re NANCeY MURPHY’s BIG MISTAKE
(THAT “CHRISTIANS HAVE
NO SOULS”) ,
& SHE SAYS RICHARD
MOUW AGREES WITH HER.
THE BEST REFUTATION of NANCEY MURPHY
I have come
across
can be found at: www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v4/n1/emergentism- physicalism
also
see http://hearingtheword2.posterous.com/must-read-excellent- article-refuting-so-calle
NOTE:
I was in a class at Fuller Seminary taught by Nancey Murphy and found it to be
unintelligible and completely contrary to all my Christian beliefs and my
Christian education coming out of Calvin College & Seminary where they don't teach anything
written by Nancey Murphy. I am surprised she refers to Mouw as a
"physicalist" who won't
sing when a song is about "soul",
because I always thought of Mouw as being in agreement with mainstream
Christianity and Calvin College (he used to teach at Calvin, maybe that's why
he left) . I think this sort of teaching that refutes the existence of soul is
extremely dangerous, especially at the seminary level where future pastors are
being (supposedly) trained
http://povcrystal.blogspot.com/2010/06/we-have-no-souls.html
Sunday, June 20, 2010 We have no souls :)
Today I read/listened to Nancey Murphy , Professor of Christian Philosophy at the Fuller Theological Seminary, discuss her 2006 book, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?. She begins by asking a question
....
"Which of the following accounts
of human nature comes closest
to your own view?
Option 1: humans are made of three parts,
body, soul and spirit.
Option 2: humans are made of two parts,
either a body and a soul, or a body and a mind.
Option 3: Humans are made of just one part,
if you want to call it a part,
that is a physical body [physicalism].
And then option 4 is “Who
cares!”
I myself used to believe that
people were made up of one part, just bodies, that the mind was really only a
construct of the brain, and that there was no soul. Now, though, I vacillate in
hope between two other views - that maybe we are two parts and that we have bodies
which perish and souls which are immortal, or alternatively, that maybe we are just one part, bodies which
are 'selves' but without souls, that in some way become changed and immortal
after death. If that sounds unintelligible :) it might make more sense after
you read (or listen to the mp3 files of) the three part interview (Christianity, Neuroscience & the Soul) with
Nancey Murphy.
In the first part of the
interview she discusses the biblical view of bodies/souls and the change in
that line of thought due to the incorporation by medieval scholasticism of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle which showed interest
in the soul.
The second part of the interview
deals with the blow to Aristotelian physics and Thomas Aquinas' interpretation
of it, that integration of matter (bodies) and Form (souls), from the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo,
and atomism. Some thinkers
went completely atomistic like
Hobbes (sort of the father of contemporary physicalism), others referenced Plato's
idea of radical body/soul dualism
for the sake of free will,
like Descartes. Most interesting to me in this part of the interview was this
bit ......
One of the things that happened with Descartes is
that, while the Aristotelian synthesis claimed that plants, animals and humans
have souls, for Descartes, only human beings have souls, and so that had come
to be the accepted view between 1650 and 1850. And so Darwin comes along and
points out this huge amount of continuity between humans
and animals. Well,
if animals don’t
have souls, one line
of reasoning goes, then why should we think humans must have them? And so on
the one hand there was a strong
movement towards physicalism on the
basis of that argument. But on the
other side people would say, oh, if Darwin is showing all of this continuity between
humans and animals, how are we going to make it clear that there are major
distinctions between us and the animals? And one common strategy was to say,
well, we have souls and they don’t.
In part three of the interview, Physicalism, free will, and the promise of resurrection, she talks about how modern neuroscience
seems to prove there is no soul in the Aquinas or Descartes sense of the word,
and that some Christian theologians and biblical scholars have been saying for
50 to 100 years that "Christians don’t have souls, never needed them, and
Christianity would be much better off if we never had thought we had
them". The interviewer asks how, if we are just bodies without
souls, we can escape determinism and achieve
immortality. Her answer is interesting - that while being just bodies without
souls, still we're more than the sum of our material parts, and that we do get
resurrected. Here below is the text of the third part of the interview .....
