It wasn’t that hard for me to accept evolution and apply a non-literal view to Genesis to maintain faith in a special role for me and fellow humans in an afterlife.
But what’s messing me up is the question I’ve recently pondered , " At what stage in the evolution of man did God imbue us with a soul ?" .
My personal take is that I don’t know and I don’t care.
Or to put it in slightly longer form, we don’t really know when in the process of evolution any unique features of humanity emerged. A million years ago the animals on earth with the highest mental functions were unable to read, write, do math, study history, educate themselves, strive for self-improvement, or do any of the other things that distinguish the human mind. Some time between then and now, those abilities emerged. We don’t know where, when, or how. Yet for sure the final abilities of humankind exist, regardless of the fact that we don’t know the circumstances in which they first came about.
So likewise with the soul. I find it most likely that humans to have an immaterial soul which God intervened to create at some point; then again, I may be wrong. Perhaps the type of consciousness necessary to constitute a soul is a product of a certain level of neural complexity which arose from the process of evolution without direct intervention. But either way, the final product is there.
(Also I must mention that I find the word “evolutionist” unbearably silly. I believe that objects fall downward; does that make me a gravitist?)
As a former Christian I have found that almost all the answers to profound questions like this became easier once I stopped having to rationalize them with religion. When did humans acquire souls? There is no such thing as a soul. Why does God permit evil? There is no God. Why are we here? There is no need to come up with a reason if there is no creator.
It’s a bit like the earth-centric model of the solar system. You can keep coming up with increasingly complex mechanisms to describe the movements of planets and the sun, but when you ditch that model for a sun-centric model everything becomes easier.
I think one of the fundamental mistakes in reasoning that people make is that humans are different in *kind *than other animals, rather than just different in degree.
My own twisted belief is that when in the Book Of Genesis it says “And God breathed life into Adam…”, what that means to me is that is the moment along the evolutionary continuum when humans became aware of God, gaining a conscience, and an awareness that life was more than struggling simply to survive.
It seems sort of a fundamental question to be so blase about.
If souls evolved gradually like other physical features, that raises the possibility that some animals alive today might have souls, or “proto-souls”. If true, that would have some profound ethical implications.
On the other hand, if God abruptly added souls at some point in the process, that implies that an animal could exist that was structurally identical to a human, but was, in fact, not human because it lacked a soul. How would such an animal behave? Would it be any different from how normal humans act? Can we be certain that all the apparent humans that we see around us actually have souls?
Most theistic models I’ve heard state that souls are send down from heaven at some point at/after conception, and return to heaven (or, well, elsewhere) at some point at/after death. Based on this they wouldn’t participate in the earthly evolution process, and proto-souls would not be a possibility - or at least, proto-souls wouldn’t be in any way implied by the earthly evolution process. (One supposes God could have sent down half-baked souls if he wanted to - in fact if I wanted to get write-my-own-religion about it I could assume that souls aren’t sent down in their order of creation, and that mentally handicapped people have the heavenly equivalent of cro-magnon souls. Such a thesis might even be handy if I wanted to endorse their mass slaughter or something.)
Ahem, I seem to have wandered a bit. On point, the separate existence of souls from human development necessarily would mean that God just abruptly added souls at some point in the process, whether just after molding the clay of just after the evolution of the spleen. What does this mean for soulless people? We’ll never have to know: God’s said that everyone has souls. (I’m not actually sure that’s in the book anywhere, but if not you can just pretend it is. :)) Just to speculate, though, we could probably assume that such animals would act like we think unsouled things would act, which probably would be like, well, animals. No moral code, no special intelligence, no willingess to pay taxes. Or alternatively maybe you think that souls are only responsible for the good parts of our personalities, and so people without souls would be cold, cruel, sneaky, and evil; maybe they’d work in politics.
The soul and spirit are somewhat related, but seem to be different. The soul is the core (or heart) of who we are. It is a aspect of the soul of the father and mother combined, it is a being that actually ‘is’ the relationship between the two people.
The spirit, is scriptural related to wind or air, this is a living quality of the soul, and first enters via the transfer of air from mother to baby in the womb, it is when the person in in the womb starts getting oxygen.
So IMHO the soul has been a continuity, the spirit which brings life to the soul happens in the womb via the mother.
Sometimes I’m a Christian Evolutionist, sometimes an Old-Earth Creationist- but I do have to concede that there were critters that looked & acted pretty close to human before Adam & Eve are thought to emerge. Perhaps God created humans “in His Image” in the Sixth Aeon to reflect His Presence & Nature and then later, in the Seventh or Eighth Aeon, imbued one couple with His “Breath of Lives” to raise humanity into becoming His Sons & Daughters. That may have been tens of thousands of years ago OR even as recent as 6000 years ago.
