Back of the Envelope

I meant to mention it yesterday, but the latest Christian Carnival is up at In the Spirit of Grace. It's apparently carnival number 89. I'd lost count myself. There's lots of good stuff there, so go read it.

Okay, maybe not only in Boston, but I don't expect that too many churches have a writers' group. I've decided to get involved with the Soli Deo Gloria arts group at Park Street. They have a Writers' Group which meets on Monday nights for writers interested in getting published. It should be interesting, help to improve my writing, and give me a chance to discuss the theological issues which crop up when writing fiction. I'll let you know how it went.

Okay, it seems Skeptic and I mostly agree on the matter of scientifically impossible, but now I'm at a loss to understand Skeptic's initial assertion:

Though the belief in miracles was once a respectable, even rational, position to hold (given our ignorance), it is no longer laudable today. Must I ask: Do virgins give birth? Do donkey's speak? Do people rise up out of their graves? When or where have you seen this, but in your imagination?

He's saying that miracles are impossible, that it doesn't make any sense to believe in them, but as far as I can tell he's making an assertion rather than an argument. He admits that it is just as much of an argument from ignorance to say that an unexplained event has a naturalistic explanation as to say that it is miraculous. The sum total of his argument, as I understand it, is that when faced with an unexplained event, it is more logical to assume that there is a naturalistic explanation than that it is a miracle, as experience shows that most such events have a naturalistic explanation. Up to this point, I agree. (There is the matter of divine providence to consider, the belief that God is at work bringing about His will in all things, even the ones with naturalistic explanations, but I concur that this sort of evidence for God is circumstantial and cannot properly be called miraculous.) I don't think, however, that Skeptic's offered any reason to rule out miracles. He complains that he's never seen one. Neither have I. That should not be a prerequisite for belief in them, any more than seeing an electron should be a prerequisite for belief in them. Miracles are rare events, and most people will never see one. We may, however, have an opportunity to examine the evidence for one, but we'll save that for later.

Skeptic also asks about my definition of miracle. That's fair enough, so let me try to be clearer. My definition is that a miracle is an "observable interaction of a spiritual element with the otherwise closed system of matter and energy." I put it in scientific terms, and admittedly, I put it in such a way that it may describe things that don't look like miracles. We can't always know whether a spiritual element was involved. To use my subway analogy from Round 2, we may know that the data looks weird, but we need some more information before we can make a conclusion as to what's causing it. A more relevant question is not what I define as a miracle, but what sort of event would I believe to be a miracle.

Let's take the Resurrection of Jesus, the central miracle of the Christian faith. What's observable about it? Well, first there's the fact that Jesus is dead. That's a measurable, quantifiable fact, although I did not personally perform the measurement. Then he's alive. That's also measurable and quantifiable, although again measured by someone else. So that's what's observable about it. But is it spiritual? Is the fact that a man came to life after being dead for three days enough evidence that I can say that a spiritual hand was required to do the resurrecting? Probably not. The data certainly looks weird, and it's so far outside of what our naturalistic explanations can encompass, that I'd be considering the word "miracle" even with so little, but I'd want more evidence. What sort of evidence? Well, a couple of angels appearing at the tomb helps, although I might consider them delusions or just strangers who seemed angelic. Then there's the fact that Jesus had been predicting his death and resurrection months before it happened, and that he performed other resurrections by what he claimed was the power of God. And there's what he said after the event, showing up where and when he wanted, talking to crowds of people, interacting with them physically, albeit with a new and improved body. Jesus, the one who resurrected others and had now been resurrected, is the one who says that his resurrection is a miracle, God at work. That's pretty convincing, like when the subway workers told us that the trains had been running all through the night that corresponded to the noise in our data continuing unabated, whereas on other nights it had ceased when the subway had closed for the night. Now the word of the subway worker may not usually carry tremendous weight. I wouldn't ask him about the theological implications of evolution, not unless I had some other reason to trust his judgement on the matter. But when he's talking about something he should know about, he has no reason to lie, and it fits our data so perfectly, then it's fairly safe to believe him. Likewise, as Jesus is the one who can best explain the significance of the Resurrection, and it so neatly fits the data, then I accept his word that the Resurrection is miraculous.

