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Science, Faith, and Human Nature: Reconciling Neuropsychology and Christian Theology
Lecture 1. Numinous or Embodied Persons? The Practical Costs of Inner Souls and Selves Warren S. Brown Body-soul dualism has been predominant in Christian thought at least since St. Augustine. However, modern neuroscience makes it difficult to believe that there is any non-embodied part of the human person that has any efficacy with respect to human behavior. This lecture will give a brief overview of the status of dualism in Christian thought, and then consider the practical costs of a commitment to the centrality of the soul (an inner numinous self) in fostering gnosticism, “inner-ness,” individuality, and an instrumental view of community. A Cartesian view of persons (in the form of mind-body dualism) has also had an impact on theories in psychology and on our understanding of the nature of psychological disorders and interventions. Lecture 2. The Knotty Implications of Recent Neuroscience Research Warren S. Brown Recent research has described brain systems involved in human mental activity, inter-personal relatedness, and religiousness. Body-soul (or body-mind) dualism no longer seems to capture what is being learned about human nature in neuropsychology. The Resonance Model will be presented that suggests how to go about resolving issues between neuroscience and Christian faith. An alternative to body-soul dualism, nonreductive physicalism, suggests that humans are physical beings with mental and spiritual capacities that are not reducible to merely the operation of neurons and neurochemistry. Rather than a soul, it is the highly developed relational capacities that endow unique psychological and theological status to humankind. Lecture 3. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Salvaging Neuroscience from Reductionism and Determinism Warren S. Brown Neuroscience is methodologically reductionist. That is, complex human mental processes are shown to result from the activity of various parts of the brain. Consequently, it is often presumed that human thought and behavior can be exhaustively explained by brain processes, and therefore are determined by these processes in a bottom-up manner. However, nonreductive physicalism presumes that we cannot entirely account for human thought and behavior by analysis of lower-level processes. There are emergent mental properties and characteristics of whole persons that affect behavior by exerting top-down influences on lower-level physiology. Thus, thinking, believing, deciding, and relating can be shown to be real and efficacious emergent properties of physical human beings. Consequently, a robust form of free will can be maintained within nonreductive physicalism
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