Bruce Waltke and the Scientific Orthodoxy

_{Cornelius Hunter

April 7, 2010

Intelligent Design

1}_{Categories
Intelligent Design}

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Bruce Waltke, a Professor of Old Testament, has parted ways with Reformed Theological Seminary, perhaps due to controversies over his sympathies with evolution. Rod Dreher at BeliefNet worries that this is a dangerous disregard for science: Read more

Comments

pelagius,
This crow is pretty good at making inferences. Do you think he has an immaterial soul?
I have no idea, but it certainly has an immaterial mind.Clive Hayden_{April 21, 2010
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Clive, This crow is pretty good at making inferences. Do you think he has an immaterial soul?pelagius_{April 21, 2010
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pelagius, Normativity isn’t necessary for reason, and neither is subjectivity. Assertion without argument, and one which flies in the face of the very definition of reason itself. Subjects reason, and reason about. Remove subjectivity, and you remove the agent - and out goes your reason with it. If you can have a belief without an agent, by all means, let me know how. You've made your assertion - now back it up, or dispute what I've pointed out without begging the question. And even if you could show that subjectivity is necessary for reason, this would be as much of a problem for the dualist as for the materialist. After all, how does an immaterial soul give rise to consciousness? You misunderstand both materialism and dualism. Dualism is not a single view - it's a range of views from property dualism, panpsychism, hylemorphic dualism, cartesian dualism, and likely more. Subjectivity (among other things) may be a fundamental, brute and not reducible. Not all things can be reduced to a thing which 'gives rise to' it. As for intentionality and purpose, even a humble vending machine has both. Its purpose is to deliver a selected product when sufficient funds have been inserted. Its internal state corresponds to the quantity of money that has been inserted up to that point. In other words, the state is about the amount of money: intentionality. One more time: If you are going to dig in your heels and insist that the "internal state of the vending machine" really and truly is 'about' money, good job: You've abandoned materialism, and have made intentionality a fundamental part of the world. You're now back to the metaphysics of Aristotle, but are going a step further since you think even artifacts really have intrinsic intentionality and purposes - some kind of panpsychism or hylozoism is in play for you. But the problem still isn't over for you, since as I said with the computer example: Computers don't 'infer' anything. I say the intentionality of both a computer and vending machine is extrinsic - meaning it does not "have intentionality" at all. *I* have intentionality, and *I* apply intentionality to the machine's operations. Drop a wooden or metal slug into the machine and it may still operate, but the machine is not therefore 'about wooden/metal discs' instead of 'money' - because the intentionality of the artifact requires my or another's mind to be 'about' anything at all. Again, if you want to insist the machine truly does have intentionality regardless of what our minds assign to it, go for it. But that's not materialism anyway, so my concern there is minimal. Now again: Do you have intentionality? Do you 'think about' things? Do you have subjective experience?nullasalus_{April 20, 2010
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nullasalus, I've already addressed your points in a previous comment which you didn't see because it, like all my comments, was held in the moderation queue for some unstated reason.pelagius_{April 20, 2010
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If computers can make reliable inferences via purely physical processes, why can’t a brain? Computers don't "make reliable inferences". They don't "make inferences", period. Unless you think computers have subjective experience, express original intentionality (do calculators literally 'think about' adding when you type in 2+2=? If you think so, well.. you've got an interesting view of computers, but you've also left naturalism behind in the process anyway.), etc. They are machines which work with symbols that only have meaning relative to a mind - our own. So I'd actually disagree technically with Clive. Yes, we can program a computer such that "2+2" yields "5". But there isn't even a "true to the computer". That's loose language. The computer, unless you have a very interesting metaphysic, has no intentionality itself, nor any subjective experience. Without a mind around to assign extrinsic meaning to it, a program makes no 'inferences', because lacking that mind a program isn't 'about' anything. It isn't even a program. Now, you can bite the bullet and say, "No! The program DOES have intrinsic intentionality! It's about something even with no mind around to assign meaning!" Then great - you've now said that the computer program is no longer 'purely physical'. You're back in the land of Aristotle, classical philosophy, and a non-naturalistic world. Now, some questions for you: Do YOU have intentionality? (Do you 'think about' things?) Do you have subjective experience?nullasalus_{April 19, 2010
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nullasalus wrote:
Victor Reppert has done a great job of developing the argument, pointing out that the material naturalists define* it has “no intentionality, no purpose, no normativity, and no subjectivity.” Yet we do have these things. And some/all of these things are necessary for reason. See what happens to reason once you decide ‘aboutness’ does not and cannot exist.
