William Hasker, "Persons as Emergent Substances"

One of the issues I have been most interested in the past few years has been the theological understanding of anthropology. How does one define a human being scripturally and philosophically? My fascination and opinion on this began in my undergraduate studies, when I wrote a paper on the dichotomy vs. trichotomy issue for a theology class. The options presented to me in that class for a biblical anthropology were dichotomy (human beings are made up of body and soul/spirit—two separate things) and trichotomy (human beings are made up of soul, spirit, and body—three separate things). As I recall, the battles were heated, though in retrospect there is precious little difference between either of those views. They are both rooted in Cartesian dualism.

In my paper, I actually began to depart from that thinking. I proposed a third possibility, which really began as little more than a redefinition of terms but actually set me on the road to thinking about anthropology from a radically different perspective. I proposed that the term “soul” was a reference to the “whole person,” which is how man can become a “living soul” in Genesis. The term “spirit” was a reference to the spiritual part of a human, and the body was the body. At the time, I had not radically departed from the dualist interpretation, but the definition of the terms paved the way for my departure.

In the Christmas series I preached in December of 2007, I proposed a radically different understanding of the incarnation of Christ based on a completely different anthropological understanding (you can go here to subscribe to those podcasts—the series was called “The Theology of Christmas”). My understanding of anthropology, though, was not born in December of ’07, but evolved over the years from my original dualism.

My current concept of humanity is that people can only be understood properly in the context of the physical body. The notion that who we really are is our “souls” or “spirits” (loosely thought of as a kind of “ghost” which animates our physical shells) does not really seem like the understanding developed in scripture to me. We are created to be physical, we live physically, and we are destined to be in eternity physically. We are physical people. Hence, while the terms in my paper did begin my journey toward this view, they did not encapsulate it. In my anthropology, based largely on the creation account of Genesis, man is primarily physical (God formed man of the dust of the earth) with a “spirit” breathed into him. The “spirit” must be defined, and it really never is in the Bible. I have defined it to myself as “personality.” God “breathed” personhood into the man when he animated the lifeless body. The “spirit” isn’t really a ghost, but the ability to think, feel, and relate. It is something special which not every physical body (as in the animals) has in equal proportions, but it is not a ghost. This spiritual body is called the “soul” in Genesis. It is not two parts, but a single entity. It is a physical body which operates on a spiritual level.

I think this view is not only a better understanding scripturally, it is also a better understanding from the view of modern science. Scientifically, the function of the brain for thought, emotion, and even ethics has been empirically verified. This article in TIME magazine is a great example of the physiological root of human ethics. My graduate advisor at LCS has also done a lot of research into this topic. He has published his own conclusions about this, and has influenced my thinking as well.

This, of course, does not fly with many, many people! But, it is the view I have. Until very recently I had not read a lot that interacted with it, and then I opened up a book I’d been putting off for some time. A few Christmases ago, I’d gotten the book edited by Kevin Corcoran, Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons. It is a collection of essays from primarily three perspectives: Cartesian dualism, physicalism, and the unity view. I have to admit, I am glad to have finally explored this book.

Interestingly, the chapter I enjoyed the most was by William Hasker, who has written a lot from the perspective of Open Theism (is it any wonder I like him?). He did a chapter called “Persons as Emergent Substances.” His argument is that, basically, physicalism (materialism) and dualism are up against series crises. He proposes a third option, the Middle Way.

The purely physicalist interpretation, which might be what my view above sounds like—though I don’t mean it to—is seen as inadequate. It doesn’t account for “the phenomena of mind (108).” Furthermore, he feels the view is going to be completely out of vogue very soon as “ethics, religion, metaphysics, and science all go about their business largely untroubled by the positivist assault, which is well on its way to becoming a distant memory (108).” In other words, logical positivism (empiricism) is on its way out. So goes materialism. Perhaps.

His critique of dualism is much more fun. I’m including some quotes which may help outline some of his thought.

“My complaints against Cartesian dualism are basically two. The first is that it cannot plausibly account for the extensive and intimate dependence of mind on brain that we find to exist. Some forms of dependence, of course, are readily understandable on Cartesian assumptions. The immaterial mind will be dependent on the brain as the channel for sensory information, and as the control center for bodily movement. It is therefore to be expected that sensory and motor capacities will be brain-dependent, and that impairment of brain function will interfere with those capacities. But why should consciousness itself be interrupted by a blow to the head, or dose of medication? And why should a personality be drastically altered—sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently—by injury to the brain or chemical inbalance in the brain? (112)”

“the functioning of the brain, and indeed of quite specific regions within the brain, is required for and intimately involved in some highly sophisticated mental processes; we do not have a situation, as Cartesian dualism might lead us to suppose, in which the body and brain merely serve up raw perceptual data which is then understood and interpreted by the immaterial mind. I believe, therefore, that an adequate theory of mind must allow for the dependence of mental activity upon brain function in a way that is stronger than Cartesian dualism can readily accommodate (112).”