And here is where I wonder what Skeptic believes. Would he accept the Resurrection as a miracle, assuming it happened as the Bible reports? Or would he insist that there was a naturalistic explanation? How far would he go to explain it? I've heard some pretty wild and implausible theories trying to explain the Resurrection, including alien intervention. How implausible do the naturalistic explanations have to get before the supernatural one simply makes more sense? If Skeptic takes the view that there must be a naturalistic explanation, then he's basing his conclusions on faith more than I am. If his position is instead that such a Resurrection would be a miracle, but he believes that it didn't happen that way, then we're having the wrong argument. He's not presenting arguments that there can be no miracles, only that he has no proof of miracles. If that's the case, we need to establish what criteria are necessary to prove a miracle and work from there.

It's been a week without any comments from me, since I've been busy working on my story. Even now, I'm only going to address one thread of Skeptic's argument, partly because I'm not sure it's a good idea to pursue both threads in a single post, and partly because the other topic is more complex and I haven't finished my response to it. Hopefully I'll have something up by Monday. Meanwhile, let me address the topic of the soul.

I'm not sure how Skeptic transitioned from my argument that the human person has two parts, body and soul, to the assumption that I believe there are three parts. As I read Skeptic's previous argument, he rejects that consciousness or mind is something distinct in itself. Instead, Skeptic takes the view that it is emergent, a result of the brain's cognition. I merely expressed my belief that the soul is not merely a manifestation of consciousness. It is something else. Consciousness is the result of the interaction of body and soul, it is, as Skeptic argues, emergent. As an analogy, consider a computer. A computer has both hardware and software. If, as a crude analogy, you consider the hardware to be the body and the software to be the soul, what I mean should become clearer. Obviously, software can't do much of anything without some hardware to run on, but without software, hardware has nothing to do. The distinctive behavior of a computer depends on both. But... software is not tied down to the computer. It needs a computer, certainly, but it can move from computer to computer, and behave in largely the same way as long as the computer is compatible and it can adapt to the differences. Software is a very different thing from hardware. Hardware, of course, can run different software, but its behavior changes vastly, as different software gives a completely different look and feel. Now, looking back at my earlier argument, which Skeptic seems to have forgotten, I never argued that the soul has much of an independent existence apart from the body. It's one of those matters I'm doctrinally neutral on. But I can see the soul being inactive until such time as a body is provided for it. Some body is necessary, but it is not necessarily identical to its former body. Thus the idea of God placing our souls in a resurrected body makes a lot of sense to me, in the same way that installing my old software on a new computer is perfectly reasonable, and something I've done before. This is, as I said, a crude analogy, and I'm not arguing that the soul is merely stored information or that it can be copied or deleted in the same way that software can, but I'm hoping it makes my position on the soul clearer.

First Issue:

Apparently my use of the phrase “scientifically impossible” has generated some confusion, though, if I understand your reply, we seem to hold very similar beliefs on the matter. Nevertheless, it’s a fair observation. I will explain.

First of all, I’m well aware that science is a methodology, and that (strictly speaking) it makes little sense to speak of it as “impossible” or “possible.” I encounter a similar problem when people ask me, “What does philosophy say?” Philosophy, technically speaking, doesn’t “say” anything—-there is no set doctrine or beliefs, etc. But usually when people ask me such questions, I know to read between the lines a bit (something I was hoping my readers might do with the phrase “scientifically impossible” so that I wouldn’t have to go into lengthy explanations) and understand that what the speaker is really asking is something like: “According to sound philosophical methodology, and the general consensus among current philosophers who are using this method in its various capacities to understand the item under consideration, what is generally agreed upon to be the case?” In a similar manner, when I claimed that a miracle is commonly held to be something that is “scientifically impossible,” I intended to say that it is a phenomenon for which our current models have no significant or satisfactory explanatory powers. So, for example, if a trained chemist knows that mixing substance A with B, under specific conditions XYZ, always yields substance C, then the idea that mixing the two under those same circumstances and yet not coming up with substance C would be “impossible.” This is also why a scientifically minded individual, when he hears the Shaman say that his magic arts created the rain, will tend to ignore such claims and look elsewhere for an explanation. I may not be a scientist, but there’s nothing cryptic or naïve about this understanding of the scientist’s approach to knowledge. As you yourself have said, our scientific models, which are based solely on matter and energy, are unable to account for miracles. This is all I meant by “scientifically impossible,” and if you’d like for me to stop talking this way that’s fine with me. I just prefer “scientifically impossible” as short-hand in my distinction between different senses of the impossible (for example, I hold that a “resurrection” is not logically impossible (i.e. according to the rules of formal Logic, and what may be determined a priori), but that it is “scientifically impossible” (i.e. scientists do not have models that satisfactorily can account for any such occurrence). Conversely, I do consider “square circles” logically impossible, since the two concepts are conceptually at variance. Since “square circle” is a logical impossibility, I do not need to consult a posteriori procedures, such as science, to determine its tenability.

