Adam wrote:

During biomedical cloning, however, the only casualties are 14-day-old blastocysts which contain as of yet literally no brain. Is a blastocyst really morally equivalent to a full-grown human being? If an organism without a brain is destroyed, can a soul possibly be destroyed along with it?

The answer, to me, is clearly no. But I would also point out that if one believes in an extra-material soul that separates from the body at the point of death and continues on for eternity, a soul can't be destroyed anyway, so it seems to me that whether stem cell research is thought to "destroy a soul" is irrelevant to the question of whether it's a good idea or not. Then again, I think almost all of the arguments against stem cell research are irrelevant to that question, for many of the reasons that you point out.

Being one of those who doesn't believe in the soul and who finds arguments such as "the soul interacts with the brain" (without any evidence for such) to be specious, I can't add much to what you've said above.

I do, however, question this:

Reproductive cloning is clearly objectionable. Not only do the products of reproductive cloning face health risks such as premature aging and other problems, but they are also, well, "products." Some basic instinct tells us that human beings should be born, not made, and as such nearly everyone finds this variety of cloning morally repugnant.

I'm not sure that's much of an argument (even though I am against reproductive cloning, I'm not sure there's a logical reason to be if the technology evolves).

Even "normal" tab-A-in-slot-B reproduction brings risks; not every baby is born a picture of health. I suspect that medical technology will address more and more of these issues in the future, for both normal reproduction and cloning (if permitted).

Regarding the instinctual feeling that reproductive cloning is wrong (and which I would concur exists in many if not most people), I don't believe that's a "good" reason for being opposed. A similar claim could be put forth against something such as interracial marriage (or gay marriage for that matter).

Further, if part of your argument is that the child produced is a "product," are you inferring they have less worth than a child produced the old-fashioned way?

Just playing Devil's advocate.

I think the Home Depot analogy is terrible: one does not think of a dinner table setting as a "potential human being" either, but that's the level of the Home Depot analogy. A Home Depot is input into the process of constructing a home; it is not the construction of a home. A better analogy is a house half-constructed, and yes, people do mourn the loss of productivity that such destruction represents but, in fairness, it is not a "home" yet; it has not been occupied by the people who give it, for lack of a better word, its soul.

"I would much rather get a sense for exactly what our readers believe about the brain, the mind, the soul, and the relations between these three things, whatever they might be."

My belief is that I don't even begin to know what the mind or the soul are, no matter how much I understand about biology or brain chemistry. Rather than profess belief or disbelief, I have to be honest, and profess my complete ignorance as to such matters.

Also, I can't see how poking around inside people's heads to measure the size of their cerebral cortex gets us any closer to finding the "soul." In either case, all we're observing is our own perception of the physical characteristics of the body.

To me the primary fear of human cloning is that we can't trust ourselves to create life, because we can't be trusted to treat life we create as we would like to be treated.

And I don't think you can argue otherwise, especially in a society where the primary moral code is pursuit of profit.

The fact is that we exploit the hell out of every life form we can find a way to exploit. There is absolutely no sane argument that we won't do the same with life we create ourselves.

Cloning will be even more horrific, because there is no safety valve of extinction. Once you can create as many humans as you want, with whatever characteristics you want, humans will become as individually valuable as the domesticated chicken.

Arguing about whether or not a human has a "soul" doesn't get to the real point: Whether we have "souls" or not, the fact is we can't be trusted to create other human beings.

Sadly, there's no one to enforce that moral truth, and we're going to do it anyway.

Although certainly not close to any formal treatise on such a subject, you might find this brief article of interest Star Trek--Star Gate--Timeline and Evidence for the Soul

There is a rather complete discussion of this very matter in the Indiana Legislature's hearings on their bill to ban both cloning and embryonic stem cell research while leaving,I think, other stem cell research intact. The bill passed with broad support in the House 80 to 15. Adult stem cell science has over 100 "cures" to date while the other has none. As to the soul, I heard about it in St. Paul's Epistle reading Sunday and the Greeks before him discussed the soul perhaps a 1,000 years before him. How far back does human knowledge on this subject go?

I tend to agree with Adam in that the connections between body, mind, and soul (if the latter does in fact exist) is one of ideology as opposed to science. Even if one subscribes to the notion of an extramaterial soul, such a belief is reconcilable with the stance that a human is no longer such if the brain stops functioning at a meaningful level.

There are many intricacies to this argument and Adam does a great job of laying the basics out. I would like to see more discussion on this at ITA in the future!

One problem with the way the question is presented is that it assumes there is no connection between the soul and body prior to brain function (or without it) while at the same time conceding it can not be determined. It seems there are two equally possible states - the soul makes contact with the body at conception and stays until natural death, or the soul makes contact at brain function, and remains only so long as brain function remains.

To take the Home Depot analogy a little further, it is the equivalent of destroying a "half built" house without knowing whether the family is in there or not, and a real possiblity that it is.

As for not being able to destroy a soul, that would also make murder of anyone perfectly moral - after all, you can't destroy their soul, all you are doing is separating the soul from the body - no different in principle from the ESCR.

I would disagree with Will's comment, "the connections between body, mind, and soul (if the latter does in fact exist) is one of ideology as opposed to science."

It is a matter of one ideology (supernaturalism) in opposition to another ideology (naturalism). Science maintains that the world is a closed system, which is a metaphysical statement. That is fine, if that is what one believes, but it should be acknowledged as a belief rather than a verifiable truth. Science/naturalism rules out supernaturalism by definition - again, this is fine - but does so as a presupposition, not as a conclusion based on incontrovertible proof.