“Cartesian souls, of course, cannot be replicated through biological reproduction; they must be directly created by God. And, given the universal divine activity of conservation, they are ‘naturally immortal.’ This fact seemed to Descartes good reason to deny souls to the beasts; thus his infamous doctrine that animals are mere atomata. Surely we cannot follow Descartes on this; a contemporary Cartesian must assign souls to the animals as well as to human beings (113).” Interestingly, I think scripture does as well. Genesis 9:10 refers to the animals as “living creatures” in the English translations, but the Hebrew is “nephesh” or “souls.” Also, I think Romans 8 paints a picture of the realm of nature waiting for its redemption. There will be animals in heaven, I think. They, too, are souls. Yet, I am not tempted to become a vegetarian, yet.

I began to be uncomfortable with Hasker at this point, “There is need, in short for a middle way in the philosophy of mind, a perspective which reduces the gulf between mind and matter without doing violence to the nature of either (114).” At first I thought he was looking for some type of “hypostatic union,” which is an idea about Christology which I have largely abandoned. But, I was pleased to read a much different idea.

“Cartesian dualism simply accepts the chasm, postulating the soul as an entity of a completely different nature than the physical, an entity with no essential or internal relationship to the body, which must be added to the body ab extra by a special divine act of creation. This scheme is not without initial plausibility from a theistic point of view, but I believe it carries with it insuperable difficulties. (paragraph break) In rejecting such dualisms, we implicitly affirm that the human mind is produced by the human brain and is not a separate element ‘added to’ the brain from outside. This leads to the further conclusion that mental properties are ‘emergent’ in the following sense: they are properties that manifest themselves when the appropriate mental constituents are placed in special highly complex relationships but which are neither observable in simpler configurations nor derivable from properties which are thus observable (115-116).”

I like this idea, but it is still not complete. “A conscious experience simply is a unity, and to decompose it into a collection of separate parts is to falsify it. So it is not enough to say that there are emergent properties here; what is needed is an emergent individual, a new individual entity which comes into existence as a result of a certain functional configuration of the material constituents of the brain and nervous system (116).”

The problems Hasker claims to solve are these: “This theory makes intelligible, as Cartesian dualism does not, the intimate dependence of consciousness and mental processes on brain function. And, finally, it is completely free of embarrassment over the souls of animals. Animals have souls, just as we do...(117)”

Hasker is becoming one of my favorites. A look at my wish list reveals a few of his books I’m looking for. I really feel that in this chapter all that is needed is a re-deployment of terminology and he would be very close to the anthropology I have posited. The “soul” which is commonly used in philosophical theology, and which he also uses, for “mind” I think should be the “consciousness” or the “unity,” the whole person. What he calls “soul,” I call the “spirit.” If the brain produces mind or spirit, what emerges then is “soul” or the unity.

One last implication before I trudge off to go to sleep. If the Cartesian view of creation of new people is true, one wonders why God participates in giving souls to people born to terrible situations. It seems to me that when two people produce a child, they are in fact producing a new soul completely apart from the decision or will of God. God gave us the ability to create new people entirely. They are souls without his immediate participation, but he participates by creating the system in which they can be created by people. Furthermore, if technology is developed which would clone humans, I believe the cloned humans would be genetically similar to their hosts, but would be different souls—not soulless creatures similar to the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” scenario. In this way, this anthropological view is more closely in line with Open Theism. Perhaps this is why Hasker and I are intrigued by it.

Anyway, it is an interesting idea. I still wonder if Hasker’s view doesn’t differ very strongly from my view of unity. If it does, I’m tempted to move to Hasker’s view. The bottom line is I don’t think we are as much a mixture of different parts as the dualists have made us out to be. We are a unity of things, and that unity is really inseparable. The dichotomy/trichotomy issue is an internal struggle of the dualists. I have abandoned that discussion.

Much of the book deals with the ramifications of these ideas on resurrection. Truthfully, I don’t really have a lot of questions about that, but I do think the contributors have adequately defended the resurrection value of my view.

At any rate, I heartily recommend this book to those of you who are dealing with this topic in your thinking.