The Soul of Theological Anthropology

A Cartesian Exploration

Joshua R. Farris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367339999
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317015031
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Recent research in the philosophy of religion, anthropology, and philosophy of mind has prompted the need for a more integrated, comprehensive, and systematic theology of human nature. This project constructively develops a theological accounting of human persons by drawing from a Cartesian (as a term of art) model of anthropology, which is motivated by a long tradition. As was common among patristics, medievals, and Reformed Scholastics, Farris draws from philosophical resources to articulate Christian doctrine as he approaches theological anthropology. Exploring a substance dualism model, the author highlights relevant theological texts and passages of Scripture, arguing that this model accounts for doctrinal essentials concerning theological anthropology. While Farris is not explicitly interested in thorough critique of materialist ontology, he notes some of the significant problems associated with it. Rather, the present project is an attempt to revitalize the resources found in Cartesianism by responding to some common worries associated with it.

Part I

Cartesian souls and theological prolegomena

1 A Cartesian exploration in natural theology and prolegomena

But that which is intelligible and without dimension is neither contracted nor dispersed, she said. Contraction and dispersal are proper to bodies. The soul, however, is equally present according to its own invisible and incorporeal nature at the aggregation of the elements into the body and at their segregation.

(Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On The Soul and the Resurrection, chapter 2, 47)

In this chapter, I lay out some of what I believe to be promising lines of reasoning for understanding both humans and God as minds in the Cartesian sense. I seek to motivate a case in favour of Cartesianism as a foundation for constructive theological anthropology. To this end, I advance a version of the knowledge argument that favours Cartesian substance dualism according to which persons are at their core metaphysically simple souls (i.e. minds), which have some kind of relationship to their bodies. But, the precise relationship of the soul to the body will be taken up in forthcoming chapters.

Natural theology

In the Introduction, I defined standard substance dualism as the view that an individual human is identical to the soul or the core of the human is the soul, which also has a body or functions interactively with a body. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a good place to start when thinking about theism. If we are to have any theological knowledge that gives us a foundational starting point for additional construction, then we must begin with mental beings. Assuming that God is or has a mind and is capable of communicating to humans and able to enter into personal relationships with humans, then it seems very natural to say that God is or has personal and/or mental properties that overlap with humans.

In an article ‘Discovering God and Soul,’ I advance an abductive argument for the overlap of properties and/or features between God’s nature and human nature.¹ I describe the soul as a sign or pointer that requires an explanation beyond it, something like Stephen Evans’ recent approach to natural theology. By way of contrast with Evans, the soul serves as a ‘sign’ that souls have access to, in addition to its ground, in a self-reflexive manner. Evans construes his project as externalist in nature rather than internalist.² I argue that souls lack a sufficient explanation in physical mechanistic and inanimate causes. The soul requires a personal cause/explanation for its existence, and this cause would appear to be higher than other human causes. Furthermore, similar to Evans’ understanding of some signs in terms of ‘cosmic wonder,’ souls serve as signs for ‘transcendent wonder.’³ Unsurprisingly, an adequate explanation for a soul is God. In this way, like Descartes the soul is the medium by which we come to know of God and the most fundamental thing we can say about God would seem to be that he is a mind like human minds.

In virtue of our having knowledge of persons as souls and that those souls bear certain features, if the world bears similar features or marks reflective of souls, then a probable explanation for the world full of souls would be a personal agent that is a soul/immaterial being. Here, I cite the argument.

1 If I have direct access to my nature as a simple immaterial being that bears one pure immaterial property, and other beings bear marks or features in similar ways, then it is likely these other beings are simple immaterial beings with complex abilities and properties.

2 I have direct access to my nature as a simple immaterial being that bears one pure immaterial property (given introspection, an enduring I-concept, and self-presenting properties);

3 and other beings, namely human beings, bear marks or features in similar ways found in premise 2 (given the principle of credulity or phenomenal conservatism).⁴

4 Therefore, it is likely that human beings (on the basis of the principle of charity/credulity) are simple immaterial beings with complex and abstract mental abilities (from premises 1–3; modus ponens).

