Souls Old and New

My brother (a philosophical sort, to be sure) came to me many years ago in a bit of consternation and announced, 

“I’m not sure I believe human beings have a soul. But, if I don’t have an enduring soul, in what sense am I the same person in the past, as I am today and will in the future?”

This is what I grew up with.

At the time, I have to admit that, I didn’t have a readymade answer. (To be honest, I was somewhere in my teens probably trying to figure out other weighty questions like who my prom date would be.) Nonetheless, the subject of soul endures through time, and is the topic of this week’s post. Why? 

First of all, I’ve been in Oxford, England the past few days talking with two philosophers and a pastor (this sounds like the lead up to a joke) about various philosophical topics. (The central theme has been the meaning of life, but I’ll leave that for another time.) In our time together, I’ve realized again how important the soul is. 

First of all—and this brings me into my usual realm for this blog, that of science and religion—it seems to me that the current trend of many scientific worldviews is toward a materialist conception of human life in which our selves are a constantly changing, thus non-enduring, collection of molecules. (As a scholar of religion, I’d have to add that this sounds a great deal like the Buddhist teaching of anatta,or “no soul.”) And this materialist version of science takes us away from an enduring, persisting soul. Another way to put this is that our souls are really simply our minds and our mind is, to quote Marvin Minsky, 

“The mind is what the brain does.” Marvin Minsky

Secondly, what is it?

If we were to rely on Webster’s dictionary for the its definition, the soulis this: “the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life.” Webster’s dictionary

Fair enough, maybe not sufficiently theologically nuanced, but the definition will work as long we don’t fall into the “substance dualism”—that body and soul are two distinct entities and that the soul fills the body in some way similar to air filling a bike tire. The biblical texts teach us that we are much more interconnected in a body-soul unity. 

Christians, it seems to me, are convinced that there’s something more than just the material body, something that God has given us. If we’re created by the God who loves us then we need to have some way to relate to our Creator, and the soul provides us a way to do just that. It is also who we are. We talk about the soul as “the embodiment of some quality.” “She is the soul of this institution.” That’s the sense I’m talking about.

So how am I the same person as in 1978 (see the picture) as I am today? In some ways, I hope not. But at the same time, I’m thankful that the core of whom I am endures, repents and thus changes. And through it all, there’s a God who loves me.


P.S. If you want to go a bit further with the question of "What is the soul?" try this lecture from psychiatrist Iain McGilchrest.