Divinely ensouled ex-apes?

I’d like to start my project on theological anthropology and science by looking briefly at perhaps the most thoroughgoing theory of humanity found within the Christian world. It is rooted in the Thomistic philosophical tradition and intimately linked with the Catholic church, which makes it quite influential. To be more accurate, my sources are the Catholic Encyclopedia and two blog articles by Professor Edward Feser, a philosopher of the Aristotelian-Thomistic school. Of course, one has to hold in mind the immense variability of Catholic thinking – it is, after all, a truly global community of faith with over a billion members and a long philosophical tradition we are talking about. This is by no means going to be an exhaustive analysis of the anthropological views present there. What I am describing might best be understood as a moderately conservative standard Catholic approach to the questions of human origins and of human nature as well.

Generally speaking, there has been in the Catholic church a tradition of seeking harmony between theology and science, between faith and reason. Unlike in some other brands of Christianity, different categories of information and different fields of study are taken as having implications on one another. Well-established scientific facts have been accepted, although not always initially welcomed, in the Catholic teaching. Thus, when discussing human origins, the Catholic church has not resorted to a crude ”literalism” with regard to the Book of Genesis which contains the Biblical accounts of how humans, among other things, came to exist. As far as I’m concerned, it has been relatively easy for Catholics to admit that there is, as results in modern biology affirm, a gradually evolved component in what we in everyday speech call humans.

It is important to stress that we talk about a mere ”component” here. In his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, Pope John Paul II said:

In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII has already affirmed that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points…

Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies – which was neither planned nor sought – constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory…

[T]he elaboration of a theory such as that of evolution, while obedient to the need for consistency with the observed data, must also involve importing some ideas from the philosophy of nature.

And to tell the truth, rather than speaking about the theory of evolution, it is more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution. The use of the plural is required here – in part because of the diversity of explanations regarding the mechanism of evolution, and in part because of the diversity of philosophies involved. There are materialist and reductionist theories, as well as spiritualist theories. Here the final judgment is within the competence of philosophy and, beyond that, of theology…

Pius XII underlined the essential point: if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God…

As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.*

The solution opted for by the Catholic church is to see humans as products of both evolution and direct divine act of creation. In Thomistic anthropology, the fundamental trait that makes this move possible is the dualism of body and soul, that is, the view that humans are both bodily and spiritual beings. In a theological or metaphysical sense, humans are human souls, spiritual beings temporarily infused in material bodies – and in Catholic view it is the spiritual being that counts, for it is everlasting and directly created by God. The bodies, known to biology as members of Homo sapiens populations, are by no means a necessary prerequisite for human existence.

Now, this theological anthropology has been considered in relation to both evolutionary biology and the Book of Genesis, as can rightly be expected. The authentic Catholic teaching affirms that all humans are ultimately descendants of a single couple, referred to in the Bible as Adam and Eve. It was to them God gave the very first human souls, and they were thus the first properly human beings on Earth. In reaction to problems posed by the evolutionary history of mankind, it has been suggested that these individuals probably belonged to some larger biologically human-like population, but nevertheless it was exclusively them who received human souls straight from God. Ever since, God has infused into each of their descendants a new human soul. This is known as the Flynn-Kemp proposal.

Being a soul-bearer and thus metaphysically human is not a genetically transmitted property, but is instead grounded in a sovereign decision of the Creator. Every descendant of Adam and Eve apparently gets a human soul, despite the possibility that there might still have been some of those non-soul-bearing pre-humans involved early in the lineage. For God, it is being a child of the first, chosen pair that matters. The metaphysically non-human part of our ancestral population is supposed to have died out eventually, leaving only hominids with human souls. The Flynn-Kemp proposal is not meant to be taken as a verified account of what actually happened in human prehistory: it is a hypothetical scenario used to point out that human evolution does not necessarily contradict the (Catholically interpreted) story of Adam and Eve – and the Original Sin, of which I shall not say more for now.

