The Discussion

The following discussion took place on the evening of the lecture, after dinner in St Edmund's College.

Second, I looked at one or two examples where it seemed to me that those of us who are Christians may have been too negative, appearing too defensive about what the psychologists might find. I think that Christians should be more open and welcoming to the challenges to re-think the basis for their beliefs, to welcome any insights psychologists can give and to take to heart any timely reminders that they provide. I suggested that an example of such insights from within social psychology are the differences between intrinsic beliefs and extrinsic beliefs, or between committed and consensual beliefs. Another area that is important is the understanding of the relation between faith and action. We can be thankful that psychologists have reminded us of these issues and that there is more to be learned. Those were issues which have arisen in the past. I also suggested that today we are in a different situation where a specific traditional belief, indeed a central Christian belief about the nature of the human person, is being called for re-examination in the light of the steadily accumulating evidence of the relation between mental life and our biological substrate. I chose to concentrate in my lecture on the neural substrate. I feel fairly strongly about this, because one of the things that has saddened me in the recent past has been the accentuation of divisions in the Christian church that have occurred over evolution. I think it is a sad saga. My worry is that, if we are not careful, similar divisions could develop among Christians about what they believe about the soul.

The third point I made was that I think that the fact that spirituality is embodied, that it doesn't stand apart from the rest of us, gives an opportunity for Christians to behave with more compassion and understanding towards those who are going through what in the old days we used to call the "dark night of the soul". Just as a footnote, I would say there is another whole area in evolutionary psychology that could be developed now. By evolutionary psychology I mean results from detailed study of the non-human primates. This raises afresh the whole question of what is it that makes us uniquely human. Many of the things that we observe in Homo sapiens we can also observe in the non-human primates. We have to ask ourselves what is it that makes us uniquely human: personally I would want to develop an answer in terms of our capacity for relationships, with God in covenant, with others and with the rest of creation.

Jim Sweeney: Striving to understand the human person and overcome the body-soul dualism is important. The religious picture has been painted in dualistic terms, but the notion of a 'substantial soul' distinct from 'body' doesn't actually sit very comfortably with the biblical view of the unity of the person, nor with Aristotlean/Thomistic philosophical categories either. Yet, the problem is death, and what becomes of the person then? You (M.J.) solve the problem by appealing to resurrection. As I understand you, the individual survives death not because there's an intrinsic element – the soul – which is untouched by death, but by virtue of the action of God who raises the person to new life. I have some difficulty with that. It seems to be appealing to something completely outside the created order to solve a problem of the created order – ie, the problem posed by death. But that just shifts dualism on a stage – to a dualistic universe rather than a dualism of the human person. I think there's a danger of making too sharp a distinction between the natural or created order and the order of Redemption.

I'd agree that we are souls rather than we have souls, which is a philosophical position – an anthropology really – and it has the implication of our 'being open' or 'marked by transcendence', and this as something inscribed in our very nature as human persons; that is to say, we have an inbuilt need for our leaning towards what 'lies beyond' our present boundaried existence. Anyway, I'd want to defend the position that there's something intrinsic to the human person (popularly called 'the soul') which gives the person this special 'character' and is at least a basis of immortality.

Malcolm Jeeves: Had I had time I would have wanted to explore, as I have done elsewhere in writing [for example, Human Nature at the Millennium, (Baker, Apollos 1997), Science, Life and Christian Belief with Sam Berry (Baker, Apollos 1998) and Whatever Happened to the Soul? Ed. Brown, Murphy, Maloney (Fortress 1999)], the whole idea of what I call soulishness. What do we mean when we talk about the "soul"? I would want to define it in terms of the capacity for relationships, beginning right back in Genesis when God walked with Adam in the cool of the evening. Humans have a capacity for relatedness to God, for relatedness to one another, and for relatedness to the rest of creation. It is this capacity to enter into a covenant relationship with God which is one of the important themes through scripture and therefore I think of soulishness in these terms. Concerning the question of death, I am struck by the frequency the picture of death as sleep is used by our Lord himself and elsewhere in the scripture. Over and over again we get this picture, that with physical death we go to sleep and we wake up again on resurrection morning. I find little support for an intermediate state or that we are going to be floating around as disembodied souls. The terms used in scripture are "spiritual body", "glorified body" - embodiment is the theme in scripture.

