Nancey Murphy

Whatever Happened to the Soul

Abstract: Traditional religious teachings about the nature of the person, especially body‐soul dualism, influence majority views of the self. Following a historical overview, it is argued that a purely physicalist account of human nature is equally compatible with contemporary science and with Christian thought. However, an account that reduces higher human capacities to neurobiology is unacceptable from a theological perspective.

Scientific Realism and Postmodern Philosophy

The debate over scientific or critical realism is characterized by confusion, which I claim is a result of approaching the issue from both modern and ‘postmodern’ perspectives. Modern thought is characterized by foundationalism in epistemology and representationalism in philosophy of language, while holism in epistemology and the theory of meaning as use in philosophy of language are postmodern. Typical forms of scientific realism (which seek referents for theoretical terms or correspondence accounts of the truth of scientific theories) are positions at home only in a modern framework. Postmodern presuppositions of other participants in the debate account for the ability of opponents to talk past one another.

Physicalism Without Reductionism: Toward a Scientifically, Philosophically, and Theologically Sound Portrait of Human Nature

This essay addresses three problems facing a physicalist (as opposed to dualist) account of the person. First, how can such an account fail to be reductive if mental events are neurological events and such events are governed by natural laws? Answering this question requires a reexamination of the concept of supervenience. Second, what is the epistemological status of nonreductive physicalism? Recent philosophy of science can be used to argue that there is rea sonable scientific evidence for physicalism. Third, the soul has traditionally been seen as that which enables human beings to relate to God. What accounts for this capacity in a physicalist theory of the person? This essay argues that the same faculties that enable higher cognitive and emotional experience also account for the capacity for religious experience.

Theology and Science within a Lakatosian Program

The writings of Ian Barbour and Arthur Peacocke can be construed as initial contributions to a Lakatosian research pre gram on the relation between theology and science, the core theory of which is the thesis that theology belongs at the top of a nonreducible hierarchy of sciences. The positive heuristic of this program involves showing that theology and the sciences have enough in common epistemologically to be so related and arguing for nonreducibility. The author in this essay rationally reconstructs some of her philosophi cal work as a contribution to these tasks.

Do Humans Have Souls? Perspectives from Philosophy, Science, and Religion:

This essay seeks to promote a concept of human nature that is usually called nonreductive physicalism, which is at least not ruled out by Scripture, and may in fact be closer to biblical thinking than dualism. The essay then looks to neuroscience to show that it provides useful insights into how and why we behave as we do.

Darwin, Social Theory, and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

This essay considers ways in which Darwins account of natural processes was influenced by economic, ethical, and natural-theological theories in his own day. It argues that the Anabaptist concept of “the gospel of all creatures” calls into question alliances between evolutionary theory and social policy that are based on the dominance of conflictual images such as “the survival of the fittest” and questions the negative images of both nature and God that Darwinism has been taken to sponsor. The essay also considers developments in biology that have called into question dualist accounts of human nature as body and soul, thus reminding us that we are fully a part of the natural world and thus contributing, in turn, to a better theological grasp of Gods relation to nature.

On The Role of Philosophy in Theology-Science Dialogue

Most disagreements about the proper place of philosophy in the theology-science dialogue stem from disagreements about the nature of philosophy itself. This essay traces some of the history of ideas about the nature of philosophy, and then proposes that in this post-analytic era philosophy can play both a constructive and critical role in the theology-science dialogue. The constructive role is well reflected in current literature so this essay explores the role of philosophy as therapy. As a test case the doctrine of critical realism is diagnosed as a theory designed to solve a problem that needs instead to be dissolved by recognizing that it is based on a misleading picture of the knowers relation to the world.

Overcoming Hume on His Own Terms

My assignment is to reply to David Hume ‘on his own terms’. One could do this at a variety of levels, for instance, by attempting to find faults in his arguments, or inconsistencies between his work on religion and on other topics. However, I intend to begin with the aims of Hume’s writings on religion, and then to ask what difference it makes if we pursue Hume’s aims, not with the epistemological resources at his disposal in the eighteenth century, but with the best current resources.

Immortality versus resurrection in the Christian tradition

For those in contemporary society who believe in an afterlife, there are a number of views available. The most common may be based on belief in an immortal soul. However, the early Christian account was, instead, bodily resurrection. As Christianity moved throughout the Mediterranean world, apologists and theologians adapted their teaching on human nature and the afterlife to Greek and Roman philosophies. By the time of Augustine (d. 430), the doctrines of body–soul dualism and immortality of the soul were firmly entrenched in Christian teaching. The incorporation of the concept of an immortal soul into Christian accounts of life after death produced a hybrid account. The body dies, the soul (at least of those who were to be saved) travels to heaven. At the end of history, there would be a general resurrection, and the souls would be reunited with their bodies, although the bodies would be in a transformed, indestructible state. This hybrid account of life after death went largely uncontested until the twentieth century. In this essay, I describe this history and argue for a return to the early Christian view of humans as a unity, not a duality, and for belief in resurrection of the body as the appropriate expectation for eternal life. This would not only be truer to Christian sources, but, valuable, I believe, in focusing Christian attention on the need to care for the environment.

Response to Derek Jeffreys

A central point of Jeffreys’ essay is to criticize me (and presumably most other contemporary scholars) for disregarding the Aristotelian-Thomist account of causation. More particularly, he follows W. Norris Clarke in arguing that nonreductive physicalist accounts of the mental are bound to fail because they violate the Aristotelian-Thomistic principle of causality according to which no effect can be ‘‘qualitatively superior in perfection to its efficient cause or of the sum total of causes which produce it.’’ For example, Jeffreys says, ‘‘If an effect were qualitatively more perfect than its cause, the cause would have to give something it lacks.’’ 1 Non-reductive physicalism is impossible because it would be a case of something (neurons, neurotransmitters) giving something it lacks (mental activity). Why do contemporary philosophers not see this simple point and give up their futile attempt to understand mental activity physicalistically? The reason, I suggest, is that between Thomas’s day and our own there has been a change in worldview, a change radical enough that Paul Feyerabend’s concept of incommensurability comes into play. We translate Latin into English and so we work with (largely) the same vocabulary as Thomas did, but the meanings of the words depend on the ‘‘grammar.’’ This is not grammar in the ordinary sense of nouns and verbs, but in the sense that there are proper and improper ways to combine the terms into sentences. There are sentences that make perfect sense in one worldview, and may even be obviously true to the speakers of that language. The same sentence may be obviously false if imported into another worldview; more likely, it will simply not have a clear meaning. Consider the first quotation above. What does it mean to speak of the qualitative superiority in perfection of the effect to its cause(s)? I can think of instances in which the interpretation of this phrase seems clear enough. Parents produce children; we have relatively clear ideas about the kinds of perfections that apply to both the parents and the children, so a comparison of degrees of perfection Theology and Science, Vol 2, No. 2, 2004