**********************
Interviewer:
Well, that certainly leads us to a whole host of new problems, and maybe best brought to light by Francis Crick’s
comment that he has “falsified” Christianity by proving there
is no soul?
Well, if he had done his
homework, he would know about the Christian theologians and biblical scholars
who have been saying for 50 to 100 years that Christians don’t have souls,
never needed them, and Christianity would be much better off if we never had thought we
had them.
I recall a very amusing remark
that you made at a conference last fall where you
introduced yourself as someone who teaches at a graduate theological seminary
and spends her time telling her students that they have no souls.
(Laughs) I do get their attention (big laugh).
And I have a
running debate with the president
of the seminary [that
would be Richard Mouw], who
is a dualist himself—he says primarily on philosophical grounds—but when I first started preaching physicalism,
he would stop when we were singing
hymns that had soul
language in it, and he would tell me
I was not allowed to sing those hymns (laughs)..."
SEE http://povcrystal.blogspot.com/2010/06/we-have-no-souls.html
here's the rest of the article:
Which of the following accounts
of human nature comes closest
to your own view?
Option 1: humans are made of three parts, body, soul and spirit.
Option 2: humans
are made of two parts,
either a body and a soul, or a body and a mind.
Option 3: Humans
are made of just one part, if you want to call it a part, that is a physical body [physicalism].
And then option 4 is “Who
cares!”
I myself used to believe that
people were made up of one part, just bodies, that the mind was really only a construct
of the brain, and that there was no soul. Now, though, I vacillate in hope
between two other views - that maybe we are two parts and that we have bodies which perish and souls which are immortal, or alternatively, that maybe we are just one part, bodies which
are 'selves' but without souls, that in some way become changed and immortal
after death. If that sounds unintelligible :) it might make more sense after
you read (or listen to the mp3 files of) the three part interview (Christianity, Neuroscience & the Soul) with
Nancey Murphy.
In the first part of the
interview she discusses the biblical view of bodies/souls and the change in
that line of thought due to the incorporation by medieval scholasticism of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle which showed interest
in the soul.
The second part of the interview
deals with the blow to Aristotelian physics and Thomas Aquinas' interpretation
of it, that integration of matter (bodies) and Form (souls), from the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo,
and atomism. Some thinkers went completely atomistic like
Hobbes (sort of the father of contemporary physicalism), others referenced
Plato's idea of radical body/soul dualism for the sake of free will, like
Descartes. Most interesting to me in this part of the interview was this bit
......
One of the things that happened with Descartes is
that, while the Aristotelian synthesis claimed that plants, animals and humans
have souls, for Descartes, only human beings have souls, and so that had come
to be the accepted view between 1650 and 1850. And so Darwin comes along and
points out this huge amount of continuity between humans
and animals. Well,
if animals don’t
have souls, one line
of reasoning goes, then why should we think humans must have them? And so on
the one hand there was a strong
movement towards physicalism on the
basis of that argument. But on the
other side people would say, oh, if Darwin is showing all of this continuity
between humans and animals, how are we going to make it clear that there are
major distinctions between us and the animals? And one common strategy was to
say, well, we have souls and they don’t.
In part three of the interview, Physicalism, free will, and the promise of resurrection, she talks about how modern neuroscience seems to prove there is no soul in the Aquinas
or Descartes sense of the word, and that some Christian
theologians and biblical scholars have been saying for 50 to 100 years that
"Christians don’t have
souls, never needed them, and Christianity would be much better off if we never
had thought we had them". The interviewer asks how, if we are just bodies
without souls, we can escape
determinism and achieve immortality. Her answer is
interesting - that while being just bodies without souls, still we're more than
the sum of our material parts, and that we do get resurrected. Here below is
the text of the third part of the interview .....
********************** Part Three
Interviewer:
Well, that certainly leads us to a whole host of new problems, and maybe best brought to light by Francis Crick’s
comment that he has “falsified” Christianity by proving there
is no soul?
