Christianity, Human evolution, and the concpet of the Soul

Great Debates
1

How do Christians who firmly believe in the concept of a soul reconcile this belief with the facts of human evolution? I’m not talking about creationists, but the many Christians out there who do accept the common understanding that humans evolved from non-human species.

Two lines of questioning come to mind:

  1. At what stage in the evolution of humans did we acquire a soul? Clearly our common ancestor with the chimp (of about 6M yrs ago) did not have a soul. Did the Australopithicines? They were pretty much just upright apes. Hard to imagine that they had souls. * Home Erectus*? They’re about as close as you could come to being half-ape and half-human, so what about those guys? Homo Sapiens appeared on the scene maybe 150k yrs ago. Did our earliest sapiens ancestors have souls? If the soul did not reside in the various human ancestors, then was there some point in time where the offspring of a particular male and female had a soul, but the parents did not? Is there a concept of the soul evolving along with our ancestors so that there was some sort of proto-soul? That is hard to imagine.

  2. Our current understanding of human evolution is that Neanderthals evolved in Europe from the native erectus stock there while we, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. Two parallel species becoming “human” in different ways. Did Neanderthals have souls? There was considerable overlap in time and space between the two species. If Neanderthals did not have souls, then we are left with the paradox that two very closely related species of humans existed and interacted (perhaps even were able to communicate with each other) and yet one had a soul and the other didn’t.

I have no religious beliefs myself and am intrigued by those many intelligent folks out there who somehow reconcile religious beliefs regarding the soul with scientific knowledge that challenges that concept to the core.

2

I would think this thread belongs in Great Debates. There’s no factual answer to be had here, I’m afraid.

3

Yeah, I goofed an posted in GQ by mistake. I’ve already asked a mod to move it.

4

I think Lib could probably answer this one really well, but to me, it isn’t all that different to the question “When does an individual become a human being?” - I’ll not pretend that I have any firm answers, but I do believe that the classical view of souls being dished out by God works best in a creationist framework and performs very poorly in a scientific one.

Assuming that we have souls at all (which I think we have to, or this discussion just becomes another ‘God doesn’t exist, nyah nyah!’ thread), and given that we are going to accept that any creation myth is not strictly factual, I tend to regard the soul as an emergent property of sentience/consciousness - perhaps something along the lines of our continued conscious existence wearing an indelible groove into the fabric of reality.

Of course this does open up the question of whether animals could have souls (of some sort) and that is an issue I’m quite happy to face.

5

In order to believe in both religion and science, one must believe that God has been intervening in the lives of those on Earth from time to time throughout history. This makes it very easy to reconcile the paradox you’ve just presented by saying that at one point during the evolution process, God stepped in and gave humans souls. It would be impossible for us now to determine when this was though.

6

Must?
Not necessarily - suppose God just tickled the fluctuating quanta in just such a way as to invoke the Big Bang, giving rise to space, time and matter (all with properties exactly as he planned when he poked the virtual particles), allowing life to arise and evolve to the point where it acquires sentience and starts weaving souls out of pure nothing.

Admittedly it would be the trick shot of all time (literally), but if He’s God, he’s presumably capable of such feats.

(I’m not going to defend this view, I just present it to demonstrate that absolutes (‘must’) are risky in religious debates).

7

Yes, I think a similar problem presents itself with the development of each human (and I even started a thread about that several months ago). But as Gould pointed out in his famous book, ontogeny does not follow phylogeny, and so it would be reasonable to assume that this true of souls as well. Hence, I think the evolution question is a more fundamental one.

Not my intention. I truely would like to understand the thoughts in the scientifically literate religious community.

A legit hijack. I was going to add it to the OP, but thought it was sufficient to have put pre-sapiens species up for grabs. If they have souls, then there is no reason not to believe that other non-human animals also have souls. That might take us out of bounds of the Christian relligion, though.

8

And away we go …

Off Off to GD.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

9

According to the Medieval conceptualization of “soul,” all living things have souls; the Rational Soul of humans is only a special case. From C.S. Lewis’s study of the Medieval Model of the Universe, The Discarded Image:

10

I agree that must is a touching word in religious debates, but your example is a belief in God in general, but not in a particular religion. Religious beliefs are worshipping a God (or multiple gods) that interact with Earth. Your example of a god as a prime mover, accidental or intentional, means that this god does not care about our lives and therefore the religion to worship it is pointless.

11

Polycarp:

That sounds more like Medieval psuedo-science to me (akin to earth/wind/water/fire type concepts). Is that accepted by modern Christian thinkers?

What do you tihnk about the subject? You are certainly one of the folks I’m eager to hear from. The details of reconciling the concept of an eternal soul with what we know today about human evolution.

Did Neanderthals have eternal souls, subject to salvation in the Christian sense? If they did, then we have two seperate species of humans with souls.

12

Neanderthals at least seem to have believed they had souls. They buried their dead with things like tools, jewelry and flowers which would indicate a belief in an afterlife.

13

I grant that the Medieval conception was pretty much one based on non-scientific, and at least partially faith-based views. However, the point behind their concept was that “the soul” was not something you had but what you were – the individual identity that you had as a living thing. As such, it got anthropomorphic almost by default – a tree or a fruit fly has a “soul” by virtue of bing a living thing.

