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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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God - Life - Soul by George J. Irbe
Introduction I have been induced to write this essay by a personal compulsion to understand some very important things and to make a permanent record of my understanding of them in some sort of order; a record I can refer back to when I have the need to express myself on rather complex abstract ideas. The important things I am referring to encompass metaphysical and theological conjectures and beliefs. Having started on this journey of important intellectual discoveries rather late in life, I do not have the time, the requisite training, or the energy that it would take to acquire the very large volume of knowledge necessary in order to become truly competent in all aspects of the philosophies involved. I am, therefore, driven by a certain degree of impatience and haste. I am going to make my own conjectures so that I can round out my own beliefs and comprehension, aware of the fact that I base them on a relatively scant exposure to the thoughts of the philosophers of record which extend back some 2500 years. I am prepared to modify or alter my views later, if I find that I have taken a wrong turn. A navigator knows that there is nothing irresolute about adjusting one's course; in fact, it is the proper thing to do. I am also quite aware that my conjectures, uninformed by sufficient study, are most likely naive expressions of what has already been proposed centuries before. Karl Popper, a noted philosopher of the 20th century, tells of what happened to him once long ago. He thought that perhaps he had ideated a novel philosophical principle, only to find out afterwards that it had been stated long before by Xenophanes (c. 570-475 BCE). Therefore, I hope that philosophers will kindly tolerate any declarations I may make in ignorance of, and without proper accreditation to, the primary authors of the ideas in question. I would never usurp someone else's ideas intentionally. I thought that "How it all comes together" is an appropriate title for this tale, because "it" really did all come together for me like a flash of enlightenment one day, the "it" being the interweaving of the concepts of God the Creator, life, soul, moral values, and natural law into one fabric of understanding. How this sudden revelation of the conceptual entirety came about deserves explanation because it bears testimony to the great benefits that accrue from casual discussion of ideas with a compatible partner. I have been pursuing my random philosophical studies for the past three years, or so. While so engaged, I have been a frequent visitor to the local public library. An outlet for one of the chains of coffee-shop franchises is located right in the library, and the franchisee (he is addressed as CK) has become my very good discussion partner. We have already worked our way through religious beliefs, evolution, the creation of this universe, and natural law, to name the big issues. About a year ago, Mortimer J. Adler's works got me interested in Aristotle and, specifically, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. I had prepared a synopsis of the Aristotelian ethics, again mostly to organize my own understanding of them. As usual, I passed a copy of my essay to CK. As usual, having read the essay, CK asked some probing, valuable questions on the subject the next time we met. CK has served as a great intellectual invigorant to me. Many times his questions have spurred my investigations onto new and ultimately very rewarding departures. CK is an intellectually devoted Christian. That is, he takes his religion seriously in an intellectual manner, rather than that of a simple and simplistic member of the flock. (I keep telling him that he should start his own ministry.) On this occasion, while discussing Aristotle's teaching about what constitutes a good life and also the fact that we must reserve judgment on the life in question until it is over, CK asked me whether Aristotle believed that we have an immortal soul. We had previously discussed the soul question at length on several occasions, mainly in the context of religion. Although we have our differences of opinion regarding the soul and its fate after death, we have agreed to disagree on the topic, since there is no certain evidence to be had either way, only belief and conjecture. As to what Aristotle believed re the soul, I couldn't give CK a definite answer. But his question set me off on another investigation. First, I returned to The Self and Its Brain, by Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles (1977), which I had read before some time ago. This work is perhaps the most complete, scientifically leading-edge testimonial to the hypothesis that an incorporeal soul exists. Furthermore, I discovered that in chapter P4 of that work, Popper provides an excellent summary of the ancient Greek concepts on the soul, which was really very useful for my present purpose. I also decided to consult Aristotle's De Anima and re-visit the Nicomachean Ethics in order to find out what Aristotle had to say specifically on the nature of the soul. Besides questions about the soul, CK and I have also had the usual encounters with several other of the ages-old dilemmas: what is this universe; what is time; how did life begin here on earth and perhaps elsewhere as well; who or what is the Creator - the entity which made it; who or what runs this system (if anything runs it) and how does who or what run it. There are also the dilemmas with good and evil, free will and predestination, human nature, natural law, etc. During our encounters with these dilemmas I have had occasional sparks of "what-if" conjectures flash through my mind, concerning the several riddles of our existence, but these sparks remained isolated incidents which I did not pursue further. Then, during one of our recent discussions about the soul, CK posed this question: Physical life is known to begin when the spermatozoon penetrates the egg. At what point does the soul of the individual so conceived begins to exist within that individual? For some minutes I was left in thought. My initial reaction to the riddle in CK's question was to concede that here we have another of those unfathomable mysteries of the kind that we had encountered so often while in pursuit of an understanding of existence. But then, something like an epiphany flooded my mind. I suddenly grasped hold of a reasonable conjecture that would answer CK's question, at least to my own satisfaction. What is more, I quickly realized that by answering CK's question with this conjecture I was opening an avenue for further conjectures that would provide answers, in my opinion (mixed with a dose of pure belief), to some of the questions of the other riddles. (As Adler says in a related context, "truth of doxa, never the truth of episteme"). What follows, then, is my attempt to do that. The Agenda I wish to organize the presentation of my arguments in what I consider to be a logical sequence of the several components of the subject. The components belong within the general subject of the meaning of the All, of our concepts of everything that we see, feel and think in the universe. Here I want to confine my arguments mainly to facts and conjectures about the beginning and development of living things, including Homo sapiens, and the convergence of moral philosophy with natural law. The points of the agenda are:
