Introduction

COMPETING IMAGES

We understand ourselves through stories, pictures, and images. This book is about the conflict between two grand images. The humanistic image says we are spiritual beings that self-create by way of our free will. The scientific image says that we are animals obedient to natural law. The question is this: Which is it? The two images, at least as stated in terms of these simple formulae, are incompatible. The answer can't be both. Or, if it is, there is a lot of explaining to do.

We want to see our selves truthfully and we want our stories to depict life as if it really means something, as if it genuinely matters. But we live in a world in which two distinct self-images vie for our allegiance. The two images disagree about our nature and about the ground of meaning. One image says humans are possessed of souls and that everything turns of the state of our soul. The other image says there is no such thing as the soul and thus that nothing depends on its state.

The humanistic image, the image embraced by most laypersons, scientists and intellectuals, claims to be uplifting and inspiring. We create ourselves by exercising our free wills. If we will well, when we die we go to heaven. From the perspective of the scientific image, the humanistic image lacks nuance, is excessively flattering and self-serving. If it provides meaning, it does so at cost to the truth.

The trouble with the scientific image, as seen from the perspective of the humanistic image, is that it is de-humanizing – it drains life of meaning. Life has no transcendent purpose, and the quest to live morally is just one, among several quirky features of our kind of animal. Defenders of the scientific image will claim that their image need not be seen as depressing, inhumane, or inhospitable to seeing one's self and others as dignified creatures that are capable of living morally and meaningfully. Proponents of the humanistic image will be skeptical. It is part of that image to deem science, especially the mental and human sciences, as a threat. Science is reductive, materialistic, and it has absolutely no resources to tell us how we ought to live, no resources to help us find our way in the high stakes drama that is life.

We cannot rule out in advance that the truth about human nature and an uplifting story about the meaning of life might be in tension. The truth can sometimes be painful. Perhaps really acknowledging the truth about human nature would necessarily undermine any sense of purpose and meaning, and bring ennui and nihilism in its train. We tell our children stories about Santa Claus and tooth fairies. These stories are false, but they please the kids. Could we be grown-up babies who fabricate false stories for the sake of meaning? Possibly. Some defenders of the scientific image think this is exactly the case. There is another possibility. Perhaps the mythic stories we are used to telling about our nature are beloved, not because we absolutely need them, but because we have been historically conditioned to think we do. This is what I think.

In claiming to be able to find room for mind, morals, and a meaningful life, the scientific image, like the humanistic image, claims that it can preserve much of what it means to be a person. If this is true, then the stark inconsistency I initially claimed marked the two images off from each other is -- at some level at least -- more apparent than real.

In fact, this is what I think. In my experience most defenders of the scientific image either ignore the dominant humanistic image or deem it silly and misguided, while defenders of the humanistic image simply assert that the scientific image is de-meaning. But if I am right, both images share a common aspiration -- to maintain a robust conception of what it means to be a person -- a being possessed of consciousness, with fancy reflexive capacities for self-knowledge, and the abilities to live rationally, morally, and meaningful. No advocate of the scientific image has yet made an adequate effort to explain carefully, patiently, and explicitly how the scientific image can do this. That is the task I set for myself.

"The problem of the soul" in the book's title is a shorthand way of referring to a cluster of philosophical concepts that are central components of the dominant humanistic image. What are these concepts? A nonphysical mind, free will, a permanent, abiding and immutable self or soul, for starters. It is the status of these concepts that ordinary people fear are at risk as science proceeds, and it is this fear that is at the root of a deep-seated resistance to the scientific image. The reason is that ordinary intelligent people have a view – inchoate in places – according to which nothing less than the meaning of life itself turns on how these concepts fare. If these concepts do not refer to real things but are mere appearances, then, well, it is the end of the world – at least the end of the world as we know it.