Well said.
Actually, St. Thomas Aquinas stated and I think it’s the stance of the Catholic Church, correct me if I’m wrong, that animals have souls. However, they are material souls and do not survive death unlike the immaterial and immortal souls of people.
Count me as another who takes a blase position on this. If I posit a squeedeleespooch as an internal organ that allows me to interact with alternate universes, yet no one can detect it, why would anyone take me or it seriously? So why should we take souls, the concept of which is just a ridiculous, seriously?
Also, if souls are not matter, and are not bound by matter, as I’ve heard suggested, how can they evolve? Our minds, although not matter, evolved because of changes in the brain matter itself. What’s the analog for the soul?
Some animals are human because all humans are animals. A large subset of animals are not human, not because they have no souls, but because they fall outside of the physical and other parameters of what is human as defined by the biological and anthropological sciences.
We can be just as sure that human beings have souls as surely as I can prove I have a squeedeleespooch.
That is exactly the dilemma for me. That humans are eligible to be considered in the "image " of God and acquire an afterlife as opposed to animals which presumably in terms of the difference between us and animals today heretofore made some sense. But now we have evidence of links between us and the rest of the animal kingdom suggesting a continuum of the characteristics that define us as opposed to the animal kingdom that we have been given charge of.
As we look forward to the New Kingdom, are we expecting that homos going back a couple of million years (homo habilis) have been waiting all this time ?
Those Christians who deny evolution do not share my predicament. Can you provide a better succinct descriptor of those like yourself who are Christian yet accept evolution as a fact?
Sure, I don’t have any problem with that sentiment. Dogs are capable of emotion, and have a rudimentary sense of right and wrong (enough to feel guilty when they misbehave), and we recognize them as having some rights. They don’t have as much of a range of emotion as humans have, nor as complex a sense of right and wrong, and we don’t recognize them as having all the rights of humans, so it’s reasonable to say that the soul of a dog is less developed than the soul of a human, but it seems pretty clear that to the extent it’s possible to know that any being has a soul, that dogs do.
The same is, of course, also true of many other animals. Dogs are just an easy example because we’re so familiar with them.
Okay, but it would seem unfair to me to the humans prior to any arbitrary point in time. This would suggest that someone’s (who qualifies for a soul) mother or father missed out on eternity. doesn’t exactly seem divinely fair.
And if you want to go to 6000 years, what about the American native ancestors who are well documented to have arrived on our continent at least 12000 years ago?
No, it makes you an Orthodox Gravitist. Unlike a Reformed Gravitist, who thinks that they fall upwards and we are all really upside down. Or a Conservative Gravitist, who thinks that falling is an illusion of the Devil.
The whole cocept of a soul would imply eligibility for an afterlife. In Christianity, that is reserved for humanity.
Can you support that with any evidence?
I don’t find it a fundamental question at all. The correctness of a multiplication table doesn’t depend on when humans first gained the ability to do multiplication. Asking when that happened may be intriguing for those with scientific curiosity but it is not important for analyzing the conclusion of the evolutionary process. To know the world around us we must study the world around us, not the distant past.
I find the notion of animals with “proto-souls” absurd. If anyone can show me an animal that appreciates the beauty of the world around it, debates the meaning of its existence, reads great literature, or strives for self-improvement, then I will consider the possibility. But since I’ve never seen any trace of such things in any animal, I feel pretty sure it doesn’t happen.
As for the notion that there are some soulless being in human shells walking around, I don’t worry about that either. Why consider an idea that’s been tried many times in human history and always failed? So many times somebody has claimed that some group of people is inferior because they were supposedly innately lacking the condition that made them human. Yet no matter how widespread those claims were and no matter what evidence was offered for them, they always ended up floundering and society returned to the Christian ideal that all human beings are fundamentally equal before God. So, in short, the idea of soulless humans has failed the test of history.
“proto” implies a primitive antecedent, you know. Something simpler. The fact that it lacks all the bells and whistles doesn’t mean much.
I’m not seing how the floundering ever had anything do to with whether the people being oppressed actually had souls - it’s not like we can actually tell. Which means that this “test of history” lacked any actual testing! It’s just that at the moment we’ve decided not to be that racist, for completely unrelated reasons.
Personally I see a lot of merit to the notion that some people don’t have souls - it’s a potential solution to the problem of evil! Bad things only happen to people without souls, ergo no souls were hurt in the making of this picture, because any time people suffer horribly in an earthquake or avalance or because I decide to enslave them, it was actually somebody with no soul to start with! Sure there are one or two nasty implications, but nothing too bad.