In many respects I found this chapter the most interesting and at the same time the most frustrating. On the one hand, Ward helpfully points out ways in which the notion of the soul that earlier Christian thinkers had in mind, for instance Aquinas, were far more in keeping with the Biblical/Semitic tradition than one might have expected. For instance, Ward asserts that Aquinas would have considered that one cannot simply substitute a new body and yet speak of it being the soul of the same person.
Ward is rightly concerned to counter reductionist views of human beings and of consciousness. One of the best quotes in the chapter is the following (p.152):
It is a poor argument to say, “We are just like computers. Computers are not conscious. Therefore, we are not conscious.” The argument should be: “We are conscious. We could, in principle, make computers just like us. Then computers would be conscious, too.”
Our conscious perspective is not reducible to a description of what is happening in our brains. But it is not at all clear that this demonstrates that one must add a soul (or a mind) as “a separate something” that is added on, as opposed to these being the subjective experience of these material realities.
Ward states at one point (p.160) that “Believers in God seem to be committed to the possibility of at least one consciousness, that is, thought and intelligence, existing without a body. God has no body…So, theists seem bound to accept the idea that there can be conscious states without bodies.” But if neuroscience suggests that the soul is an emergent property of human beings, might it not be appropriate to rethink our doctrine of God, rather than hold onto a traditional view of humans on the basis of an aspect of classical theism that may itself be modelled on those earlier understandings of the soul?
The truth is that on this subject, too, great minds (whatever those are!) disagree, whether their area of expertise is in neuroscience, biology, philosophy, theology, psychology or something else. And so the key point is not to pretend we have a view that is the definitive answer, but to continue to explore and to seek ways of doing justice both to the importance of ongoing scientific discoveries, and to the reality of our subjective experience and its importance.
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