Ever wonder what it is like to be in the next life, that is, to be dead? (I thought it best to leave the word “dead” out of the title of this essay.) Since this is something we all must face sooner or later, I thought it might be of interest to engage in some rational speculation about what a human being experiences, if anything, after he becomes unconscious for the last time.

This is not a theological enquiry. So, depictions of hellfire and eternal bliss, though they may be apologetically defensible, are not where this essay is going. Rather, I shall explore what natural reason might tell us about afterlife possibilities.

Now one can make the rather impertinent observation some have offered about the curious situation of the atheist at his own funeral: “All dressed up and nowhere to go.” That is, after all, the ultimate implication of most forms of skepticism, materialism, and atheism.

Reincarnation, or, Getting Another Bite at the Apple

On the other hand, we have the doctrine of metempsychosis or reincarnation offered by both the Vedic tradition in the east and Plato in the west. In that view, dying is followed by birth into another life. Plato, in his dialogue, the Timaeus, expresses his own version of metempsychosis, when he postulates that the form of life we reenter depends on how we live this present life.

“He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state.”¹

Prescinding from Plato’s speculation about moving down and back up the ladder of living things and since we presently know what it is to experience our own human life, it is not all that difficult to imagine reentering the same kind of life we presently have.

Death Without Continuous Reincarnation

Far more intriguing is the prospect of trying to imagine what it is like to experience life after death when no immediate or proximate reincarnation occurs. Since (1) death entails the loss or corruption of the entire human body and (2) it appears that all we know in this life comes to us through the senses and brain, which are material organs of the human body, what would life after death be like? What could or would we know or experience either intellectually or sensitively in such a hypothetically disembodied state of being?

This last view is doubtless of greatest interest to the majority of those who share some form of the Christian religion, which dominates in Western Civilization. Now, I am not presuming the revealed content of that religious worldview, but merely am noting that its central doctrines entail the notion of death and some form of afterlife for the spiritual soul – but without any notion of proximate reincarnation. The Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection pertains to something that happens for most all men, not at their immediate time of death, but at the end of the world at some point in the future. Until that indeterminate span of time has elapsed, the spiritual soul must exist without a corporeal body. It is that purely spiritual condition of temporally extended human existence upon which I now focus my attention.

Indeed, among leading Christian figures we have, in the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, the beautiful truth expressed that “…it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” One cannot but wonder exactly what this statement might mean to us, the living, who have no direct experience of what it appears to affirm.

What Reason Can Say About the Separated Soul's Experience

Certainly, most human beings admit to having no direct evidence of what it is like to be dead before we are actually dead. But we do have some (1) speculative philosophical arguments about what the separated soul can know and (2) possibly analogous experiences which some have reported to us about this condition of continued immaterial existence.

St. Thomas Aquinas offers a rather complete speculative explanation of what man’s spiritual soul can know after the soul’s separation from the body.²

St. Thomas affirms that the separated soul can no longer operate using sense powers or sense organs, since they belong to the body and the soul of the deceased is no longer the actuating form of the body, Thus, such acts as forming and understanding universal concepts abstracted from phantasms, which themselves are formed from physical sense experience, are no longer possible when we are dead. Still, he insists that “... the soul in that [separated] state understands by means of participated species resulting from the influence of the divine light ….”³ In other words, while the soul no longer can perform such acts by its own natural bodily powers, God can infuse such knowledge into it.

For the same reason, the separated soul can have knowledge of some singulars to which it is related in some fashion. This is not accomplished by abstraction from phantasms, but “… by the infusion of species by God, and in that way it is possible for the intellect to know singulars.”⁴ Such knowledge would naturally entail formation of judgments and self-reflective awareness of one’s own existence in the act of making of such judgments.

However, St, Thomas maintains that “… by natural knowledge [that is, unless God directly infuses such knowledge], … the dead do not know what passes on earth.”⁵ The notable exception is the state of the blessed in heaven, who see God, and who, through Him who sees all things, are infused with knowledge of things that take place on earth.⁶

But, What is it Really Like to be Dead?

While the preceding speculative musings may be of great interest to the philosopher or theologian, they do little to help us ordinary mortals to imagine what it is really like to be dead. The unfortunate fact is that we simply cannot imagine the spiritual experiences described above for the simple reason that imagining entails the use of the imagination, which is a sense power whose function depends on bodily organs, and thus, completely terminates at the time of passing into the next life. We need something that will help us to grasp precisely what it would be like to be a disembodied spirit that is still, in a meaningful sense, having a real life experience. How would it “feel” to be living, but without a body and without the body’s sense organs that we need for sense experience in this life?

I do not herein propose to demonstrate the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. Those are proper topics for other venues and I have addressed them myself elsewhere, including on this Strange Notions site. Rather, I propose here simply to give two examples of reported human experience that depicts the content of “disembodied existence,” namely, (1) those drawn from near death experiences and (2) those drawn from our own experience of dreams.

Near Death Experiences

I do not intend to give a broad analysis of NDE here, but merely want to show that those who claim such experiences often claim out-of-body events, some of which appear to be verified by others. For example, we have the rather common NDE claim of people feeling themselves “floating” up out of their bodies, say, on an operating table, and then “seeing and hearing” the doctors and nurses – being able correctly to report what they were wearing and actually saying and doing – all while being unconscious from anesthesia.

Perhaps, a case some readers may have seen reported is that of a migrant worker named Maria, who had a severe heart attack and was in cardiac arrest. She was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. “At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building … [and] … was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn.” Her observations were later confirmed in exact detail!

Such experiences of being “out of the body,” and yet having accurate sense knowledge of objects and people which the patient cannot possibly perceive in their “medically dead” state, attest to the possibility of actual sensory experience of someone while in a seemingly disembodied state, that is, someone whose consciousness has actually separated from his body and yet is able to have continued and verifiable sense experience.

Such NDE experiences tend to confirm the possibility of “disembodied spiritual experience.” I do not claim that the people involved are actually dead, since clearly their consciousness subsequently returns to their bodies. But they do meet the criteria for some form of disembodied sense experience.

“Disembodied Dreams”

My final example of a “disembodied experience” can easily be verified by all of us, namely, as experienced in a dream. I suspect that most of us have had the experience of sitting in a theatre and watching a movie in which we become so engrossed that we literally “forget ourselves” and, as it were, start “living” on the screen in front of us. We lose consciousness of ourselves as having separate and distinct bodies sitting in seats, which are not part of what is taking place on the screen before us.

Similarly, we have probably all had dreams in which we were victims of some sort of bodily attack (as in a good nightmare!) and well aware of a sense of being in a body. In deep dreams, we can sometimes experience things as if we were in a body even though the experiences are not those of our sleeping body.

Moreover, I have certainly had many a dream myself in which it was like the theatre experience. I was watching often very vivid scenes of events, things, and persons engaged in various activities of which I was simply an observer, having no self-reflective bodily experience at all.

Nothing prevents God from giving us similar experiences of sensible reality, since anything our natural powers can do to actuate our subjective experience, God can do as well. Call it miraculous or merely how things work in the afterlife. Either way, the experience is that of a disembodied spirit and it can be fully as real, or more so, than any experience we have in this life – only in a disembodied form like that of a vivid dream -- one whose objective reality cannot be epistemically doubted.

I am not trying to offer a speculative defense of the reality of a spiritual afterlife in this essay. My sole purpose has been to show what it might be like to be alive and fully engaged in both intellectual and sensitive experiences in a spiritual afterlife, while awaiting what Christians believe to be a later resurrection of the body. Indeed, we might have to adjust the impertinent observation about an atheist at his funeral that I offered at the beginning of this essay. What if it turns out that the atheist is all dressed up and then shocked to discover that he does have somewhere to go?

For those who reject the notion of free will, our experience of making our own decisions is nothing more than a deep-seated illusion. “The reality is,” insists biologist Anthony Cashmore, “not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar.”

Those who argue for the nonexistence of free will often do so on scientific grounds. And those who offer a scientific “proof” against free will point to one type of experiment more than any other—namely, those done and inspired by neurobiologist Benjamin Libet.

In 1983, Libet seemed to prove that the unconscious processes of the brain—the interaction of molecules, electrical discharges, and the like, which are associated with decision-making—are ultimately in control. In other words, our voluntary decisions begin unconsciously in the brain. So it is the brain, not the person, that decides the actions we “feel” to be voluntary.

Libet-style experiments involve having a subject carry out a simple prescribed behavior (flexing the wrist, bending a finger, etc.) whenever he feels the urge to do so. Watching a special clock while he executes his movement, the subject notes the specific time at which he decided to move. The goal of the researchers is to plot a timeline of averages, noting the typical sequence of brain activity (e.g., by EEG), muscle activity (e.g., by EMG), and conscious urging (by subjective reporting). The expectation is that if our intentional actions are truly free, associated brain activity will follow the moment of decision. But this is not what Libet found.

Why does this matter? Well, it has obvious implications for the truth of the Catholic worldview. It also concerns human nature and how we understand ourselves as human beings. For if we don’t have free will, then this may dramatically change how we govern ourselves and interact with others. Much of how we operate as individuals, communities, states, and institutions presuppose that we are personally responsible for our actions. But if it were proven that we are not, this would entirely undermine our rationale for structuring and governing society on the assumption that we are free creatures.

So did these experiments really succeed in proving that free will is an illusion? They did not.

First of all, the experiments look exclusively at spontaneously willed behavior with brain activity. Participants were asked to act when they felt the urge. These experiments, then, say little about choices resulting from rational planning. At most, they suggest the nonexistence of free will in the restricted case of willful spontaneity. The voluntary actions with which they are concerned are barely more than split-second reactions. As some critics have observed, such studies tell us more about “picking” than “choosing.”

But even that conclusion might be overly hasty, for the concept of free will is not as plain as often presumed. Free will is a spiritual appetite for the intellectually known good. A decision, moved by free will, is not a quantifiable event like a neuronal discharge. Nor is it reducible to an instantaneous impulse or urge. And a willed movement is not always a purely linear cause-then-effect event like a cue ball striking an eight-ball into action. The activity of the will is more “smoothed out” and pervasive than an impulse. And it is enacted in layers. Thus, even in a setting like the Libet-style experiments, the free will cannot be isolated as cleanly as many assume.