More specifically you have a concern that I am appealing to something outside the created order to solve a problem of the created order. I begin from the Christian belief that "God upholds all things at all times by the Word of His power". It is this same divine upholding, moment by moment, which gives us grounds for confidence that we shall be raised to new life. The 'new creation' is as much upheld as the present creation. To put it in a slightly different way, I believe, as a Christian, that it is only by God's grace that I came into existence, it is by His grace that I continue in existence, moment by moment, and it will only be by God's grace that I shall continue to exist after physical death. Everything depends on the gospel of grace.

Fraser Watts: The nature of the body is a mystery - as you say it's a spiritual body and that's very much a transformed body. There is a line going around at the moment that there is a sort of consonance between neuroscience that is in its way emphasising the physicality of the human being and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body that also in a different way emphasises it. But it seems to me that there are a huge number of differences in assumptions between those points of view and they are not as easily run together as some people want to.

Malcolm Jeeves: I think I would agree with that. There is a great temptation for us to try to infer that the authors of the various books in the Bible were aware of these discussions of dualism and monism and physicalism and so on, so easy for us to read these philosophical viewpoints back into scriptural writings. It seems to me that the evidence over three decades now does point increasingly to the unity of the human person.

Brian Heap: It's interesting how the area you have been talking about, the brain and the mind, has started to bridge the gap that previously we've seen in terms of 'two cultures' – arts and humanities on the one side and science on the other. I suppose it has been the artists, the people in the humanities and the theologians who in the past have expanded the ideas that you were talking about tonight, but that suddenly we are finding that the neuroscientists are beginning to encroach on their areas much more strongly than before. I suppose the earlier discussions have been on the theory of the mind and our understanding of the soul, but now the neuroscientists are starting to have the tools that allow us to address some of these same questions.

I was interested in this in connection with the current debate over the status of the human embryo. There is a view that the human embryo up until day 14 does not have any neural elements and therefore in the UK we developed legislation which was argued strongly, both for and against in 1990, which allows for experimental work to be done on the human embryo up until day 14. The argument for this is that day 14 is the time after which division into two individuals does not occur, whereas up until that time there could be two individuals leading to identical twins. It struck me that the point Malcolm Jeeves was making about the extent to which there is interaction between the mind and the neural substrate is quite helpful in this question of the status of the human embryo.

Experimentation on embryos in the first 14 days would be unacceptable to some who believe that personal individuality and genetic individuality start from the moment of fertilisation, but there is an alternative viewpoint which draws attention to the idea that genetic individuality occurs at fertilisation but personal individuality does not occur until somewhat later, which would be the time of the development in development biological terms of the neural substrate.

Robert White: My view is that it is dangerous and unwise to use such a sophisticated determination of the time at which an embryo becomes an individual person as that involved in the development of the neural substrate in an embryo. Quite apart from anything else it has only recently become technologically possible to determine this. But more importantly, there is no doubt that our scientific understanding tomorrow will be different from today, and it is certainly different from what it was yesterday. If we are forced to define a moment in time when a human life starts, then we should use some very obvious and unambiguous point like the time of fertilisation. If you were to ask the proverbial man in the street about when neural cells start to differentiate in the embryo, then they wouldn't have a clue; but if you were to ask them when a baby is made, they would certainly have an answer.

Jim Sweeney: That's the traditional Catholic view.

Malcolm Jeeves: But you have got to make a distinction here – you say "human" being. Right from the word go it's human. It's when the person emerges that we are asking about.

Robert White: Perhaps you can amplify the difference between a human and a person.

Malcolm Jeeves: Well, the material is human.