A. Beginning and development of life on earth In cosmology, the most commonly accepted theory of the formation of our universe is colloquially called "the big bang" -- a huge explosion of energy from an infinitesimally tiny source in an infinitesimally small moment of time. I will not venture into the complex physical theory underlying this conjecture, because for my purposes I can stipulate the creation of the universe as a given. But it is worth noting here that Mortimer Adler offers a comparable philosophical concept to the "big bang", called "exnihilation" [1, p.34]. This term denotes the creation of something out of nothing. It should be noted that our concept of "nothing" in this instance simply means that we cannot possibly conceive of the "what" from which the "something" was created. Physicists, in their turn, will also admit that they do not preclude the existence of "something" else before the big bang. I will describe later on how the concept of exnihilation has served my purposes in a somewhat different application. In my opinion, one of the nicest efforts to reconcile the creation as described in Genesis with the complexities of the physical theory of creation is by Gerald L. Schroeder [2]. Schroeder presents a most interesting exposition on the meaning and measurement of time according to cosmological theories and compares this time scale to the "days" of creation in Genesis. However, we don't need to linger on the early moments of creation, but rather must make a quantum leap forward in time to the creation of life on earth. The great majority of scientists agree that the very formation of life on earth is beyond any meaningful expression in terms of probability. If we rather go with the most recent hypothesis according to which a proto-life form arrived on earth via an asteroid, that does not change the odds for the creation of life, per se, in the universe. As Popper puts it:
Schroeder cites the mathematician Roger Penrose on the chances for life in the universe:
However miraculous is the very existence of biological life as we know it, that too is not quite the subject of my argument. Let me stipulate the miracle of life and proceed to the next level -- its amazing, explosive development here on earth. That is, indeed, another miracle. At this point I must digress briefly to talk about a "cover-up" the likes of which is not uncommon in the scientific community. These kinds of cover-up involve the ignoring, or discarding, or explaining away as unreliable those observations and data obtained in experiments and investigations that clash with and tend to disprove a currently-popular hypothesis. This particular cover-up evokes a rather personal feeling of anger in me because it was perpetrated in the discipline of geological sciences, which happens to be the field of my academic training. The facts of the cover-up are as follows. Early in the past century, a noted professor of geology from one of the prestigious eastern universities in the United States was on a field trip in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. He came unto a fossil-rich formation of shale (known as the Burgess shale) from which he collected many samples of various fossils. He took the samples back to his laboratory for examination. This professor of geology observed that many of the fossilized animals found in the samples from the Burgess shale layer were not supposed to be there, according to the evolutionary sequence of appearance of animal phyla set by the rigid dogma of the Darwinian theory. Sedimentary rock strata are dated on the geological time scale by establishing the sequence of their deposition in relation to other strata, and by radioactive isotope dating techniques. The Burgess shale was dated to be 530 million years old. Because of the way that the Burgess shale deposit was formed, the fossil remains are exceptionally well preserved, in some cases showing the details of internal organs and ingested matter. Shale is formed from the mud that accumulates on the sea floor. The exceptional condition in the formation of the Burgess shale was that the mud was deposited on a sloping bottom near the edge of the continental shelf. Periodic earth-quakes dislodged the mud and made it cascade, as large mud slides, down into great depths. The marine life forms, inhabiting the continental shelf waters in large numbers and variety, were swept into the depths by the catastrophic mud slides. There they were quickly entombed and compacted in an anaerobic environment. That explains why the anatomical details of the animals are so well preserved. Our professor of geology saw that many of the animal forms in the Burgess shale were not supposed to be there, because they were supposed to come along on the Darwinian ladder of evolution at a much later time than 530 million years ago. As a dutiful servant of the established dogma, he fudged the interpretation of some of his discoveries; he hid much of the most controversial fossil evidence in his laboratory drawers and did not report on it at all. These fossils were only found again decades later, after the death of the good professor. As I mentioned above, these kinds of acts that violate the very principles by which a scientist is to work in pursuit of the truth are not uncommon. Unfortunately, organized science is as dogmatic and stifling as organized religion. A prime example of this dogmatic tyranny is the fate of that reviled heretic of established science, Immanuel Velikovsky. It is best left to Schroeder to state the scientific importance of the Burgess shale fossils.
