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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Well, Greg, today we have questions regarding your.
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A
One of your favorite topics, which is smallmouth bass fishing.
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B
Can you imagine if I started asking you questions?
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A
What color stimulated a reaction strike from a smallmouth bass during spawning?
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B
African or European? Sorry, it's a Monty Python reference. Sorry.
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A
I know that had to do with a bird. Okay, got it.
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B
Okay, now that silliness is over. This first question comes from Rolf. Would a human clone have a soul?
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A
The simple answer is yes. And the reason I say that is actually multiple reasons. This depends to some. Well, I guess I got to back up on this. There's no specification in the question made as to how old the human clone or the cloned human being. Maybe that's a better way of putting it. Because sometimes if you say a human clone, what you're saying is it's a clone. That's its main identity. And it just happens to be a human clone, but it's a clone. And then people get. Have odd ideas about that. But you say a cloned human being, then what we have is a human being that came into existence through a process called cloning. And this is what we don't want to lose sight of, that human beings are human beings, no matter what method they came into being by, whether it's the regular way or whether it's a clone way. You know, cloning is just a way of mechanistically accomplishing what happens in a womb. There are some unique aspects of it, and it's been a long time since we engaged this issue. So I can't remember all the terminology, but it's the. I mean, taking an ovum and then placing the DNA for the sperm into that ovum and kind of building a clone that way, it still produces a human being. And human beings are ensouled by nature. There is a dualism to all human beings. There's an immaterial self and a material self. There's a soul and a body. This is standard Christian theology. There are people who identify as Christians and deny that they're physicalists, which strikes me as the oddest thing in the world. I can't understand. And I can think of a couple of Chris Date, for example, who is a conditionalist when it comes to the issue of hell, he's a physicalist. And Nancy Murphy over at Fuller, she's a physicalist, a philosopher there. So in kind of the Christian tradition, it doesn't. I don't know, it makes no sense to me. That's not our topic. But in any event, I'm just Saying he human beings are body and soul, okay? So when a human comes into existence, they have what humans have, which is a body and soul. Now there is a view that, it's called a creationist view of the soul, which says that God creates the soul separately from the process of reproduction and then joins that soul with the human body that is reproductive, just been formed. And then that raises a question, was when does the soul become part of the individual before it does? The individual is just a physical thing, a human, physical thing, but not a human being, because a human being also has the soul. And some say at the moment of conception, some say at the quickening, whatever. And I think this is the Roman Catholic view, the creationist view of the soul. But that just makes no sense sense to me because the question is how does the soul get fallen then? If God's creating the soul, then he can't create a fallen soul. That makes him responsible for the fallenness of the soul. If the soul gets fallen when it joins with the body, that's kind of gnostic because it implies the nasty material stuff fouls up the wonderful spiritual stuff. And that doesn't seem right. And so my view is called traditionism. And it just simply says that means that the whole human being is created by mom and dad. And so at conception, the human being comes into existence and the soul and body exist at the same time. Now certainly the soul has its many capacities that can't be experienced by the individual until the body has developed to such a point where that can be the case. But that's true of a newborn. You know, a newborn can't do math, but they have the soulish capacity for doing that. Once their mind, their brain develops adequately to be able to be used by the mind for that kind of purpose. So yes, a human clone or a cloned human being would have a soul on my view. And I don't know why someone would argue otherwise, to be honest. On the basis of what would they say that? Now of course, if you're a physicalist, then no human has a soul at any stage of development. You just meet all the way down. Which raises the question for all of those Christian physicalists. Well, when you die, you're gone, right? So what do you make of the resurrection? Well, it's a recreation of you, your body, because you don't have a soul and never will you just have a body. Well, how is the recreated body the same body that I had? The same me? I am my body on that view. And when I die, my body goes you know, whatever decays and goes into the earth and goes into plants and whatever, it gets recycled. So what gets resurrected? Well, it's a doppelganger. It's an imitation you. It's a digging for the right words here. It's a, you know, a phone of you. It's a clone. Not a clone even. It's a. I think doppelganger is probably a replica. It's a replication of what you used to be. But then how is it that I go to heaven or hell? Any human being does that on that view. Because what gets resurrected is not me anymore. Because if I'm identified, my identity is with the physical body that I have, and the physical body disappears, then I disappear. And making a replica who's exactly like me is not the same as making me. And by the way, that's not philosophically challenging to understand. Just think about it. You know, that doesn't work, and it's inconsistent with scripture anyway. So the simple answer here to the question that Rolf has asked is yes, a cloned human being, that is a human being that comes into existence as a result of cloning process, would have a soul just like every other human being has.