Well, if he had done his
homework, he would know about the Christian theologians and biblical scholars
who have been saying for 50 to 100 years that Christians don’t have souls,
never needed them, and Christianity would be much better off if we never had thought we
had them.
I recall a very amusing remark
that you made at a conference last fall where you
introduced yourself as someone who teaches at a graduate theological seminary
and spends her time telling her students that they have no souls.
(Laughs) I do get their attention
(big laugh). And I have a running debate with the president of the seminary,
who is a dualist himself—he says primarily on philosophical grounds—but when I first started preaching
physicalism, he would stop when we were singing hymns
that had soul language in it, and he would tell me I was not allowed to sing
those hymns (laughs).
Well, I know you’re using the
word “preaching” figuratively when you say “preaching physicalism,” but it does
seem to me that physicalism poses some very
serious problems. Once you acknowledge that the brain is what’s doing it, you get back to some very serious
stakes for Christians, do you not?
Yes. And serious stakes for the
whole human race. It’s the problem that Descartes and Hobbes already
recognized: if human bodies are
controlled by the laws governing their parts, then everything that a human
being does must be controlled by the laws of the natural
sciences, and if that’s the case, then not only do we not have free will, not only
do we not have moral responsibility, but we can’t even have rationality. And so
if what you and I are saying is simply the
product of the outworking of the laws of neurobiology inside our heads,
then there’s nothing rational about what we’re doing: we’re just making
noises.
Well, if I thought
determinism was true I wouldn’t
have spent so long preparing for this interview.
That’s right, you would
have known that it was either going to come out well or
badly!
Exactly! But how do we get out of this now? This is
a tough spot.
I believe that, in contrast to
Hobbes’ day, we are in a position right now where we can begin to unravel the
knot. We have this image of the way the world is constructed, and an image
about how the major sciences relate to one another, that I will call the
“hierarchy of the sciences” with the corresponding “hierarchy of complex
systems.” So we think that everything is made of subatomic particles, whatever
the physicists say they are this decade, and atoms are composed of those,
chemical compounds are composed of those, biochemicals are composed of vast
complexes of those simpler molecules, and now you’re getting into the range of
biology. You can start talking about cell walls and variously more complex
tissues, and then organs, and then organisms, and then you can move to ecology
to talk about the large systems in which the organisms live, or you can move to
psychology and the social sciences to talk about the complex relations among
human beings. It seems to me that the major
assumption throughout the whole of the modern world view has been that
the parts of any of these complex entities unilaterally determine the behavior of the whole. This makes sense in some kinds of systems. If you think of an
ordinary mechanical watch, it’s just almost undeniable that the behavior of the
parts of the watch determine the behavior of the whole.
Now our goal in this intellectual
endeavor is not just to understand ant colonies,
but to give a sense of the human person, and some of the phenomena that we
associate with being one, like subjectivity, a sense of having the ability to choose,
of having free will, the sense
of being responsible for our actions, of being moral agents, and of course,
very importantly, the ability to have a relationship with God or the divine. So
how do we get there from this?
Well, we are like the ant colony.
We are complex systems with holistic characteristics. Some of those
holistic characteristics are able to exert downward effects on lower level parts,
and much of this is what’s going on in our cognitive systems. I have the
ability to perform what I call self-transcendence. For instance, I find myself
angry at a student, and I can then move to a level of evaluation and ask, “Why
am I angry at that student? Should I be angry or should I not be angry?” and make a judgment about that. And if I think I should
not have been angry, then I can go back and try to redesign my cognitive
processes so I’m not so likely to be upset about students doing those sorts of things.
And when we get to the point where we can reflect on those higher order reflections in light of moral concepts provided by our culture, we’re at the level that we can become morally responsible agents. So I can decide that I was perfectly justified in being angry at the student. I treat the student badly as a result. But then I reflect on whether that was a Christian way to interact with the student, and Jesus’ enemy-love comes to mind, and I think, “Oh, whoops! I failed morally.” So we have to have these multilevel capacities for self-transcendence and self-evaluation. We have to have the cultural resources of moral evaluative language, and that is what gives us the capacity to be moral thinkers. Of course the capacity to make ourselves carry out what we decide is the moral thing to do, that’s a discussion for another whole day.