For each study participant, in carrying out the prescribed movement, the will to move in this way at this time is nested within a multiplicity of other intentions motivating the same action. A singular act of wrist flexion is driven also (presumably) by the will to participate in the study; by the desire to follow the specific instructions given; by the desire to contribute to neuroscientific advancement; and in the will to do something for the common good. Additionally, the subject may bend his wrist because he desires to fulfill a class requirement—a class he desires to pass—or because he thinks it will hold the attention of the attractive research assistant across the room. The point is this: due to the complex integration of intentions involved in a single choice to move a body part, these studies cannot account for all the reasons that cause a person to conduct a singular movement. There is a sense in which the free decision of the research subject to flex his wrist “now” originated even before he entered the research lab.

We find ourselves here at an important juncture. It shows that once we have started making claims about free will’s reality or unreality, we have turned from all observation, measurement, and data analysis. We have reached the far side of the physical and have (perhaps unwittingly) thrust ourselves into the realm of philosophy.

Let’s turn to some further considerations. The Libet experiments relied on machines to capture brain and muscle activity. But it must be noted that neither EEG nor fMRI, nor any other form of advanced imaging, can capture the qualitative content of brain activity. When researchers carry out Libet-style experiments, they note the onset of brain activity and compare it to that of muscle activity and, more importantly, the time when the subject reports consciously willing the prescribed movement. But there is no precise way for scientists to know—even when the subject acts on an urge—whether the brain activity recorded or observed is representative of decision, or decision-making, or planning to make a decision.

In fact, more recent research shows the same brain activity believed to induce conscious decision-making is also found in subjects even when they do not make a conscious decision. Libet’s initial conclusion was “that cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act . . . can and usually does begin unconsciously.” But these recent studies call such a conclusion into serious question.

There are several other critiques and limitations that have a significant impact on how much (or little) Libet-style studies actually prove. For an excellent detailed discussion of these limitations and their philosophical implications, read Alfred Mele’s little book Free.

At most, Libet-style experiments prove that a constrained subset of willed behaviors is not as freely executed as we are inclined to assume. But as we have seen, they hardly prove even that much. As far as Catholics traditionally conceive human freedom, such experiments pose little threat—and thus, the human person has every reason to believe that he remains infinitely more free than a bowl of sugar.

Sometimes, the most important questions are the basic ones. Back in 2011, I argued that the most important question in the gay-marriage debate was “What is marriage?” The next year, Robert George, Ryan Anderson, and Sherif Girgis published a book exploring just that question: What Is Marriage?: Man and Woman: A Defense. But in the face of contemporary questions of transgenderism and gender identity, it turns out that we need to ask a yet more-basic question: what are men and women, and what makes them different?

To some of you, that question might seem obvious, even asinine. Nearly all of us have a working understanding of what we mean by “men” and “women.” Ironically, even people who believe that it’s possible to be transgender still affirm this: calling a man a “trans-woman” presupposes that we know what a woman is. In other words, what does it mean to say that a biological male is a woman?

I. Bad Answers to the Men and Women Question

Bear in mind, we’re looking for what it is that makes all men unlike all women. So here are some incorrect answers to the question:

1. Using stereotypes to distinguish men from women: women may tend to be more nurturing and men more abstract-thinking, etc., but there are so many counter-examples to any stereotype that you can come up with that this is obviously not a workable answer.
2. Using social norms to distinguish men from women: things like “women wear dresses, and men wear pants” are both stereotypes (suffering the same flaw as #1) and culturally-contingent: think Scottish kilts or female dress slacks as obvious counter-examples.
3. Using hormones to distinguish men from women: men typically have higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of estrogen, than women do. But testosterone and estrogen levels vary from individual to individual, and change throughout your life.
4. Using sexual organs to distinguish men from women: This is an obvious difference, but it’s not a satisfying answer. A castrated man isn’t less of a man, after all, nor is a woman any less a woman if she’s had a hysterectomy or mastectomy. Plus, a small portion of the human family is born “intersex” (a poor term) with ambiguous genitalia.
5. Denying that such a difference exists: Obviously, the fact that we can speak coherently of men and women means that we’re somehow distinct.

Nevertheless, while all of these answers miss the mark, all of them also have an element of the truth, which makes them attractive. So what would a better answer look like?

II. A Better Answer

Here’s what I think a better answer might look like:

1. The essential distinction between men and women is genetic. All men have a Y chromosome (typically XY, although in some cases XXY or XYY), and no women have Y chromosomes. In other words, men are adult male humans and women are adult female humans.
2. This genetic difference tends to express itself in different sexual organs. In rare cases, something impedes this from happening as it is ought to, or something happens to the sexual organs. But even in the case of those borned “intersexed,” there is a genetic sex: it just may be harder to tell.
3. This genetic difference also tends to express itself in different brain chemistry, different levels of various hormones, and differences (big and small) in cognitive and behavioral development.
4. Society also plays a role, and environmental factors can even impact hormone levels. It is not always easy to determine which social behaviors are attributable to social roles, or environment, or innate genetics. But most societies amplify the differences between the sexes by creating a set of gender roles.

The chief benefits of this definition of men and women are threefold.

First, this is what we have always meant by men and women, even before we knew what genes were. There was a recognition that there were real differences between male and female humans, present from birth, and we expressed these different types of humans with the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ for children and ‘men’ and ‘women’ for adults (and ‘male’ and ‘female’ on the whole). Genes explain why these differences exist (and why unusual things sometimes happen in how the genes express themselves). Second, this is how we speak about non-humans. We can coherently speak of male and female mammals using a similar genetic distinction. Finally, this definition avoids two obviously-false extremes: the idea that men and women are interchangeable, and a sort of “Rambo and Barbie” reductionism.

III. The Implications for the Transgender / Gender Identity Question

The points above are much bigger than contemporary debates over gender identity and transgender issues. A lot of the ink spilled over the last few decades on issues like feminism could be aided by everyone having a clearer understanding of women and men and the differences between them (and especially, of which of those differences are innate and universal, and which of those are socially constructed, etc.). But while it’s not reducible to that question, I think it’s helpful.

We can both affirm that there really are fundamental genetic differences between men and women, and affirm that (for example) some women act and emote in conventionally-masculine ways, and may even have higher-than-average testosterone levels, etc. So it’s no surprise that there are people who don’t “fit” the social expectations for what a man or what a woman is like. That, of itself, is nothing new – terms like “tomboy” exist to describe this reality. And our response ought to be one of compassion and support, particularly if we’re Christians.

But having a coherent definition of “man” and “woman” does show why transgenderism is a non-starter. What I mean is this. If the claim were just “I’m a man who likes feminine things,” that would be a coherent idea. But if a biological male claims to be a woman, what does that person mean by “woman”? They can’t mean that a biological male is biologically female, because that doesn’t make sense. And if their understanding of what it is to be a “woman” is rooted in any of the types of definitions we explored in Part I, you can see why those don’t work.

So there’s something a bit deceptive in all of this. A person who believes in transgenderism cannot say that men and women are the same thing (since there would be nothing to “trans” if the two genders are the same). But they also cannot affirm that men and women are essentially different, since affirming that fact would make their own claim nonsense. So “transgenderism” relies on the language of “man” and “woman,” and even relies on the idea that the two are somehow different, while emptying those words of any actual meaning and refusing to define what this new meaning of “man” and “woman” actually is.

The idea of the mystical body of Christ has always been one of great interest to me, as there was always something about it at odds with the mentality in which I was raised: "Be yourself", etc. was (and remains) the mantra of the day, and the whole idea of being but a single part of something larger did not always sit well. I remember being a ten-year-old watching as the Borg stripped Captain Picard of his identity and "assimilated" him into their collective (his pronoun "I" replaced with "we").¹ And of course the Borg were an enemy to be resisted.

Years later, I recall reading Ayn Rand's Anthem (1938) and slowly realizing that the "we" narrating the story was really a single individual, living in a dystopian future scrubbed of the concept of "I" and living under the control of an oppressive, collectivist society. Examples like these would color my view of Plato's Republic the first time I encountered it, as I began my career as a philosophy student, but I've since learned to enjoy Rand's book as an interesting science fiction tale. Not regarding it as quality philosophy, I have instead placed it on the shelf with other, similar works like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931) and Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952).

Plato's Republic shows us a society (Plato's idea of a perfect one, in fact) where the individual is not considered to be self-sufficient, but a vital part of her or his community, with a role to play as a tradesman, worker, or soldier/guardian. Plato imagines people not as individuals in their own right, but as components in something larger: In Book II of the Republic, Plato tells us that individual humans are the same kinds of things as cities. Human bodies are a collection of living parts (cells, organs, and systems) that work together to accomplish a goal (a successful, healthy life).² Cities, meanwhile, are collections of living parts as well (individual people, families, and institutions). Cities are made of different organizations: schools, energy providers, waste disposal services, businesses providing food and clothing, etc. If you think about it, the human body has systems that perform similar tasks for itself ... and all these systems working together properly give rise to a healthy human being. Plato's argument, therefore, centers on the idea that society comes before the individual.

The individual too, in Plato's view, may be regarded as a kind of collective (a miniature city, according to his analogy), a composite soul made up of cooperating parts. These parts, like people, find themselves at odds and in pursuit, at times, of conflicting goals; Plato sees such internal disagreement as the explanation of temptation.³

Plato's words certainly resonated with me, especially when it was pointed out to me that this was actually quite similar to what St. Paul described when he said of the Church: "For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many" (1 Cor 12:13-14).

This is the mystical body of the Church, which is the mystical body of Christ. The members of the Church act not on their own, but as parts of a larger organism, directed by Christ as their head, and each individual serving a specific role in the service of the whole. As St. Paul explains, "there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone" (1 Cor 12:4-6).

