Like Dennet I do not believe in God but, unlike him, I am a firm believer in the mind-body distinction. As part of my therapy to get me rid of my strange philosophical views I wanted to find a contrasting stance. And I found one, a materialist who believes in God. Here she comes.
There is a podcast Philosophy Talk from California hosted by Ken Taylor and John Perry. In the instalment Faith, Reason and Science August 2, 2009 they invited a modern-day theologian Nancy Murphy, the author of Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will argued that religion and science sometimes conflicted — but this conflict did not necessarily work to the detriment of either. For example, modern science put a question mark over the traditional Christian dualist notion that the body and soul are two distinct entities. In this case, Murphy contended that what had been interpreted as a religious and scientific conflict need not be one, because some modern Christians are backing away from dualist readings of the New Testament as better translations became available.
Here is a rough transcript of the relevant fragments of the conversation.
John Perry
Does not Christianity tell us that we are rational because we have an immortal soul that is immaterial and has nothing to do with neurons, except maybe some correlation? How does one reconcile those [science and Christian dualism]? (...)
Ken Taylor
The science is right and the dualism of Christianity is wrong?
Nancy Murphy
I agree. Beginning at least a hundred years ago biblical scholars and critical church historians starting asking the question whether the body-soul dualism was part of the original Jewish and Christian teaching. And there’s almost a hundred percent consensus right now that the Hebrew scriptures are not dualistic. It’s based on bad translations. There are still some conflicts among conservative Christians as to whether the New Testament requires Christians to be dualists, but my own view is that it does not, those authors were simply not interested in that question. So this is a vast oversimplification, but as Christianity was spreading in the Mediterranean region with all those philosophical systems, most of which were dualistic, Christianity picked up dualism as it went along. It has been unnecessary baggage ever since.
John Perry
Unnecessary baggage, it sounds very good, but you are talking about St. Augustine, about the whole Middle Ages, about the understanding what Christ was all about, that has shaped millennia of Christianity, you are going to reject all of that.
Nancy Murphy
Yeah, they are wrong.
Ken Taylor
Maybe its not in the Bible, but the Catholic Church says that the revelation is given in the Bible plus tradition. The Bible needs lots and lots interpreting.
Nancy Murphy
I used to be Catholic myself, but I’ve since switched to more primitive Baptist sort of religion, which puts much more stock in trying to get clear on what the New Testament was teaching. and if we find a discrepancy between the New Testament Teaching and later Church pronouncement, the New Testament will win out.
[There is a] promise of a future life, but not promise of an immortal soul - promise of resurrected bodies, which is quite a different idea.
John Perry
How do you see resurrected bodies philosophically, what happens at resurrection.
Nancey Murphy
Remember that it was biblical critics a hundred years before all those developments in neuroscience who said that the original Christian Hebrew texts did not teach body-soul dualism. Its not that Christians are backing away from dualism, because of science, we backed away from dualism because of the better reading of our own faith. Now, when you get to resurrection, this an area when science will not be able to tell us anything, because what we are talking about is a transformed creation that is so radically transformed that the science which describes it is no longer going to apply and all we know about resurrection comes from various and conflicting pictures what Jesus was like after his resurrection. (..) There is no literal way to describe what a resurrected person is going to be like.
(end of transcript).
What can a non-Christian dualist say to this, without considering all the metaphysical ramifications.
1) Apparently dualism is such a compromised notion that even religion is backing away from it. Dualism is so stupid that originally it was not part of the revealed truth. It was implanted there due to bad philosophy of Greek rather than Hebrew origin. Dualism is lousy.
but there is a another interpretation
2) Dualism has nothing to do with religion, contrary to what people think. Right or wrong, it must defended and argued for in its own terms. So non-religious dualism is a justified stance, which can be legitimately espoused by an independent mind.
Guess which of the two positions I like more.
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