That issue aside, we seem to have another problem that is not simply a semantic entanglement. According to my understanding of your argument, you hold that: (1) simply because “science” (dare I use the word) cannot account for miracles, it does not follow that miracles are not real; and (2) we cannot, as you say, throw out the observations simply because our models for making sense out of them are unsatisfactory. My reply to this is two fold.

First of all, starting with (2), I am not aware of any “observations” or “effects” that are being ruled out because it doesn’t fit our models—-that is to say, I’ve never seen anything that I would consider to be a “miraculous” aberration from our perfectly natural explanations of things. People come to me all the time claiming that God worked a miracle for them, and once I probe them to find out about their alleged miracle, I find that there is nothing interesting to observe (for example, someone says that God healed them of cancer, but this was after certain treatments and such). Maybe there are “miracles” out there, but I’ve never been exposed to any of them, and when I investigate those who claim to have had them, I usually find poor deliberations, or even, in some cases, psychological instability in the observer. As for the second prong of that argument, number (1), (and supposing for the moment that we could find a miracle), you are absolutely right in holding that something might be real even if we cannot account for it in any kind of natural or scientific sense. Germs, for example, were very real in ancient times, even though humans had no way of accounting for the noticeable effects of germs in any kind of scientific/biological sense. But we must be careful that we do not commit the fallacy of drawing conclusions from the unknown.

If we encounter a phenomenon that it is unexplained, we cannot violate our epistemic boundaries by rushing ahead and providing explanations for it. For example, suppose we all see a dead man rise from the ground and begin walking about. The religious observers might want to say, “It’s a miracle of God! He was resurrected by the Almighty!” But the scientifically minded might want to say something like, “Well, this certainly is odd, but I just know that there has to be a perfectly natural explanation for this. Just wait long enough, and we’ll eventually have a scientific/natural/physical model that explains this otherwise perplexing occurrence.” Now the problem with this scenario is that both the “scientist” and the religious individuals have violated their epistemic boundaries—that is, they are committing the fallacy known as argumentum ad ignorantum (“appeal to ignorance”). What we have is an inexplicable phenomenon—-a dead man walking—-and yet both are drawing answers from the unknown: one says, “It’s a natural occurrence” and the other concludes, “It’s God.” Both parties are reasoning fallaciously. Why? Because the hard truth is that it currently is, well, unexplained!

The reason that I gave this example is to illustrate a few points. First of all, that we have no right to ontological claims (i.e. of things that exist, such as spiritual entities) which abrogate sound epistemological procedure (i.e. a procedure through which we may rightfully make a claim to knowledge). Now you can believe whatever you want, and we can make conjectures all day, but it would not count as an item of knowledge. This is precisely the problem with all God-talk. When asked to define “God,” religious people often say that he is invisible, intangible, non-physical, without taste, color, sound, or spatial properties, and that he is atemporal and eternal. This, of course, leaves the rest of us wondering what the difference might be between a God of that sort and one which doesn’t exist! Now, you claim that a miracle is “the observable interaction of a spiritual element within an otherwise closed system of matter and energy.” So at this point I must ask you two things: (1) what do you mean by “spiritual element” (how would you define it) and (2) in what sense do you claim that it is observable? If it is observable, is it observable in such a way that other “non-spiritual” models may account for the item in question? If so, why do you choose the “spiritual” explanation rather than the “non-spiritual” model?

As a final note, you said that I ruled out virgin births because it's illogical. But that's not quite true. I rule out virgin births primarily for the reason given above: I’ve never seen a virgin give birth, nor a snake talking in a garden, nor a dead man rising up out of his grave, nor an ass rebuking someone with a human voice. It is a matter of inductive, not deductive, reasoning that leads me away from such beliefs. As a side note, I’m aware that there have been virgins who have given birth, but this has been explained by biologists in such a way that precludes the miraculous intervention of a divine lover, as we find in so many of the ancient myths. Spiritual explanations have been slowly driven off the scene by “scientific” explanations (or natural/physical/observable explanations, if “scientific” offends you). At one point the stars were peepholes into heaven where the gods abode, and seasons changed by the will of the gods, and if you were ill it was because you angered a god, but now we know better.