Metaphysically human and biologically human – in authentic Catholic view they are not quite the same thing, but it seems that the historically known Homo sapiens populations are considered human in both senses. Why would they be that? In Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, it is held that human souls are manifest in certain intellectual powers that only humans among all animals possess. Rationality is a property of those with a rational (human) soul, and a suitable material platform for it is a Homo sapiens brain. The soul is in union with the brain, which in turn makes rationality manifest through bodily organs in human speech and agency. In proper Aristotelian-Thomistic terms, the organic body is matter and the soul is its form, making it a human body instead of bare matter.

There has, of course, been a lot of philosophical debate over the very concept of soul. Some hold that rational thinking can be shown to be immaterial, thus implying a soul, on purely philosophical grounds. Even if we assumed that souls are real and an integral part of a properly human being, one critical question could be raised at this point. Should only those members of Homo sapiens populations with manifest rationality be considered properly, metaphysically human? This is not necessarily what Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology suggests. I at least see an option of insisting that, by virtue of being descendants of Adam and Eve, all modern human beings are granted human souls by God. In the case of severely mentally disabled and thus manifestly non-rational people it might just be something wrong with the neural system, for example, that inhibits the soul from manifesting rationality in the way it could were it united with a properly functioning material body. Similarly, one could speak of infants whose brains have not yet reached a stage of development sufficient to manifest their rational souls, or something like that.

But the possibilities of detecting rational souls empirically are still unclear, and that makes me suspicious. Consider the following arguments:

If a human soul necessarily manifests itself in outwardly observable rationality when in union with a Homo sapiens body, some of the members in modern Homo sapiens populations have no human souls.

If a human soul does not, when in union with certain bodies of matter, necessarily manifest itself in outwardly observable rationality, any natural object might have a human soul.

It is integral for at least the Aristotelian brand of Thomism that humans are clearly distinct from other creatures by virtue of their rational souls. The above counterarguments could apparently be refuted only by verifying that the modern biologically human populations are in fact descendants of one single couple somewhere back in time. (Preferably, they should have been of a distinctively hominid kind; I think a pair of some Cretaceous proto-mammals wouldn’t suit the purposes of Catholic teaching). It would also be required that these first parents were chosen by God as the first bearers of rational human souls, and that God had committed himself to ensouling the descendants of that couple and not any other creatures or objects in nature. If these truth claims can’t be verified, one is left uncertain about where human souls are located in the observable reality – which, of course, has implications on who shall be granted the privilege of being called humans.

What about the Book of Genesis, then? So far, I am a bit unaware of where exactly it is stated there that the first human beings were ensouled by God. There are two accounts of creating humans. In Genesis 1 (New International Version) it reads:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

And in Genesis 2:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Some interpretation of the first passage might imply that ”in his [Gods] own image” means ”with a rational soul”, for it is indeed held in Catholic teaching that God is a spiritual, rational being. As for the other one, it might be suggested that ”the breath of life” is in fact the human soul. The version of the text found in Catholic Encyclopedia has ”living soul” instead of a ”living being” – clearly an exegetic problem there, which I shall leave for others to address. Even if we assumed that the passage speaks of a living soul, we would be left with a problem, since there is no mention in Genesis of anything being breathed into the woman, created soon afterwards.

The Bible clearly does not necessarily support the view that two pre-human animals were given rational souls and thus made the only human beings in their population. The Catholic readiness to ignore the part where man as a bodily creature is actually shaped from dust seems like a mere ad hoc -rationalization of the passages to fit the overwhelming scientific evidence for the evolutionary origins of humanity. But I have in principle no problem with such moves. At least this kind of a Catholic interpretation takes different fields of study seriously, and that is basically what I am trying to do as well.

I will not make any strong conclusions as to the credibility of the Thomistic anthropology described here, for I am not really that familiar with its underlying philosophy. Suffice it to say that so far, this approach to the concept of humanity has not convinced me, and further investigations need to be made. In the meantime, I have several different topics to discuss, so I’m not sure how soon exactly I might be getting back to this one.

*The original message to the Academy can be found here in French, Italian and Spanish. The English translation is from Edward Fesers blog. 