In this view, being a part of a collective and effectively losing one's self to relations with and service for others who also lose themselves is not necessarily an idea to be resisted. Either that, or the collective communities as individuals described by Plato and Paul are dressing the bland reality of Borg life in a more attractive package (something that sounds lovely, but is ultimately the same soul-killing system Ayn Rand imagined in Anthem).

The question, then, is whether we can find reason to accept the Platonic/Pauline ideas of individual life-as-community life as reasonable and accurate. If we could try to objectively consider what individual existence is, without any opinions or preferences regarding our statuses as individuals, what would we discover? A look will shed some interesting discoveries. And as I have the benefit of writing on Plato's city-soul analogy for my doctoral thesis, I have done quite a lot of reading on this question already.

One of the most interesting observations I had the pleasure of reading about comes from the Dutch trauma psychiatrist Bessel Van Der Kolk (2014), who observes that our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. In fact, he says, “barely exist as individual organisms”.⁴ This is something we cannot escape, he says, even if we go off on our own and avoid contact with others (Van Der Kolk works with victims of trauma, including victims of childhood abuse who deliberately avoid contact with others in adulthood, as a form of self-protection). He explains: “We are part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our own muscles tensing as the players run and jump) ...”⁵ Most of our energy is devoted to either connecting with others, or in response to the work, actions, or behaviour of other human beings.

Tragically, those of us who do find ourselves withdrawing from the community of others face unfortunate consequences: "[A]lmost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal.”⁶ In Van Der Kolk's view, the best way to deal with human suffering comes from dealing with how our problems "interfere with our functioning as members of our tribe."⁷

This unity of experience also has an aspect that ties this idea back to Plato’s Republic. The Dutch philosopher C.A. Van Peursen (1966) describes the “diffuse” existence of the individual (individual existence being secondary to the existence of the community). In and by himself, Van Peursen says, an individual cannot be “cut loose from the social pattern within which alone he comes to be himself.”⁸ In fact, Van Peursen also observes that the word “I” is not even employed in tribal societies; it is only used in relation to another person: “’I-father’, ‘I-uncle’, and so forth.”⁹ Individual identity arises from the group, family, or tribe, and one’s relationship with the others.

In conclusion, the idea of being a part of a collective is not necessarily something to be resisted, if properly understood. When St. Paul describes the Church as such, presenting us with a thing so very much at odds with the attitudes of our time, it may be a great stumbling block toward accepting the Kingdom of God. Also, in teaching Plato's Republic many times over the years, my explanation of the city described by Socrates is often greeted with looks of disbelief and silent head shakes. Yet both ideas might be seen as acceptable (even desirable) if we better understand the nature of the neural "machinery" actually working right now within each of our heads, and how our relationships form us into the people we become. By focusing lesson who we are than what we can do for others, we become less selfish and, somehow, both less and more ourselves. Our identity changes as our focus shifts, but our individual role in the service of others flourishes, breeding a new individual identity.

This idea is nicely summed up, in this story adapted from a famous Japanese folktale. 

"Contrary to popular belief
the tables of Hell are laden
with the most exquisite dishes of food.
Whatever you could possibly desire:
soups, salads, stews, sauces, curries
if you want, fruits, succulent meats
(grilled to order), pastries, ice cream.
The single unusual factor being that
one must eat with a fork three feet long.
Holding it close to the tines you could manage
to eat, but when you do so, a demon immediately
slaps you (or pokes you with his fork),
and says, "Hold it at the other end!"
So getting the food on the fork up to your mouth
is quite impossible, alas, though an abundance
of delicious food is readily available.
 
"In heaven the situation is exactly the same:
same long tables covered with tasty dishes,
same long forks.
The only difference in heaven
is that people feed the person sitting across the table from them."¹⁰

The lesson of this story is this: if we could become less concerned with our own happiness and more concerned with the happiness of our neighbors, it would be a happier world. Rethinking our place among our fellows is the key. One has only to be assimilated willfully; “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

This post will articulate the final eight of fourteen principles that I think underlie the Catholic environmental vision. Part one ended on the thought that the first six principles imply a positive and optimistic attitude toward the natural world, the creator, and the human race.

Principle seven, however, is not positive, since Catholicism holds that at the very beginning, something happened which damaged the way man relates to creation. Original sin has disrupted the harmony that ought to exist between humanity and the rest of the natural world. After the fall, God says to Adam:

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (Gen. 3:17-19)

In reflecting on the effect of the fall of man on creation, in his January 1, 1990 World Day of Peace address Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All Creation (PC), Pope St. John Paul II offered some sobering thoughts. “When man turns his back on the Creator’s plan, he provokes a disorder which has inevitable repercussions on the rest of the created order” (PC 5). For John Paul II, this is reflected by the Old Testament prophet Hosea when he wrote, “Therefore the land mourns and all who dwell in it languish, and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and even the fish of the sea are taken away” (Hos 4:3). In our day, the pope continues, people inside and outside the faith sense that the earth is suffering. The cause of this suffering is “the behavior of people who show a callous disregard for the hidden, yet perceivable requirements of the order and harmony which govern nature itself” (PC 5).

Catholic theology claims that original sin has affected every human being in many ways. In terms of the effect of original sin on man—and thus on people’s regard for nature—I will point out just three: a darkened intellect, a weakened will, and concupiscence.

• It is hard for people to know the truth. Mankind, in fact, makes profound errors, many of which are self-chosen out of self-interest.
• In addition, our wills are weak: we might see exactly what we should do but we don’t seem to have the strength of will to do it. “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mt. 26:41).
• Finally, we are subject to concupiscence. This means that our passions and emotions rule our reason and will rather than being directed by them.

Many if not all environmental problems stem from original sin in so far as they are a result of ignorance, short-term thinking, or willful selfishness. For example:

• Ignorance. Until recently, people simply didn’t know that some forms of irrigation could deposit so much salt in the soil that it would eventually kill the plants they wanted to grow, and so, they irrigated their fertile fields into deserts.
• Short-term thinking. Some early Yankee settlers in California learned from Native Americans that some pine trees on the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada mountains were edible. So they cut down the trees to get the nuts.
• Selfish evil. In places where organized crime controls the garbage industry, toxic waste is illegally and unsafely dumped because the gangsters make more money that way.

These are examples of how humanity’s actions negatively affect the environment. But this is not inevitable or even the norm, which leads to our eighth principle: the positive transformation of the world through work.

Creation, including human nature, is wounded but it is not ruined. Creation and human nature remain essentially good. As Pope St. John Paul II points out in his encyclical Laborem exercens, “Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth” (LE 4). In carrying out this mandate to work, “man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe” (LE 4).

Even though work—humanity’s primary activity—is difficult, it is still the way we transform creation and build up human culture. Labor is one of the basic means by which people sanctify themselves, others, and creation itself.

All work which is not evil per se (like criminal activity) has dignity and value. This includes both intellectual and manual work, as well as ordinary, everyday tasks.

Just as our present world is the result of the work of hundreds of generations of people before us from which we benefit (and in some cases suffer), our work today contributes to the cultural and environmental inheritance of those who will succeed us. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and those who will come after us will benefit from any good work we do during our time on earth.

Mankind’s basic role in the natural world is to be a sub-creator or co-creator with God. Man takes things in the natural world and recombines them in order to create new things. Whether it is the creation of stories or of cell phones, this remaking of things out of something is another dimension of man’s creation in the image and likeness of God, who makes things out of nothing.

In addition, I think we can be very optimistic about the future, despite the environmental problems we face today. The reason is that just as human ingenuity has had a great role in creating our environmental problems, it can also find solutions to these problems. Henry Ford figured out a way to mass produce automobiles so that cars were affordable for everyone. This set off a worldwide transportation revolution with many positive effects, as well as negative environmental problems, like L.A. smog. However, there are far more cars in the Los Angeles basin today and far less air pollution than in the 1960s.

The ninth principle is the universal destination of goods. It answers the question of who should benefit from the goods of God’s creation and human co-creation.

God created the earth for the benefit of all human beings, not just some. This means that the resources of the earth belong to everyone. They belong to all the people living now, including the poor, and they also belong to future generations.

The Church teaches that private property and the rule of law are two powerful ways to protect people’s right to secure the goods of the earth for their own and for others’ welfare. In fact, poverty and injustice actually increase in places where governments appropriate property in the name of “the people,” where laws are inconsistent, and where contracts cannot be enforced.

Nevertheless, a street orphan in Central America has an intrinsic right to a family, to food, to shelter, to education, to a safe and clean environment, to marry (at least potentially), and so on, even though practically-speaking it is impossible to enjoy these goods at this moment. In the same way, future generations have a right to a healthy planet in which the resources are not all used up.

I think it is important to note that wealth is not a zero-sum game. Because of the innovative creativity of human beings, there is not a fixed amount of the goods of the earth such that if one person has more another person necessarily has less. The marvel of the modern world is that wealth can be created and the goods of the earth can be multiplied.

For example, in the late 1960s, Paul Ehrlich in his wildly successful book “The Population Bomb” predicted massive famines and wars due to the pressure the world’s growing population was putting on the world’s food supply.

But these famines and wars never materialized. Why? Plant breeders such as Norman Borlaug, using philanthropic funding from sources like the Rockefeller Foundation, had by that time effectively solved the world food problem by developing new strains of cereal crops which produced greater and greater yields. Just as we have more cars and less smog in Los Angeles, around the world fewer farmers are growing more food on less land than ever before. There is no foreseeable end to these developments. For example, a high protein/low starch corn has been developed which could be a great boon to the millions of people for whom corn is the staple of life.

Closely connected to the universal destination of goods is the Catholic principle that “we are all in this together” as human brothers and sisters. This is the tenth principle: solidarity. Solidarity or “brotherhood” is the practice of the sharing of material and spiritual goods (CCC 1948).

In If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation (CPPC), Pope Benedict XVI points out that solidarity should be both intragenerational, that is, lived in regard to all who are now alive, wherever they are or whatever their economic situation, and intergenerational, that is, practiced toward those who will come after us (CPPC 8). Borlaug’s work is a prime example this solidarity. Borlaug’s green revolution helped hungry people all over the world and it will help future generations. And his work was funded, in part, through the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller, who had long-since died but who had wanted to leave a legacy for the future.