Issue 2:

Before I answer your question about the soul, I’m going to need an explanation as to what you mean by “different substance” that adds its conscious thinking abilities to our mind. You claim that there is a physical substance, and a soul (or thinking thing) which arises from that physical substance—-so far so good—-but then there is also an entirely different substance called the spirit, which also thinks, and somehow blends its thinking together with that of the soul to create a composite thinking-thing. All of this is terribly cryptic to me. It is not enough to show that something is possible (if, indeed, you can do that); I want also to know how you came to find out about this alleged other substance, and what your justification for its reality is. In my experience, there are only two types of things—-commonly referred to as body/mind or, in some places, body/soul. We are all familiar with the physical dimension of our person, and as beings which think, we are all certainly aware of the mind/soul part. But what is this additional thinking-spirit thing and how does it mix with the other conscious parts? Also, what does it mean to be human? Must you have all three parts? When the physical dies, do the other two thinking parts go on? If so, does it make any sense to say that “you” went on living now that the physical part is dead? In other words, if to be “John” means to have all three elements, then even if the physical part dies, so has John. Perhaps something went on living, but whatever it was, it wasn’t John (because John just is mind/soul/spirit substance). So explain to me what these three parts are, how you discovered them, how they work together, and which parts are essential to an individual's identity.

Wow, I apologize for the length of this. I’ll try to be more pithy from now on.

While my degree is in Electrical Engineering, what I actually did can best be called experimental physics. (I also did some theoretical physics, but I am most definitely an experimentalist, not a theoretician.) And what strikes me most about Skeptic's argument on miracles is that his definition of scientific deviates significantly from that of the practicing scientist. There's an old joke that goes, "An engineer thinks equations approximate the real world. A physicist thinks the real world approximates equations. A mathematician is unable to make the connection."

Skeptic talks a bit about nonsense phrases. "Scientifically impossible" is one such phrase. Science is a method of making observations about the world, and creating models to explain such observations. That is all science is. There is no such thing as impossible for science. There are only observations which fit the current model and observations which do not. When the observations do not fit the model, you do not discard the observations, you discard the model--or, if possible, you adapt the model to fit the observations. If you are unable to do so, you take more observations, accounting for all influencing factors and minimizing the ones you can't account for, until you have enough information to work out a model. If that proves beyond your means--as it often does in real science--you publish your results and hope that someone else can explain your observations. You cannot a priori make the decision that virgins giving birth and people rising from the dead won't be allowed observations because they're illogical, any more than you can ignore evidence that an electron can be in two places at once or that distances change depending on how fast you're moving, simply because they're illogical. I consider the first two a lot less nonsensical than the latter two, but the latter two are observed scientific facts which we've developed models to account for. If we had continued to discard these observations because they didn't make sense, as we did initially, then all of modern physics wouldn't have happened, and I'd be writing this on paper and sending it through the mail rather than typing it on my laptop and posting it on the Internet.

Now, it is true that when a scientist is performing scientific experiments, he often discards some of the data. He doesn't discard this data because it is illogical or unscientific; he discards it because it is caused by something outside of the system he's trying to model. The Universe is simply too vast and complex to model the entire thing. Instead, scientists look at smaller closed systems, systems for which there is no outside influence, and create models for those, ignoring the rest of the Universe. Unfortunately, it's impossible to create a completely closed system, and even if it were, performing measurements on it opens it up anyway. Scientists usually settle for a small, or at least well-defined, outside influence. When my research group was doing the experiments which went into my Ph.D. thesis, we discovered that the data was very noisy throughout most of the day, with lots of apparently random deviations from what we expected. However, late at night, from about 1 am to 5 am, the data became very clean--the noise went away. By doing this over several nights, we realized that this noise corresponded to the times during which Boston's subway was running (the proof was that during the one night that the subway continued to operate for maintenance purposes, the noise never went away). We concluded that the electrical current running through the third rail of the subway system was creating an inconstant magnetic field, giving us noisy measurements. We decided to discard the data we got while the subway was running, not because the subway wasn't a real influence causing real deviations in our measurements, but because the subway was not part of the closed system we were trying to model, and we didn't have the means (or the desire) to add the subway to the model.