Again, it is simply a matter of one ideology or worldview in opposition to another. Both are a matter of faith.

Although different kinds of faith, if you can call them that: The minister and the physicist are doing different things with their "faiths."

Paul:

Maybe. Can you elaborate? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you; I'm just not sure what you're saying.

The danger of your supposition about the soul haunting the regions of the brain is that it is thin on understanding what Christianity actually understands, is perhaps a straw man argument that is easy to knock down, that will marginalize the concerns of Christians. I hesitate to give you more ammunition.

You may wish to consider the Aristotelian/Thomist understanding of a hypostatic union of form (soul) and matter in man, which is not subject to the "ghost in the machine" conceptualization.

Also, David Hart wrote an article covering some of the historical/scriptural understanding of the human person, here. He comments on the 'hard' dualism of enlightenment thought:

This is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the 17th-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul--whether we believe in such things or not--it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition.

The "living soul" of Scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life. Thomas Aquinas, interpreting centuries of Christian and pagan metaphysics, defined the immortal soul as the "form of the body," the vital power animating, pervading, shaping an individual from the moment of conception, drawing all the energies of life into a unity.

This is not to deny that, for Christian tradition, the soul transcends and survives the earthly life of the body. It is only to say that the soul, rather than being a kind of "guest" within the self, is instead the underlying mystery of a life in its fullness. In it the multiplicity of experience is knit into a single continuous and developing identity. It encompasses all the dimensions of human existence: animal functions and abstract intellect, sensation and reason, emotion and reflection, flesh and spirit, natural aptitude and supernatural longing. As such, it grants us an openness to the world of which no other creature is capable, allowing us to take in reality through feeling and thought, recognition and surprise, will and desire, memory and anticipation, imagination and curiosity, delight and sorrow, invention and art.
The fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa calls the soul a "living mirror" in which all things shine, so immense in its capacity that it can, when turned toward the light of God, grow eternally in an ever greater embrace of divine beauty. For the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor, the human soul is the "boundary" between material and spiritual reality--heaven and earth--and so constitutes a microcosm that joins together, in itself, all the spheres of being.

I doubt even the dogmatic materialists among us are wholly insensible to the miraculous oddity that in the midst of organic nature there exists a creature so exorbitantly in excess of what material causality could possibly adumbrate, a living mirror where all splendors gather, an animal who is also a creative and interpretive being with a longing for eternity. Whether one is willing to speak of a "rational soul" or not, there is obviously an irreducible mystery here, one that commands our reverence.

Finally, I recommend looking into Bernard Lonergan's thought on the matter. I quoted at length from his work, Insight, on your prior post, 'happiness is not a module' with regard to vitalism.

Lonergan and Hart in the same post! Knowledge of souls prior to 1996? Erico is well read in this area. It does pay, for science as well, to get back to Aquinas. Being does precede essence.

As a man of science with some Christian sensibilities, the only way I can think of to reconcile the concept of an "immortal soul" with modern neuroscience and evolutionary psychology is the hope that the information content of the extraordinary arrangement of physical matter we call the brain that gives rise to consciousness, emotion, language, and the other faculties unique to the mind of man, could in some sense be preserved by a being with infinite information-processing power after that magnificently ordered structure has ceased to be in the cosmos we can measure. I fear that being may be the observable universe itself, however, which we know thanks to modern cosmology does not have infinite information processing power.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I thought I'd pass along this gem from Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=2&articleID=000E555C-4387-1237-81CB83414B7FFE9F

I'm back! Sorry, school interfered with blogging.

"In it the multiplicity of experience is knit into a single continuous and developing identity. It encompasses all the dimensions of human existence: animal functions and abstract intellect, sensation and reason, emotion and reflection, flesh and spirit, natural aptitude and supernatural longing."

That all sounds nice, but I'm not sure what, if anything, it's saying. So the soul is the sum total of human existence; that's great, but all of those functions mentioned (animal functions, abstract intellect, sensation, reason, etc.) can be found in the brain; this can be seen from the fact that they can each be destroyed, separately, if parts of the brain are destroyed. How can this possibly be reconciled with the belief that the soul somehow resides in "the body"?

"You may wish to consider the Aristotelian/Thomist understanding of a hypostatic union of form (soul) and matter in man, which is not subject to the "ghost in the machine" conceptualization."

I'm trying to meet you halfway by eliminating jargon when I talk about neuroscience (and believe me, if I wanted, I could turn the jargon up to 11), so it'd be nice if you'd do the same when you talk about religion. Just an honest request.

"The fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa calls the soul a "living mirror" in which all things shine,"

You can say the same thing about the brain, and Emily Dickenson did:

"The brain is wider than the sky,
For, but them side by side,
The one the other will contain
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do."

"a soul can't be destroyed anyway"

...touche. I should have caught that while editing, because that statement clearly makes no sense. I meant, of course, that the soul's ties to the body are cut, and it flies off to its next station, whatever that might be. Not being religious myself, I'm not clear on the details.

"Even "normal" tab-A-in-slot-B reproduction brings risks; not every baby is born a picture of health."

Yes, and in addition to these normal risks cloned organisms have to suffer additional risks that drastically lower their life spans.

"A better analogy is a house half-constructed"

A fourteen-day blastocyst is not a house half-constructed. If anything, it is two boards nailed together, surrounded by enough material to make a house. Oh, and the boards are lying on a blueprint for the house, and there are robots around who can read the blueprint and build the house. Seeing that this image, while perhaps corresponding better to the real world, is starting to lose clarity, I'll stick to my Home Depot analogy, thanks, which wasn't really that far off.

Call it whatever you want it is alive and it is human. You were one once.