Robert White: So is someone who is in a persistent vegetative state a human or a person, or (as I would contend) both?

Malcolm Jeeves: Let's deal with the other end of life first, where we're starting from. The naturally aborted foetus is a human foetus, but is it a human person? There is a continuing lively debate about when it is appropriate to label human cellular material as a person.

The late Professor Donald Mackay raised the question of whether the foetus from the moment of conception has the status of a person, adding the further question, if not, then at what stages must the rights of a person be recognised. These, I am sure we would agree, are deep issues. It is in this sense that I said that of course, the foetus is human, it is alive and its growth is a divine work. That, however, leaves unanswered the question of whether at an early enough stage in foetal development there is anyone there to whom normal obligations are owed or who can meaningfully be said to "have rights" as a person – a centre of personal experience and personal agency. Because there is complete continuity in biological development does not rule out a decisive moment (or stage) before which there is nobody there and after which there is a 'she' or 'he' there. The logical fallacy, as Donald Mackay pointed out, is to deny that because there is continuity there is therefore no difference between the ends of the continuum. The same would apply to dying. A person is an entity belonging to a different category from nerve cells.

As Donald Mackay also pointed out, there is no knock down argument that a foetus aborted before a few days or weeks is not and never was a person any more than we can prove conclusively that trees are not inhabited by spirits. These are not matters of proof but of commitment.

Jim Sweeney: But if you push that argument to a conclusion you still have difficulties. If you say there's not a person at day 10 but there is one at day 16 – then at that stage the problem of heaven and 'finding all these persons you never knew' still arises. I mean, what's the difference in terms of that kind of problem between a naturally occurring abortion on day 10 as against one on day 16? Is one a person 'fit for heaven' and the other not? Maybe it doesn't make sense to talk about heaven this way.

Brian Heap: That's when this question arises about the extent to which you require the neural substrate in order to get the interaction that points to individuality. If there isn't a neural substrate present, could you identify the group of undifferentiated cells as a person? Many developmental biologists would say that there is a defining moment when the neural cells evolve which makes the difference. And if you look at it from the other side, you gave examples of the way in which, in Alzheimer's disease, there is a gradual deterioration in the neural substrate. You commented that none of us is immune from some form of neural deterioration and in that sense it can be extremely distressing to see people who have hitherto had religious faith or belief who may then go through this terrible period of spiritual distress. You drew attention to the fact that there seemed to be a linkage between spirituality or spiritual appreciation and the neural substrate itself. So what about those of you who work at the sharp edge and on the practical side, dealing with counselling people who have distressing experiences and symptoms.

Fiona Blake: Initially I was anxious that a focus on the physical responses of particular parts of the brain and the biological element of its study was going to lead towards more reductionist perspectives. I see this happening frequently within psychiatry, so it is very refreshing and for me a novel perspective to see these scientific studies as actually unifying. They bring a holistic perspective that the body and mind are integral and that therefore spirituality is also integral to the person. I find it particularly helpful that if somebody has a disordered experience, whether it be found to be biological in terms of neurotransmitters or defective temporal lobe, or whatever, they are still valuable as human beings. In dealing with people with distorted experiences, I consider their mental disturbances as illness. In doing so I am supposing that they actually have an integrity that they can aspire to, and that they are valuable individuals despite their illness. I find it helpful to think of their totality and their preciousness and meaningfulness as a whole. I have seen the development of understanding of schizophrenia and depression and various mental disorders as being reductionist, with the more we find about brain imaging differences between normal and abnormal and the different reaction of different neurotransmitters as taking away from their essential humanity.

Malcolm Jeeves: It is certainly true that there is an understandable trend in recent years for more brain scans to appear in psychiatric journals. There is a similar understandable increase in references to serotonin levels, biochemistry, and such like. They are often balanced by references to cognitive therapy and the like. However, I can see the force of your point that often we don't talk much about people. It's actually people who are sick.

