Re: George Coyne and Richard Dawkins

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> writes:

On Thu, 23 May 2024 08:00:03 -0700, John Harshman
<john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:
>

On 5/23/24 1:38 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

On Wed, 22 May 2024 16:51:07 +0100, "Kerr-Mudd, John"
<admin@127.0.0.1> wrote:
 

On Wed, 22 May 2024 07:44:39 -0700
John Harshman <john.harshman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
[time for a snip] >> He got himself into that pickle by saying God
is not an intervening >> engineer. The alternative is that every
living thing has a soul.

>
There are other alternatives. For example, the soul could be an
emergent property of the body, particularly of the brain. If he
gave us brains (mentioned above), souls could have come along with
that, and perhaps even gradually. Maybe chimps have
near-but-not-quite-souls.
>

>
How about: God emerges from sapient (or could I say superstitious?)
beings?

 
"Though sensitive soul in man and brute agree generically, yet they
differ specifically. As the animal, man, differs specifically from
other animals by being rational, so the sentient soul of a man
differs specifically from the sentient soul of a brute by being also
intelligent. The soul therefore of a brute has sentient attributes
only, and consequently neither its being nor its activity rises
above the order of the body: hence it must be generated with the
generation of the body, and perish with its destruction. But the
sentient soul in man, over and above its sentient nature, has
intellectual power: hence the very substance of this soul must be
raised above the bodily order both in being and in activity; and
therefore it is neither generated by the generation of the body, nor
perishes by its destruction."
 
Thomas Aquinas, Of God and His Creatures, chapter LXXXVIII, LXXXIX

>
To the extent that Aquinas can be understood here, he seems to be
going back to the first option, that God is an intervening engineer,
creating and installing a soul into each human.

>
I can't claim any particular insight into Aquinas, I was just aware
from discussion elsewhere that he considered all animals to have a
soul of some type. What struck me in the above was where he said "As
the animal, man, differs specifically from other animals by being
rational …" He doesn't sound like somebody who would have been
perturbed at the idea of humans evolving from other species.

According to Google Gemini, Aristotle believed the heart more important
than the brain in rational thought. But by the middle ages the concept
of the brain having ventricles associated with different mental
functions like imagination, memory, and reason existed. Maybe Aquinas
didn't believe that reasoning could be done by any part of the body. For
example mathematics seems pure, abstract, and universal, not of the
materal world at all.