Getting back to the subject of miracles, I agree with Skeptic that defining a miracle as something which is "scientifically impossible" is nonsensical, but for the entirely different reason that the phrase "scientifically impossible" is nonsense. However, I don't think a miracle is simply something outside the current scientific model, which seems to be his approach, defining it as something merely unusual or strange. I'd take a more, ahem, scientific approach. The only truly closed system is the Universe itself, but only because it is defined that way, as the whole closed system of matter and energy. Anything that affects the Universe is considered a part of it. (Technically, any spiritual influence which may or may not exist is part of the Universe by that definition, but most scientists dislike including it, since it's such a wildcard. So we'll define Universe slightly differently, as the whole system of matter and energy.) Many scientists take the view that, in principle, the entire Universe (per our definition) can be modeled, even if it will be forever beyond our means to do so. I actually agree that the whole system of matter and energy can be modeled, but I don't believe this system is truly a closed one.

I define a miracle as the observable interaction of a spiritual element with the otherwise closed system of matter and energy. Any model based solely on matter and energy, as our scientific models are, will not be able to account for miracles, any more than the model of my quantum system could account for the Boston subway. That does not make the spiritual element any less real, or the resulting miracle any less observable, just beyond the scope of the model. There is, of course, the question of whether you can build a model which includes the spiritual. It would be hard to do, as we don't know of any way to observe the spiritual, only its effects, but that's never stopped science before. Dark matter and dark energy are wholly theoretical constructs to explain observed effects for which we haven't yet observed any cause. However, any model which includes a freely acting, conscious entity--such as God or even humans--is notoriously difficult to construct with any precision, which is why scientists prefer to leave that sort of stuff, when encountered on the human scale, to the soft sciences of sociology and psychology. Similarly, they leave models including spiritual influences to the soft sciences of theology and philosophy. The hard sciences deal only with systems which are closed to the messy influence of conscious entities.

As for the second matter Skeptic discusses, the emergent view of consciousness, I think I understand what he is saying. However, I don't think he addresses my question. In Skeptic's original argument, he said that it was absurd to think consciousness could be separated from the body. His argument for the emergent view of consciousness is simply that consciousness is a property of the physical system of the brain, such as liquidity is a property of water. My immediate instinct is to point out that there are other liquids besides water. I don't regard the soul as pure consciousness, but as a thing of spirit, a substance of another type, which may have consciousness, just as methanol and acetone are other substances besides water which have liquidity. The liquidity of acetone and methanol is not the same as the liquidity of water, and likewise I think the consciousness of the soul is not the same as the consciousness of the body. Now I take the view that human consciousness is a product of both body and soul, and that separating them gives you something less than the product. This is mere assertion at this point in the argument. However, so is Skeptic's assertion that there can be no consciousness without the body, yet he adds that it is absurd to think that there can be. He has not yet addressed why he thinks it is absurd.

I'll respond to two issues as well.

First of all, the issue of miracles is a tricky matter because people often vacillate (well, let's be realists about it, they equivocate) on the use of "miracle." Some use "miracle" to mean a thing that is extraordinary, such as the "miracle of birth" or the "miracle of water being assimilated by a vine and turned into a grape that produces wine." This first definition is a silly way, I think, to get miracles on the scene (in a scientific sense). Anyone could believe in a "miracle" of this sort. But then there is the second idea of miracle in which a miracle is something that is impossible in a scientific sense. Now if one pays close attention not only to the metaphysical assumptions, but also the grammar of the assertion, then one will realize that miracles are excluded as a logical possibility in this latter sense. To say that a scientific miracle is possible would be like uttering some kind of nonsensical phrase like, "The impossible is possible" or "God could make a married bachelor" or "I found a square circle." When we speak nonsense, we are embracing metaphysical nonsense. This, I think, was the great achievement of Ludwig Wittgenstein: he showed us that to permit grammatical errors is to commit a metaphysical one as well. But suppose we did have an unexplained event. Could we then explain it by saying, "It was God"? What else would that be but to transgress our epistemic boundaries and commit ourselves to drawing a conclusion from ignorance of what caused the event? The only conclusion that one is warranted to draw from an unexplained, or mysterious event, is that it is, well, unexplainable! Anything more would commit the logical fallacy referred to as argumentum ad ignorantum.