Further readings:

http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=7463

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.fi/2014/12/knowing-ape-from-adam.html

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.fi/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-i.html

Introduction

Welcome to Uniting Lines! This is a blog site exploring possible meaningful relations between traditional concepts and truth claims of Christian theology and modern scientific understanding of human beings and the natural world. There could be numerous grounds for such an intellectual quest, and I’d like to make my starting point clear. Actually, Professor Wesley Wildman might as well do that for me:

Too many theologians have not exerted themselves to learn what they need to learn from the sciences of cognition and culture. Just think of Augustine or Thomas within the Christian tradition, or Maimonides in the Jewish tradition; these were cutting-edge thinkers who were masters of the sciences of their time. But most contemporary theologians have wound up resorting to very useful, but tired, categories such as sin to talk about the human condition; then use those words as if they had a stable meaning, and do not need to be rearticulated for our time, in relation to the various other insights we now possess into human behavior … Theology has not been agile enough to rearticulate its fundamental pathways in relation to the rapidly changing understanding of human nature created by the sciences of cognition and culture. As theologians, we have not followed in the footsteps of Augustine and Thomas, Maimonides, and Sankara, and all the rest of our luminous-genius forebears. I take the fundamental theological categories themselves to contain priceless insights, but those insights are profoundly obscured when the anthropology in which they are expressed is 1,500 years out of date.*

There you’ve got it. Christian believers already have the means to defend theism against evidentialist atheist attacks: there are videos on YouTube where this is done by witty theologians. Basically everybody knows that religious beliefs can’t be absolutely refuted on rational grounds. Yet for a decent apologist this could be nothing more than a beginning. If indeed her beliefs contained ”priceless insights”, should she really be happy thinking: ”Brilliant! At least I’m not totally denied epistemological justification for my theological propositions! Too bad there are more and more people who really can’t comprehend what I mean by them.” No, she would have to consider the propositions separately, critically, and constantly asking herself: ”What do I mean by this? Is this belief a justified truth-claim when articulated this way?”

As for me, I am not a practicing Christian at the moment. I do occasionally pray and might even attend a service once in a while, but I don’t feel any urge to engage in religious activities or to formulate a solid Christian worldview that I could promote. My interests in writing about theology are more intellectual than apologetic, even though the views and arguments presented here might have some apologetic value. Having said this, I do not wish to alienate anybody from core Christian beliefs and concepts: I am deeply interested in, sometimes even obsessed with, making sense of them where it seems problematic. I have, however, no hurry in this project, and if there be no point where everything ”starts making sense” then so be it.

My religious background is ambiguous. A belief in the existence of some kind of God or at least in the meaningfulness of that concept has virtually always been part of my worldview, but there are very few if any dogmatic statements about God I’d always have embraced. I very much like the way Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of religious beliefs as resembling not propositions but images, thus being immune to propositional counterarguments and mutable only through the complex and capricious set of experiences we call life.

God is such a ”wittgensteinian image” in my mind, and its characteristics have undergone wild changes over the years. I feel very strongly that my conception of God has always been shaped by theological interpretations of my own life and circumstances, rather than by any dogmatic Christian theology taught to me. I have been brought up by agnostic parents, in no way hostile to religion but not especially concerned in it either. Then again I live in a historically overwhelmingly Christian country and my ”theology of life” has been full of Christian – although very arbitrarily applied! – ideas, most prominent of which have been the omnipotence of God, divine violence and God as the source of love.

My congregational activities have exclusively taken place in liberal Protestant surroundings. In my teens I have been an active member of the Töölö congregation in Helsinki, where I used to attend service regularly and assist in confirmation school (see link for the Finnish definition). It was partly my background in the congregation, partly another impromptu theological interpretation of my life that led me to apply to the University Of Helsinki to study theology in 2013.

The questions I find especially interesting, concerning the relationship between Christian theological anthropologies and scientific understanding of humans, as well as between the ”will of God” and the dynamics of nature, have not always been that important to me. In fact, I first had more interest in history of religion outside Christian contexts: my Bachelor’s Thesis dealt with Iranian (Zoroastrian) mythical dualism and its possible roots in cultural interaction between Indo-Iranian and Uralic speaking prehistoric populations. At the same time, though, certain events in my personal life were a strong incentive for me to keep thinking about theological and philosophical issues, and to explicitly formulate problems that, in my view, needed to be solved. Soon after completing my thesis last spring, these problems became my foremost scientific concern.