Lack of solidarity can create environmental problems. Out of ignorance, people have thought that natural resources were limitless or that oceans were so vast that one could dump anything in them and it would simply “disappear.” This was a common attitude in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with our vast, resource-rich continent to settle. Shortly after World War Two, for example, the Atomic Energy Commission had some steel barrels of nuclear waste. It dumped them in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Francisco. That took care of the problem, didn’t it? We know better now. Polluting the environment is like urinating in a swimming pool. We really are one human family and so, out of solidarity, we should care about what happens to other people in the world and to our descendants.

The eleventh Catholic environmental principle shapes the way we practice solidarity. It is the idea of subsidiarity. According to the Catechism, “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (CCC 1183).

Subsidiarity means that higher levels support and coordinate the lower levels when—and only when—necessary. Higher levels do not interfere with the legitimate life and functions of the lower levels.

When it comes to environmental questions, individuals, families, civic organizations, businesses, governmental entities, and international bodies each have a legitimate sphere in which to exercise their specific responsibilities. Solutions cannot be handed down from above for everyone to obey because centralization and authoritarianism simply do not work. Individuals and groups should take responsibility within their own realm.

The twelfth principle of the Catholic environmental vision is the problem-solving virtue: prudence. Prudence is the natural virtue which governs our practical decisions. Prudence means using reason to recognize a problem or opportunity, to gather and weigh evidence, to apply objective standards, and to arrive at a decision for action. Prudence counsels us not to ignore problems. If, for example, global warming is both real and a bad thing for us and for future generations, then we are obligated to take realistic steps to act against it, without embracing impossible utopian agendas.

A particular application of subsidiarity and prudence for Catholics is that the Magisterium or teaching authority of the pope and bishops provides the principles (such as those articulated here) but the laity has the responsibility to work out concrete solutions.

As Pope Benedict XVI points out, the application of the principles of the Gospel to social life is the work of reason, “enlightened reason,” which requires Christianity to constantly “reshape and reformulate social structures and ‘Christian social teachings’” according to the concrete demands of the time (Jesus of Nazareth 126-27). This reliance on reason is why Catholics can work with fellow citizens of widely different ideologies, since we are looking for solutions which accord with reason. However, prudence is not confined to technical, practical solutions. There is another whole dimension to consider.

The thirteenth principle is that environmental decisions are moral decisions. Although some environmental matters are purely technical questions (should I use aluminum or titanium?) or involve prudential choices between goods (should I raise chickens or grow vegetables?), one must always begin environmental problem-solving by examining the moral issues involved. When prudence makes a decision, one of the sets of standards it judges by is the standard of the morally right thing to do. One may never do a direct evil or do evil so that good may come of it (Rom 3:8). To give an extreme example, if a government decided to do its part in ending its country’s “addiction to carbon” by cutting off all use of oil, natural gas, and coal, it would probably plunge its people into extreme poverty and suffering that would be morally reprehensible. This would be an example of illegitimately putting environmental ecology over human ecology.

This brings us to the have-nots.

The fourteenth and final principle of the Catholic environmental vision is the option for the poor. The Church insists that the poor and powerless must always be taken into consideration both in assessing environmental problems and in proposing solutions. Out of solidarity, those with power must take the poor into account because the poor don’t have a way of asserting their own dignity and rights. The powerless “poor” includes future generations. These have absolutely no ability to determine our decisions but nevertheless they have to live with the consequences of them.

Conclusion

The Catholic Church sees God as the good creator of his good creation. Within this creation, God has placed his god-like creature, man, to discover creation’s inner nature and wisely to direct it to his own fulfillment. Despite original sin, man can bring the goods of creation to every human being on earth and safeguard these goods for the benefit of future generations, all the while never forgetting the poor. I think this, in brief, is the Catholic vision of creation, stewardship, and solidarity.

Tomorrow (June 18), Pope Francis will release his long-awaited teaching document on the environment and human ecology. With that in mind, I wrote this article to articulate some principles that underlie the Catholic environmental vision, with the hope that atheists can better understand it and perhaps find common ground. I don’t know if these principles have been set out systematically, but in my research, I have uncovered fourteen. My selection of them is my own, as is the order in which I present them. In this article I'll identify and explicate the first six, then we'll cover another eight in my next article.

The first principle is that God is the sole creator and sustainer of the universe. This includes the laws of nature implanted in things. Because God is also good in himself, we can say that God is the good creator.

A second principle is that everything God has created is good. In Genesis, when God looks at the entire creation, including the first man and woman, he sees that it is “very good” (Gen 1: 31). One reason the author of Genesis may have included this is that human beings have a recurring temptation to see physical reality, including the human body, as evil. Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and the Albigensian heresy are three examples.

An axiom of Catholic philosophy is: “All that is is good.” This is to say, everything which has being is good. It is easy to feel that wheat, wine, sunshine, and butterflies are good. But subatomic particles, uranium, arsenic, crocodiles, and killer whales are also in themselves good. Physical evils, such as floods, tornadoes, blizzards, man-eating tigers, and dangerous microbes, are bad for us but good in their being.

The third principle is that part of the goodness of the universe is that it has a design and a purpose. Things have an inbuilt order which we can discover, recognize, and cooperate with. Everything in the universe behaves according to laws, from subatomic particles, to atoms, to molecules, to chemical compounds, to cellular life, to plants and animals, even to the human body. Matter obeys the laws of physics, plants and lower animals obey their genetic programming, and animals follow their instincts. An amazing dimension of design is the potentiality in being. Assuming the Big Bang is correct, everything that exists now is a coming into being of potentialities inherent in the singularity.

In addition, everything in nature acts for an end or purpose. Every human organ, for example, is marvelously ordered to carry out a function: the eyes see, the fingers feel, the digestive system digests, and the sex organs reproduce. All technology is predicated on discovering and using things according to the way they naturally work. When Orville and Wilber Wright understood the physical laws of thrust, lift, drag and stability on three axes, and built a machine which could exploit these laws, they learned to fly. Hence, Artigas argues that modern science and technology have grown from the specific Christian premises that there is a natural order, we can know this order, and it is good to know it (Artigas 29-30). As Feser points out, it is not necessary that anything know its end or purpose in order to act toward it (Feser 35). For example, the human reproductive system produces new human beings without any awareness and it produces human beings, not bonobos, carrots, or lead.

The fourth principle is that the human race is singular and the summit of creation. Man is singular on the earth in that there is nothing else like him. There is no other being in the physical world—at least on planet earth—with a nature which makes it possible for it to exercise reason and free will. This is one of the things we interpret Genesis to mean when it reports that God made man, “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:27). As awe-inspiring as are the number, variety, complexity, and beauty of the creatures of the natural world, humans alone possess oral and written symbolic language, mathematics, art, music and philosophy.

I think it is also true to say that man is like everything else . . . but more. Man is the summit of creation because he holds within himself all the lower levels of the created world. His body is made up of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, which obey the laws of physics. He is composed of chemicals which obey the laws of chemistry. He is a conglomerate of trillions of cells which act just like all other cellular life. His body carries out all kinds of operations automatically, like plants and animals do. He has a body which has instincts and emotions, like the higher animals. While contemplating the wonders of the natural world, the Psalmist exclaims amazement that God has made man, “little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor,” giving him dominion over all His creatures (Ps. 8: 3-8). We do have god-like powers.

The fifth principle is that the earth is for our use. This principle is perhaps the hardest Christian environmental truth for modern people to accept, although almost no one had a problem with it until about 1960.¹ The earth and its creatures exist for us, not us for them. In Genesis, man receives the command to “subdue” the earth. He possesses “dominion” over the animals and is “given” the plants to eat.

Why is it morally legitimate for us to “use” creation? According to the Catholic vision, there is a fundamental difference between human beings and everything else in creation. Human beings have absolute value: we are ends in ourselves. According to the Vatican II Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, man is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake” (Gaudium et spes 24). The rest of creation is of limited value: it is a means to an end. This is already seen in God’s mandate to Adam and Eve to subdue and use the things of the earth. In a highly technical explanation of this in his Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas Aquinas writes, in reference to “subsistent intelligences,” by which he means men, “the good things which are given them . . . are not given them for the profit of any other creature: while the gifts given to other creatures by divine ordinance make for the use of intellectual creatures.” In other words, the gifts which man is endowed with are for his own benefit, not for the benefit of the creatures below him. On the other hand, the good things lower creatures possess are for our benefit (and the benefit of other lower creatures). They are for us; we are not for them. We are not designed to be shark food or malaria hosts, even though we can be those things.

This is why the earth’s ecology is at the service of human ecology and not vice versa. According to Pope Benedict XVI in his January 1, 2010 World Day of Peace Message, If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation (CPPC), “Our duties towards the environment flow from our duties towards the person, considered both individually and in relation to others” (CPPC 12). Note that our duties towards the environment do not flow from any “duties” towards trees, dolphins, the air, or the earth as a whole. For example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) tells us,

[I]t is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives. (CCC 2417)

On the other hand, an environmental policy or practice that does real harm to people to benefit “the environment” is wrong. For example, some environmental activists hammer spikes into trees to “save” them and to punish the logging industry. If the spikes are discovered, they must be laboriously removed, and they lower the economic value of the trees. If they are not found, they could physically injure a logger or sawmill worker when the saw hits the hard object.

If it is legitimate for man to use creation, may he use it any way he wishes? As we will see later, the answer is no.

This brings us to the sixth principle: Stewardship is man’s God-given mandate to direct wisely the development of the earth. If we look back over the five principles articulated so far, one could argue that the first great principle of the Catholic environmental vision is that God is the good creator of everything that is. The second is that man is God’s steward of creation. The principal of stewardship is also the answer—or at least an answer—to those who (falsely) say Christians believe God has given them license to rape the environment. A steward is not the owner of a good thing but rather the one who is entrusted with its use and care. The owner of the entire natural world is God who has given mankind the order to fill the earth and subdue it. Man’s stewardship imposes responsibilities on him.

