Do We Have a Soul? 1.

To a Christian, nothing is more important than the concept of an immortal soul. Indeed, in a sense, we may say that the whole of Christian theology is predicated on the existence of a human soul. If there were no soul, why be bothered about what will happen to that something we call the "soul" after our death? Yet I am often astounded by how little the average Christian know about their own "soul", that supposed entity whose interest and moral goodness he struggles day and night to advance and the belief in the existence of which his faith is ultimately based. 

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "the soul may be defined as the ultimate principle by which we think, feel, and will and by which our bodies are animated." and "the term 'mind' usually denotes this principle as the subject of our conscious states, while 'soul' denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well" and the thesis of "the substantiality of the soul" or its spirituality is "that the soul is not itself composite, extended, corporeal or essentially and intrinsically dependent on the body, is the doctrine of spirituality."

Current Catholic Catechism teaches that the soul is "the innermost aspect of humans, that which is of the greatest value in them, that by which they are most especially in God's image: 'soul"signifies the spiritual principle in man...The doctrine of faith affirms that the spiritual and immortal soul is created immediately by God". But in some other traditions, not only human beings have souls, even other animals and plants or other inanimate things have souls and the word "soul" may be used as a short-hand term for "spirit", "mind" or or the human "self" or "personality".

Plato thought that the psyche or "soul" is the incorporeal, eternal force directing our being and how we behave and that when our bodies die, our soul will be reborn in later new bodies. It is thought to comprise three parts: the logos or the mind or reason, the thymos or the emotion or spiritedness which is male and the eros or the apetittive or desire part which is female and that to have balanced life, all three must exist in harmony. 

To Aristotle, the soul or psyche is thought to be the essence of a living thing which cannot have an existence separate from a physical body such that an organism's soul is defined by its purposive  activities or the actuality of the body's intentions so that when a body dies, so will its "soul" die or vanishes with it or at least that when we die, our "soul" will travel down the river of Lethe after which our "soul" will then "forgets" what it used to be as described in the Greek myths. This is quite different from the Platonic view, where the soul can exist independently of the body after the body's death. To Aristotle, there is a hierarchy of living things and hence a corresponding hierarchy of souls like plants, animals and human beings. All living things share the activities sustenance, growth, reproduction but only animals and humans have sensory faculties and self-willed locomotion and acitvities. However only human beings have reason: man is a rational animal but human beings do not have the kind of soul or personality which defines him as a unique individual in the member of the class of human beings. 

I suppose that the idea of Christian soul began with Genesis 1:2.7 "Then the Lord took some soil from the ground and formed a man out of it; he breathed life-giving breath into his nostrils and the man began to live". If so, then soul must mean merely the "life-giving breath" which God himself "breathed" into Adam's nostrils. Is that breath physical, like the kind of air containing roughly 4 parts of nitrogen and 1 part of oxygen which we daily respire and air in its more efficient form ie. purified oxygen which we cause to be pumped into the human lungs to resuscitate his otherwise unconscious human body? If so, is God's breath oxygen or oxygen plus nitrogen and perhaps traces of some other gases? Of course, we now know that a human body will cease to function if deprived of oxygen for three minutes or more. Our doctors will certify a person dead only if he is "brain dead" ie. that his brain stem will cease to respond to specified stimuli. We also know now that among the organs to which the oxygen is supplied, the brain which is less than 2.3 % of our body weight, consumes about 20% of our entire intake of oxygen and that if our brain ceases to function, we will lose consciousness or the ability to know what is happening around us. If the above analysis is correct, then only if the words of the Bible are taken or interpreted metaphorically can we posit the existence of the Christian soul as we now understand the term ie. some kind of "spirit", somehow different from our phyiscal body and which somehow is able to have knowledge of what is good and evil and an entity which somehow has "agency" (the ability to act) and is otherwise the seat of what is supposed to be our "free will" and which may drive it to do either good or evil, i.e. a non-corporeal entity or a force which is morally relevant to our thoughts and our actions. How did it come about that what was originally merely a breath from another entity called God become our morally relevant mind having a free will? And what do we mean by such related concepts as "mind", "spirit" and "free will"?

From the account in Genesis, it is obvious that our soul is that which gives "life", our physical life and by implication the life of our brain and by further implication the life of our mind and by even further implication our "spiritual life". By each of the relevant steps, we move a little further from our body, first to a particular part of our body (our brain), then to a philosophic concept "mind" and finally to a theological and metaphysical concept "spirit" or "soul". 

However the original Hebrew word "nephesh" or  ruach"(wind ) and in other parts of the Bible, the word "neshama" (breath ) are used to desribe the spirit or the soul gradually developed into our current Christian idea of the human "soul". Some Christians make a distinction between the body (soma), soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma). Whatever the beliefs of relevant Christians, one characteristic of that purported human "soul" is evident and absolutely essential to Christian theology, ie. free will.

A contemporary Christian theologian Roderick Chisholm says that when we act freely we exercise " a prerogative which some would attribute only to God: each of us, when we act, is a prime mover unmoved, In doing what we do, we cause certain things to happen, and nothing --or no one--cause us to cause those events to happen". That "spiritual part" or our "incorporeal mind or soul" is the focus of our "eternal life".  To Aristotle, the reasoning or intellect of man may be further divided into five parts:  art (the product of man's activity outside of himself), prudence (the skill or art of doing the relevant activity and is concerned with what man ought to do in future) science (the kind of scientific knowledge or understanding of how things work and which distinguishes a man from an animal) nous (intuitive understanding or intelligence of how our mind works) and finally sophia or wisdom ( or the combination of such intuitive understanding of how our mind work with scientific understanding) which are peculiar to our race.  

Since Biblical times, we have come a long way in the understanding of the functioning of our brain and of the way our psyche, our thoughts and feelings work. Scientists are now proposing an alternative view. Their view is that we are animals which have evolved according to the principles of natural selection and that like all other animals, we are subjected to the laws of physics, of chemistry, of biology and psychology and that we have no special ability to circumvent the laws of cause and effect. Our only difference from the animals is that we have got a more developed brain. To the scientists, there is no such thing as what the Christians call a purely spiritual "soul". If it does not exist, then it is futile to talk about how the soul "acts" or exercise so-called "free will" which according to Christian theology will land us either in a place, now invisible to us, called "heaven" if we have done what pleases God and if we have not obeyed the will of God, then to another place, equally invisible now, called "hell".  Who is right? Who is wrong? The Christian or the scientists? Who has got better evidence in support of their own views? Whom should we believe?