So miracles in a scientific sense are out. But before dismissing the idea of miracles, we need to ask ourselves a very, very important question: When the ancients spoke of miracles, were they referring to the abeyance of scientific laws, or were they referring to something like the first idea of miracles that I provided--i.e. some wondrous, awe-inspiring thing (such as childbirth)? My response to this question is in concert with a number of theologians who point out that the alleged miracles of antiquity were of the awe-inspiring kind and not the deviation-from-science kind. Why? Because the miracles they spoke of took place during the pre-scientific era. It is impossible to speak of miracles as that which defies scientific laws when there is no such thing as scientific laws (in our modern sense of scientific laws). There were, of course, rules of thumb and regularities, but the ancients did not live in the same world that we do now--and by that I mean something like this: that if they saw a man foaming at the mouth and rolling on the ground, they could not see epilepsy. Why? Because, if you have an ear to hear it, "epilepsy" did not exist--that is, such an interpretation was not even an option or possibility; it never occurred to them or entered their mind; it was debarred from their social reality. It was not a possibility in the same way that it is not a possibility for us today to see a demon-possessed individual. If we see a man foaming at the mouth and rolling on the ground today, we see some form of mental disorder, not a demon. In short, the ancients did not make a distinction between science and miracle because there was no scientific context in which miracles could gain traction as an antagonizing force to science. Hence, the ancients did not mean "miracle as opposed to science"--they meant something else. To the ancients, a miracle was something that inspired awe, wonder, amazement, and that baffled them. Today, we have explained much that was not possible for them to understand. Though the belief in miracles was once a respectable, even rational, position to hold (given our ignorance), it is no longer laudable today. Must I ask: Do virgins give birth? Do donkey's speak? Do people rise up out of their graves? When or where have you seen this, but in your imagination? The ancients could see a nymph darting through the woods, but today when a man tells us he sees Big Foot in the woods, we simply laugh.

Now for the second matter. You have accused me of being a materialist. I say "accused" to imply that I, too, have a certain disdain for materialism (it implicitly denies that I am conscious via its reductionism). Allow me to state clearly that I am not a materialist: I am a property dualist (notice that I did not say substance dualist). What this means is that I hold that there is only one kind of substance in the world, but that this one substance has the ability generate properties which are not reducible to the physical constituents themselves--and one of these properties I call "consciousness."

I will explain what I mean by using an analogy. When a person considers water, we make a distinction between its physical properties (hydrogen and oxygen) and its emergent properties (liquidity, or slipperyness, if you will). There is only one substance, not two; but this one substance has two kinds of properties--i.e. physical properties and non-physical properties. Certainly you would not want to say that there are two substances at play with each other here: the hydrogen-oxygen compound and then the liquidity, which is its own kind of substance! As you know,since these physical particles are combined in certain ways (forming atoms and molecules of various sorts and in various arrangements) there has been a new emergent property created: liquidity. But I must ask: is the property of liquidity, or a water's slippery-ness, a different substance altogether? Can there be liquidity without hydrogen and oxygen? More specifically and to the point: can the emergent property of liquidity separate itself from the physical parts of hydrogen and oxygen and become its own substance? Certainly, it cannot. In the same way, consciousness cannot separate itself from the physical particles that work together in homeostasis to support the "property" of consciousness.

I won't try to address all of Skeptic's points right away, but I will focus on two of them.

First off, on the matter of the uniqueness of the virgin birth--well, the simple truth is that the story is not unique. The claim of demigod is not new, although in most of the stories sexual relations between mortal and immortal are implied. Okay, in most of them it's made very explicit. However, in others, such as Romulus and Remus being born from Rhea Silvia after she was visited by Mars in the form of a golden rain, her virginity is left intact. Here's a bit of what came out of one of my earlier discussions comparing the Christian virgin birth story with those of other mythologies:

One approach to this question, which I think C.S. Lewis has proposed, is to say that the Christian account is the ultimately true one, and the accounts found elsewhere are echos or shadows of this truth that reside deep inside the minds and souls of even unregenerate people. This view has the advantage that miracle stories in other religions don't have to be seen as satanic or as threats to the validity of the Bible.

A quick caveat for the above quote--this comes from the Skeptics Anonymous page at MIT. This is (or rather was, as it's now defunct) a form that allows people to ask spiritual and theological questions of MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship, which we would field to our discussion e-mail list. There would then be a lively debate, and then someone (usually me), would compile the answers and send it to the person who asked (if they gave us an e-mail), and someone else (whoever the webmaster was) would put the answer on the webpage. I had a hand in answering most of the questions. However, the question as it appears on the webpage is generalized from the question actually asked, and some of the answers aren't necessarily as general as the question. The one on marriage in particular refers to a question about a specific case, which is not described on the page.