nullasalus, Normativity isn't necessary for reason, and neither is subjectivity. And even if you could show that subjectivity is necessary for reason, this would be as much of a problem for the dualist as for the materialist. After all, how does an immaterial soul give rise to consciousness? As for intentionality and purpose, even a humble vending machine has both. Its purpose is to deliver a selected product when sufficient funds have been inserted. Its internal state corresponds to the quantity of money that has been inserted up to that point. In other words, the state is about the amount of money: intentionality. If these can be present in a mere vending machine, why not in a vastly more complex brain?pelagius_{April 19, 2010
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Clive, If computers can make reliable inferences via purely physical processes, why can't a brain? Please be specific.pelagius_{April 19, 2010
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pelagius,
If this were true, it would be impossible for computers to reach reliable inferences. Yet they do it all the time. It’s that simple.
They do whatever they're programmed to do, we could program them to make 2+2=5, and that would be true to the computer. It's that simple.Clive Hayden_{April 19, 2010
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I'd add a few things. Lewis' argument is not meant to be one in favor of cartesian dualism or souls directly. It's a statement about what must be a part of nature for us to "reason" in any meaningful sense of the word. Victor Reppert has done a great job of developing the argument, pointing out that the material naturalists define* it has "no intentionality, no purpose, no normativity, and no subjectivity." Yet we do have these things. And some/all of these things are necessary for reason. See what happens to reason once you decide 'aboutness' does not and cannot exist. (* At least, naturalists used to. Lately you have naturalists insisting they can be dualists or non-materialists - like David Chalmers. Or naturalists trying to expand the definition of physical/material to include some/all of those 4 things listed, without realizing that's a surrender of naturalism and a return of an Aristotilean-style worldview. There's even naturalist panpsychists now. Go figure.)nullasalus_{April 19, 2010
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Clive wrote:
If inference were the product of material movements, then the movements could always have been otherwise, and thus you would have another “truth” that you adhered to. It’s that simple.
If this were true, it would be impossible for computers to reach reliable inferences. Yet they do it all the time. It's that simple.pelagius_{April 19, 2010
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pelagius,
1. Lewis is assuming that reasoning carried out by an immaterial soul must be reliable, but there is no basis for this assumption.
Inference must be something other than movements, just as "ought" is not the result of an "is", as was elucidates by Lewis. If inference were the product of material movements, then the movements could always have been otherwise, and thus you would have another "truth" that you adhered to. It's that simple.Clive Hayden_{April 19, 2010
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Clive, Those C.S. Lewis quotes exhibit the same flaws I identified in your argument: 1. Lewis is assuming that reasoning carried out by an immaterial soul must be reliable, but there is no basis for this assumption. He doesn't realize it, but he's in the same boat as the materialists. We possess a faculty of reason. We don't know for sure that it is reliable, and in fact we know for sure that it is not completely reliable. The best we can do is to test it from within, building up a sense of its reliability. All of this is true whether reason is brain-based or soul-based. 2. He fails to recognize that logic, reason, mathematics, etc., can be reliably mapped onto physical processes, as computers amply demonstrate. A reliable physical brain is therefore not impossible, contrary to his claim.pelagius_{April 19, 2010
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pelagius,
The obvious explanation is that thought, like everything else that humans do, is a physical phenomenon.
