Abstract
Catholic theology’s traditional understanding of the spiritual nature of the human person begins with the idea of a rational soul and human mind that is made manifest in free will—the spiritual experience of the act of consciousness and cause of all human arts. The rationale for this religion-based idea of personhood is key to understanding ethical dilemmas posed by modern research that applies a more empirical methodology in its interpretations about the cause of human consciousness. Applications of these beliefs about the body/soul composite to the theory of evolution and to discoveries in neuroscience, paleoanthropology, as well as to recent animal intelligence studies, can be interpreted from this religious and philosophical perspective, which argues for the human soul as the unifying cause of the person’s unique abilities. Free will and consciousness are at the nexus of the mutual influence of body and soul upon one another in the traditional Catholic view, that argues for a spiritual dimension to personality that is on a par with the physical metabolic processes at play. Therapies that affect consciousness are ethically problematic, because of their implications for free will and human dignity. Studies of resilience, as an example, argue for the greater, albeit limited, role of the soul’s conscious choices in healing as opposed to metabolic or physical changes to the brain alone.
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Notes
It is beyond the scope of this position paper to take up the epistemological questions that separate science and religion or philosophy. A classic work on the Catholic philosophical tradition on epistemology is Jacques Maritain’s The Degrees of Knowledge (1932). For a survey of Catholic scholarship on the religions-science dialogue see the work of Phillip Thompson (2009).
Bernard Lewis argues that this positive relationship between faith and reason explains why the Christian nations of the west developed universities and science while the Muslim nations were left behind in the Middle Ages, because they allowed no such mixing of faith and reason (Lewis 2003).
The most elaborated thinking on the soul and its faculties in Catholic Theology comes from Thomas Aquinas. He is recognized officially by the Church as the great synthesizer and holds a unique authority. See Marie I. George (George 2011) for an analysis of Ape intelligence studies from this perspective.
For more on the classic philosophy of knowing and the soul in the Catholic Tradition see Edward Feser's Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (2010) chapter 4.
The tradition varies over when exactly the eternal human soul is created. For Thomas Aquinas this was not until quickening, that is, when the child could be felt moving in the womb. Today, life begins at conception in official Catholic dogma. For more on this question see the article “The Human Embryo as Person in Catholic Teaching” by Norman Ford (2001).
There is some agreement among neuroscientists that the decision making model called free will “applies at the cognitive or systems level, not at the neural or implementation level.” This is especially true in goal setting and the ability to estimate outcomes of actions in advance (Dehaene 2001).
The Catholic acceptance of various theories of evolution that John Paul II indicated with much media attention in 1996 was not new. In a statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope said, “the theory is more than just a hypothesis” and that evolution is compatible with Christian faith. The 2004 International Theological Commission statement, Communion and Stewardship (published on the Vatican’s website), elaborates that Catholicism holds the view of evolution that reconciles God as the ultimate and subtle cause of species evolution, with their own naturally given contingent causality that is expressed in the process of evolution (i.e. God gives a measure of causality to created things). It states (par. 56) “God’s action does not displace or supplant the activity of creaturely causes, but enables them to act according to their natures and, nonetheless, to bring about the ends he intends” International Theological Commission (2004). God intervenes during this evolutionary process in a special way when the living being able to receive a human rational soul becomes a human person. In 2005 along with physicist Lawrence M. Krauss and biologist Francisco Ayala, Catholic cell biologist Kenneth Miller published an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI in which they expressed their concern regarding Cardinal Christophe Schönborn’s apparent condemnation of “neo-darwinism,” and asserted that “claiming that evolution definitely implies a lack of divinity, and/or divine purpose in nature is as much an affront to science as it is to the Church” (Krauss et al. 2005). http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/; See too, Cardinal Christophe Schönborn (2007). For criticism and Schönborn's response see First Things, April 2006 issue available online at: (http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/defining-davidson-down-31) (Accessed July 2012).
The definition of the soul for Catholic theology and philosophy is taken from Aristotle’s De Anima bk 1 (2010). This is divided into vegetative, animal and rational souls each with its own faculties in a hierarchy of life forms. Death occurs when the body is damaged or impaired in some lethal way and no longer apt to receive a soul in all three forms of life. Living things defy the physical law of entropy because they grow, heal, reproduce and change materials into their own substance. They react and adapt to their environment and evolve.
There remains room within this theory for grades of distinction, since one might ask, if living cells taken from one body are given to another, as for example blood, does this result in a coming of souls? One answer to that problem may be that cellular life is derived from that human rational soul at a lesser (either animal or vegetative) level of soul, rather than the rational soul that produces the self-conscious and free person. Human cells are not persons, but are the living product of the soul with something of the soul’s principle of life in them.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to elaborate the metaphysical theory of causality undergirding this statement, which extends over many centuries of thought going back to Aristotle’s argument of the impossibility of an infinite regression and thus the existence of a first cause. A contemporary summary can be found in W. Norris Clarke's, The One and the Many, A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (2001).
Numerous histories of metaphysics can be found that trace this downfall. A recent bestseller is Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 by Israel (2006).
For a summary of the historical rejection of body-mind-soul hylomorphism that begins with Descartes and modern science see Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited by Brown et al. (1998), as well as, Alone in The World? by Wenzel Van Huyssteen (2006).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Michael Kalichman, director of the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology at University of California San Diego, for initiating this interdisciplinary collaboration and for his assistance with this paper.
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McGoldrick, T.A. The Spirituality of Human Consciousness: A Catholic Evaluation of Some Current Neuro-Scientific Interpretations. Sci Eng Ethics 18, 483–501 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9387-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9387-2