Body, Soul, and Moral Anthropology in Today's Times

Last week's New York Times featured a short piece by Yale's Paul Bloom on, among other things, "the great conflict between science and religion in the last century"; "the conclusion that our souls are flesh"; our "mistaken" "common-sense dualis[m]"; and the "scientific view of mental life."

Bloom's opening paragraph is consonant with many of the discussions we've had here on MOJ:

What people think about many of the big issues that will be discussed in the next two months - like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the role of religion in public life - is intimately related to their views on human nature. And while there may be differences between Republicans and Democrats, one fundamental assumption is accepted by almost everyone. This would be reassuring - if science didn't tell us that this assumption is mistaken.

In Bloom's view, most people today -- and, in particular, religious people -- embrace a comforting but indefensible "dualism", believing that "bodies and souls [are] separate." Bloom quotes the President's Council on Bioethics report of December 2003, "Being Human": "We have both corporeal and noncorporeal aspects. We are embodied spirits and inspirited bodies (or, if you will, embodied minds and minded bodies)."

This is all wrong, says Bloom. "The qualities of mental life that we associate with souls are purely corporeal; they emerge from biochemical processes in the brain. . . . As the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points out, the qualities that we are most interested in from a moral standpoint - consciousness and the capacity to experience pain - result from brain processes that emerge gradually in both development and evolution. There is no moment at which a soulless body becomes an ensouled one, and so scientific research cannot provide objective answers to the questions that matter the most to us."

The correct view of mental life, Bloom insists, can only overpower religion:

The conclusion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with the notion that the soul survives the death of the body. It is a much harder pill to swallow than evolution, then, and might be impossible to reconcile with many religious views. Pope John Paul II was clear about this, conceding our bodies may have evolved, but that theories which "consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."

This clash is not going to be easily resolved. The great conflict between science and religion in the last century was over evolutionary biology. In this century, it will be over psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls.

Bloom is right in this, I think: The stakes are very high.