Some readers will undoubtedly claim that 'the soul' is an old-fashioned term that is now rarely used, save in specifically religious contexts, and then only by true believers. But in my experience, even if the term is not part of everyday usage, it is a concept that most people believe in or implicitly assume. This is even true of so called secular humanists. A quick and reliable diagnostic test to show this is to ask a person if they believe humans possess free will. Most everyone will answer 'yes'. Then ask what their free will is or consists in. This diagnostic test reliably reveals advocacy of a conception of persons as possessed of the ability to circumvent natural law. The only device ever philosophically invented that can do this sort of job is an incorporeal soul or mind. And that is why the soul is the problem.

When people are introduced to the conflict between the humanistic and scientific images, Copernicus and Galileo, Darwin and Freud are mentioned as the major players. And they are. Furthermore, each hit to the humanistic image -- the cosmological, the biological, and the psychological -- advanced by these great thinkers has in various ways been accommodated by the humanistic image without causing it to completely unravel. The standard move is to acknowledge that we are both fallen and part animal, and to acknowledge that the theories advanced by these thinkers enrich our understanding of our animal part and partly deflate certain excessively flattering, but ultimately unnecessary, stories about our nature and place in the universe. The basic strategy is to provide both the humanistic and scientific image with room to roam within a certain circumscribed space. The humanistic image reveals our spiritual nature. While science unlocks the secrets of the external world and our animal part.

However, this sort of accommodation cannot work without the premise that we are only partly animal. But the current situation is that the scientific image -- especially as it is being propelled forward by advances in the sciences of the mind, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, in particular -- is that we are all animal. Furthermore, the mind or the soul is the brain. Prior peace treaties between the two images cannot abide this sort of challenge. Or so I claim.

The question remains, can we do without the cluster of concepts that are central to the humanistic image in its present form -- the soul and its suite -- and still gain some or most of what these concepts were designed to do? My answer is 'yes'. Although there are no souls or nonphysical minds, no immutable selves, although there is no such thing as free will, there are still, at the end of the day, persons. What is a person? A conscious social animal that deliberates, reasons, and chooses, that is possessed of an evolving or continuous -- but not a permanent or immutable -- identity, and that seeks to live morally and meaningfully.

So what's lost? What's different? What is lost is the cluster of philosophical concepts that are believed by most to be central to the humanistic image. My own view is that since these concepts don't refer to anything real, we are best off without them. Furthermore, once these concepts are eliminated, we still have more or less what we wanted -- a picture of persons as rational social animals. Mind, morals, and the meaning of life are all still in place.

An attentive reader will rightly worry: what about God and personal immortality? The cluster of philosophical concepts which I say must go, not only support a certain traditional conception of the person, but they also support and are supported by a mother lode of views in philosophical theology, views about God, his nature, and our place in his plans.

There is no point beating around the bush. Supernatural concepts have no philosophical warrant. Furthermore, it is not that such concepts are displaced only if we accept, from the start, a naturalistic or scientific vision of things. There are simply no good arguments -- theological, philosophical, humanistic, or scientific -- for supernatural entities and forces, for the beliefs in divine beings, miracles, or heavenly afterlives. Of course, I can't just say this and expect the reader to let me get away with it. I'll do my best to show why supernatural concepts lack rational warrant.

But my main aim is to show that the scientific image can gain us pretty much everything we can sensibly want from the concept of a person without the unnecessary concepts of free will, an incorporeal mind, and an immutable soul. So far as the nature of persons goes -- as rational social animals that seek to live morally and meaningfully -- the humanistic and scientific images can be reconciled. Most of what we traditionally believe about the nature of persons remains in place even without the unnecessary philosophical concept of the soul and its suite. Furthermore, accepting the part of my argument that supernatural concepts refer to nothing real does not mean that the moral and communal functions of religion lose their sense. The attempt to awaken the mind and heart by words and hymns that gesture at that which is higher and greater than us is not rendered senseless if the concepts of the soul, God, and a spiritual afterlife go the way of phlogiston. There is much that is greater than each of us taken alone. There is love and friendship. There is benevolence and compassion expressed by a feeling of connection to all creatures great and small, indeed even to the awesome inanimate cosmos. And there are certifiably great individuals who exemplify our most noble aspirations, Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad, among them. Words such as 'holy', 'God,' and 'grace' gesture metaphorically, but not literally. And if understood as modes of metaphorical expression, but not literally -- not as genuinely referring terms -- they can be used to advance what is noble and good.

