesn’t know what
the soul is.’ My reply was straightforward: we had spent that first year studying the Old and
New Testaments, and the question of the ‘soul’ simply hadn’t arisen.

Now of course that was a slightly polemical stance, but I still think it was justified. The problem
is that there are a great many things which have become central topics of discussion in later
Christian thought, sometimes from as early as the late second century, about which the New
Testament says very little; but it is assumed that, since the topic appears important, the Bible
must have a view of it, and that this view can contribute straightforwardly to the discussions
that later thinkers, up to the present day, have wanted to have. The most striking example of
this is the referent of the word ‘justification’: asAlister McGrath points out in his history of the
doctrine, what the great tradition from Augustine onwards was referring to with that word is
significantly different from what Paul was referring to when he used the word. That’s fine; we
can use words how we like and, with that character in Alice in Wonderland, can pay them extra
on Thursdays; but we must then be careful about importing back into our reading of scripture
the new meanings which we have assigned to technical terms which, in the first century, simply
didn’t carry those meanings. We should also pay attention to the question of whether the word
may, in its original scriptural context, carry other meanings which we may simply be screening
out.

This came home forcibly to me eight years ago when I published a little book called For All the
Saints, a precursor toSurprised by Hope. The book was basically explaining why I didn’t
believe in ‘purgatory’, and didn’t agree with the practices that have grown up around ‘All Souls
Day’. I pointed out that in scripture ultimate salvation is not in heaven but in the resurrection
into the combined reality of the new heaven and new earth. I also pointed out that, again in
scripture, the word ‘soul’ is not normally used to refer to someone in the intermediate state. A
review of the book appeared in the London Times; the reviewer saw the point, but the
headline-writer didn’t. The headline read: ‘New Bishop Abolishes Heaven and the Soul’. That,
of course, was precisely what I hadn’t done, but I can see why the misunderstanding arose –
though it was frustrating to get a flood of letters complaining against the liberalization of the
church. I hope this more sophisticated audience today will not make the same mistake. But I’m
afraid I do regard the traditional Christian preaching about everyone having a ‘soul’ which
needs ‘saving’ as now almost hopelessly misleading. When the New Testament uses this
language – which it very, very rarely does, by the way – it didn’t mean anything like what
westerners since the Middle Ages have supposed. There is indeed a reality to which that
language is trying to point. But continuing with the language when it is bound, now, to convey a
very different meaning from that genuine reality is perverse.

I want in this paper to propose a view of the human person which you might call eschatological
integration. Just as the Pauline view of God’s ultimate future for the cosmos is the joining
together in the Messiah of all things in heaven and earth, so I believe that Paul’s view of God’s
ultimate future for the human person is the full integration of all that we are made to be. Just as
in my recent book After You Believe I have tried to reinhabit the Aristotelian virtue-tradition by
substituting this Pauline eschatological vision for Aristotle’s eudaimonia, so I believe that by
looking to the goal, the telos, we gain insight as to how to develop and sustain an appropriate
Christian anthropology for the present. God, says Paul, will be ‘all in all’; and for Paul it is the
body, not just the soul, the mind or the spirit, which is the temple of the living God. The body is
meant for the Lord, he says, and the Lord for the body.

One more preliminary remark. The western tradition, catholic and protestant, evangelical and
liberal, charismatic and social-gospel, has managed for many centuries to screen out the
central message of the New Testament, which isn’t that we are to escape the world and go to
heaven, but rather that God’s sovereign, saving rule would come to birth ‘on earth as in
heaven’. The story of all four gospels is not the story of how God came in Jesus to rescue
souls for a disembodied, other-worldly heaven. It is the story of how God, in Jesus, became
king on earth as in heaven. Ultimately, any would-be Christian view which doesn’t serve that
central vision is, in my view, either folly or idolatry, or possibly both. I realise that’s quite a
serious thing to say about a very large swathe of would-be orthodox theology, but I am afraid it
may be true. I believe therefore that a Christian anthropology must necessarily ask, not, what
are human beings in themselves, but, what are human beings called to do and be as part of
the creator’s design? Not to ask the question that way round, and to think simply about
ourselves and what we are, risks embodying, at a methodological level, Luther’s definition of
sin: homoincurvatus in se.