Man’s stewardship includes respect for God’s creation. A person’s abuse of creation is wrong because it degrades him and is an injustice to other people on earth and to future generations. However, it is not wrong because of any inherent rights which lower created things possess. Abuse of creation is also wrong because it is a kind of insult to God who has created it good.

Man’s actual practice of stewardship can be seen in human history, which is an astonishing account of man’s dominion over and use of the goods of the earth through discovery, adaptation, and technology. We rightly think of our age as one of an explosion of knowledge and of astounding scientific and technological progress. But the discovery and use of fire, the domestication of animals, and the development of agriculture all occurred in human prehistory.

Stewardship is also not optional. As Pope Benedict XVI points out, God has created the world with a certain “grammar” which includes “giving man the role of a steward and administrator with responsibility over creation, a role which man must certainly not abuse, but also one which he may not abdicate” (CPPC 13). Whether anyone likes it or not, man is master of creation. Therefore, he has a responsibility.

In the next post, I will articulate the final eight principles. After that, if there is interest, I can start applying these principles to specific environmental issues.

In light of the Vanity Fair cover story about Bruce Jenner’s decision to undergo a "gender transition" and current desire to be called Caitlyn Jenner, I thought it would be appropriate to look at five important questions those who support gender-transitioning need to answer.

1. What determines reality: facts or feelings?

My wife used to work at a psychiatric hospital where it was standard procedure to not feed into a patient’s delusions. If a patient, for example, said he was a cat, that would not justify leaving a bowl of milk for him in his room. However, if a patient with a male genetic code and male genitalia said he was a woman, then the staff had to treat him as a woman and refer to him with female pronouns.

But what’s the difference between someone redefining his species and redefining his sex? After all, both of these things are determined anatomically and genetically. Or consider this non-hypothetical example: what if a person thinks she is disabled but is actually healthy? Should we treat her mistaken sense of identity, or should we disable her so her body conforms to her mistaken self-identity?

Well, just as transgender people make a distinction between the sex they were purportedly assigned at birth and the sex they now identify with (i.e., their gender), the “transabled” make a distinction between the disabilities society says they don't have and the disabilities they think they have.

The woman pictured below is named Chloe Jennings-White, and she is “transable.” This means that, although her legs function properly, she still uses leg braces and a wheelchair, because she identifies as “disabled.” Living as an able-bodied person is as painful for her as it is for a transgender person to live in accordance with his biological sex. Some "transabled" people even ask doctors to help them become disabled (such as by having their spinal cords severed).

But how is allowing a person to identify as transable any different from allowing him to identify as transgender? In fact, one researcher in Canada (who happens to be transgender but not transable) says the transgender community hasn’t supported the transabled community because the former doesn’t want its recent momentum in the court of public opinion to grind to a halt by being associated with what most people recognize to be a serious pathology.

Indeed, if we are disgusted that a doctor would amputate the healthy limbs of a transable person, then why aren’t we equally disgusted by a doctor who would amputate the healthy genitals of a transgender person?

2. What do the terms man and woman mean?

If I were to say that a woman is someone who wears high heels and makeup, and has long, flowing hair and a curvy figure, many people would accuse me of sexism. They would say I’m reducing what it means to be a woman to some superficial traits that aren’t representative of all women. After all, some women have short hair, and others can’t stand the aches and pains associated with high heels.

And yet, isn’t that what Jenner’s transformation into a woman is endorsing—the idea that a woman is a svelte and sultry individual who looks good (to some people) in a corset on a magazine cover? In fact, this is one reason that some feminists actually oppose gender reassignment and transgender identities.

So here’s my question to transgender advocates: “What do the terms man and woman actually mean?”

What is the difference between a gender-non-conforming man (a biological male who enjoys looking and acting like a woman but wants to be called a man) and a transgender woman (a biological male who enjoys looking and acting like a woman and wants to be called a woman)?

If the only difference is the terms themselves, then modern “gender ideology” is guilty of eviscerating the concepts of male and female of any objective meaning beyond “what I want to be called.” How can we ever hope to raise well-adjusted men and women who interact with one another in a healthy way (and so form the foundation of civilization) when no one has any idea what men and women are in the first place?

3. Is it hateful to be attracted to one sex but not to transgendered people who identify as that sex?

Many people in the transgender community complain about not being considered “real" men or “real" women. They want to end the distinction between one who is male or female by birth and one who is male or female by choice. In fact, one pro-transgender website says that the idea that transgender people are not “real men and women” is

probably the most hurtful myth of all. It tells us that transgender people are somehow less human because of their gender identification. It is proof that they do not have a place in proper society. It is hateful and unacceptable. Everyone should have the right to be men and women, regardless of sex category or anything else.

This often happens in the realm of dating and interaction with the non-transgendered. For example, a transgender man (i.e., a biological woman who dresses like a man or has undergone surgery to try to resemble a man) may not be attractive to biological women, since they usually desire biological men, not transgender men. He may become indignant when women say, "I only date actual men" or "real men."

Many states already have laws that outlaw discrimination based on “gender identity,” which means that it is illegal for an employer to make distinctions between biological men/women and transgender men/women. Granted, the law has no authority to coerce private citizens to not make those same distinctions. However, the law can legitimize the culture's ostracizing of those who believe there is a difference between biological sex and self-proclaimed gender.

Society may, for example, consider a woman who dates biological men exclusively rather than transgender men (or men who do the same with biological and transgender women) to be as bigoted as someone who refuses to date immigrants because he or she prefers “natural Americans.” Will it become, in the words of the above critic, "hateful and unacceptable" to decline a romantic gesture from a transgendered person because that person is not an "actual" man or a "real" woman that one would normally be attracted to?

4. Will parents be guilty of child abuse if they fail to “transition” their children who identify as transgender?

In the past few years, there have been several high-profile cases of parents who helped their children undergo sex-change reassignment surgery in order to accommodate their identification of being transgendered. One famous case in 2011 involved Thomas Lobel, an 11-year-old boy who identifies as a girl named Tammy. His adoptive lesbian parents claim that Thomas (pictured below between them) has said he was a girl ever since he was three years old, and they worried about suicide risks if they didn’t help him use hormone blockers to stave off puberty.

But what about the mental health risks involved in trying to change a child’s sex? According to John Hopkins University professor Paul McHugh, “When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70 to 80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings.” Imagine how devastating it would be for a little boy or girl to have his body permanently mutilated just because he or she expressed a fleeting, childish thought.

The other disturbing scenario we have to confront is this: Confronted with the claim that children with gender identity disorder are at greater risk for suicide and the assumption that a sex-change operation is the only way to prevent such a horrible outcome, will parents be convicted of child abuse if they don’t consent to a child’s sex-change therapy or operation? Imagine a child tells his teacher or counselor, even at the age of four or five, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl; but Mommy says that’s not true.” Could this result in the child being taken from his parents' custody for his own safety? In a culture that celebrates being transgendered, it’s not hard to see this coming to pass.

5. Will a culture that celebrates transgender identities tolerate evidence that such identities are harmful?

According to McHugh:

A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.

When presented with evidence like this, supporters of sex-change therapy usually say that negative health outcomes arise from “social stigmas” or “lack of resources for the transgendered.” But this is a classic example of “heads I win, tails you lose.”

If a transgender person reports having no negative health outcomes, then transgender therapies and surgery are vindicated. But, if a transgender person regrets his decision to change genders or reports having high levels of stress or other disorders, then that’s not because being transgender is harmful. Instead, it’s because society oppresses the transgendered, and that causes their negative mental health outcomes. Of course, this is a convenient way to frame the issue so that one's position can’t be disproved.

We may even come to the point where testimonies of those who underwent sex-change operations and regretted their decision, such as the one shared on the Catholic Answers Focus podcast, will be seen as another cause of stigma and thus be declared anathema in the public square.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: we should not mock or dehumanize people who have gender identity disorder. Someone struggling with this disorder requires counseling, appropriate medical intervention, and an empathetic ear that is willing to listen. But we also shouldn’t celebrate the mutilation of healthy bodies or facilitate the destruction of masculinity and femininity.

We should treat identity disorders equally and not refuse to call something a disorder just because many people disagree with that assessment (truth isn't determined by majority vote, after all). Instead, we must compassionately help the person who has an identity disorder, regardless of his or her age or stage of life, come to know his or her true self and flourish as the person he or she was created to be.
 
 
(Image credit: CNN)

NOTE: This is a follow-up article to Patrick's post on Wednesday titled, "Body, Soul, and the Mind/Brain Question".
 

 
Having laid the foundation of the human soul in Wednesday's post, let us now turn to its proper character and function. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, man’s soul comprises all those powers proper to lower organisms, namely metabolism, sensation, and locomotion; however, a still higher power remains that is non-existent in all other soul-possessors—intellection. “We must conclude that the nutritive soul, the sensitive soul, and the intellectual soul are in man numerically one and the same.”¹

Therefore, according to Thomas, the substantial form of the human body is the intellective soul, which, in the larger context of this question, is interchangeable with mind. It is by means of the intellective (or intellectual) soul/mind that man experiences an intellectual mode of existence in the world as an embodied creature, an existence entirely different than that experienced by plants, amoebas, frogs, or dogs. There is something it is like to be a knowing, human person, and this something is markedly different from what it is like to be a bat, for example.² Intellectual existence shapes every facet of our lives and inherently defines what it means to be human.³

This intellectual soul permits us entrance into the sphere of truths where we can apprehend absolute principles and act as responsible agents. It also allows us to encounter a world not populated by brute particulars, but particulars of a universal kind. This allows us to know not simply that things are, but on an even deeper level, what things are. It gives us the ability to paint and build houses, to fall in love, and do science.

As we noted earlier, the middle path of hylomorphism must avoid the pitfalls of dualism and its twin, materialism, and it must also account for world-access and presence. Where dualism wishes to assert the preeminence of mind/spirit/soul over and against the body and brain, hylomorphism adamantly maintains that they are not separable, except through the event of death. The body and the soul are “grown-together,”⁴ forming a concretized whole that has powers and capacities greater than the sum of its parts. While the substantial form of man, his soul, is the principle of actuality and thus possesses a type of freedom from the body as it persists through time, nevertheless the material component of man, his body, is an absolutely essential ingredient to the substance of man, for the very raison d’être of form is to inform some matter.

