Emergent Monism and the Classical Doctrine of the Soul

Abstract

Traditional Christian belief in the existence of human life after death within a transformed material universe should be capable of rational justification if one chooses carefully the philosophical scheme underlying those claims. One should not have to appeal simply to the power of a loving God to justify one's beliefs. A revision of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is proposed that allows one to render these classical Christian beliefs at least plausible to a broad range of contemporary thinkers as a consequence of a cosmology based on the principle of universal intersubjectivity and the need for a common ground between opposing subjectivities.

A Heuristic Science‐based Naturalism as a Partner for Theological Reflections on the Natural World

“…In line with what has been previously mentioned about complex causal relations (bottom‐up/top‐down) and in analogy with the third principle of HSN (coherent discontinuity), I am inclined to maintain that highly complex systems emerge from less complex ones with no ontological inconsistencies. I would thereby provisionally propose emergent monism (see Bracken ; Clayton ; Auletta , 147–149) as the ontological frame of HSN. The realm of life cannot be entirely reduced to pure chemical‐physical interactions: biological systems display peculiar features requiring a proper scientific treatment, as an assessment of the Darwinian theory can show.…”

A pragmatic critique of three kinds of religious naturalism

“…Stump notes (ibid., 525) that Samuel Alexander, in his classical theory, associated is defensible, 4 and even, in the classical emergence discussion in the 1920s, that Deity itself might be seen as the emergent evolutionary stage following consciousness, 5 several religiously inclined thinkers explore the epistemic credentials of theism in the framework of nonreductive physicalism or naturalism (Drees 1996, McGrath 1998. Even the Christian doctrine of bodily survival after death can, it has been claimed, be combined with nonreductive physicalism, 6 or at least with antidualism (see Stump 1995;Forrest 1996;Barbour 1999;Murphy 1999aMurphy , 1999bClayton 2000;Schouten 2001;Bracken 2004). This is partly because the dualistic picture of a disembodied mind is not Christian at all: the Bible urges us to believe in an embodied self, a total person ( Barbour 1999, 363).…”

“…11 Note again the emphasis on diachronic emergence here. 12 Bracken (2004) interestingly appeals to Whitehead in his attempt to defend emergent monism (or at least nondualism) compatible with a traditional Christian account of the soul and of survival.…”