…………………………..
3. A Biblical Contribution to the Mind/Body Problem

So, to conclude, some remarks on a possible biblical contribution to the mind-body problem as
it has appeared in philosophy over the last few hundred years. Here, as often, I have the
distinct impression that philosophical problems are the two-dimensional versions of what in
theology are three-dimensional questions, and that once we grasp the three-dimensional
version we see how to hold on to the apparent antinomies of the two-dimensional version. The
problem has been, if I can be provocative, that the philosophers are often sharper thinkers than
the theologians, so that they can tell you exactly how perplexing their two-dimensional puzzle
is while the theologians and exegetes, who have the tools first to give the problem depth and
then to solve it or at least address it creatively, either aren’t aware that the philosophers are
having this debate or can’t see how to solve it for them.

My basic proposal, as is already apparent, is that we need to think in terms of a differentiated

unity. Paul and the other early Christian writers didn’t reify their anthropological terms. Though
Paul uses his language with remarkable consistency, he nowhere suggests that any of the key
terms refers to a particular ‘part’ of the human being to be played off against any other.
Each denotes the entire human being, while connoting some angle of vision on who that
human is and what he or she is called to be. Thus, for instance, sarx, flesh, refers to the entire
human being but connotes corruptibility, failure, rebellion, and then sin and
death. Psyche denotes the entire human being, and connotes that human as possessed or
ordinary mortal life, with breath and blood sustained by food and drink. And so on. No doubt
none of the terms is arbitrary; all would repay further study.

What then about the problem of causation, and the related problem of determinism and free
will? Here again we have the two-dimensional version of a three-dimensional theological
puzzle – that of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. I think it’s important that Christian
theologians give a fully Trinitarian account of God’s action in the world, in which, though God
may be thought of as a pure spirit, it is vital for our knowing who God is that he is the father
who sends the son and who sends the spirit of the son (Galatians 4.4-7). He
is capax humanitatis, because humans were made in his image. His action in the world is not
to be thought of as invasive, intrusive or (still less) ‘interventionist’. All of those words imply, or
even presuppose, a latent Epicurean framework: the divinity is normally outside the process of
the world, and occasionally reaches in, does something, and then goes away again. But in
biblical thought heaven and earth – God’s sphere and our sphere – are not thought of as
detached or separate. They overlap and interlock. God is always at work in the world, and God
is always at work in, and addressing, human beings, not only through one faculty such as the
soul or spirit but through every fibre of our beings, not least our bodies. That is why I am not
afraid that one day the neuroscientists might come up with a complete account of exactly which
neurons fire under which circumstances, including that might indicate the person as responding
to God and his love in worship, prayer and adoration. Why should the creator not relate to his
creation in a thousand different ways? Why should brain, heart and body not all be wonderfully
interrelated in so many ways that we need the rich language of mind, soul and spirit to begin to
do justice to it all? And – a quite extra point but not unimportant – if in fact we humans are
much more mysterious than modernist science has supposed, there might be further
interrelations of all kinds. I am fascinated by Rupert Sheldrake’s work on all this (e.g. Dogs
That Know When their Owners are Coming Home and similar works, exploring the reality
of intersubjective communication where physical links are demonstrably absent).

In particular, and coming home to what for me is very poignant just now, we do not need what
has been called ‘dualism’ to help us over the awkward gap between bodily death and bodily
resurrection. Yes, of course, we have to postulate that God looks after those who have died in
the Messiah. They are ‘with the Messiah, which is far better’. But to say this we don’t need to
invoke, and the New Testament doesn’t invoke, the concept of the ’soul’, thereby offering, like
the Wisdom of Solomon, a hostage to platonic, and ultimately anti-creational, fortune. What we
need is what we have in scripture, even though it’s been bracketed out of discussions of the
mind/body problem: the concept of a creator God, sustaining all life, including the life of those
who have died. Part of death, after all, is the dissolution of the human being, the ultimate valley
of humiliation, the renouncing of all possibility. Not only must death not be proud, as John
Donne declared, but those who die cannot be proud, cannot hold on to any part of themselves
and say ‘but this is still me’. All is given up. That is part of what death is. To insist that we
‘possess’ an ‘immortal part’ (call it ‘soul’ or whatever) which cannot be touched by death might
look suspiciously like the ontological equivalent of works-righteousness in its old-fashioned
sense: something we possess which enables us to establish a claim on God, in this case a
claim to ‘survive’. But the God who in Jesus the Messiah has gone through death and defeated
it has declared that ‘those who sleep through Jesus’ are ‘with the Messiah’, and he with them.
This ‘with’ness remains an act, an activity, of sheer grace, not of divine recognition of some
part of the human being which can, as it were, hold its own despite death. At and beyond death
the believer is totally dependent on God’s sustaining grace, and the NT’s remarkable reticence
in speculating beyond this is perhaps to be imitated. The New Testament speaks of this state
as a time of ‘rest’, prior to the time of ‘reigning’ in God’s new world. ‘Blessed are the dead who
die in the Lord,’ says John the Divine. Amen, says the Spirit (Revelation 14.13).