Hylomorphism also sufficiently guards against materialism. The hylomorphic alternative does grant materialists that matter is eminently important, concurring with them that the matter of the body is essential—especially so when concerning the matter of the brain. However hylomorphism maintains, in contrast to materialism, the real presence of personal subjectivity experienced by each person by insisting that the substantial form of man is the intellectual soul. There is something about man (human nature) that is properly transcendent, non-reducible, and subjective. Because of this, we are able to reach beyond the material constituency of our corporeality in a non-physical, spiritual way, especially when we come to know anything. This must be granted if one honestly assesses one’s life-as-lived experiences. “We go beyond the restrictions of space and time and the kind of causality that is proper to material things,” writes Sokolowski,⁵ when we make vows,⁶ use language, utilize words and symbols, create art, share ideas and thoughts, perform works of Shakespeare, propose mathematical formulas, debate and discuss, engage in politics, and much, much more.⁷

This is especially the case when we invoke the personal pronoun, I, and act as responsible subjects and agents of truth—there is truly an “I” to speak of, present in every human person, that serves as the center of all personal activity. This spiritual modality of man is his intellective soul. But all of these activities, powers, and capabilities which are spiritual in character, require, at least in part, that we be embodied as well. One cannot bring to life Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a spiritual activity transcending space and time—without having actors with bodies. Though this may seem obvious, it is important for this position.

When it comes to the brain and the mind, it is not a case of either/or, but rather both/and. The brain and nervous system, being informed by the downward causality of man's intellectual soul and thus existing in a properly intellectual way, have a critical role to play when it comes to consciousness and perception. This, however, does not prove that the brain is the seat of intellection, but on the contrary, simply reinforces the hylomorphic position. The brain and the mind are wedded together, or, as Kass says, “grown-together.” Therefore, the mind working in, with, and through the brain exists and operates in a truly spiritual and transcendent way, allowing for world-access.

The mind is not some homunculus trapped within the Cartesian theater of consciousness and scanning the screens of sensory input. Rather, it is actively engaged with the world through the brain and the body as a whole. And just as hylomorphism maintains that persons are concretizations of matter and form grown together, so too does this anthropology grant that things existing in the world exist as matter-form composites. Our world is not populated by heaps of matter but rather matter as informed and as organized wholes. These matter-form composites, existing as intelligible wholes, are potentially knowable to man for he is an intellectual being capable of coming to know things by virtue of his intellectual soul. Moreover, through the brain—not by the brain but rather through it—the meaning, or the intelligibility, of things is conveyed.

Sokolowksi illustrates this idea further utilizing an innovative analogy. The brain and nervous system function, he maintains, much like a transparent lens. When a lens works properly, it refracts and presents that which is beyond it, whether that is a newspaper or the Andromeda galaxy light years away. Unlike a television screen that creates that which is seen, a lens serves as the physical medium through which what is seen is conveyed.

When I hold up a magnifying glass at arm’s length, and gaze into it looking at the wall opposite me through the lens, the image that seems to appear in the glass is not actually in the glass like the image on a TV screen, but rather is actually out there, beyond the glass. With the TV screen, I behold a representation, an image of the real thing, but not the thing itself. But with a lens, what I see in the glass is not something representing the wall, but rather the wall as wall, but in a specifically non-physical way. The lens, then, serves as a physical medium through which the external world of matter-form composites is conveyed and known.

Applying this analogy to the mind and the brain, we can begin to grasp the complex interrelation of soul and body. The brain and the nervous system are the physical medium through which the external world is accessible and knowable to the immaterial mind, not as the result of a secondary stage of re-presentation, but in a single, concomitant moment. The mind needs the brain for it is in accordance with human nature that we come to knowledge and understanding of the world through our physicality and the corporeality of things. This lensing analogy is also helpful in the negative sense, for if the lens is damaged, or misshapen, it cannot convey its object clearly or without distortion. So too when the brain is damaged, the extra-mental world of matter-form composites is not as easily accessible or knowable, and perhaps even opaque to the mind.

The intellect and the brain are wedded together, with the brain and nervous system acting like transparent lenses, not giving themselves, but rather giving that which is beyond them and other. It is only by being interwoven in the body that the mind, the I, can come to know anything, and, furthermore, it is only by encountering corporeal things, through the senses, that we are ever able to attain knowledge of the incorporeal. Therefore, to posit any separation between the mind and the brain, or, to posit any theory that considers the two identical, is incorrect. We conclude that the brain, though an absolutely necessary cause, is not a sufficient cause for the human mind.

This solution offered, however, may strike some as dissatisfying, still riddled with ambiguities. I would like to address that feeling of uneasiness. For many of us, our own intellects have been influenced by the categories and presuppositions of the Cartesian worldview that surrounds us in our contemporary culture. Because we live in a positivistic society that is more apt to follow the decrees of scientism, we almost unconsciously equate the true with the provable, or scientifically demonstrable. We want things to be, as Descartes articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy, clear and distinct.⁸ Because of this, we desire to know clearly and distinctly how the immaterial mind and the material brain relate exactly to the point that it could be modeled. However, this desire is misplaced and unwarranted. There are inherent limitations concerning the human person that do not admit of such clear and distinct conceptions.

One such instance concerns the very nature of conscious experience. According to philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, there are easy problems concerning the mind, and then there are hard problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that are susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science.⁹ Essentially, the easy problems—which are in fact monumentally complex in scope and wildly ambitious in aim—concern the functionality and structural mechanisms of cognition, like the “ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to stimuli...the focus of attention,” and much more.¹⁰ In all of these cases, a clear cognitive or neurophysiological model can be employed to give an adequate account of what’s going on up there.

However, the real issue in explaining consciousness is the problem of felt experience. As Chalmers puts it, there is a co-relative subjective element (i.e., pertaining to a subject, a unique I) to all of our objective mental activities; with each and every perception of the color red, for example, there is a concomitant felt subjective experience of what it’s like to perceive the color red. In a word, “there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.”¹¹ I think Chalmers is correct to point out this perplexing quality of consciousness that is simply inextricable by recourse to material explanations and does not admit of clear and distinct answers. Why is it that when our visual or auditory systems engage in visual or auditory information processing, we have a visual or auditory experience? Why is it that when I hear “Amazing Grace,” or smell Dial soap I have an experience of these particular stimuli? His question, the hard problem, is this: “why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”¹²

I believe that Chalmers’ distinction between the easy and the hard problems of consciousness is merely symptomatic of a second, deeper dichotomy concerning the nature of the human person: the distinction between problem and mystery and the rampant confusion of the two. Problems are those things that can be objectified.¹³ For us today, the word objective connotes a sense of precision, exactness, or unbiased truth. It comes from the Latin word objectum, which means, “a thing put before (the mind or sight).”¹⁴ In its original usage, then, something objective was something placed before me, in front of and present to my powers of manipulation, capable of being solved or overcome. Problems are questions in which I am not involved, and because of that, I can solve them (at least in theory). They can be addressed and solved through a technique repeatable by others. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I myself am inherently a part of; I cannot be separated from it, in an objective sense.¹⁵ With mystery, I am both part of the problem and the problem-solver.

In our modern world—particularly the Western culture—everything has been reduced to the problematic, leaving no room for mystery; we Americans are good with problems—we put a man on the moon, for goodness sakes! Mysteries, are a different story. In our culture, mysteries are those things that we have not yet solved. Daniel Dennett announces, “Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don’t know how to think about—yet.”¹⁶ He goes on to equate the mystery of consciousness with other mysteries that eventually fell before the methods of science, such as the origin of the universe, the reproductive process, the nature of time, space, and gravity.¹⁷ Unfortunately, I do not suppose that the mystery of the human mind will give way to Daniel Dennett’s probing any time soon.

What I have been arguing for, and what I have proposed by way of a hylomorphic alternative, is a recapitulation of the mystery of the human person, revealed in the spiritual modality proper to him. The competing anthropologies of dualism and materialism each treated man as a problem to be solved: How, Descartes asked, can we clearly and distinctly conceive of the mind in relation to the body? Or, how, materialists wonder, can we prove that the mind is nothing but an epiphenomenon of the brain? Both positions fail, where they hylomorphic alternative maintains a both/and position that accounts for corporeality as well as intellectuality. It does not attempt to swallow up subjectivity into physical brain activity alone. It incorporates the brain and the mind in such a way that they are not only compatible, but also co-dependent and “grown-together.”¹⁸ The mind, or spirit, of man exercises definitive downward causality on the brain and the matter of the body, while the body and the brain are needed for the full flourishing and activity of the mind. Truly, man is not a problem to be solved, but rather a mystery to be lived. Let us insist on the mystery of the human person, and especially, on the mystery of the mind and the brain.
 
 
(Image credit: Kool News)

In addition to my recent article, “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Strange Notions has featured several related pieces, “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine” by Matthew Allen Newland, and more recently “Exorcising Epistemology” by Matthew Becklo. True to the spirit of the Areopagus and mission of Strange Notions, these authors and I have approached the much-debated topics of the mind-brain problem and consciousness from different perspectives, arriving at subtle and nuanced conclusions.

Digital dialogue, unlike its real life, real-time analogue of face-to-face debate, can limp when it comes to clarity and expression. My intention with the first piece was to point out the limitations of reductionist materialism—the effort to reduce subjectivity, consciousness, felt-experience, etc., to the brain’s material causality and it alone, to make shine the inherent limitations of an atheistic and materially-closed universe, and thereby to beg the God question. That aside, given what’s been written by Newland and Becklo (two marvelous pieces that I thoroughly enjoyed), and Philip Lewandowski’s most recent addition on the limitations of materialism, what appears needful at this point is a more thoroughgoing presentation of the mind-brain/soul-body problem according to the Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective, which holds to a hylomorphic (“matter” and “form” together) ontology.