"A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound-a proof that there are no such things as proofs-which is nonsense. Thus a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: `If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.'" [Haldane, J.B.S., "Possible Worlds," Chatto & Windus: London, 1927, p.209] But Naturalism, even if it is not purely materialistic, seems to me to involve the same difficulty, though in a somewhat less obvious form. It discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such a humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself." (Lewis, C.S., "Miracles: A Preliminary Study," [1947], Fontana: London, Second edition, 1963, reprint, pp.18-19. Ellipses Lewis') "It therefore follows that all knowledge whatever depends on the validity of inference. If, in principle, the feeling of certainty we have when we say `Because A is B therefore C must be D' is an illusion, if it reveals only how our cortex has to work and not how realities external to us must really be, then we can know nothing whatever. ... This admission seems to me completely unavoidable and it has very momentous consequences. In the first place it rules out any materialistic account of thinking. We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behaviour of matter' several light-years away that particular relation which we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer's brain, considered as a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter as being true about another bit of matter seems to me to be nonsense." (Lewis, C.S., "De Futilitate," in "Christian Reflections," [1967], Hooper, W., ed., Fount: Glasgow UK, Fourth Impression, 1988, pp.86-88) "What makes it impossible that it should be true is not so much the lack of evidence for this or that scene in the drama as the fatal self-contradiction which runs right through it. The Myth [of Evolution] cannot even get going without accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by such inferences that you can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and sub-men and cave-men at all. Unless you start by believing that reality in the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any palaeontology, any archaeology. To reach the positions held by the real scientists- which are then taken over by the Myth-you must, in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational - if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel- how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution? They say in effect: 'I will prove that what you call a proof is only the result of mental habits which result from heredity which results from bio-chemistry which results from physics.' But this is the same as saying: 'I will prove that proofs are irrational': more succinctly, 'I will prove that there are no proofs': The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one's suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought. But the man who does see it, is compelled to reject as mythical the cosmology in which most of us were brought up. That it has embedded in it many true particulars I do not doubt: but in its entirety, it simply will not do. Whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it can't be like that." (Lewis, C.S., "The Funeral of a Great Myth," in "Christian Reflections," [1967], Hooper, W., ed., Fount: Glasgow UK, Fourth Impression, 1988, pp.117-118)Clive Hayden_{April 18, 2010
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Clive, Your error is in supposing that logic and reason cannot be carried out on a material substrate. This is not true. Computers do it all the time. Furthermore, even if you were correct that reasoning is carried out by an immaterial soul, you are no more justified than the materialist in assuming that your reason is reliable. After all, if you can't even explain how an immaterial soul thinks, how can you demonstrate its reliability? We know that human thought can be disrupted by fatigue, loud noises, drugs, even hunger. If thought is carried out by an immaterial soul, why should it be affected by these things? The obvious explanation is that thought, like everything else that humans do, is a physical phenomenon.pelagius_{April 18, 2010
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pelagius,
Unfortunately, your argument applies equally to thoughts generated by an immaterial soul.
