“On [the] …” are posts based on Apophysics but do not require any previous reading. They are essays that expound on key themes or ideas in philosophy from my own perspective.
Without a doubt, the notion of the soul is of great interest to those who seek to understand. On the border of ontology and metaphysics, belief in personal souls seems enigmatic at best. What is a soul, anyways? What does it do? If it is “in” a person, how? Any serious inquiry into the nature of the soul must respect the philosophical tradition, which has much to say on this topic, especially in the evergreen works of Plato and Aristotle. Similarly, the Christian tradition should be consulted, as it has formed, developed, and generally accepted a popular view of certain functions of the soul. While I am intrigued by these accounts, I will argue for an alternative perspective in this paper, as I do not believe that persons “have souls” in the traditional sense. I will argue that both the ancient philosophical and especially the Christian accounts of the soul are metaphorically helpful, but inadequate when it comes to understanding God’s creation.
Let’s start in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth. God makes all things, but one thing He makes specially; in His image God makes man, letting him rule over other elements of His creation.1 Discussion on the imago Dei may proceed endlessly. Instead, I would like to point out that God made all things, man included. Man was formed from dust, mud, or clay, i.e., some substance or matter, and was given life in at least a similar way to other animals and even plants. Aristotle understands this notion of life quite well, as he explains a three-tiered hierarchy of souls, from plant to animal to human. A plant has life and growth, and an animal adds to this its passions; finally, the human adds to this its rationality. Yet, each has a body. It is the soul—psyche—within the matter—the body—that is the body’s form, making the matter alive and animating it through the soul’s various faculties. Remarkably, this account is quite parallel to today’s common secular understanding of a person, especially if we translate psyche into its transliterate word, psyche, or something similar to it—the mind. Surely this is a vast improvement upon Plato’s view: the soul is an entity joined to the body but belonging to, and destined to return, to the realm of the forms. Nevertheless, I think there is merit to both views, while each is uniquely flawed.
Setting aside the hard problem of consciousness, which is an adjacent matter, modernity is quite happy to consider the body alive without some “ghost in the machine”. I think this is quite reasonable. God created man, as I mentioned, from matter and breathed life into him, making him alive. On and on we go, maintaining life through the generations via reproduction. I take this ongoing maintenance of life to be natural, in accordance with God’s design, and without the need for additional supernatural intervention. Accordingly, if our bodies are alive in and of themselves without the need for supernatural intervention, it seems as if Aristotle’s vision of the soul may be outdated, as we might expect from its age. I simply find no need for us to view the body’s form as the animating life-force of the body and the various faculties thereof. But this is not so much a critique of Aristotle’s view of the soul, as it is a rejection of his matter-form dichotomic account of reality. My view is that reality just is, fundamentally, and that form is emergent. While it may be interesting to talk about objects as having formal, efficient, and final causes, these three are not fundamental to reality; however, matter is. Without the need for form or formal cause, matter exists irreducibly and without metaphysical support.
Instead of holding to Aristotle’s account of form, what if we considered the form of something to be its exact, data-like measurements? This altering or updating of Aristotle’s understanding of reality is far more comprehensible to those of us living in modernity. We could, in principle, exactly measure any material thing, recording those measurements in linguistic and symbolic notation that can then be used to not only describe that thing perfectly to anyone capable of reading the notation but also distinguish and relate it to all other things that have been measured. These data-like measurements could certainly be viewed as the form of their referents. Of course, this data could be viewed, organized, and evaluated in all sorts of ways, and, in principle, recorded through all of time.
What does this mean for the soul? Maintaining Aristotle’s language with my altered meaning of form, I argue that we can call the form of the body the soul. It is not substantive, nor is it right to speak of it existing in the same way that matter exists. It is exactly and only the data-like measurements of a person through their lifetime. In my view, this accounts for everything about the person, including everything within, beneath, and beyond their consciousness. The soul has no further nature to speak of and is related to the body only as a measurement thereof. But what about its function?
As data, the soul’s function is only informative. That is, it functions as an exact description of the person to whom the soul belongs. Of course, recording or reading these data is not practical on any meaningful level. We might say that someone has a kind soul, but we are really just describing a pattern in their behavior.2 Still, if a description of someone is accurate, the data corresponding to that description would “exist” in their soul.