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B
And it seems to me if you are taking the genetic material from another human being and putting it into an egg so that the DNA will be the same as the other person, well, that's no different than, say, an egg splitting and creating identical twins.
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Right?
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B
So I don't think it's any different. But that's what brings us to our next question, which is from PNW Twin. When identical twins form from a single cell fertilized egg, when does each receive a soul?
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A
Well, following the point that I just made, they would receive the soul when they become individualized human beings. So, I mean, this is speculative, obviously. So we have to start with a foundational theology about this. Whether you're a creationist, first of all, you've got to be a dualist. If you're a physicalist, you're not in this discussion. If you're a dualist, then the human is the body and soul, and the body is obviously coming into existence through the process of physical reproduction. And then the question is, when does the soul become united with the body? Or when is the human body become a body, soul union? And on the tradition view, at fertilization, and on the creationist view, it's hard to tell when God makes that soul and attaches it to the human being. By the way, if you hold to a creationist view and say that at the instant of fertilization where the egg ceases to be an egg and the sperm ceases to be a sperm and they are unified in a new human being, the soul could be joined with the body at that instant. And so the practical ramifications are the same in either view. It becomes more problematic when one holds that on the creationist view, the soul comes in later, because then early abortions would not be the destruction of a genuine human being, but only of a human physical body at the earliest stages of development. So I think that is a concern in this discussion, and it's best to play it safe when you're talking about the destruction of a human being, to adopt the view that is the most conservative, especially since on the creationist view, I don't know how that's grounded, frankly, biblically or philosophically. So it'd be better to take the more conservative view, tradition view, or the creationist view, that when the human being comes into existence, it is a fully ensouled human being, a full human being. Now, this would mean that you would have one human being initially when the sperm and the egg join to create a zygote, and when the zygote hives off to create an identical twin at the moment of that separation, then you have a separate human being. I mean, even considering in a scientific fashion, the first is a human being. It's distinct from mother in a number of ways, but certainly it's inside mom domicile there. But nevertheless a distinct human being. The DNA makes this clear. And when that cell splits, once it splits, now you have two distinct human beings. And therefore, and I don't know, I can't describe the process. Who knows how the soul comes into being and how the human mother and father create a human soul.
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B
Is the soul splitting?
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A
Well, I don't even know it makes sense to call it that because the body's not splitting, it's just reproducing. The body is. I mean, I don't even know if you could call it splitting. It's a unique kind of thing. And I don't think the soul splits because these are unique. What happens is there's a creation of a new unique human being with if it's a full human being, he or she is a full human being, then he or she.
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B
There's never a human being without a soul.
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A
Correct?
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B
Yeah. So it's one thing. So you can't just create a human body. I mean, you couldn't create a human being without a soul.
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A
Correct. Okay, but there's Another line of discussion here that regarding this goes back somewhat to the earlier called, well, cloned have a soul. Is that cloned? Human beings, cloned creatures. The first thing was a lamb, but the lamb clearly had conscious awareness of stuff. It was a sentient being. And sentience is characteristic of souls, not simply matter brain, for example. It's totally different from anything physical. So when you think about it philosophically, all the characteristics of soulish behavior I held are had by those organisms that are cloned, like acts of will and beliefs and thoughts and things like that, sensations, whatever. They're five basic characteristics of the soulish activity. So, yeah, so we have every reason to believe that the human being, whether just one individual or the human that hives off into another human being, in the case of identical twins, they're all full human beings.
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B
Let's go to a question from Ann.
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A
Oh, by the way, I just thought. It just occurred to me, of course, I don't know if these are identical, but we had twins in the case of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Esau. Jacob and Esau, they were twins, right? One grabbing the other's heel and the red yarn and all that. But they weren't identical.
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B
Yeah. It doesn't sound like they were identical.
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A
No.
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Okay, so here's Ann's question. Do anencephalic babies with no cerebrum cerebellums have a soul?