I don't see how, when logic and reason are themselves immaterial. If all thoughts were a matter or material movement, then you have this problem of truth being the product of those movements and nothing else, not immaterial laws of reason and logic. If you cannot see the self-referential incoherence of the materialist on this score, it is only because your brain happens to not be in that state at this time. Seriously, read De Futilitate, Transpositions, and Miracles from C.S. Lewis, it will clarify things for you, if your brain states will allow it, that is.Clive Hayden_{April 17, 2010
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Of related interest: Jeffrey Schwartz - Decades ago, he began to study the philosophy of conscious awareness, the idea that the actions of the mind have an effect on the workings of the brain. Jeff's breakthrough work in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) provided the hard evidence that the mind can control the brain's chemistry. http://westallen.typepad.com/brains_on_purpose/about_jeffrey_m_schwartz_.htmlbornagain77_{April 17, 2010
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---"Moral judgments happen in the brain, not in some immaterial soul or spirit." Immaterial minds and wills are faculties of soul and, with respect to morality, can either accept or resist the brain's impulses; the material brain is an organ, is part of the body, and can only obey matter's laws. Thus, only the soul can take on the responsibility of a moral decision. Interestingly, the mind and the brain can influence one another, which provides more evidence that each plays its own role. That, by the way, is why the virtue of self control is possible. The body makes demands [I want another cookie] and the mind/will composite either ratifies or rejects that impulse [you've had too many already]. Also, the immaterial will can reject the suggestions of the immaterial mind. [I know I should stop smoking, but I would prefer not to.] The body presents a craving, (desire, feeling etc;) the mind, which makes judgments about truth, formulates a moral judgment, and the will, which decides what to love and hate, chooses either to carry out the mind's judgment or go another way.StephenB_{April 17, 2010
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Pelagius; This interview has much more detail about Vicki's Near Death Experience: coast to coast - Blind since birth - Vicki's NDE http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=99EAF86E08E54010bornagain77_{April 17, 2010
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Clive, Your objection seems to boil down to this: If thoughts and beliefs are physically represented in the brain, then they are subject to physical disruption, which means they might be wrong. Any thought or belief might therefore be wrong. That means that no thoughts -- including this one -- can be trusted. Unfortunately, your argument applies equally to thoughts generated by an immaterial soul. We know that thoughts and beliefs can be incorrect, and we know that this can be due to a variety of factors (distracting environments, emotional state, fatigue, intoxication and many others). Any thought or belief might be affected by one of these factors, and might therefore be wrong. That means that no thoughts -- including this one -- can be trusted. Your argument, if correct, would undercut the reliability of all human thought, whether brain-based or soul-based.pelagius_{April 17, 2010
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Mr Hayden, When it destroys real truth, it destroys its own claim for truth by subjecting itself to the same perils of changing truth by changing material. To be clear, you've expanded what was claimed for magnets and morals to every sense experience and thought. I don't have a problem with that, but I just want to be clear on it. Yes, there are many examples of these misperceptions. Beer goggles, the flashes of light that precede a migraine, tintinitis, and the vivid hallucinations of schizophrenics, to name a few. However, most of us can get through the day, and agree that the sun has risen and set in the usual directions. The death of certainty is not the death of reality. I'm pretty certain of that!Nakashima_{April 17, 2010
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Pelagius states: "My point is that if moral judgments can be altered by applying a magnetic field to a particular part of the brain, then they are not the product of an immaterial soul or spirit, as Stephen claims. Unless, that is, you believe that souls and spirits are disrupted by magnetic fields." And yet: Blind Woman Can See During Near Death Experience - Pim Lommel - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3994599/ Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper (1997) conducted a study of 31 blind people, many of who reported vision during their NDEs. 21 of these people had had an NDE while the remaining 10 had had an out-of-body experience (OBE), but no NDE. It was found that in the NDE sample, about half had been blind from birth. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_1_64/ai_65076875/ and yet physical blindness can also be temporarily induced by "magnets" as with moral blindness: Researchers induce temporary blindness to learn more about vision Excerpt: Prior to the tests, the researchers mapped each participant's visual cortex -- the area at the back of the brain that processes what the eye sees -- with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a harmless noninvasive technique using brief magnetic pulses. When applied to the visual cortex, TMS induces temporary, reversible blindness lasting only a fraction of a second. http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/3080 Thus pelagius your foundational reasoning is faulty in that you presuppose that if that which has a clear spiritual basis, such as true and right moral judgment, or even truly "seeing", can be disrupted to the body by with magnets to the brain then you have somehow conclusively shown that they have arisen from a material basis, Yet what you have failed to realize is that it is entirely reasonable that a soul can live in the darkness, in the house of its physical body, if you prevent true spiritual light from entering the house. ------------- further note: Delayed choice quantum eraser http://onemorebrown.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/god-vs-the-delayed-choice-quantum-eraser/ of note; Consciousness must be INFORMED with local certainty to cause the wave to become a particle. We know from the Double Slit Experiment, with delayed erasure, that the simple fact of a detector being present is NOT sufficient to explain the wave collapse. If the detector results are erased after detection but before conscious analysis we see the wave form result instead of the particle result. This clearly establishes the centrality of consciousness to the whole experiment. i.e. The clear implication from the experiment is that consciousness is primary, and detection secondary, to the collapse of the wave function to a 3-D particle. Consciousness must precede 3-Dimensional material reality.bornagain77_{April 17, 2010
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pelagius,
If the brain were just a “receiver” for “transmissions” of the soul, then the soul would notice when the transmissions weren’t received correctly, because the body would do something that the soul didn’t want it to. This isn’t what happens. The experimental subjects don’t say “I wanted to say that X is wrong, but instead my mouth formed the words ‘X is right’”. They actually decide that X is right, and they say so. The decision itself is flipped from what it would be otherwise, simply by the application of the magnetic field. Moral judgments happen in the brain, not in some immaterial soul or spirit.
