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Not exactly, says Murphy. And that is one reason why this debate matters. (More on this in a minute.) But there's another reason why the current debate about the soul should be of pressing interest to Christians generally, not only to philosophers and theologians. The larger cultural context of this debate is crucially distinctive.
If, in centuries past, the most influential thinkers took the reality of the soul for granted, the most influential thinkers in our post-Christian society are virtually unanimous in their rejection of any notion of the soul. In widely acclaimed books such as Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (1991) and Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works (1997), one finds an unabashed confidence in the ability of science to provide a purely physical account of the human person. Cognitive science, we are assured, is both the outworking and the ratification of Charles Darwin's view, which he expressed at the end of The Origin of Species, that "[p]sychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." For her part, Nancey Murphy suggests that "neuroscience has in a sense completed the Darwinian revolution, bringing not only the human body but the human mind as well, into the sphere of scientific investigation."
The findings of neuroscience have joined with advances in geology, anthropology, and biology to paint a picture of human nature that is markedly different from that held by educated people even as recently as two hundred years ago. It is the cumulative weight of such evidence that has led Christian thinkers such as the distinguished neuroscientist Malcolm Jeeves to concur with their secular counterparts that the soul as traditionally conceived may very well be redundant.
So is it time to take soul out of our catechisms and sermons, our hymns and praise songs? Not all Christians agree. Historian Allen Guelzo, writing in these pages ["Soulless," January/ February 1998], observed that "while Christians are mostly consumed with opening yet newer rounds in their century-and-a-half-old war with Charles Darwin, they have scarcely the faintest idea that the new consciousness enthusiasm"—that is, the broad consensus represented by secular thinkers such as Dennett, Pinker, and Patricia and Paul Churchland and Christians such as Murphy and Jeeves—"is by far the greater threat to the integrity of Christian belief." The case against dualism, Guelzo suggested, has by no means been definitively made.
Perhaps the most substantial contemporary defense of the traditional understanding of the soul is John Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting (1989). Cooper, professor of philosophical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, carefully considers philosophical arguments for and against dualism, but the core of his book is a detailed consideration of the biblical understanding of the human person, as revealed in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. "The Christian defense of the body-soul distinction," Cooper acknowledges, "has in large part been motivated by the doctrine of the afterlife." More specifically, he writes: "Traditional Christianity has held fast to an ontological distinction between body and soul mainly because it follows from the doctrine of the intermediate state."
In other words, most Christians believe in the existence of the soul because they believe that Scripture teaches the existence of an intermediate state, after death and before Christ's Second Coming, where humans have conscious existence, followed by their reuniting with their glorified physical bodies at the Parousia. If this, as Cooper argues, is what Scripture clearly teaches, how can Christian thinkers like Murphy deny the existence of an immaterial soul?
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