Only an omniscient being, God, would have a thorough knowledge of the soul. Given a typical definition of omniscience, God’s knowledge of a person is identical to their soul, as I have defined. In fact, I would argue that the mind of God is the only feasible “place” for the soul to exist.3 Does this pose any problem with a Christian definition of the soul? Quite the opposite, as far as I can tell. While this definition certainly causes conflict with teachings in the Christian tradition, I have not found any need to radically alter my reading of Scripture, and the definition does not put any core Christian belief at risk. In general, understanding “soul” to mean “inner man”, “mind”, or occasionally “life” remains not only applicable but also more comprehensible. In my definition, these translations of psyche are all important parts, even, the most interesting parts, of the data of the soul. In other words, I do not think that my definition undermines traditional Christian translations and interpretations of the Bible. On the contrary, I find this view to have superior explanatory power when it comes to understanding God’s creation and Person.
Imagining souls as only “existing in” the mind of God causes us to carefully consider the core Christian doctrine of resurrection. As it is sometimes told, a person’s soul leaves their earthly body and will be given a heavenly body at the resurrection, after the pattern of Christ. Setting aside exegetical quibbles with this account, I find it to be rather Platonic. It is as if the soul possesses the body for a time and then returns to whence it came only to take up habitation in a new body. Somehow the personhood is transferred via the soul from an earthly body to a regenerate body. How would this process occur if the soul is nothing but data? I argue that just as all things came from God, He can and will make our new bodies from His knowledge of us, our souls. I imagine that our regenerate bodies will be exactly us, but cleansed by the blood of Christ, that is, conformed to His image and fully sanctified. Our soul remains intact in the mind of God even after our death, and is created into a body made anew, free from the curse of sin and death.4
This Platonic-Christian account of the soul’s journey raises some interesting ideas. What if we were to imagine the mind of God as containing the Platonic realm of the Forms? Considering God’s perfect knowledge, we could posit that all things have an exact data-like representation in the mind of God. If these data were to be sorted, organized, and generalized, we might have something that looks very much like Plato’s Forms.5 Indeed, it follows that the realm of the Forms, thus described, may very well be the home of souls.
All of this philosophizing brings me back to my core point: the soul is not substantive and does not need to be for us to make sense of the world and of ourselves. It is, however, an interesting abstraction, whether it is defined as I have done here or otherwise. It is a way of speaking about a person in a general and abstract way. It is an exact description of what we are and survives our bodies. It is, in part, our rationality, in so far as it is our rationality that distinguishes humans from all other things and is part of the beautiful complexity recorded in our souls. It is in this rationality that God has enabled us to desire the truth, seeking understanding of ourselves and of God through rigorous thinking.
The breath of life may be important, but I do not find it to be a unique thing in man, as some suggest based on Genesis 2:7. Genesis 6:17 and 7:15 mention a breath of life in similar language to 2:7, but it is in reference to animals. I take this to mean something like a life-force, or non-substantive “spirit” of life. The imago Dei is probably very important to our understanding of persons, but it is beyond my ability to address that concept here.
Viewing the data of the soul with respect to patterns of behavior, I think, is a very helpful reference frame for understanding a person, especially in the context of a Christian worldview with its understanding of morals, Christ’s role in salvation, and resurrection.
I do not believe that measurements of the sort described in this paper are possible—in principle, it is possible, but in practice, there is an epistemic barrier at the quantum level, at the very least.
I am very uncomfortable invoking the “mind of God” anthropomorphism without serious preface involving rationality and the image of God. Thus, I only mean it here to be an illustrative metaphor.
Perhaps, if God is Spirit, then the soul only possibly existing in the mind of God has some significance to the nature of the soul, somehow making it spiritual as well. This is a very fruitful idea, I think, but requires an investigation into the nature of God beyond the scope of this paper.
The details here need not be precise; the point is to suggest that my view of the soul does not contradict with Christian belief.
Consider the Form of the chair: chairness. Within the data of all chairs possible, not only those instantiated but also those never to be made, there would be the common thread of chairness. With such data, I believe that this could, in principle, be computed.