The reason why I am reporting on this particular deception in considerable detail is because it tried to hide another miraculous event in the development of life on this planet. Of course, the deception, or cover-up, was perpetrated because the Burgess fossil evidence knocked the Darwinian theory of evolution off the rails. To me, the miracle of it is that the entire, immense set of genetic codes -- the building blocks for every life form imaginable -- appeared on earth at the same time. The evolutionary process comes into play only insofar as certain environmental conditions and climate change -- gradual, or catastrophic -- favors the prominent development of some genetic combinations while suppressing the development of others. It is a known fact that in the genetic make-up of any one animal or plant phylum there are many genes that are dormant. Quoting Schroeder again, first on the over-abundance of genes in very simple life forms and then on the distinctiveness of the genetic make-up of the different phyla:
In summary, when we talk about life on earth, we must recognize three highly improbable events to have taken place: (1) the creation of life itself in the universe, (2) the creation of the huge set of genetic codes and, (3) with respect to life on earth -- its sudden explosion in all its many forms. I will conclude with another quote from Schroeder:
B. Development of the understanding of the "soul" The discussion of the beginning and development of life on earth is a foundation for, and has a bearing on, the discussion of the meaning of the soul. If we reach back into ancient times, even into primitive times, we find that a majority of men have believed that human beings have a soul. Different opinions have been held on whether the soul is a material substance or an incorporeal, abstract entity which has also been called a spirit, or ghost. The other major difference in belief has been whether the soul dies with the body or whether it possesses immortality of some sort, which includes various forms of belief in reincarnation. Here I am concerned mainly with how the Greeks thought of the soul, because it is the Greek philosophical heritage which is the foundation for our current concepts of the soul. In particular, I am focusing on Aristotle's understanding of the soul because it has a direct bearing on the moral and ethical component of the soul which is found in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics [5]. In addition, I have discovered that Aristotle's conjectures about the soul, found in De Anima [4], are the most explicatory and most acceptable to me. To the modern, 21st-century person who is not familiar with ancient Greek philosophy (that includes most of us), much of the speculation by the Greeks on what is matter and what is soul seems on first look to be downright childish. And yet, even if their scientific knowledge was primitive, the basic ideas behind many of their conjectures were pointing in the right direction. For a brief summary of how the ancient Greeks dealt with the concept of soul, I have excerpted and paraphrased from Section 46 of Chapter P5 of The Self and Its Brain [3]. In Greek philosophy the soul was an entity, a substance, which sums up the conscious experience of the self. Already in fifth century BCE Pythagoreanism considered the soul to be incorporeal. The Greek concepts of nous and psyche corresponds closely to the modern concept of "mind". The concepts of "mind" and "soul" are quite similar, and often are used interchangeably. Popper sketches the history of the concept of soul in three stages: (I) the material soul from Anaximenes (d. 502 BCE) to Democritus (460-370) and Epicurus (341-271) (including the location of the mind); (II) the dematerialization or spiritualization of the mind, from the Pythagoreans and Xenophanes to Plato and Aristotle; (III) the moral conception of the soul or mind, from Pythagoras to Democritus, Socrates, and Plato. I Homer thought the soul was a vaporous breath. To the philosophers from Anaximenes to Diogenes of Appolonia (6th century BCE) the soul consisted of air. They regarded soul (in the general sense) as air and the individual soul as a portion of the air that one breathes in, because air to them was the finest and lightest form of matter. Anaxagoras (500-428) may have been moving away from the concept of a purely material soul. To him the mind is the principle of motion and order -- the principle of life. He said (DK 59 B12): "Mind (nous) ... is the most rarefied of things and the purest; it has all the knowledge with respect to everything, and it has the greatest power. And all that has life (psyche), the biggest [organisms] and the smallest, all these the mind rules." Heraclitus (535-475) interpreted all material substances and especially the soul as material processes. All material things were in flux, they were all processes, including the universe itself. All were ruled by law (logos). The soul was fire; like fire it could be killed by water. All these thinkers were what are called "dualists" because they gave the soul a very special status in the universe. The medical thinkers of the time were also materialists and dualists. Alcmaeon of Croton (c. 535) was the first to locate sensation and thought in the brain. Theophrastus (c. 371-287) reports "that he spoke of passages (poroi) leading