If this is not enough, if you feel that you really need the concepts of the soul and its mates, as well as the theological ones to which they are connected to refer to real things, then you want more than you can have -- more than any philosophically respectable theory can provide.

Although my main aim is to show that the scientific image leaves ample room for a humane concept of the person, in order to show this I will need to wade waist deep into the waters of philosophical theology. One reason is that the problem of the soul -- that is the entire class of troublesome concepts that pertain to the nature of persons and their minds -- has deep theological roots. Indeed, one might say that the concept of the soul is a theological concept. So I won't be able to convincingly make the reader see how souls can go while persons remain fully intact without doing a fair amount of work exploring the various ways the traditional concepts of persons and their minds are part of a philosophical picture with deep theological roots.

The word person comes from the Latin persona which originally referred to the mask worn in Greek and Roman drama. The word eventually took on a broader meaning -- role, part, character, role represented by an actor, eventually citizen. It is telling and useful to think of persons as characters in a play and of human life as a drama. Drama has structure, plot, theme and meaning, and it brings both thought and the emotions powerfully into play.

We want human life to possess all these characteristics -- structure, plot, theme, meaning, and to enliven our hearts and minds. The role an actor plays in a normal play is make-believe. A good actor can play a role with which she doesn't personally identify. In the drama of real-life we want to be ourselves. And we want both our character and the larger plot to be genuinely meaningful, not simply the result of a good plot and good performance.

We are immensely complex animals, amazingly intricate in design, and possessed of remarkable gifts -- consciousness, as well as the abilities to live rationally, morally, and meaningfully. But we are animals through and through. Unless, we accept this truth about ourselves we lack self-knowledge of the most basic sort. And we will be tempted to succumb, as most people have, to puffing up and decorating the basic image with all manner of magical and supernatural props, all manner of self-serving nonsense about the ways in which God -- or various minor spirits -- bless our kind of person, sometimes exclusively.

In the drama of real life meaning comes from the large-scale stories, pictures, and images we have of our natures and our place in the larger scheme of things. Most people find the grand images they believe in and abide in churches, synagogues, and mosques. Even those who have never entered these hallowed halls get their picture of their nature, station and duties at least in part from such places. How's that? The stories told in these places leak out and permeate our ideas of what it means to be a person, what it means to live a moral life, and where and how fulfillment is to be found.

I can put the point another way: most ordinary people are religious, and even the ones who aren’t, are. What, you ask, does that mean? It means that when people in the West talk about mind, morals and the meaning of life, when we use words like ‘mind,’ 'soul,' ‘self’, ‘free will,’ and ‘morality’ we either explicitly acknowledge that we embed them in a religious philosophy, or we use these ideas and concepts in ways that reveal that they are so embedded.

This is why we cannot adequately understand the humanistic image, even in its alleged secular variant, without acknowledging that the concepts it endorses pertaining to human nature have deep theological roots that are part of what gives them their sense. We are made in God's image after all.

There is, as I've said, no way to discuss the nature of persons and their minds without wading into the waters of philosophical theology. What I hope to show is that we can preserve much of what we mean to say when we speak of 'mind', 'soul,' 'the self', 'free will,' and so on without continuing to endow them with that part their meaning that comes from their religious or theological roots. These concepts can be tamed and naturalized without engendering a depressing picture of what it means to be human. But this cannot be done without a more thoroughgoing honesty about the way such concepts still function with their religious roots as part of what existentialists called the Background -- or what following Dostoevsky and Freud-- we might call, the Underground.

The scientific image, and the naturalistic philosophy that is its ally, no longer accepts the terms of the peace treaty that sequesters it to understanding and explaining our animal side. Our animal side is our only side. We are all animal and the brain is our soul. Is this bad news? I don't think so. There are still persons. Consciousness exists. Love, friendship, and morality all remain in place. Nothing disappears, save for certain fictions that weren't there anyway.