You say this as if it were objectively true, as if it were true regardless of the state of your brain. But if this position were only a state of your brain, which could be exactly opposite with some magnets close enough to your head (as you maintain), then it isn't objectively true. The problem with the sort of explanation that you're positing is that it becomes self-refuting when applied to itself. It cuts the trunk of the tree, while the assertion rests out on a limb. When it destroys real truth, it destroys its own claim for truth by subjecting itself to the same perils of changing truth by changing material. This cannot seriously be maintained for very long, for every assertion is defeated in the same way, even the assertion that there is a defeat. Clive Hayden_{April 16, 2010
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Ted, Thank you for your gracious resonse to my comments. I am sorry that I did not take up the question that you had hoped I would address. It was my perception that we were focusing less on when the first humans lived and more on the problem of how they arrived, which is the subject of the Biblical metaphors that I alluded to. In any case, it isn’t at all clear to me why it would be necessary to abandon the idea that God actively breathed life into the first humans regardless of when they arrived. Hence, I don’t understand the relevance of the question? Still, I will be happy to speculate with you about it sometime, though I think it is probably too late to do it on this thread. On the matter of Bruce Waltke, my impression was that he accepts the principle of Darwinian evolution as a scientific fact, though he refers to it simply as “evolution,” (perhaps a bit of a dodge?) and that he felt the heat from others in his church who disapproved of that position. I am not clear about why you alluded to the question about dating the arrival of the first humans in that context, since I have no reason to believe that he was taking up that issue when he decided to pack it in. Am I missing something? I don’t really know how the average ID proponent would respond to your question about ID and whether the science is less about “design in nature” and more about the distinction between “intelligence and brute matter.” I am not really sure about what you are getting at here since, for my part, there is no dichotomy. Perhaps we can think of the former as the hypothesis and the latter as a method or means for confirming that it. Finally, I don’t mean to suggest that there is nothing of value in the works of John Polkinghorne. Keep in mind that I was on a very narrow track, namely the problem of reconciling Scripture with science. I submit that both disciplines fit very well together and there is no need at all to abandon reason on either side of the ledger. To me, Christians like Polkinghorne who deny God’s omniscience are, at least in a Biblical context, abandoning traditional teachings for no good reason. Ironically, they are no closer to resolving the paradox of predestination/free will than they were before they made the compromise, and, receiving nothing for their purchase, they are now on less solid ground. It causes me to believe that they cannot differentiate between essentials and non-essentials. Granted, we need to read authors with whom we disagree in order to keep from being one dimensional people. Further, we need to know what the world is thinking if we are going to address their errors, if we can agree that there are such things as errors. Still, there is a thing about orthodoxy and a thing about brilliance. I guess I am just greedy, but if I spend serious time with an author, I want both.StephenB_{April 16, 2010
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Clive, If the brain were just a "receiver" for "transmissions" of the soul, then the soul would notice when the transmissions weren't received correctly, because the body would do something that the soul didn't want it to. This isn't what happens. The experimental subjects don't say "I wanted to say that X is wrong, but instead my mouth formed the words 'X is right'". They actually decide that X is right, and they say so. The decision itself is flipped from what it would be otherwise, simply by the application of the magnetic field. Moral judgments happen in the brain, not in some immaterial soul or spirit.pelagius_{April 16, 2010
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pelagius,
My point is that if moral judgments can be altered by applying a magnetic field to a particular part of the brain, then they are not the product of an immaterial soul or spirit, as Stephen claims. Unless, that is, you believe that souls and spirits are disrupted by magnetic fields.