from the sense organs to the brain." This concept was continued by Hippocrates (c. 460-370) and Plato (428-347). The Hippocratic medical treatise On The Sacred Disease asserts with great emphasis that the brain "tells the limbs how to act", and that the brain "is the messenger to consciousness (sunesis) and tells it what is happening. "It also describes the brain as the interpreter (hermeneous) of consciousness. Of course, sunesis can also be translated as "intelligence" or "sagacity" or "understanding". Hippocrates explains that it is the air one breathes in that gives the brain intelligence, because the air is soul. Democritus explained all material and psychological processes mechanically, by the movement and collision of atoms, and by their joining or separating, composition or dissociation. In Democritean physics, soul consisted of the smallest atoms -- the same as those of fire -- round and able to penetrate into and move other things. Democritus was a monistic (soul and body made of the same material) atomist. But he also ascribed moral concepts to the soul: "Men don't get happiness from bodies or from money but by acting right and thinking wide." (DK B40); "Who chooses the goods of the soul, chooses the more divine; who chooses those of the body chooses the more human." (DK B37); "He who commits an act of injustice is more unhappy than he who suffers it." (DK B45). II Another idea introduced by Pythagoras (c. 530) or the Pythagorean Philolaus was that the essence of a thing is something abstract (like a number or a ratio of numbers). In the tradition of incorporeality, Xenophanes (570-475) introduced the idea of monotheism. Pythagoras and his followers were fascinated by numbers and things numerical. Thus they looked for a numerical solution to everything, including the soul. The philosophers who followed the Pythagoreans in proposing a theory of the soul and/or of the mind which interpreted them as incorporeal essences were (possibly) Socrates (469-399) and (certainly) Plato and Aristotle (384-322). They were later followed by the Neo-Platonists, by St. Augustine and other Christian thinkers, and by Descartes. Plato extended his theory of Forms and Ideas to a theory of the true nature or essence of things in general. The soul is, very nearly, the essence of the living body. Aristotle's theory is again similar. He describes the soul as the "first entelechy" of the living body; and the first entelechy is, more or less, its form or its essence. The main difference between Plato's and Aristotle's theory of the soul is that Aristotle is a cosmological optimist, but Plato rather a pessimist. Aristotle's world is essentially teleological: everything progresses towards perfection. Plato's world is created by God, and it is, when created, the best world: it does not progress towards something better. Similarly, Plato's soul is not progressive; if anything it is conservative. But Aristotle's entelechy is progressive: it strives towards an end, an aim. It is probable that Aristotle's teleological theory -- the striving of the soul towards an end, the good -- goes back to Socrates who taught that acting for the best purpose, and with the best aim, follows with necessity upon knowing what is best, and that the mind, or the soul, was always trying to act so as to bring about what is best. Plato regards the body as a prison of the soul, but also thinks that the soul, or mind, or reason ought to be the ruler of the body. Plato, like Freud, upholds the theory that the mind has three parts: (1) reason; (2) activity or energy, i.e spirit or courage; and (3) the lower natural appetites. Plato, like Freud, assumes a struggle exists between the lower and higher parts of the soul. Plato describes the mind as the pilot of the body. Aristotle too has a theory of lower (irrational) and higher (rational) parts of the soul; but his theory is biologically rather than ethically inspired. The irrational souls or essences of Aristotle may be said to be anticipations of modern gene theory: like DNA they plan the actions of the organism and steer it to its telos, to its perfection. Aristotle's psychology does possess the notion of the self-consciousness of self. III In the development of the theory of the soul or the mind or the self, the development of ethical ideas plays a major role. The promise of a better world to come -- if the right religion with the right rituals was adopted -- was the first step on the way to the Socratic and the Kantian point of view in which the moral action is done for its own sake, not as a price for rewards in the next life. Both Democritus and Socrates thought that to commit an act of injustice was to debase one's soul. Socrates was the first to realize that morality was not God-given, but a World 3 product of the human mind. Socrates decided that mind, or thought, or reason always pursued an aim, or an end: it always pursued a purpose, doing what was best. Socrates also recognized another important concept, that in terms of ends, purposes, and decisions the most relevant is the conscious choice of the ends and means. This is a statement within an ethical context. It makes it clear that the ethical idea of a responsible moral self has played a decisive part in the ancient discussions connected with the mind-body problem, and the consciousness of self. The above completes