Brain Science and the Soul? As If!

🙂 Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been sloppy, but I still think you’re getting it wrong.

He doesn’t tell Daniel Dennett to look out because the soul is the pattern of neural firing in the brain; he tells Daniel Dennett to look out (which pretty clearly is intended to be a joke, in a different sense than you mean) because “The human person is pretty much what the Christian tradition has always assumed.” The post doesn’t address the question of materialism, it addresses a conclusion associated with materialists, namely, the one explicitly noted in the first paragraph, “The soul is irrelevant”; the interpretation of this is clarified by the remainder of the article, in which the counterposition, the “opposite direction” in which modern science points is that “the traditional emphasis on moral and spiritual discipline was exactly right” or, alternatively, “virtue depends on the formation of good habits, and they require careful and comprehensive discipline of the soul”. The argument is about views of morality, not metaphysics; it’s explicitly about one particular materialist argument, one which he claims is raised against “traditional Christian views of the human person,” understood as requiring the truth of the claimthat “The soul must be disciplined.”

Reno isn’t talking about “materialists qua materialist”; he’s explicitly addressing one particular kind of argument, which he claims is (or rather, used to be) common but does not ever claim is universal or intrinsic to materialism, and which on the foundation of materialist metaphysics rejects the moral view Reno associates with Christianity and Aristotle. It responds not by trying to refute materialism but by denying that the evidence the argument recognizes as legitimate allows the purported conclusion to be drawn. That is, it responds not by arguing against the metaphysical premises but by arguing that the moral conclusion cannot be drawn on the basis of the evidence to which materialists appeal. The “We’re not just stuff” passage explicitly addresses this, since it immediately goes on to explicate these claims in moral terms. Likewise, the Brooks quote in context simply notes that views of what the evidence suggests have changed since the argument Reno is criticizing began to take hold.

Hi, Richard,

Sorry to get back to this so late. You are not quoting the complete argument. The complete argument is this:

The argument goes something like this: If we can see the physical process by which ideas are associated or feelings felt or decisions made, then surely we must admit that human beings are nothing more than physical entities. The concept of a soul, so we are told, is irrelevant.

And the last sentence is glossed morally later in the post. You are assuming that if Reno is objecting to the argument he must be objecting to the premise; but this is false. To rejec t the move from “we can see the physical proces sby which ideas are associated or feelings felt or decisions made” to “surely we must admit that human beings are nothing more than physical entities” to “the concept of a soul is irrelevant”, he simply has to reject one of the links; he is not, as you seem to think, committed to rejecting themboth.

I don’t see the paragraph as implying this; what it implies is that there is (was) an argument by materialists of the following sort:

(1) We can see (in neuroscience) the physical process by which ideas are associated or feelings felt or decisions made.
(2) Therefore, human beings are nothing more than physical entities.
(3) Therefore, the concept of the soul is irrelevant = modern science requires us to reject traditional Christian views of the human person.

‘Traditional Christian views of the human person’ are glossed morally later in the article — “the traditional emphasis on moral and spiritual discipline” as he puts it later. Thus the sense of soul here is the ethical sense, as in ‘the moral state of your soul’, and not metaphysical, and the argument being criticized is the whole argument from neuroscience to materialism to a particular view of moral life. I’ve no doubt that Reno is not a materialist; but he isn’t arguing against materialism in the post — he’s arguing against “modern liberal antinomians” who take neuroscience + materialism to underwrite a particular moral view.

I would agree that the argument could be stated more clearly, but I think it’s pretty clear that what’s being criticized is not materialism as such, but an argument from neuroscience to a particular view of ethics (by way of materialism), one in which, in Reno’s words, “private hedonists are capable of being effective public servants”.