Of course, there has to be a medium for the mind to work through, if you destroy or alter it, with magnets or a gun, the medium is altered, just as my radio wouldn't sound correct if I threw a brick at it.Clive Hayden_{April 15, 2010
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Clive, My point is that if moral judgments can be altered by applying a magnetic field to a particular part of the brain, then they are not the product of an immaterial soul or spirit, as Stephen claims. Unless, that is, you believe that souls and spirits are disrupted by magnetic fields.pelagius_{April 15, 2010
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pelagius,
You might want to take a look at this: Morality is modified in the lab Scientists have shown they can change people’s moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses. They identified a region of the brain just above and behind the right ear which appears to control morality. And by using magnetic pulses to block cell activity they impaired volunteers’ notion of right and wrong. The small Massachusetts Institute of Technology study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lead researcher Dr Liane Young said: “You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. “To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”
If you shoot a bullet through the brain it stops working all together too. What's your point?Clive Hayden_{April 15, 2010
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Thank you very much, StephenB, for your interesting and clear reply to my question. I was actually soliciting a different type of answer--in which you would address the fact that the first humans lived long before the cities and agriculture of Genesis 2 & 3, a fact that needs to be confronted by advocates of an historical reading (an historical reading of Genesis being crucial to the folks who weren't happy with Dr Waltke). Although you addressed another aspect of the biblical text, your answer helps me understand ID better. For many years I have suspected that the fundamental issue in ID is not so much design in nature, but intelligence itself, as distinguished from "brute" matter. (I made noises along those lines in my first study of ID, here http://home.messiah.edu/~tdavis/Of%20Gods%20and%20Gaps.htm.) Judging from what you say, perhaps that is a correct understanding of ID. I continue to regret your failure to see anything of value in Polkinghorne, who has been making design arguments and defending core elements of biblical theology since before the ID movement even existed, but perhaps 20 years from now you will have changed your mind. I wish you well as I go out the door, TedTed Davis_{April 15, 2010
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StephenB:
The soul contains both the faculty of the intellect and the faculty of the will, both of which are involved in moral consciousness. Also, the soul is, from a theological perspective, the cause of the body’s life. An individual’s spirit is a different thing, to be sure, but the point is that both soul and spirit are immaterial and cannot come from matter, at least in a Biblical context.
Stephen, You might want to take a look at this:
Morality is modified in the lab Scientists have shown they can change people's moral judgements by disrupting a specific area of the brain with magnetic pulses. They identified a region of the brain just above and behind the right ear which appears to control morality. And by using magnetic pulses to block cell activity they impaired volunteers' notion of right and wrong. The small Massachusetts Institute of Technology study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lead researcher Dr Liane Young said: "You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. "To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."
Full articlepelagius_{April 15, 2010
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---Aleta: "Being a “morally and spiritually conscious human beings” is different than having a soul." The terms do get mixed up a lot. The soul contains both the faculty of the intellect and the faculty of the will, both of which are involved in moral consciousness. Also, the soul is, from a theological perspective, the cause of the body's life. An individual's spirit is a different thing, to be sure, but the point is that both soul and spirit are immaterial and cannot come from matter, at least in a Biblical context. ---"And the Genesis story about God breathing life into man makes it sound that man was just inanimate matter until infused with a life force, which is a different thing than being infused with a soul." From a theological perspective, the soul is the cause of the body's life; without it the body cannot live. When the soul is separated from the body, the body dies.StephenB_{April 14, 2010
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