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At Jesus Creed, there is a discussion about The Stem Cell Challenge, which evoked my response below.

The Catholic Church does not have a position on ensoulment. Rather, the position is that, for all practical purposes, from the moment of conception, human life is to be treated with all the dignity of a human person. The Catholic teaching office addresses, in different ways, the sanctity of human nature, human life and human persons, and does not recognize a parvity of matter regarding offenses against same. This means that it views all offenses against human nature, life and persons as very grave matter.

Most people (most US Catholics, included) do draw distinctions in the relative gravity of such moral realities. The moral objects of the generative aspects of life (e.g. birth control, masturbation, erotic behaviors) are not deemed equal in significance to those of incipient human life, itself (e.g. abortifacients, embryonic stem cells, cloning, in vitro fertilization). Apparently, for many (most?) people, the moral status of the embryo increases as it advances through gestation from incipient through sentient to sapient human life, such that any human values in competition with the moral value of the embryo (e.g. medical research, life of the mother) must become increasingly more significant if one is to justify its destruction.

The physicalist conception of the soul does not eliminate metaphysics; it advances yet another metaphysical hypothesis. Whether one employs a substance, process or some other root metaphor in one’s metaphysical approach, one will encounter the classical sorite paradox, which asks when an aggregate of individual grains of sand becomes a heap of sand. This paradox results from our conceptual confusion between efficient causation (adding grains of sand, in other words, the gestation process) and logical causation (defining a heap, in other words, a human person).

The substance approach doesn’t square with our moral intuitions because its essentialism (overemphasis on logical causation) cannot account for the changing moral status of the embryo, which most people seem to – not unreasonably – impute. The process approach is equally unsatisfying because its nominalism (overemphasis on efficient causation) is dismissive of our most deeply felt epistemic and moral sensibilities regarding a person’s very identity, in which one’s personhood is grounded, even as a member of Homo sapiens, much less, as an imago Dei.

I mentioned Charles Hartshorne’s concept of nonstrict identity based on asymmetric temporal relations (in another context on another thread) and it has some bearing, here. The practical upshot of this concept is that a human organism’s past, but not its future, comprises its identity, which basically means that, once ensouled, personhood perdures with all of its necessary and sufficient conditions (notwithstanding a lack of certain traits and characteristics such as in sleep and coma) until death.

The collective moral intuitions that seem to ground the apparent consensus regarding the increasing moral status of the embryo as gestation advances, I strongly suspect, do not derive from most people’s metaphysical presuppositions and postures. Instead, they derive more holistically from a constellation of irrational, pre-rational, nonrational, rational and supra-rational dispositions, which honor, even if only implicitly, ethical approaches that are somewhat aretaic (virtue), somewhat deontological, somewhat consequentialist (teleological), somewhat authoritarian & traditional & scriptural, somewhat contractarian and so on. For the most part, then, they are not apposite to formal argumentation with its clearly disambiguated and rigorously defined concepts, apodictic certainties and moral verities, but are more so an assortment of informal arguments, inclinations and dispositions that gift us with probabilistic notions and deeply felt epistemic, aesthetic and moral sensibilities.

We must prescind from our robustly metaphysical approach to a more vague phenomenological perspective, then, which embraces a semiotic realism, while, at the same time avoiding the mutual unintelligibility, incommensurability and occlusivity of the old substance-process, essentialism-nominalism conundrum and associated paradoxes. This is to say that we are realizing values, making meaning and attaining, albeit fallibly, absolute moral truths. We have been gifted by scripture and tradition, reason and experience, with basic moral precepts, profound anthropological truths and theological insights. Beyond the most basic of precepts, however, we need to come together in charity and dialogue to wrestle with some very thorny bioethical issues, remaining open to divine guidance and civil public discourse, wherein the Spirit moves.

Some of the most compelling arguments, then, in the public square, can indeed come from slippery slope appeals and reductio ad absurdum arguments, notwithstanding that they are otherwise considered logical fallacies in formal arguments. We do not enjoy, in my view, the luxury of indubitable formal arguments with apodictic certainties. Metaphysics, in the end, are neither irrelevant nor unimportant, but they are only one rational appeal among many others and, for manifold reasons, generally lack sufficient normative impetus because they are otherwise so descriptively elusive. Some of the most compelling arguments in the public square can come from nonbelievers, even, secularists like Nat Hentoff and Charles Krauthammer.

