Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature

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Summary: No more Plato from the pulpit!
Review: People who have actually studied philosophy and are tired of hearing people rave on and on about saving "souls" can read this for direction and sound arguments. It is a good collection of experts in theological, scientific, and philosophical fields that are not trying to push materialism onto you and call it Christianity. These are seminary professors and Christian scholars who have done their homework and are trying to make the corrections necessary to share the faith in today's world. It accentuates religion's key characteristic of a new life in Christ. Makes a great partner to William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience." Theological Anthropology is much overlooked today, and Christians are taking flack. You do not have to believe in evolution, but you cannot deny modern neuroscience and psychology. This book delineates how that can be done.

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Summary: Critics do not appear to know the issues
Review: Quite simply, this is an extremely useful book.

It is a decidely Christian rejection of substance dualism, something that has been wanting in a popular yet still academic format for some time now. This book argues persuasively that a dualistic mindset is not only unnecessary, but a real hindrance to Christian thought.

As to the accusations of heresy given by some earlier reviewers - it seems that the reactions were a little ill-reasoned. In particular I would like to respond to Bruno D. Granger. Granger attacks the book because:

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But even much more important, I think that Christian anthropology is fundamental for one of the most basic Christian dogma: the double nature of Christ, both human and divine. Traditionally it was thought that Christ had a human physical body and the third person of the Trinity as soul. But if humans are only physical beings without a (spiritual) soul then Jesus of Nazareth could not have been been both human and divine.

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I don't doubt that many modern Christian dualists also think this way - that Jesus' BODY could not have been the divine "part," it was His SOUL that was the divine nature. However, this is heretical as far as historical Christian Orthodoxy is concerned. it is the christological herey called "nestorianism," splitting the divine and human natures up into two distinct substances. This, naturally, makes the body of Jesus nothing more than human (i.e. not divine at all), and renders the atoning work on the cross totally useless. But the obvious reason to reject this dualistic heresy present by Mr Granger is that it basically denies the incarnation altogether. If the "divine" and "human" parts remained so separate, did God really become man at all? Did the word really become flesh?

Glenn Peoples

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Summary: Authors want to have cake and eat it, too.
Review: This book is about a puzzle: how our souls are connected to our bodies. The book's answer is called nonreductive physicalism.

Chapters 2 and 3, about evolution and genetics, can be skipped. They're too detailed and technical to be thumbnail introductions on those topics, but too philosophically naive to provide useful bridges to the rest of the book.

The authors of the later chapters (especially Murphy) at least appreciate the key issues. Ultimately, however, the book suffers from two major flaws. One is that its message doesn't hang together. The book repeatedly rejects the idea that people are "nothing but their bodies," but it also repeatedly declares that people consist of bodies and nothing else. And the book denies that one can explain people's spiritual lives neurobiologically, but it endorses a research program to do exactly that.

Second, the book is theologically precarious. It shuns the idea of an immaterial soul as incompatible with modern scientific ideas about how the physical world works. But exactly the same considerations will lead one to disbelieve in Biblical miracles, in divine healing from illness, and in the work of the Holy Ghost. The book in fact acknowledges this problem, without offering a solution (pp. 147-148).

Note for philosophy students: A key early mistake in the book (or perhaps a deliberate tactic) is to lump together two rival views, namely reductive and eliminative materialism. From there on, the book constantly declares that it is not reductive about the soul, when what it really means is that it is not eliminative about the soul.