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J.P. rejoins the podcast! In this episode, he shares good news about his health and reflects on why he was eager to write the Foreword to Have We Lost Our Minds?: Neuroscience, Neurotheology, the Soul, and Human Flourishing.
We discuss:
- J.P.’s health journey over the last few months
- How Christians have contributed to the secularization of culture
- The importance of the conversation about what it means to be human
- Why the arguments in Stan’s book have personal meaning for J.P.
- The importance of responsible scholarship, especially as Christians
- The crucial difference between acknowledging a “soul” and acknowledging a “substantial soul”
Resources and Citations:
- Find out more about Have We Lost Our Minds?
- Get the introduction to the book for free on the Global Scholars website.
- A printable group discussion guide can be found here.
- Brandon Rickabaugh and J.P. Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism.
- Stan Wallace, “Continuing the Conversation: Clarifying the Central Ideas of Have We Lost Our Minds?”
- The Lausanne Movement’sThe Seoul Statement, Preamble to Section IV: “The Human Person: The Image of God Created and Restored”
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[…] this episode of the Thinking Christianly podcast, J.P. rejoins the podcast! He shares good news about his health […]
You say the soul emerges out of the brain – I take that to mean out of what is physical. My question has to do with DNA – is that physical or material or is it like numbers, which are not physical? If God breathed humankind into existence, couldn’t the soul have been breathed into existence before anything material or physical existed from which the soul emerged?
Dick, thanks for your note. Actually, my point is that the soul does NOT emerge out of the brain. I’m critiquing those who say it does (non-reductive physicalists). As to DNA, it is not essentially material, because all the material components can be replaced and it be the same DNA. Rather, it is fundamentally immaterial (specifically, a set of relations). To your last line, absolutely! In fact, on my view, God created human souls with the ability to create bodies. My book goes into this in further detail.