However, the idea is not without merit. Whatever a “soul” might be, it’s something that goes intrinsically with being a living thing, not an added accretion to a living body. A modern analogy would be the discussions on whether a virus or a strand of DNA “has life” – is “a living thing” in some metaphysical sense.

And in that perspective, it’s possible to see the idea as not a yes/no question but a spectrum, ranging from “Yes, a virus is capable of reproducing and responding to stimuli within the context of its parasitism of another clearly-living thing, so it’s alive in a sense” to a developmentally mentally disabled child.

Now the question of whether a soul can survive the death of the body in which it resides is a quite distinct idea. For some reason, man is so structured as to have a great deal of trouble conceptualizing his own absence – even in envisioning his own death, he becomes a disembodied entity hovering over the grievers and observing them weeping at his death. I’d say that very few, even of the atheists here, find it easy to conceive of a world in which they are absent – they will, in their conceptions, persist as a viewpoint from which to observe that without-them world.

Personally, I see the soul as analogous to a program, perhaps heuristic and capable of self-rewriting, running on a computer, which may conceivably be extracted onto a floppy disk and then loaded into another computer where it can run again, in a different environment with different IP architecture but the same program.

Obviously such a program can be erased, and if not preserved will vanish when the computer on which it runs crashes irretrievably. It can be wiped by a total reformatting of the hard disk on which it resides or the destruction of the CD it was burned onto. But it can in theory outlast the computer on which it runs.

14

No; you see he would have nudged the pseudoquark (or whatever) in just such a way as to create a universe in which specific miraculous coincidences show his care and concern for the beings that come into existence. Damn! I said I wasn’t going to defend the idea…

15

I’m not sure how a soul is different from a “mind” or a “personality” if it is not independent in some way from a body. The problem here is that so much of what makes us us is tied to our bodies - our appearance, our chemical infrastructure, how well our neurons fire, our genes.

To expand on the software analogy, consider a program that makes heavy use of APIs. It might look and to a certain extent act differently depending on whether it is running on a Windows, Linux or Solaris box. Is it the same running on a machine with a black and white 11" monitor vs. a color 21" monitor? Is it the same program running on a 100 MHz Pentium vs a 1 GHz MHz Itanic? If it has 32 M of memory vs 1 G?

Of course this is not quite equivalent, since software is written in a language specified by a set of standards, but I think you get the picture.

To get back to the OP, my definition of a soul is supernatural to some extent, and thus it is reasonable for a god to add it to physical beings. Since it appears unmeasurable, and outside the laws of science, I wouldn’t have a problem with a god inserting the soul somewhere during our evolutionary development. I don’t believe in any such thing, but it does not contradict any known science.

16

Well, maybe there aren’t as many people as I thought who understand and accept the details of human evolution I outlined and who also believe in the mainstream Christian concept of the soul (ie, something that needs salvation, that is connected to God in the sense of Jesus having died on the cross for the salvation thereof).

17

If humans had souls then animals must right? Look how closely related to them genetically we are, and in structure…eyes, teeth, hair, brains, hearts, digestive tract, respiratory system, etc.

If all animals had souls then plants should too, they are alive with a sort of respiratory system and can replicate in a variety of ways.

How would only humans have a soul?

Rational…someone came up with that ‘distinction’, same guy mentions vegetables too, lol! Well that answers my question mostly…

But would the religious folk agree?

I don’t think there are souls, once you’re dead you’re dead in MHO, but that’s pretty boring.

But I do feel that if humans have souls, so do animals at least.

18

Well, try this one on for size:

Absent the salvific act of the Atonement, Czarcasm et al. are right – whatever composes a human being dies, dead, kaput, totally, without any survival beyond a possible hysteresis of consciousness consumed with pain and regret, at the moment of bodily death.

Jesus made it possible to “save the program when the computer crashes” – when you say “save a soul” you’re not just playing metaphor but talking literal truth – what would have been eradicated totally gets preserved for future use.

And no, Voyager, my understanding of what a “soul” is does not differ significantly from my understanding of what a “mind” is – and both are, effectively, a program running on the hardware of the human brain and body.

19

Poly:

You lost me on the Czarcasm reference. Must be from another thread that I’m unfamiliar with, although I think I do understand what you are saying about “saving the program”. No offense, but that doesn’t sound like mainstream Christain thinking to me, where “saved” is used to mean “from eternal damnation”, or at least “to be reunited with God in heaven.”

Any thoughts on Neanderthals? If I’m a Christian, can I expect to encounter any of our distant cousins in the afterlife?

20

Ok, this is really getting off topic now.

It’s fine that a being or god would have created things in such a way as to have a religion to worship it. But that’s not the point! The point is that the religions that do exist believe in a god or gods interacting with universe. Is it possile for a being to have created it so there was religion? Yes, but that possibility has nothing to do with the religious beliefs that praying/worshipping to a god or gods will affect their lives or the lives of others. Without that belief, the worship and prayer is pointless since no amount of prayer will change anything. This is why an intervening god is essential to religion.