the summary of Popper's Section 46 of Chapter P5. The point I want to stress here is that, notwithstanding all the simplistic suppositions about the material world and a material soul by some of the early Greek philosophers, there were many others who, from the times of Pythagoras, conjectured an incorporeal soul, or mind. Furthermore, many of them conjectured that the soul or mind resides in the brain and controls the actions of the body. Even more significant is the recognition by several early philosophers, particularly Socrates, that the incorporeal mind or soul is the centre where moral decisions and choices are made. Socrates is the precursor of Aristotle who expanded the concept of a "responsible moral self," into a natural moral code. In my opinion a most significant development in the soul/mind concept was achieved by Aristotle. As Lawson-Tancred says in the Introduction to De Anima, to Aristotle the meaning of the Greek word "psyche" was "that in virtue of which something is alive". Aristotle himself writes, "the soul is, so to speak, the first principle of living things," and adds, "In general, and in all ways, it is one of the hardest things to gain any conviction about the soul." [4, Bk I, ch. 1]. Indeed, for us as well as Aristotle, it is difficult to conceive of the incorporeal soul. It is Aristotle's emphasis of his view that all living things, and only living things, of the material world have a soul that has great significance. He says, "... soul is the first actuality of a natural body which potentially has life. Now this kind will include any body that has organs -- and even the parts of plants are organs, ..." [4, Bk II, ch.1]. Aristotle later comments further on this point, saying that "... the ensouled is distinguished from the unsouled by its being alive. ... we say that the thing is alive, if, for instance, there is intellect or perception or spatial movement connected with nourishment and growth and decay. It is for this reason that all the plants are also held to be alive ..."; and "... the soul is the first principle of these things that we have mentioned and is defined by these things, the nutritive, perceptive and intellectual faculties and movement." [4, Bk II, ch.2]. It is the generous endowment of the intellectual faculties, faculties of mind and soul, that make us human. Thus, although many people view Aristotle's investigation of the soul as being merely from a biological point of view, Aristotle, having recognized the intellectual activity of the soul, unavoidably had to, like several other philosophers, designate the soul as the responsible agent for making important moral decisions. It could be, as Popper says above, that Aristotle's theory of the soul was biologically inspired, but Aristotle also postulated different levels of activity for different souls, and the human soul was in charge of the highest form of activity, i.e. the intellectual activity. Some quotations from the Nicomachean Ethics will confirm that this is the case:
Finally, I must incorporate into this discussion on the development of our understanding of the soul one of the most definitive combined neurological and philosophical studies of our time by Popper and Eccles.[3] Popper declares without reservation that he believes "in the ghost in the machine" [3, ch. P4, sec. 30]. That is a popular expression used by neurologists and others who have concluded from observations of the activity of the brain that the brain appears to be receiving instructions from the incorporeal mind or from what Popper and Eccles call the self-conscious self, or what can also be called the soul. Further on Popper says, "The analogy between the brain and computer may be admitted; and it may be pointed out that the computer is helpless without the programmer." [3, ch. P4, sec. 33]. By the programmer Popper means the self-conscious self, which can also be the soul. In concluding the section on the relationship between the brain and the self (i.e. the soul), Popper states:
Popper is known for his rational philosophy and understanding of scientific theory. He does not subscribe to the immortality of the soul because, of course, that cannot be conjectured on a rational basis, but must be left to belief. However, he does not exclude the subject from legitimate consideration as is indicated by this statement: "If there is anything in the idea of survival [of the soul], then I think that those who say that this cannot be just in space and time, and that it cannot be just a temporal eternity, have to be taken very seriously." [3, Dialogue XI]. In conversation with Eccles, Popper explains his approach to the question as follows:
I see a definite connection of thought between Popper's conceding of the possibility that the human mind "may have some sort of forerunner in the not self-conscious but perhaps conscious perception of animals" and Aristotle's theory about all living things possessing a soul. Also of significance to me is the statement "we can say that self-consciousness arises to full self-consciousness only slowly in a child, because I don't think that children are fully self-conscious before they are fully conscious of death." That implies that the self-conscious self, or soul, undergoes development and maturation along with the physical body. |
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