The second question I'll address is Skeptic's reluctance to separate body from soul, another matter I've thought about before, and I mention it on my blog, although only in passing. This is a subject which Roz Picard, a professor studying AI at MIT, spoke about to the Graduate Christian Fellowship, and her thinking did much to shape mine. She pointed out, like Skeptic, that while the Bible does refer to the soul, it doesn't make a clear distinction and describe the soul as a separate entity, as we do today. The two words most commonly used for soul are pneumatos, meaning breath, and psychos, meaning life or self, and neither clearly describes a separate entity. Therefore, I think that modern thought is probably wrong. The thing I discovered when looking into this is that what I think of as modern religious belief is really the popular religious belief common in the US today, and it is not universal. Most people do not think deeply of such things, but those who do come to differing conclusions, and the belief that soul does not have a separate existence, that physical death is in effect non-existence until resurrection, is respectable in the scholarly Christian community. Not too long ago, there was a lively debate on this matter, which included three different views of the state of the soul separated from the body: non-existence, conscious existence, and something in between. Note that all three acknowledge the importance of the bodily resurrection, and that there's something wrong with a soul without a body, but they all take different views of what the soul without the body is like. I am personally undecided on the exact nature of the body and the soul. I take a view closest to Jeremy Pierce's: that the soul can exist without the body, but that its existence is incomplete and not fully conscious. It's something I play with in my fiction. I don't think the soul is meant to have an independent existence from the body, and therefore studies of the influence of genetics and physiology on personality and psychology don't really bother me.

As I read what Skeptic says, he takes the purely materialistic view of the mind, that there is nothing more to us than our physical bodies. Here I'd disagree, and I wonder that he concludes that the very existence of the soul is ludicrous with what we know today. I don't see what we've learned that disproves the soul. I believe in its existence, and even if it is not an independent entity in itself, our lives are more than the physical. Therefore I can also accept the possibility of beings of pure spirit, even if we are not so ourselves, beings such as angels and demons and, yes, God.

The problem is not a problem with Jesus per se, but with the metaphysical belief in dis-embodied conscious states. Spirits, which I take to be no different from conscious/thinking things (after all, what survives after you die but that part of you which thinks?) cannot be separated from the biological, causal systems which produce those conscious states. Now, one of the things I've always admired about the Christian tradition is its appreciation (except in recent times) of the flesh. Even the supposed resurrection of Jesus is understood to be a bodily resurrection. But since the 19th century, Christianity has become excessively Platonic in its understanding of the duality of mind and body--that is, they no longer believe that consciousness is simply a distinct property of physical systems, but wish to go further by declaring that it is a substance all to itself (indeed, even one that can shed its physiology completely!). This is absurd. It is one thing for the thinkers of ancient times (e.g. Plato, and perhaps Pythagoras) to believe that mind can be separated from body, but this view has become untenable (or at least unsupportable) in our post-modern world. We've learned too much about how things work.

Does God exist? Well, perhaps in some form or other, depending on how one wishes to define "God". But suffice it to say that Jesus is no more a Son of God than Caesar, or Alexander the Great, or anyone else who has been claimed as such (and many of these were also held to have been born through a mystical union of a god and a mortal woman--i.e. a virgin birth). In short, the question of God's existence is still an open question for me, but the divinity of Jesus is not. My goal in studying theology at this juncture in my life is, in fact, to reach a definitive assessment of the value of Christianity--both as it was practiced, and as it is currently practiced today (and the two are by no means the same!)

I've recently been engaged with an e-mail debate on theology and philosophy with an agnostic friend of a friend. It's been fascinating, covering a wide range of topics, from the nature of the soul to whether the definition of miracle includes scientific impossibility. I've convinced him to make our debate public, posting it on this blog. I should have the first installment online tomorrow. Since I want to be sure I don't mangle his arguments, I'm going to make him a guest co-blogger, and let him post his own thoughts. Since he prefers anonymity, he will be blogging under the pseudonym Skeptic. The debate posts will indicate that they are part of the debate in the title, and will be part of a Religious Debate category. In anticipation of this, I've moved the byline up to the top of the posts, just below the title, so you'll know who's writing the post from the beginning.

It's been a while since I've been in a good debate, and I'm looking forward to it continuing.

The latest Christian Carnival is up at Technogypsy.