Teología&Biología

"A few months after starting this book, I attended a conference on the relation between the brain and the soul, sponsored by (fittingly enough) the Vatican.(...) Much to my surprise (...) many of the theologians attending this meeting didn't believe in a classic nonmaterial soul (this would probably be an even bigger surprise to the faithful they represent). Instead, they seemed to accept the principle that the mind is inexorably tied to the brain, and they consequently believed in a soul that is pretty much one and the same as the neurally mediated mind, a part of the physical world that must by its nature obey the laws of physics.If the soul is equivalent to the mind, and the mind depends on the functioning of the brain (...) where is the soul hanging out while the body decays in the interim between death and Judgment Day? Not surprisingly, the Vatican conference ended inconclusively. No matter how all the pieces of the puzzle were moved around, they didn't fit together to make a coherent picture. As the philosopher David Hume said long ago, logic and reasoning (and presumably science) cannot explain the immortality of the soul. Either you believe or you don't.My reason for discussing this conference and the issues it raised is not so much to argue the point that it would be difficult, and maybe impossible, to find scientific solutions to theological riddles, but rather to demonstrate that a spiritual view of the self isn't (or doesn't have to be) completely incompatible with a biological one. Whatever else we are and aren't, much of what we are is accounted for by what goes on in our brains. Some theologians, as we've seen, have come to accept this. But even people who believe in an immaterial soul that survives death have acknowledged the fact the normal functioning of the soul depends on the brain. Shakespeare embraced this notion when he called the brain the soul's frail dwelling. A few minutes with my mother, a devout Catholic with Alzheimer's disease, makes it painfully clear just how fragile the soul's dwelling is."Joseph LeDoux, "Synaptic Self", pgs. 14-16.