Hill Gaston: Is it useful or valid in thinking about the question of Alzheimer's as it might affect someone's spirituality to draw an analogy with the "locked in" syndrome where someone's neurological substrate does not allow them to communicate in any of the normal ways that we would expect and yet the person has some capacity for thinking and feeling things? Is there a sense in which the neurological substrate in Alzheimer's does not allow the expression of spirituality as we would normally recognise it, and perhaps even as the person might consciously recognise it, and yet spirituality might still be a real aspect of the whole person?

Malcolm Jeeves: You mean they're still in there but they can't get out?

Hill Gaston: Yes. But does this reasoning bring in a vague soul, allegedly residing in the individual, even though there is no evidence for it?

Malcolm Jeeves: If you push me, I have to say it does. You raise an important point which I would like to pick up; one of the aspects of human uniqueness, the degree to which you find it in humans, is the capacity for relatedness to others, and to a covenant God. The most important commandment is "to love the Lord your God" and to love others, and in this way we enter in to relationships. But there is a syndrome known as Capgras Syndrome in which the individuals, whilst they can visually identify the members of their family, feel no relationship with them at all – they don't show any love to them, they can't show love to them, they can't empathise, they seemingly can't enter into relationships. These sort of people illustrate what goes wrong when you cannot enter into personal relationships. There is a need to think through more carefully what it is that is essential about humanness, what are some of the defining characteristics, because I suspect that some of the ones we have used in the past are really rather peripheral. I don't think it's having a soul that marks out humans as different from animals, I think it is more profound, to do with the capacity for loving relationships.

Hill Gaston: So, the Capgras Syndrome people fail the relationship test, but you would still regard them as human?

Malcolm Jeeves: Absolutely - they form some relationships, but they are not able to form normal relationships. They are an example of what happens when the normal capacity to form relationships is not working properly. [This underlines the danger of reductionism, since we are talking about people who enter into relationships and with all our technology, we mustn't forget about that.]

Mark Phippen: Within the Bible, there are references to people, to human beings, as having "a body, a soul and a spirit". There's a distinction sometimes drawn between soul and spirit and in some Christian circles, soul is regarded as not what we've been talking about, but as emotion, mind, will, that sort of concept which is much more in the realms of psychology, not that part which is supposedly immortal. So what is it that makes us human? I'm not sure that it is soul, or necessarily mind: it may be spirit. I want to make another point, again in relation to what it is that marks us out as human – I work as a counsellor and I'm very struck with the degree to which people talking to me need to find meaning in their experience, and often that comes across in what we might call spiritual with a small 's' terms. In simple levels many people think of it as punishment from God for all the things that have happened; but it can be much more sophisticated. But we need meaning to make sense of our lives – I'm not sure whether we find that elsewhere than in religion.

Malcolm Jeeves: The word 'soul' and the various translations that are rendered 'soul' are not uniform throughout Scripture. There is a whole variety of ways in which the word is used and it's used at different times in different contexts. In the bible there is a theme running through, primarily from the Hebrew tradition, that it is the whole person that is meant by soul. This is distinct from the Greek tradition which was, at times, a dualist position, so that Socrates could take the poison because he believed he had an immortal soul which was going to go on anyway after he died. The biblical view emphasises the dependence upon God throughout. Of course the word 'soul' is used in a variety of ways but I believe that, certainly in the New Testament, it refers essentially to a person. "My soul doth magnify the Lord", means "I magnify the Lord". In a recent bible translation such as the New International Version, what was previously translated as soul is now translated as me, myself, I, in totality, not this bit of me doing this, or this part of me doing that.

Denis Alexander: My comment and question is going to move us away from the soul. I wanted to pick up some of the concerns about reductionism and also comment on the interpretation of the kind of brain scan data that you mentioned in your lecture. For example, you showed scanning data of the brains of murderers and suggested that there are differences from the brains of non-murderer controls. It seems to me that these kind of correlative data are invariably ambiguous.