According to this school of thought, the foundation and starting point is nature and its characteristic motions, changes, and growths—fish swim, trees grow, humans strive. The source of this motion, or principle of change or growth, is what Aristotle called soul, the substantial form of a living being. All living beings possess souls as their substantial form: bacteria, algae, amoebas, ferns, flies, fish, dogs, horses, and human beings all have souls. On the other hand, inanimate beings such as human artifacts, be they hammers, paintings, or super computers, lack a soul (substantial form) though they do possess form.

The distinction here is between the source and kind of the form present—for living beings, the soul (substantial form) is immediately given to the being itself at the moment it comes to be (in conception); for artifacts, however, the form is imposed gradually on some matter (and this is usually done by a human, albeit animals too impose form on matter, such as beavers imposing form on streams and marshes). A pile of bricks becomes a chimney when a mason imposes chimney form onto the raw material. Contra Descartes, the human soul is not a thing separate from and then inserted into a living body nor imposed from without, like Tony Stark stepping into his Iron Man suit (as handy as that analogy was in my last article). The ethereal Casper-the-ghost connotations conjured by the word soul distorts its etymological root meaning. Soul derives from the Latin anima, meaning animation or “animate,” i.e., alive. This etymology is helpful precisely because we are far less likely to conceive of “animation” all on its own; “animation,” as a property, inheres in a living being.¹

The soul (substantial form) of all living beings is that which makes the organism a substance, a living, integral, particular being. It is the principle that, from the very beginning of the organism’s existence, exercises downward causality on the matter, guiding, directing, informing the “stuff” of the thing, making it to be this substance and not that. For example, frog form (or the soul of the frog) informs froggy matter as it grows and matures from a fertilized egg, to a tadpole, and finally to a fully grown bullfrog in a way that dog form does not. Froggy soul actualizes itself in froggy matter, and doggy soul in doggy matter, each making the substance to be the whole substance that it is—from its bone structure, to the constitution of the organs, to the size, shape, and type of brain and sensory systems the organism has, etc. Although similar molecules—amino acids, proteins, carbohydrates, oxygen and carbon dioxide, etc.—are present in frogs and dogs alike, the matter of each organism as formed and as organized as a whole, integral organism is different according to the substantial form and soul of each.

Form is not merely the outward shape or contours of the thing in question; rather, form designates the essence, the what of the thing predicated. In addition, substantial form and soul cannot be reduced to DNA, as many materialistic biochemists would argue. DNA, as organized and structured matter, is itself informed and semiotic—the information that DNA bears is immaterial. It’s the difference between a Rorschach Ink block card and a newspaper page—in the first, you simply have matter (ink) unorganized; in the second you have matter (ink) organized in such a way that it bears immaterial meaning, letters combining to make words, words to make sentences, and sentences to convey meaning, none of which is in the ink on the page. These strands of nucleotide bases are themselves material, bearing an immaterial “sentence” composed of millions of “letters.”² Dr. Leon Kass, author of The Hungry Soul, provides a concise formulation concerning the relationship between form and matter. He writes: “Form and material [matter] are, in the first instance, relative and correlative terms: Form is the something made of certain materials; materials are, as materials, materials of and for the thing as formed.”³ Form, then, is the principle of actuality in the organism causing it to be.

Physiologically, the most fundamental life process that separates animate organisms from inanimate things is the metabolic system—the taking in of nutrients for self-maintenance and energy. Metabolism is the most basic prerequisite for a being to be animated, i.e., to possess a soul. Hence, the first function of soul as the substantial form is to metabolize. Food that is “originally outside and other…must be brought inside and transformed into same.”⁴ What persists through time, despite the continual exchange of old stuff for new stuff on the molecular and cellular level, is precisely the form, the soul inhering in ever-new matter. Despite the continual exchange of old cells for new cells, to the point that every cell in one’s body is different than the year prior, the organism remains the same. My dog, despite having all new cells a year later, still comes when called, sits when commanded, and prefers his favorite chew toy. In a word, he is the same dog despite having a completely new cellular make-up. To this point, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski from the Catholic University of America writes, “It is not true that all the causation [in living bodies] comes from the material elements in the body…rather, in living things the matter itself is shaped and reshaped by the thing as a whole, and hence by the animation [soul] of the thing.”⁵ From this, we gather that the soul does not emerge as a byproduct of trillions of neurons buzzing, or chemicals ebbing and flowing, or molecules splitting and dividing, but rather it is present from the beginning, actively making the body be an integral, unified whole through time.

Therefore, although the soul can be conceived as distinct from the body, to conclude that they are in fact actually distinct is a deep intellectual error the consequences of which modernity is deeply entangled. The error consists in treating the soul as if it were a piece in the whole of the body, like an organ. The soul and the body do not form a unity of parts “placed with each other side by side, like bricks in a building.”⁶ The soul is not one part among many in the body. On the contrary, soul and body are united in an essential, not accidental, way so that they are “grown-together.”⁷ They are non-independent components of the human person that, while existing in life, are intrinsically conjoined, causally so, with the soul actualizing the whole. A part such as the liver, for example, cannot subsist on its own apart from the unified body, nor would it make sense in its own right.⁸ A liver only makes sense when it is seen within the larger whole.

Dualism errs in separating the body from the soul, treating the soul as a part in the body. Likewise, materialism errs by eliminating form altogether, and insisting that bare, brute matter stands alone and can account for self-identity through time and the manifest organization of a whole, integrated being. The hylomorphic view synthesizes the two positions so that the soul, or substantial form, and the body are “grown-together in the enmattered form or the informed matter that is the given thing; the dog and its flesh, the oak and its roots…are each inseparably related and…mutually interdependent.”⁹ Therefore, the form or soul of living organisms is not some ghostly thing residing in the body for a period of time. Nor is it merely the outside surface of the skin, and yet, this epidermal boundary is intrinsically related to and caused by the unity and wholeness achieved by the form. It is neither visible nor tangible, and yet, through the matter it informs, the soul becomes, in a sense, visible and tangible. In short, the soul, the principle of animation, is that which makes a thing to be the thing it is through time as a unified whole.
 
 
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article on Friday.
 
 
(Image credit: Untamed Science)

According to many today, the advance of the natural physical sciences continues to shrink the “space” for God. The “gaps” where someone can place God are decreasing, and therefore the “God hypothesis” will one day be swallowed whole by the progress of the scientific endeavor. Even more, the “space” where one could posit the human person as something more than just a complex, organized collection of matter and energy is said to have disappeared.

While I find a materialist metaphysics very hard to coherently defend, I do find it interesting that an increasing amount of “secular” philosophers, who have no particular sympathy towards deism or theism, are beginning to question the assumption that materialism is true.¹ It seems the rise of the physical sciences has led to matter and energy being proclaimed as the one true “god.”

As we read a few months back on Strange Notions, in Pat Shultz’s article on the personal pronoun “I” and inner subjectivity, atheism and materialism seem to be connected in an intimate manner. But if we can show that materialism is false, beyond a reasonable doubt, we can begin to proclaim with Dr. Edward Feser that materialism is in fact one of the last superstitions and one of the final myths that we have created.² We then can begin to recognize that there exists more to reality than simply matter and energy. Our heart and mind can then be opened to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the human person and ultimately to the possibility of the Divine.

While I will not propose arguments for either this more complete account of the human person or a specifically theistic worldview in this essay, I do wish to address the coherency of actually holding that materialism is true. Materialism is the metaphysical proposal that all that exists is material in its nature. This means that no immaterial, spiritual entities exist in all reality. While there are many issues that arise which challenge the coherency of the materialist hypothesis, one of the most basic is the existence of truth. The reason is that truth, and our beliefs in general, necessarily seep into every facet of our human condition. Every coherent thought we have and word we proclaim is some sort of belief statement about the true nature of reality. Even when we aim to purposely deceive, we are working off of the assumption that there is a truth about reality that we are trying to keep hidden. We cannot say that truth does not exist without at the same time contradicting ourself.

But there is a key distinction that makes the human person so unique. It is not simply the case that it is possible that some of the beliefs we hold are actually true. Rather, the human person is capable of using reason to hold that certain beliefs are more rational to hold as actually true over alternative beliefs. In other words, it is possible for the human person to distinguish between beliefs that merely appear true and beliefs that are actually true. This is done through the proper use of reason and the intellect. The alternative to this position is complete skepticism, where a person holds that one cannot tell the difference between a belief that is actually true and one that only appears to be true.

We can already begin to see that the position of complete skepticism is incoherent and must be rejected. The statement, “I hold that it is actually true that a person cannot tell the difference between a belief that is actually true and one that only appears to be true” is clearly an incoherent proposition. In a more succinct manner, what we are saying is that, “I hold that complete skepticism is actually true.” This is a self-contradiction and what is called a “proof by contradiction”. Therefore, we reject complete skepticism (this will be an important part of the actual arguments below) and move on to the main attraction.

We will be using the form of a basic logical philosophical proof. If you read the series at Strange Notions about the existence of an unconditioned reality, this should look very familiar. This type of argument can be very strong, because if the logical form is valid and the premises are true, then the conclusion is necessarily true (from the metaphysical—the ontological—point of view). From an epistemological point of view, if the premises can be shown to be true, beyond a reasonable doubt, then the conclusion that follows is also to be held as true beyond a reasonable doubt.

We will be proposing all the ways in which truth could arise within the human person, while at the same time assuming that the human person is a purely material being. If all these options must ultimately be reduced to absurdity, using valid logical form and true premises, then we will also reduce the assumption of materialism to absurdity. This will be done by taking each of the options one at a time, assuming it is true, and then working to show that the position is actually internally incoherent. And if the position can be shown to be internally incoherent, then means we must reject that original assumption.

The Argument

I. Either all of reality is material in nature (i.e., materialism is true) or all of reality is not material in nature (i.e., materialism is not true).

We start by breaking our options for reality into two absolute groups. There are no other options available. Either all of reality is material in nature (i.e., materialism is true) or all of reality is not material in nature (i.e., materialism is not true). We do this so that if the assumption that materialism is true leads to a logical contradiction, then we must conclude that materialism is not true.