One can read an excellent consideration of the topic at hand as articulated by Dr. Krauthammer at the following link, which has similar statements by many others on the Bioethics Commission appointed by Bush: Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry – Statement of Dr. Krauthammer

It is for reasons such as those given by Dr. Krauthammer and others, as well as deference to the arguments advanced by the teaching office of my church and other conservative Christian leaders, that I believe that human life is sacred and deserves respect from its inception, requiring compelling reasons when one wants to manipulate it or interfere with it, even therapeutically.

In my view, for all practical purposes, human life should be treated with the dignity of a human person well before the origins of sapience and, absent the most serious consideration and very compelling reasons, should still be considered inviolable well before the origins of sentience. As for the earliest days and weeks following conception, it is difficult to advance a formal metaphysical or theological argument, or even to make a more informal appeal, based on ensoulment or personhood. Still, regarding this early post-conception period, any such considerations and deliberations, in my view, if too casual, could have a morally corrosive effect and so deserve our utmost moral circumspection and dutiful deliberation.

This discussion, now regarding soul & resurrection, continues here >>>

If none of the different types of dualism are in play (and my suspicion is they’re not, but who knows), and a physicalist conception of the soul is on the mark (reductive or nonreductive), then those notions advanced by Polkinghorne, Ratzinger, Kung et al would seem to shed some light on this mystery. I have been tempted to reconcile some aspects of it by distinguishing between the temporal, atemporal and nontemporal and invoking the timelessness explanation.

But, this might should give one some pause. After all, if nondual hypotheses re: soul have further reinforced, in some ways for me, an even more radically incarnational outlook, which has me deeply in love with all of creation as expressed in the space-time-mass-energy plenum, then my embrace of the embodied material is also an embrace of temporality.

So, rather than invoke an atemporality, where the temporal is not even a category, or a nontemporality, where it is a category but does not apply in one case or another, I want to invoke a trans-temporal reality, where we go beyond the temporal but not without the temporal. And I do not see this as a trivial distinction even as I recognize that it perhaps adds little explanatory adequacy.

It does honor my deeply felt aesthetic and moral sensibilities regarding God’s love for creation and its creatures. It does square with my vague panentheist conceptions, whereby the Creator is interacting intimately but not coercively with creation, coaxing us forward as co-creators with our robustly participatory roles in bringing about the Kingdom. How this indwelling or interactivity is accomplished I don’t know but I think we can affirm the possibility of an implicate ordering or divine matrix of interpenetrating fields as a weak analogy but good metaphor. And I think this vague metaphor works for all manner of dual and nondual conceptions of the soul. The essential teaching is THAT we are deeply loved and wonderfully cared for even if HOW remains an intriguing mystery.

Confusion arises both when we overemphasize our concepts (essentialism, or overemphasis of logical causation, our naming and defining exercises) and when we overemphasize processes (nominalism, or overemphasis on efficient causation, our common sensical and scientific notions of causation). The old sorite paradox results from conflating logical and efficient causation in our speech and thought: When does the addition of individual grains of sand (efficient causation) finally result in a “heap” of sand (logical causation)? When do the processes of conception & gestation (efficient causes) result in a soul (logical causation)? When does resurrection (a process, efficient cause) finally result in a holistic, glorified unity of an enspirited, ensouled, embodied person (logical cause)?

A radically deconstructive postmodernism is wholly nominalistic and says that all of our naming and defining exercises are mere logical causes, human noetic contributions. An a prioristic, absolutistic, naive realism is wholly essentialistic and says that objective & physical reality either wholly corresponds to our conceptions or meaning, itself, is otherwise threatened. A semiotic realism is, instead, probabilistic and  does an end around this essentialism-nominalism conundrum, seeing these approaches as the obverse sides of the same dualistic epistemic coin, and affirms the meaningfulness of our conceptions to the extent we can cash out some pragmatic value from them, which is to ask what difference would it make if reality was like this (one conception of the soul, or even God) or like that (another approach to the notion of soul or God)?

Given equally plausible accounts, we would invoke an equiplausibility principle, which encourages us to go with that conception which is the most life-giving & relationship-enhancing, not unrelated to the precautionary principle, which encourages us to take the safest route in our moral and practical deliberations.