We accept that every mental subjective thought has a physical correlate in the brain. But normal notions of cause-effect relationships break down when we think about the relationship between subjective mental experiences and physical correlates in the brain representing those experiences. This is illustrated by the apparently simple question we can ask of a computer as it works out a mathematical problem: "Is it the case that the electrical functioning of the computer chips is causing the mathematical problem to be solved, or is it the case that the mathematical problem is causing the flashing of electrical currents through the chips?"

The answer is of course ambiguous – in a sense the answer is 'both'. The answer is equally ambiguous when we ask about the murderer's brain: "Is it different from other brains as a result of his harbouring murderous thoughts and practising murderous behaviours over a period of many years? Or is it different in the causal sense that here there is a brain pathology which might act as an explanatory cause of his murderous behaviour?". It seems to me that the kind of correlative results you showed can never, in principle, tell us the answer to that question. Can you comment on this conundrum?

Malcolm Jeeves: I agree, of course, that correlation does not demonstrate causality. I also agree that to do full justice to the events occurring as the computer solves the mathematical equation both accounts are necessary and both are correct within their domain. On your more specific question I can perhaps best respond by asking a further question. I told you the story of Phineas Gage and his radical change in moral, ethical and social behaviour after his accident. I mentioned the more recent reports by Tony and Hannah Damasio studying two people who received damage early in life to brain areas similar to those damaged in Gage's accident and who in their late teens manifested similar behaviour problems to Gage. My question is, do you think that these case studies indicate that in some instances the direction of causality is clear? I think they do.

The other point I flagged up at the end, and this is relevant to your question, is that most of the evidence I put up was from a "bottom-up" approach – you look at what's happened when the brain has gone wrong, either if you've done it experimentally if you're using animals, or with accidental damage with humans, and you look at the changes in mental life and behaviour that follows. What I called "top down" research is harder to do. By this I mean studies of the effects on the brain of what we habitually think and do. That is the other side of the coin, and if the brain is as malleable as it would appear, then we have really hardly begun to take that seriously.

Relevant to your point is the study of Alzheimer's patients I mentioned which was reported by Bonainto and his colleagues in Neuroepidemiology, 14, 1995, pp. 101-9 and in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 20, 1995, pp. 105-13. I believe it has now been replicated in several countries and the same result is coming out in each place. So what is happening? Answer, we don't know. What it seems to me to suggest again is that the top-down effect of what you do with the neural substrate seems to be having some very long-term effects.

Michael Harris: So far as I am aware, the Bible tells us that we are created in the image of God, however we interpret that. God is seen as a being in relationship, Jesus, with the Father, with the Holy Spirit. In that sense we are created to relate not just with God but with each other as in the first two commandments. Might this not provide a solution to the Capgras patients who, as you discussed, might just be locked in. They are still created within the image of God and that is what defines them as unique from the rest of the animals in the created order.

Malcolm Jeeves: What defines continuing respect and love of others is what I called the "Jesus narratives". It is not because people have got a soul, but because He loved people from all these different groups of society, that is the motivation for us to follow in the steps of the Master. The motive of the Jesus narratives is the essential thing to me.

The participants:

Fiona Blake is a consultant psychiatrist at Addenbrooke's Hospital Cambridge, working in general adult psychiatry with special responsibility for the homeless mentally ill.

Hill Gaston is Professor of Rheumatology at the University of Cambridge.

Mike Harris was born and raised in South Africa, completed a BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Birmingham and is currently a medical student at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge.

Brian Heap is Master of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge and Vice-President and Foreign Secretary of The Royal Society, the UK's Academy of Science. He is an endocrine physiologist.

Mark Phippen is Head of the Cambridge University Counselling Service and an active member of a local church.

James Sweeney is Senior Research Fellow at the Von Hugel Institute in St. Edmund's College, Cambridge, researching social exclusion issues and the Churches, and is a Roman Catholic priest.

Fraser Watts, a former research psychologist, is now Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences in the University of Cambridge, and works on the interface of theology and psychology.

Robert White is Professor of Geophysics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. Edmund's College, Cambridge.