We will start by assuming that materialism is true. This means that the belief-making mechanisms of the human person are ultimately reducible to the overall physical state of the human person. Many would point towards the chemical processes in the brain and the overall state of the nervous system, but of course there may be more “materiality” to the human person that we have yet to discover and study. This is the reason we use the general statement of “the overall physical state of the human person”—whatever that physical state may end up being. And the reason this is true is because nothing but matter and energy exists, so all our beliefs ultimately arise from the complex interaction of matter and energy.

II. If materialism is true, we have three alternative possibilities:

(A) The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any sort of consistent natural physical laws.

(B) The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and always lead to true beliefs.

(C) The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and do not always lead to true beliefs.

What we have done here is lay out all possible options in all reality. (I did not include the option of natural laws always leading to false beliefs, since that option can be easily seen to be incoherent.) We will take each option in turn to see whether it can account for holding beliefs that we have reason to believe are more rational to hold as actually true than alternative beliefs; that is, we will see if any of these options can account for the fact that the human person is capable of distinguishing between beliefs that are actually true and beliefs that only appear to be true.

III. The Materialist Options evaluated

Materialist Option (A)

1. We assume that Materialist Option (A) is true. (The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any sort of consistent natural physical laws)
2. Complete skepticism is false.
3. If the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any consistent natural physical laws, then all the matter/energy that makes up the human person’s belief-making mechanisms behave in random ways.
4. If the belief-making mechanisms behave in random ways, then the beliefs that come from this belief-making mechanism will also be random.
5. If the beliefs are random, then the human person cannot rationally hold that any belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true.
6. If the human person cannot rationally hold that any belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true, then complete skepticism is true.
7. Contradiction between premise (2) and premise (6).
8. Therefore, we reject the original assumption of Materialist Option (A).

The job at hand now is to show that each of these premises is true beyond a reasonable doubt. Premise (2)—that complete skepticism is false—was demonstrated above.

Premises (3) and (4) are evident from the fact that if even a single part of the matter/energy that forms the human person’s belief-making mechanisms does not follow any consistent physical laws, then the beliefs that come from them will be random. To be random means that our belief-making mechanisms are not directed towards coming to true beliefs—in fact these mechanisms aren’t directed towards anything!

Premise (5) and (6) simply shows that if our beliefs are completely random then we have no way to rationally hold that any of our beliefs are actually true, rather than simply appearing to be true. Furthermore, our belief in the fact that our beliefs are random would itself a random. This leads to complete skepticism, which creates an internal contradiction in this hypothesis. Therefore, we reject Materialist Option (A). The belief that the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any sort of consistent natural physical laws is false.

Materialist Option (B)

1. We assume that Materialist Option (B) is true. (The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and always lead to true beliefs)
2. If the human person’s belief-making mechanisms always leads to true beliefs, then every belief the human person holds is true.
3. The human person does not always hold true beliefs.
4. Contradiction between premises (2) and (3).
5. Therefore, we reject the original assumption of Materialist Option (B).

This option is the one that is most easily seen to be false. The proposal that we always come to true beliefs is false by the fact that two people can, and many times do, hold contradictory beliefs to be true. It is also shown forth by the fact that we assume that science has shown that people have come to false beliefs about reality in the past. Those entering into discussion on a site like Strange Notions are actually working from the assumption that they are coming together to discuss what the actual truth of reality is, which assumes that false beliefs about reality are possible. With that said, we can reject Materialist Option (B). The belief that the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and always lead to true beliefs is false.

Materialist Option (C)

1. We assume that Materialist Option (C) is true. (The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and do not always lead to true beliefs.)
2. Complete skepticism is false.
3. If the human person’s belief-making mechanisms follow natural physical laws, which do not always lead to true beliefs, then some beliefs a person holds are true and some they hold are false.
4. If the exact same natural physical laws that govern the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do lead to both true and false beliefs, then the human person cannot rationally hold that any particular belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true.
5. If the human person cannot rationally hold that any particular belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true, then complete skepticism is true.
6. Contradiction between premises (2) and (5).
7. Therefore, we reject the original assumption of Materialist Option (C).

Materialist Option (C) is probably the hypothesis that needs the most attention. This is because it seems to have the most promise of being able to describe reality as it actually is. Common human experience tells us that the human person can come to both true and false beliefs. And when we assume materialism, the belief-making mechanisms would seem to need to follow some sort of very complex natural physical laws. Obviously, if they didn’t always follow some sort of natural physical laws, then the coherency of our physical sciences is undermined, and we would be back to Materialist Option (A), which we addressed above. This is because the sciences rely upon the assumption that matter and energy actually do follow complex natural “physical laws” (even laws stating probabilities, such as those in versions of quantum mechanics, are natural physical laws nonetheless.)

So we again begin by acknowledging that complete skepticism is false. In premise (3), we simply point out that if the belief-making mechanisms of the human person do not always lead to true beliefs, then some of the beliefs that the person holds will be true and some of them will be false.

Premise (4) is the key premise in this argument. It points out that these consistent complex natural laws lead the human person’s belief-making mechanisms to sometimes hold true beliefs and at other times to hold false beliefs. In other words, the same law in the same exact situation can lead to either a true or false belief. If that is the case, then there is no way to tell whether a belief we hold is actually true, or whether it merely appears true. (The only way to avoid this conclusion is to hold a deterministic account of beliefs, where every belief we hold is true. This is Materialist Option (B), which we discussed above and found to be false.)

As has been the problem with all three of these proposals, there is no way to step back and use reason to say that this belief is actually true, rather than the belief only appearing to be true. In other words, complete skepticism is again true. Materialist Position (C) contains an internal contradiction. We can then reject Materialist Option (C). The belief that the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and do not always lead to true beliefs is false.

IV. The Grand Conclusion

What we have done is evaluate all three options that would attempt to explain, at a metaphysical level, how the human person would come to beliefs on a materialistic view of reality. What we have found is that all three of these positions are internally incoherent. Because of this we can reject the original assumption that all of reality is material in nature and conclude that there exists in all of reality more than just matter and energy—materialism is false. But even more specifically, because we are dealing with the belief-making mechanisms of the human person, we can conclude that the human person itself is not merely a material being.

The fact that this is a philosophical proof means that no finding in science could in principle undermine the conclusion. The only way to disprove this conclusion would be to use philosophical argument. Because of this fact, “promissory materialism”, the belief that one day the sciences will be able to explain all of reality in terms of matter and energy, is of no use. It does not matter what science discovers about the physical “laws” of the universe. It does not matter what other discoveries science makes in regards to quantum physics, string theory, multi-verses, or any other surprises this beautiful and vast cosmos has in store for us. This is, in part, what makes good philosophical arguments so strong.

The Evolution Objection

When I have had discussions with others about the topic of materialism and truth, evolution naturally comes up. Many times evolution appears to be the savior of this whole materialist enterprise—if a materialist has tried to replace God with matter and energy, then Jesus is replaced by the theory of evolution.

The central point of the evolution objection is that evolution is a sort of “optimizer”. Evolution has no ultimate purpose, goal, or “end”, but the more beings who survive to reproduce with a certain trait means that there will be a higher probability of having that trait passed down to future generations. So it could be proposed that in the roughly four billion years since it is believed life first appeared on earth, the belief-making mechanisms have been optimized so that, at this point in history, we have very good reason to believe that the majority of our beliefs are actually true. This plays off of the fact that it is reasonable to believe that a biological being who holds more true beliefs would seem to have a higher probability of surviving.

The fact of the matter is this could all be true, but it would still not change the fact that materialism is an incoherent belief.

The reason for this is we are not debating whether the human person could actually hold some true beliefs. The above discussion hinges upon the question of whether it is possible to show that any specific belief we hold is actually true, rather than simply appearing to be true to us. If we can’t show this, then the human person is left in a state of complete skepticism, even in regards to the belief that “materialism is true”.

For example, “materialism is true” is a belief that the materialist needs to show is actually true, and doesn’t simply appear true to them. But the materialist necessarily saws off the branch that they are sitting on when they claim that materialism is true. This branch is itself the only thing that gives them the ability to hold that anything they hold is actually true. They are making the claim that materialism is true, but they cannot tell you if it is actually true, or if it only appears true. They destroy truth itself, which destroys their ability to hold any of their beliefs as being actually true statements. In fact, any thought a materialist has, or any statement that a materialist speaks, ends up being proof that materialism is false.

Truth is one of the key ways in which the transcendent nature of the human person makes its presence felt. This is why, over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle called the human person the “rational animal”. A rational intellect, a self-conscious nature, and a free will are all inextricably tied together. To be able to say that we have reason to believe that something is actually true, and doesn’t just appear to be true, is to “take a step back” from our belief. Picture it like placing the belief in front of you, and then objectively studying whether it is true or not. This is the reason why the human person can hold that it is rational to believe that some beliefs are actually, objectively true. And as we investigated at the beginning of this essay, the alternative, complete skepticism—that the human person cannot tell whether a belief is actually true or only appears true—is false.

So in the end, materialism and truth do have irreconcilable differences and must go their separate ways—to divorce and never become united, although it is, in fact, a union that never could have taken place.

It may be possible to boil down this entire essay to one statement: if complete skepticism is false, then materialism is also false.

But what then in regards to the proper conception of the human person itself? We have rejected materialism and we must also reject a dualist account, most prominently because of the mysterious and almost magical notion of how these two substances of an immaterial mind and material body would come together to interact. Our gaze must then fall to a type of hylomorphic account; an account that recognizes a distinction between the material and immateriality of the human person, but insists that the person is a single unified substance. This type of account must hold that the spiritual aspects of the human person do not reside in the living body, but rather must be identified with the entirety of the single unified living body—a living body that is a unity of both immateriality and materiality.

The next task is to defend and nuance this hylomorphic conception of the human person. I leave this task to the better equipped Mr. Patrick Schultz, who I just so happen to know has produced two fantastic essays on this exact topic (coming this Wednesday and Friday at Strange Notions.)

So we shall wait, not in the darkness of uncertainty, but in the light, knowing that philosophy can shed light on the issue of the true nature of the human person!