5 If it is likely that human persons are mental simples with abstract and complex properties and there is not a suitable naturalistic explanation for this, then the likely metaphysical explanation is a mental Being (some call God) with abstract and complex abilities.

6 There is no naturalistic explanation for this.

7 Therefore, the likely metaphysical explanation for human persons is a mental Being (some call God) with abstract and complex abilities (from premises 4–6, modus ponens).

8 By logical extension, assuming there is a cause behind humans and the natural world, we have reason (principle of credulity) to think this Being is like human beings because the physical world bears marks or features of a Being with complex and abstract mental abilities (premises 1–3),

9 Therefore, we have good reason to think that the physical world points to a Being with a mental nature like human beings and the natures they have, which comprises a personal paradigm explanation. This Being is often referred to as God.

Consider the first premise. I take it that I am an immaterial substance bearing at least one property or feature that is instantiated by the soul (i.e. immaterial substance) and is not owned by the body. It may be possible that a soul is spatial in some sense, but it is likely not spatially extended bearing the same kinds of properties we assume of bodies where bodies are extended and have mass and other empirically verifiable properties. Attending to my mental states, it becomes plain that I as a thing with mental states am just different from my body. It is certainly true to say that I own my body and have personal experiences of the world in and through my body, but strictly speaking I am not body – at least not essentially so. I am distinct from my body, which seems to be basic upon reflection. In terms of my own phenomenal experiences of the body, I readily make an intuitive assumption that I am not identical to my body. I can reflect on various parts of my body as distinct objects of my own first-person awareness and see that they are not identical to me. There is not one garden-variety material object (where material things are publically accessible objects of spatial extension that are non-thinking) that adequately describes or makes sense of who I am. I seem to be something different, which is justified by my persistence through time and space.

In contrast to the body, I persist through time and space. I persist as a subject through time. Reflecting on the experience of my writing this section of A Cartesian Exploration, I realize that I existed yesterday to today as I enter into the next few seconds, minutes, and hours of my life. At some point in time, my body does not seem to persist as wholly the same object whereas I do.

Furthermore, I exist at differing spatial locations in my body. As I experience my body, I can directly focus on differing parts of my body through my thinking and through my control over the parts of my body. To reflect on the various parts of my body that I control, I naturally make a distinction between who I am in relation to my body. Thus, I intuitively believe that I am not my body.

Instead, I am the kind of thing that thinks and experiences. I am something other than a material object; I am an immaterial object that has first-person consciousness. I experience the world from my own vantage point. And, as I experience the world I do so as a subject that owns my individual and distinct thoughts, emotions, and beliefs at different times. Yet, at every moment if we are to assume actual continuity of the subject that is also distinct from its body, then we must assume that there is at least one property that is pure and distinct from the properties of the body. This property is the first-person property. And, such a property is foundational to all experience, which is rooted in an immaterial entity.

As an immaterial entity, I have complex mental abilities to achieve abstract thinking. I am able to discriminate between various objects perceptible to my experience. When I am presented with the option of choosing between an apple and an orange to eat, I can recall what both taste like. Then, I can determine which of the fruit I desire the most and proceed to making a choice.

Transitioning to other human beings is a natural inference to the best explanation. If I am to be charitable to others, then I have good reason, based upon the complex effects like their movements and verbal communication, to conclude that they have the ability to cognize and discriminate about options. Like me they too have complex mental abilities (premises 2–4).

Moving from human persons to God or the causal agent behind the natural world is related, but a somewhat different issue (premises 5–7). The difficulty is that God or another Divine-agent is not embodied like humans are embodied, so we cannot posit precisely the same accounting.⁵ However, while this being does not seem to have a body, it does bear marks in and through the natural order similar to humans bearing marks in their natural bodies. Furthermore, the natural world bears marks and features that reflect an agent/being that has a mental nature (i.e. one that is a simple immaterial being with complex/abstract functioning). A mental/personal God would seem to provide a more rational explanation for the universe bearing marks of personal agency than other alternatives, like naturalism for instance. Not only does this agent bear marks of having generic causal powers that brought the natural world into existence, which we know through a cosmological argument for the existence of a Being. This agent bears marks of being the kind of being that must discriminate between options (i.e. an individual mind with complex/abstract mental functioning). It seems that through a variation of the Design argument or a Fine-tuning argument, we have evidence that suggests not merely generic causal agency (i.e. a pantheistic being of a sort), but a Being with a mental nature resembling human nature.⁶ We have here an argument beyond generic theism pointing in the direction of a personal Designer, as we find with the Christian portrayal of God. Once again, this moves beyond many natural theology arguments to a richer concept of God.