One closing remark, if I may, about epistemology. I have argued for an ontology of
differentiated unity as both eschatological reality and as given in the Messiah, restoring and
recapitulating the goodness of the original creation. Within that reality, humans are called to a
particular vocation of obedient image-bearing, summing up the praises of creation on the one
hand and ruling wisely over God’s creation on the other. Part of that praise, and part of that
rule, is I believe to be construed as truth-telling: telling the truth about God in praise, speaking
God’s justice, his wise ordering, into the world in stewardship. In John’s gospel, truth isn’t
simply a correspondence between words and reality. Nor is it a matter of coherence within a
whole system. Truth is a dynamic thing; it happens. And it happens when human beings,
attentive and perceptive with every fibre of their multifaceted god-given being, speak words
through which the inarticulate praise of creation comes into speech, and words through which
God’s wise and just desires for the world are not just described but effected. And, in this
speech, reason and emotion, objective and subjective, absolute and relative are all
transcended in the reality which John sometimes calls truth and sometimes calls love. When
Paul writes about ‘speaking the truth in love’, perhaps this is part of what he means. We
perceive in order to praise: epistemology, ultimately, serves worship. We perceive in order to
speak: epistemology serves truth, which serves justice. And all of this is what is meant by love.
And love is what is meant by being human.

Reading: A Book Review

A Survey of Contemporary Evangelical Thought
Book Author:
Malcolm Jeeves
Warren S. Brown
A Review of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion: Illusions, Delusions, and Realities
about Human Nature by Malcolm Jeeves and Warren S. Brown, West Conshohocken:
Templeton Foundation Press, 2009, viii + 160 pp., $17.95.