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Yes, because anencephalic children have. They're human beings. So it kind of goes back to the same equation. Even severely deformed or congenitally defected children are still human beings that have these defects. And this is a severe kind of defect. And these children don't last long, but nevertheless, they're still human beings. And keep in mind, these babies respond to stimuli. They experience sensations. The experience of a sensation is a soulish element. So you can get stuck with the pin and the sticking and the neurological response that your body goes through when that happens is physical. The experience of the pain when you get stuck by the pin, that experience, that qualia, so to speak, is something that the soul experiences. The body doesn't experience it because apart from the consciousness of the soul, the body is just a physical thing. You stick any physical thing, merely physical thing, it's not going to experience pain. But when you stick a human being, they have an experience of pain or pleasure or whatever. They have sensations, and sensations are an activity of the soul.
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B
Also. I think the confusion behind this question could be the idea that our brains are our soul or our souls arise from our brains. But I think it's more. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, Greg, this is more of your specialty area. But the brains enable us to enact our soulish qualities. They don't create them.
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Correct.
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B
And they don't reside there in, in the brain.
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Yeah, they don't reside in the brain, that's for sure, because these are non physical elements and non physical things don't exist in a physical space that's characteristic of physical things. So our souls are not in our brains, strictly speaking. They're not in our bodies in a way that a pea is in a pod kind of thing. They are unified with our body in a deep, significant fashion, but they are not the same as our bodies. So I got a little off track there in my thinking. I don't know if I answered the question that you were just asking.
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B
Well, I was just talking about how you mentioned earlier about how newborns have certain capabilities doing math and they can't, they can't use it yet. But I think the same is true for any baby, even if they don't have a brain.
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A
Sure. Well, the, the capacities of the soul are enabled by human development. And if human development can't proceed, those capacities are not realized. But that doesn't change the nature of the soul, the capacities of the soul or the value of the human being just because certain capacities are not realized. If one argues the value of the human being is based on that, then you have human value being extrinsic and instrumental, not intrinsic. If it's just based on what you can do and what you can accomplish, that's instrumental, extrinsic value. And that's not enough to ground the deep value human beings actually have. So you have a child with anencephaly and you can't use them for a third base, you know, just because they don't have a brain stem or whatever. They only have a brain stem, but not a cerebral cortex. So. And this is a very, very important part of the Christian worldview and can be defended philosophically and physically. Lots of people don't realize their full capacities that their souls are capable of engaging in participating in because they have certain limitations. The problem of congenital defect is a big one. But there are other concerns as well. People use drugs, and here's the old commercial with the here's your brain, here's your brain on drugs. And it's the fried egg thing. Well, you could lose your capabilities, obviously, because there's injury to the brain. And so therefore the capability of the cooperation of the brain and the mind is Hampered. JP Morgan used to give, and this is his specialty, the mind, body problem, philosophy of conscious business, et cetera. He said it's kind of like human being in a car. So you have a human being that is locked in a vehicle, and he uses the vehicle to get around and do everything. But if the vehicle is impaired in some way, then it's not going to operate. You're not going to be able to operate it very effectively because the impairment of the vehicle, and in some things, it's not going to be able to be. You're not going to be able to do it at all. And so the analog is the person in the car is like the soul, and the body is like the vehicle. And so our souls run our body, as it were, even though the disanalogy is our body can affect our soulless states and our soul states can affect our body. That's because of the communion or the union between the two. So this analogy only goes so far, but generally speaking, I think this is a great way of looking at it. And you can see how the soul runs the body, but is limited by the body's capabilities in doing what it's naturally capable of doing.
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B
And just because, let's say a baby's born without hands, well, that doesn't mean they're not a human being. So it would be no different for any part of your body that it would remove the image of God from them.
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That's correct.
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Just because, say, you can't play the piano, that doesn't mean you're not a
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human being of the same thing. Right? Right. They wouldn't be able to exercise that capacity to play a piano. But that's because of the physical limitations. So that's actually a good. A good example of what I'm talking about.
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B
So I am going to do one more question, even though we're at TIME right now, because we've touched on a lot of these issues here. So this one comes from Mitch.
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You're the boss.
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B
I just read an article in which scientists were able to decode someone's thoughts solely by analyzing the person's brain activity with an AI model. Does this disprove that the soul is real and that consciousness is an immaterial, private experience?