Now it does appear to me that
some of our older notions of causality and the causality of the will are going
to have to be reexamined here, because it doesn’t sound to me like the will is
going to turn out to be some kind of “uncaused cause.” Right. But, also one has to wonder,
if the self, the mind, the soul is just a
manifestation of very complex meta-levels of organization of a physical system,
then what happens to immortality? What happens to life after death?
Well, the Christian view, the early Christian view,
and some scholars
say the only suitable view for Jews also, is the view of the
resurrection of the body. Jesus simply died. There was no soul going off to
heaven. But three days later his body was, not just resuscitated, but raised in
a transformed manner, suitable for some other world than this crass material
world that we live in. And so what Christian preachers need to do is to reemphasize the resurrection at the end of time, rather than the sermons
that say your loved-one’s soul has flown to God and is at peace in heaven and
all that sort of stuff. And I think that’s much more authentically Christian
than the souls-flying-away kind of image.
I must ask this skeptical
question: why is it that the physical sciences and neuroscience have been able
to chip away at dualism, whereas the seeming improbability of bodies being brought back to life is accepted?
(That was a very
poorly worded question!)
(Laughter) Well, actually there are a lot of Christians who accept pretty much all of the Christian teaching except resurrection. You can ask scholars, is there enough historical evidence available, and there is a small but strong minority of Christian scholars who say that we’ve got adequate evidence to conclude that something really strange happened on that third day. It was such a powerful event that it totally changed the lives of the disciples, who’d been hiding—turned them into fearless evangelists. We would all say that we can’t describe exactly what it was like. It’s not a ghost, it’s not a resuscitated corpse, it’s like nothing anybody has ever seen. But to be a Christian, Saint Paul would say, “If Christ be not raised then our hope is in vain.” So it’s a part of the package of being a Christian, and even if there isn’t enough historical evidence for it to stand on its own legs apart from the whole system, you have to ask is there enough reason to believe in the Christian system as a whole. And I could go on for ten days straight about why I think there is.
Well, I suppose my question really
is, where do you draw the line? What aspects of your theology have to accommodate themselves to contemporary science, and what
aspects remain matters, inviolable matters of faith?
Well, belief in God and God’s
doings in the history of his people are not really the sorts of things that
science could ever disprove. And I really want to emphasize again that, on this
matter of the soul, although it’s been taken to be central to Christian thought
for many centuries, I was convinced prior to looking at the science that physicalism
was a perfectly okay understanding, and even a better understanding of the
original biblical teaching. So biblical scholars beat the neuroscientists to
this conclusion by almost a hundred years.
Well… right on!
(Laughter) But I would be really
upset if I found some aspect of what I see as central to my Christian belief-set to
be in radical conflict with science, and couldn’t find any way to resolve the
conflict.
Professor Nancey
Murphy, thank you very much. Thank you very much. It’s been a delight." [END].
Vander
THE BEST REFUTATION of NANCEY MURPHY
I have
come across can be found at:
www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v4/n1/emergentism- physicalism
also
see
http://hearingtheword2.posterous.com/must-read-excellent- article-refuting-so-calle
NOTE: I was in a class at Fuller Seminary taught by Nancey Murphy and found it to be
unintelligble and completely contrary to all my Christian beliefs and my
Christian education coming out of Calvin College & Seminary where they
don't teach anything written by Nancey Murphy. I am surprised she refers to Mouw
as a "physicalist" who won't sing when a song is about
"soul", because I always thought of Mouw as being in agreement with
mainstream Christianity and Calvin College (he used to teach at Calvin, maybe
that's why he left) . I think this sort of teaching that refutes the existence
of soul is extremely dangerous, especially at the seminary level where future
pastors are being (supposedly) trained. -Vander-