Questions to which I am eager to seek answers can be presented as follows:

Who/what is a human being?

Can the functioning of the natural world be seen as manifesting divine moral preferences?

Is there a universally meaningful use of the theological concepts ”sin” and ”Fall”?

All the possible answers need to be grounded on theological, scientific and philosophical considerations, with disregard to none of the fields. A merely theological answer will not be enough, nor can it suffice to address a problem in scientific or philosophical terms alone. My starting point is the conviction that different kinds of truth claims should fit together and form a coherent system of some kind. If we are to assume that theological truth claims have some bearing on realities that are understood and discussed in other terms (biological, for example), then we need to challenge ourselves to seek meaningful relations between the discourses concerned. This involves analyzing and comparing the truth claims and, of course, the very concepts that are used to describe reality in them.

My basic assumptions allow me to ask questions like ”what does it mean that God created man when we know that even the very first Homo sapiens was a product of evolution and had non-human ancestors?” Some, say, Barthian thinker could claim that the two categories of information, revelational and scientific, are so totally different that it will not be worth it trying to form a meaningful relationship between them. Revelation-based truth claims are not claims about the reality observed in science, but about something that is true in a whole different way. Science can’t and shouldn’t be used to ground or rationalize this kind of propositions: they have to be accepted by faith instead.

But then again theological statements are often presented as having some bearing on the ”natural” world, the one that we can observe empirically and describe scientifically. We learn our theological concepts and form our religious beliefs through narratives. They describe, at least superficially, events in comprehensible social situations, with humans surrounded by other humans, various natural objects and creatures, and often supernatural agents as well. The narratives, whether they be Biblical or part of some folk tradition, present human actions and circumstances as something that can be interpreted and evaluated in religious terms. Insofar as such narratives are dominant in a community, the individual members are indeed encouraged to make interpretations of the world they inhabit. They learn to associate things and events with theological concepts, which in turn derive their content from narratives and the way the narratives are discussed in the community.

At least it is seldom clearly spelled out whether a claim is supposed to be true merely in theology or in other contexts as well. There are Biblical beliefs about God creating the world, about him stating what is proper conduct for creatures, about human beings doing something God is unhappy with, and so on. There are traditional beliefs about a specifically human condition, sin, which implies opposing God’s will; and finally about salvation, in which this harmful condition is miraculously overcome by the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Indeed, it is claimed that Jesus saves human beings from sin. These are beliefs about us and our surroundings, but then what are we and what are our surroundings?

The most general answer one can give is that we as living things are very complex and variable, and the world we inhabit is not very simple either. There is thus a vast array of different perspectives one needs to take into account in order to fully appreciate the richness of being human. We are members of Homo sapiens populations, shaped by evolution – which is a system of a great many variables and definitely not just a simple cycle of adaptation and natural selection. We are brains, neurally connected to certain kinds of bodily organs, sorting out an unbelievable amount of information and producing a unique experience of the world. We are persons, living creatures with a first-person perspective, usually possessing means to conceive of ourselves in the first person, that is, language. We are deeply social beings. Most of the capacities we’re born with are of no use without a human social context: the company of other humans and intense communication with them is the kind of environment we definitely have adapted to. We are also axiological beings: we ascribe value to situations and actions, and this is articulated in language, for example when talking about moral issues.

And then, of course we might be images of God. We are probably sinners, and if so, we can also be redeemed. For me, these propositions are best understood as synthesizing and making sense of everything mentioned above plus a lot more, making sense of it in a deeply human way, in a religious way. Similarly, I presume, the religious claims can be made sense of in other discourses. Just how exactly one is supposed to do this is the big question that fascinates me. I am already grateful for all the people I’ve encountered with whom I share this interest, and I invite all of you reading this post to participate in the search for a rich and up-to-date understanding of humanity, world and Christian theology.

*Quote from an interview published in Conversations on Human Nature (Agustin Fuentes & Aku Visala, 2016)