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A
Well, I would ask the question how. I have a lot of questions about this. Okay. But that part of it depends on exactly what is going on here and all the particular details. All right? And if it succeeds the way it was just described, then all it would teach us is that the. Strictly speaking, given certain Capabilities of science and AI. Your conscious thoughts are not first person private, but that doesn't mean you don't have a soul. The nature of thoughts themselves are propositional. They don't extend in space, they don't have weight, they don't respond to the laws of physics and chemistry. So they're not physical. And they are held in a non physical place. And that is we are the owner of those things. And all it takes is just a reflection on the nature of these things to see that. So one of the arguments for the soul is that the soulish activities are third person private. I'm sorry, first person private. And people can't know this, only we can. And that's not a characteristic of any physical thing, because any physical thing, purely physical thing, is, is third person public. Any person can examine this pen here that I'm holding and have the same access to it that I have to it in principle. Okay, but here's the problem and I want you to think about this story, okay? When I was a kid, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes, and there were subsequent novels. I loved them, I devoured them. But Tarzan could speak English. And the reason he could speak English is because his parents apparently were killed. They had a home in Africa somewhere. I don't know what they were doing. His parents died and he was an infant and the apes raised him. And there were books in the home where he was born. And so he would go back to his home and he would look at the books and the books would allow him to learn English. Now you crinkled your brow when I said that. And now you're chuckling because there's a problem here, right? You can't learn any language by looking at the language and learning it. The only way they were able to crack the Egyptian code is because they had a language they could understand. And there it was side by side with the Egyptian as a translation. And so they could figure out based on this language they could understand. This is the Rosetta stone. Now they crack the cod on hieroglyphics. And once you got a big bunch of it done, then it's easier to get the rest of the letters. Just like when people do these puzzles, you know, they can buy them at the airport and work on them when you're on the airplane and you decode things based on certain patterns. If you get some of the letters in, you can see the rest anyway. Notice though, you have to have a means of decoding it. And if you don't have a means of Decoding it. I don't care how much AI looks at my electrical impulses. They are not going to be able to tell at all what those mean, what thoughts those represent in my mind, unless they have a code. Here's how the code characteristically works. I'm thinking of my daughter right now, Eva or Annabeth. Or I'm thinking about those dumb cats that are running around in our house. There are three of them. Actually, one's not so bad as the boy, but nevertheless, when I say that and I got all these wires hooked to my head, then there is a correlation being made between my thoughts and whatever electrical. Electrical activity is done. And AI can decode or can organize that. And if they get enough, watch this feedback from me about what I'm thinking when these electrical things are going on. Now they got a means of translating, and now they can go back. And even if they do enough of this, they could just strap me up. I don't have to say a thing. They're reading my thing. They're reading the impulses and. Okay, scare quotes. They're reading my mind. No, they're not reading my mind. They are translating from the electrical impulses based on what my mind told them those represent. There is no access to my mind at all in that.
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B
So it's like you wrote a book and they're reading the book, but the information came from your mind. Is that kind of what you're.
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A
No. Well, there's another step. I have to tell them. If I make up my own language. Tolkien did this. He made up his own languages. Right. You're not going to be able to read his thing and know what they say unless he tells you what this letters represent. And so now there's a language of electrical impulses of certain sorts in my brain, and no one's going to be able to translate that into English thoughts unless I give them a means of translation from my mind one way or another. And that is here. I'm thinking about this right now. Now I'm thinking about this. And then they build these correlations between what I say I'm thinking and the things going on.
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B
They're not actually seeing a picture of your cats in your brain.
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A
No. They don't even know what cats are. All they see is an impulse that. Think of it like a language, like Tolkien. Here's these runes that he's writing out, like Elvish runes. He said this set of runes means this. He tells you that. And then every time you see this set of runes, now you know. And so you could tell. You could. You could have AI understand all of that. And then it could start reading the runes as it's able to take the. Just like it does with any text. But they have to know the language first. They can't do like Tarzan did, which he didn't. He couldn't do that. He can't just look at the letters and learn English. This is silly. And I think I realized that even when I was a kid. Wait a minute. This doesn't work.
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B
And look at the. Okay, so you have an immaterial image of the cats in your mind. We know this is immaterial because you can express in different ways. You could draw it and then you could express it that way. You could have the impulses in your brain and express it that way. You could write it out and express it that way. The information is immaterial, but it can be expressed in various physical ways.
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A
It's the difference between a token and a type. The token is the physical thing. Picture of a cat, C A T gato in Spanish or whatever. Meow in Thai. A lot of these animals have names in Thai that sound like the noise they make, you know? So there are lots of tokens, but they're all referring back to the original type. And the type is not physical.
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B
All right, there you go, everyone. Yeah, we got all of those in. Thank you so much. Rolf and PNW twin and Ann and Mitch. We really appreciate hearing from you and we love to hear your question too. You just go to X, use the hashtag strask or go to our website@str.org this is Amy hall and Greg Kochl for stand to reason.