How to Keep the Non-Reductive in Nonreductive Physicalism?

Introduction

I was delighted to be invited to give a presentation at the conference "Person, Soul, and Consciousness," organized by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, July 14, 2017. However, it is a bit odd for me to be speaking at a conference with this title, because, first, I have regularly objected to using "person" as a philosophical concept. The definitions end up either ruling out many individuals whom we want it to cover, such as babies and people with disabilities, or else they rule in too much: I would vote for Kanzi, the bonobo, to be admitted. Second, I have spent years arguing that there is no such thing as a soul; and, third, I do not think anyone knows enough about consciousness yet to say much at a scholarly level; however, I reserve this particular remark to neuroscientific contexts.

Nonetheless, I was delighted to be invited, especially because there are so many papers on Aquinas's anthropology. He has seemed to me to be the most difficult of significant theologians to classify in terms of dualism, or something else. He appears to be a very complicated monist until you get to his argument for the survival of the rational soul during the intermediate state. At that point he sounds more like what is called a holistic dualist, in that a mere soul is not considered to be a complete human being.

My plan for this lecture involves two parts. First, I will give as brief an account as I can of why I favor a monistic approach to Christian anthropology, which, following fellow philosophers of mind, I generally call "nonreductive physicalism." Where I hope to make my contribution will be to make good on the claim that it is possible to be ontologically physicalist (with regard to humans) without reducing our traditionally understood higher faculties to mere brain functions. So in my second section, Atoms versus Complex, Self-Organizing, Dynamical Systems, I will present an account, as the title suggests, of complex dynamical systems theory. I believe that it not only solves the problem at hand, but also represents a genuine worldview change that has been happening quite quickly over the space of only about ten to fifteen years.

Why Christian Physicalism?

There are plentiful writings from the twentieth century up to today arguing against dualism and for monism, along with an enhanced appreciation for the centrality of bodily resurrection in the good news of the Gospel. However, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biblical critics had called miracles into question, especially the Resurrection of Jesus. So, whereas for centuries the immortality of the soul had been combined, in eschatology, with the general resurrection, "Enlightened" Christians focused only on the immortality of the soul. However, as biblical criticism became more sophisticated, especially in recognizing the need to read words (such as the Hebrew nephesh) in context, the question was raised around 1910 of whether nephesh had rightly been translated into Greek as psyche and then eventually into "soul."

Now, in speaking of Protestant developments, I have discovered, after moving from a liberal seminary to teach at an evangelical institution, that one always needs to specify whether one is speaking, on the one hand, of liberal or mainline scholars, or, on the other, of conservatives. Among liberal Protestants, by the 1950s, there was near consensus that dualism was a Greek cultural accretion to an earlier, more authentic, Hebraic theology and ought to be rejected. Conservatives are going through the same process now.

It has been difficult to sort out Catholic scholars. Using my quick and dirty research methods of reading secondary literature, it seems that during the twentieth century, Catholic biblical scholars were increasingly more likely to reject dualism, but no general account of Catholic theologians was possible.

It is now recognized that no simple distinction can be made between Greek dualism and Hebraic monism. First, Hellenistic and Hebraic cultures had been mixing for several centuries before Jesus's day. Second, we moderns have too much of a tendency to read René Descartes's sharp distinction between material and nonmaterial back...