That is a statement of faith, not science. You, no doubt, are speaking of human “sapience” and “language,” right? You are making a special religious case for human consciousness and communication? Do I read this right?
Yes, I’m referring to human sapience and symbolic language, because that’s the only kind of sapience and symbolic language! We perform certain activities – in language, reason, argument, art – which lie with sapience and are quite entirely foreign to all lower forms of life.
No, it’s not a religious argument; it’s a philosophical one. It is not a conclusion of faith, but a conclusion of
reason (which includes science but is not limited to it).
I took the proposition for granted, since this a Catholic board, and I’m basically trying to resolve a uniquely Catholic problem, and this philosophical proposition is held by every Catholic thinker I can think of. No offense, of course, but I’m not
really conversing with you. Though I appreciate your (name removed by moderator)ut, I know full well I am relying on premises you don’t necessarily agree with and don’t especially care to refight the materialist/dualist/hylomorphist battle in a thread about Eden.
Sapience is not independent of genetics. The other great apes do not have the genes that code for large brain development and the formation of speech.
As I wrote (and you subsequently quoted): that’s a hardware concern.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim that “those functions depend on ensoulment”?
I must say I lack your industry in putting together book lists and ISBNs for a little CAF talk. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest:
Percy, Walker.
The Message In A Bottle. Farrar Strauss, 1979.
Particularly Chapter One, “The Delta Factor”
Percy, Walker.
Lost in the Cosmos. Farrar Strauss, 1983.
Particularly the middle bit on semiotics.
There are others, but by naming just two you might actually get the chance to read them.
Now it should be said that I am a hylomorphist, and as such I do not struggle with the fact that the matter of a person has a profound impact on his form, on his spiritual soul. But a quick look at the booklist you’ve proposed,
Anastasia, would seem to suggest that the ISSR has adopted some form of physicalism as its formal position. Aside from the rather vast question of whether that position is true or false, how on Earth do you reconcile it with the Catholicism you profess? Call it a fundamentalism, but all faiths do have fundamentals, and one of ours is that, when
Gaudium et Spes tells us that we are “not being mocked by a fantasy [of a soul] born only of physical or social influences,” then the only intellectual honest steps are to either: affirm the teaching, or deny it and exit the Church.
I’ll still take a look at them, of course. I just don’t see how I could accept physicalism and remain Catholic.
Although it’s been interesting, we have drifted well off the moorings of our original topic, so I’ll let it go after this.
EDIT: One final note. It occurs to me that
archaeology can aid us here. If I am correct to say that only rational, post-ensouled humans would be capable of art and symbol, then we can say with certainty that ensouled man came into being no later than 35,000 years ago, which is the most up-to-date dating I have seen on the earliest art-carvings and cave paintings. If we assume that the Fall happened with only two sapient humans on the ground, then surely the Fall predates this civilization. If the Fall involved more than two persons, we are no closer to successful dating.
