So are you saying we shouldn’t be held responsible by God because our actions are pre-determined, but it’s OK to be held responsible by human law, because society needs rules?I don’t think the absence of free will negates the basis of law. Humans are social beings, and society needs rules to function. I think its absence, though, does call into question the notion of eternal responsibility. Sometimes on the news I’ll see a person arrested for a horrible crime - shaking a baby to death, for instance. As good, upstanding people, we always react with horror to such news. Our religion tells us those people will burn eternally for such actions (barring repentance, etc). Occasionally, though, I imagine myself in that evil person’s place. If I had been born into that body and experienced every single event in that person’s life up until that tragic moment, would I have behaved differently, and not shaken the baby? I don’t think so.
I have to say I detest this.THE soul is spiritual … on loan from God, so to speak.
Personality and a lot of other aspects of our persona may be a complex mix of heredity and DNA and brain chemistry and electrical currents and a lot of other things.
Personality, for example, can be easily altered by various medications for good or ill. [And not just medications and other chemicals. Electrical stimulation and physical assault, for example can also change personality. Psychoanalysis is sometimes called “The Talking Cure” … meaning that WORDS alone can also change personality.]
Interesting book:
alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=8063959&matches=65&title=the+talking+cure&cm_re=workslistingtitle
The soul is unchangeable … except to the extent that it is affected by grace and by sin.
Thousands of books have been written about personality and how to measure it and how to change it … etc, etc, etc. My library on psychology is at least 1000 volumes and I only have a small percentage of the total that are available. ]
Probably if you did a search, you would find almost as many books that discuss and describe the soul.
This idea fascinates me, but I am just wondering how to reconcile this classic scholastic concept with modern neuroscience.Something that seems to have been missed is that the soul is the principle of life - physical life as well as spiritual life. It is the soul that makes our body a living body. When the soul departs, the body is dead. Our soul is “simple” - that is, it cannot be divided into parts; the physical body can (eg. you can cut off a finger. But if you do, the finger will die because the soul cannot be “cut” into parts.)
Nita
I’m not learned in modern neuroscience, but it (and any new discoveries) wouldn’t alter perenial philosphy on the nature of the soul. Physical sciences are concerned with the material elements of the human body, and their discoveries have no bearing on the existence and nature of the soul. “Life” is a very mysterious reality. Physical sciences establish criteria to determine when they consider it present in a body (through observation of physical activity), but they do not know what it “IS”, or it’s source.This idea fascinates me, but I am just wondering how to reconcile this classic scholastic concept with modern neuroscience.
To be honest, I do not put much stock in Scholastic science.
Are you making a kind of Rupert Sheldrake kind of argument, that genetics are just the material cause of biological life (the bricks so to speak), and the actual building and deciding on form/shape is determined by the soul?