This book provides an excellent and very accessible overview of the state-of-the-question at
the intersection of the cognitive sciences, psychology, and religion. Jeeves, who is Emeritus
Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews and the author of many books on
science and religion in general and on psychology and Christian faith in particular, and Brown,
who is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute at the Fuller Theological Seminary,
Professor of Psychology at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, member of the UCLA
Brain Research Institute, author of numerous research articles, and author and editor (by
himself and with other colleagues) of four other books, here combine to present in summary
fashion their mature views at the interface of neuroscience, psychology, and religion. Those
familiar with their previous work will not find much new here, but those looking to get up-to-
speed on the discussion will thank God for this little book, particularly in terms of how the
authors help us think Christianly about neuropsychology, avoiding determinism and
reductionism on the one side, but also not ignoring the latest scientific developments on the
other side.
There are nine chapters to the book that cover the spectrum of issues historically (tracing the
transition from the “warfare” paradigm that was predominant for a long time to the “partnership”
approach that characterizes much of the more constructive efforts to engage psychology and
religion, and also overviewing thinking about the mind and the soul that has developed over
two millennia in the western world), experimentally (identifying the major breakthroughs in
research on brain function, evolutionary psychology, the neuroscience of religiousness, etc.),
and philosophically and theologically (e.g., on the mind-brain “problem,” and on the nature of
human nature). Thus between the first introductory chapter and the final chapter that both
looks backward (taking stock) and forward (anticipating new vistas), the reader is given a
superb introduction to how the relationship between psychology, the neurosciences, and
religion have developed, particularly in the last century and a half. Endnotes, a “Further
Reading” list, indexes, and a number of helpful color figures add to the usefulness of this book
for both undergraduate and (introductory) graduate courses on science and religion.
In particular, students who are being initiated into the discussions will benefit from the following
highlights (at least for this reader) in the book. First, the history of the “science” of
phrenology—the theory that human personality traits were correlated with brain and skull
shapes—in the nineteenth century is replete with instructive lessons for contemporary
discussions about the relationship between neuropsychology and religion and even the
emerging field of neurotheology. For one thing, phrenologists also related their findings with
religion across a spectrum, from those rejecting religion given advances in phrenological
understanding on the one side to those seeking to harmonize phrenological findings with
religious faith on the other, and all sorts of positions in between. Things do not seem to have
changed much since the mid-nineteenth century, with the exception that while the scientific
credentials of phrenology have been debunked, there are now new initiatives afoot in quest for
the “God spot” in the brain that also have drawn forth a spectrum of responses vis-à-vis
religion. The question today is whether or not the project of neurotheology and those of its
cousins can avoid the pitfalls left in the wake of phrenology and its descendants.
With regard to the perennial problem concerning the mind-brain relationship, Jeeves and
Brown provide a fair description of the various historical and contemporary views while setting
forth their own position. Of course, the dominant options currently on offer are either some
version of a mind-brain dualism or some form of a physicalist construal of the mind. The former
extends the veritable legacy bequeathed by the western philosophical and theological tradition,
even if it has been taken up and recast by contemporary neuroscientists of note such as Sir
John Eccles and Roger Sperry. The latter is certainly the default position of most active
cognitive scientists and neuropsychologists, particularly those uninterested in engaging their
work with religious or theological matters, so that the mind is either an epiphenomenon of brain
processes or certainly otherwise reducible, ultimately, to neurobiological and
neurophysiological functions.
Jeeves and Brown are part of an emerging via media in this discussion attempting to chart an
alternative route between dualism on the one side and reductive physicalism or materialism on
the other side. This third way—variously labeled emergence theory of mind, non-reductive
physicalism/materialism, dual-aspect monism, or emergent dualism—is suggested as providing
the most coherent model for making sense of neuropsychological research while respecting
the complexity and capacity of the human mind. In particular, Jeeves and Brown argue that
their non-reductive physicalist/materialist interpretation is consistent with the latest
neuropsychological findings, which they summarize in terms of eight principles of brain
operation (chapter 4): that the brain is part of an organic system connected with the nervous
system and the body’s sensory-motor organs; that the brain is nested within this loop of action-
feedback interactions; yet the brain can also engage in “off-line” action emulation (i.e.,
undertake abstract thought that does not necessarily have motor-sensory consequences); that
the complexity that is the brain is constituted by several support systems, all of which work
distinctly and yet together; that many distinctive functions of the brain have been confirmed as
localized to various support systems or neural areas, even while such localized processing
also serve as important nodes or connection points of the brain understood as a “widely
distributed processing network” (p. 47); that the brain thus seems to have evolved out of a
genetic blueprint most congenial to the adaptability and survival of the human species on the
one hand, even as the brain exhibits a self-organizing impulse and plasticity in response to and
in interaction with its environment (both within and outside the body) on the other hand; that
such plasticity reflects the dynamic nature of the brain’s learning capacities across the life
span; and that these neuropsychological principles invite a “dynamic core hypothesis” of the
mind as dependent upon but irreducible to the ever-changing neural states involving
differentiated neural networks and their interactions with the brains various support systems. In
sum, given these latest developments in the field of neuropsychology, Jeeves and Brown
recommend their theory of the emergent mind as supporting the existing experimental data, as
coherently demonstrating how the whole of the mind is both greater than the sum of the
(biological) parts and yet is simultaneously constituted by nothing more or less than those
parts, and as allowing for genuine “top-down” causation (so that the mind is in turn capable of
influencing the brain and the body).
It remains to be seen whether or not such an emergence model can be sustained over the long
haul both in terms of the ongoing advance of the neuropsychological sciences and with regard
to the ongoing discussions and debates in philosophical, religious, and theological circles. With
regard to a specific subset of the latter conversations, however, Jeeves and Brown are rather
convincing, in my opinion, that neuropsychological research poses no threat to Christian faith
even if such research continues to narrow the gap between ourselves and our closest animal
kin, the non-human primates. In addition, with regard to the further implications of
neuropsychology for Christian theology, I endorse also the proposal that “the imago dei cannot
be based singly on human anatomy, genes, neurology, or behavior. Instead, the image of God
in humankind arises from a combination of structural, functional, and relational elements” (p.
126). This kind of suggestion is precisely what we would expect the dialogue of science-and-
religion and science-and-theology to produce, so long as both sides are equally respected at
the discussion table.
Hence it is without hesitation that I recommend Neuroscience, Psychology, and Religion as a
wonderful primer that clarifies the Illusions, Delusions, and Realities about Human Nature.