I take it that the natural world bears features of a mental agent with complex and abstract reasoning abilities.⁷ Fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God bear this out. Fine-tuning arguments for the existence of a supernatural being (i.e. God) come in three forms, namely, the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, the constants of nature, and the initial conditions of the universe. I consider the first, namely, laws of nature. A Being with discriminatory abilities is required to account for the laws of nature in relation necessary for an embodied being (such as human beings) to exist and have a relation to the soul depends. An example of fine-tuning would include gravity, which is that attractive force between physical objects. Gravity increases in strength proportionate to the masses of objects and wanes with the distance between objects. This longstanding force must remain constant for human brains to develop in evolution and for sustaining minds. Gravity, alone, in all of its manifestations is highly specified and unique to the natural world we live in. Arguably, the best explanation for this occurrence in the natural world is a personal being having complex and abstract mental functioning (granted this Being has greater powers than humans) able to design the world in such a way as to allow complex life to evolve.⁸ The uniqueness that the natural world reflects is not only inexplicable in terms of material processes alone, but is unquantifiable in mathematical terms. Uniqueness (as a value) is a feature that is relevant and explicable in terms of persons not in terms of physical processes. Furthermore, consider the design of conscious beings to come to exist in and through evolutionary processes. This too requires a personal being with a mental nature that has intentions and is able to discriminate, devise a plan, and put it into motion.⁹

Naturalism provides no solution for human minds/souls, so the most likely explanation would be theism. I propose that the world does, in fact, bear marks of agency similar to humans. The criterion I advance is what I call discriminatory abilities, which finds support in the fine-tuning of the universe and the unique relationship that obtains between minds and bodies. Accordingly, there are physical effects that seem to require a personal explanation. Personal agency finds an adequate grounding in a being that has complex and abstract mental functioning. Thus, if God is the causal agent behind the physical world that sustains the world and human souls, then he must be the kind of being that has discriminatory abilities. If this is the case, then there is good reason to believe that this being is a soul/immaterial substance that bears a pure mental property like humans. The present argument grounds a natural intuition/assumption about the paradigm of souls and the physical world grounded in an immaterial God.

Theistic dualism

Theistic dualism is a term that refers to God in relationship to the whole world. It is not intended as a negative term to suggest that God is good and the physical creation he has created is bad, but to highlight the ontological difference between the two. In this broad ontological framework, we have a paradigm for thinking about both God and souls. Given that God is an immaterial mental being distinct from physical things, we have a framework in which to situate other souls. Theistic dualism, then, is a way of looking at the world.

Why natural theology, theistic dualism, and the soul

Presently, there is an inclination among analytic philosophers and theologians toward relational and participatory ontologies of persons.¹⁰ However, as I consider substantive views of persons in A Cartesian Exploration, I show that there are reasons for affirming a substantive view as foundational to relational participatory views. My goal here is to motivate the discussion by offering reasons in support of substance dualist ontology as it pertains to human persons.

I define strong participatory ontologies as those ontologies in theology that begin with relations and personalism. Personalism is characteristically described as existential in nature insofar as persons cannot be understood apart from the relations they enter into. In this way, persons are only understood in terms of the community they exist within. According to these strong relational/participatory ontologies, we cannot analytically define persons. However, I think we should understand persons as conscious and volitional beings. Relations themselves only make sense if substances make sense. What seems upon reflection to be basic to our understanding of perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: A Cartesian exploration in tradition
• PART I: Cartesian souls and theological prolegomena
• PART II: Creation and Cartesian souls
• PART III: Cartesian souls, hamartiology, and soteriology
• PART IV: Cartesian souls and personal eschatology
• Conclusion
• References
• Index