The Human Soul and Neuroscience: Is Belief in the Soul Obsolete? | Prof. Marie George

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2022

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at University of Alabama, Birmingham on November 1, 2021. For more events and info visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1. Marie George has been a member of the Philosophy Department since 1988. Professor George is an Aristotelian-Thomist whose interests lie primarily in the areas of philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. She has received several awards from the John Templeton foundation for her work in science and religion, and in 2007 she received a grant from the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) for an interdisciplinary project entitled: “The Evolution of Sympathy and Morality.” Professor George has authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles and two books: Christianity and Extraterrestrials? A Catholic Perspective (2005) and Stewardship of Creation (2009). She is currently working on Aquinas’s “Fifth Way,” and also on a variety of questions concerning living things (self-motion, consciousness, evolution, etc.). Professor George is a member of ten philosophical societies, including the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.1	The branches of neuroscience that have the most direct bearing on whether humans have a soul
0:15.9	are those concerned with understanding the brain and its relationship to cognition and emotion.
0:22.6	In order to understand what the human soul is, the domestic tradition maintains that one must
0:27.3	first talk about what the soul in general is, and then what's distinctive about the human soul,
0:32.1	namely that it's the cause of the life activities of thinking abstractly and making free choices.
0:43.2	Many of those who think that the findings of neuroscience challenge the notion that humans have souls do not make these considerations. For example, they often conflate soul with mind.
0:49.5	Since what these people propose in many cases has more immediate bearing on the faculties of the human soul, the intellect, and the free will, than on the soul itself.
0:59.0	I'll begin by looking at these faculties, and then towards the end I'll talk about the soul.
1:04.0	In regard to the intellect, some claim that neuroscience shows that their thoughts have physical causes,
1:10.0	and so they maintain that scientists are able to, quote unquote, read people's minds
1:14.6	by identifying the physical causes in question.
1:18.6	As for free will, certain experiments done by neuroscientists appear to show
1:22.6	that our choices are determined by our brains and that free will is an illusion.
1:32.3	I'll elaborate further on these claims, but I'm going to begin by explaining why the to mystic tradition maintains that the intellect is immaterial, from which it would follow
1:38.6	that neuroscience can say nothing about the intellect as such.
1:43.4	Now, if there's any number of different meanings of the word
1:46.5	intelligent, an animal that can learn is in some sense intelligent, but the word intellect generally
1:53.7	names a very specific form of intelligence, one that is different from the sensory knowledge
1:59.0	that makes animals capable of learning.
2:01.6	How exactly does intellectual knowledge differ from sense knowledge?
	...

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