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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\nWard 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):<\/p>\n
It is a poor argument to say, \u201cWe are just like computers. Computers are not conscious. Therefore, we are not conscious.\u201d The argument should be: \u201cWe are conscious. We could, in principle, make computers just like us. Then computers would be conscious, too.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
At times, however, it was unclear whether or not Ward is happy with a non-reductive physicalism, with an account of the mind as an emergent property<\/a>. It depends what he means when he argues for the reality of the soul as something not reducible to something else. Does he regard it as a separate substance? Or is he simply saying it exists in the same sense that one may legitimately say that software<\/em> exists, without denying that on another level the CD-ROM in your hand can be described in material terms that would not do justice to the reality of the software perpective, and yet would nonetheless be correct in its own terms?\n<\/a>
<\/a>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 \u201ca separate something\u201d that is added on, as opposed to these being the subjective experience of these material realities.<\/p>\n
Ward states at one point (p.160) that \u201cBelievers 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\u2026So, theists seem bound to accept the idea that there can be conscious states without bodies.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n