John Polkinghorne on our eschatological hope

...My understanding of our nature is not framed in the dualist terms of an incarnated soul. The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of survival after death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather, the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new environment of his choosing. That will be his eschatological act of resurrection. Thus, death is a real end but not the final end, for only God himself is ultimate. Although there have, of course, been strands of he Christian tradition which have used the language of the survival of an immortal soul, I believe that the tradition which is truer, both to the New Testament insight and to modern understanding, is that which relies on the hope of a resurrection beyond death.

If this psychosomatic understanding is correct, then it is intrinsic to true humanity that we should be embodied. We are not apprentice angels, awaiting to be disencumbered of our fleshly habitation. Our hope is of the resurrection of the body. By that I do not mean the resuscitation of our present structure, the quaint medieval notion of the reassembling of bones and dust. In a very crude and inadequate analogy, the softward running on our present hardware will be transferred to the hardware of the world to come. And where will that eschatological hardware come from? Surely the 'matter' of the world to come must be the transformed matter of this world. God will no more abandon the universe than he will abandon us. Hence the importance to theology of the empty tomb, with its message that the Lord's risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning within history of a process whose fulfillment lies beyond history, in which the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the universe are together to find their fulfillment in a liberation from decay and futility (cf. Rom. 8:180-5).

--John Polkinghorne, Science and Christian Belief, pp. 163-164

The soul as the emergent property of a moral nature

I have for some time been attracted to the view that understands the soul is an "emergent reality," as I think it holds great potential for fruitful dialogue, if not cooperative therapeutic interaction, between the theological and psychological disciplines. Representative theologians such as John Polkinghorne (also a noted scientist) and Keith Ward have been on the forefront of this relatively new understanding of the human soul.

In brief, this view was inspired by philosophical, psychological and medical speculations on the "mind-body" problem, and suggested by new paradigms in physics, specifically the school of thought known as "non-reductionistic materialism." The mind-body problem is actually an old philosophical conundrum pertaining to how the mind is related to and interacts with the body, and what properties, functions, and phenomena should be regarded as, respectively, mental or physical. In physics, "emergent properties" are those that characterize complex systems that, while arising out of the properties and relations that characterize a system's simpler constituents, are neither predictable from, nor reducible to, these lower level constituents or properties. For example, the property of flight (as it pertains to a bird) cannot be predicted from, nor can it be reduced to, the sum total of characteristics, properties, or elements that make up the construction and material nature of a bird's wing.

How the theory of emergent properties pertains to the origin and nature of the human soul is the proposal that the soul emerges (by the design of God, of course) as the unique personal individuation, intelligence, and self-consciousness of a moral (in our case human) nature. Furthermore, as an emergent reality or property of our physical nature and design the soul cannot be predicted from, nor can it be reduced to, the sum total characteristics, properties, or elements that make up our physical existence.

But wait! Wouldn't this still mean that the soul emerges from our physical nature nonetheless? ("That's not what I learned in Sunday School!" I can hear you say.) Yes, indeed, it does mean this. And yes there are incredible theological ramifications that follow from such a proposal. I intend to explore some of these with you in future entries.

So....until next time.