Bottom-Down Argument Essay

Conclusion

It has been rightly noted that tension between theology and psychology transpires only when psychology attempts to fully and exclusively explain religion in its own language.58 It is certainly true that findings from contemporary neuroscience have raised important questions about the origin, nature and destiny of the human person – questions that will continue to spark numerous healthy and contentious debates. Such findings have led some theorists to adopt a strong reductionist position that deems all human mental properties to be ontologically reducible to neuronal brain activity, and to accordingly classify all metaphysical theological postulates about the human person as illusory.

Yet as we have seen, rather than supporting a

reductionist psychology, recent scientific and philosophical insights present natural evolution as a process that gradually creates ‘new levels of reality’, levels that manifest their own distinct powers of causation and thus require distinct types of explanation.59 It is in the light of this view that this essay has advocated an emergentist perspective, one that argues that human consciousness is ‘explanatorily, causally, and hence ontologically irreducible to the systems out of which it has evolved’,60 and neurobiology can thus only represent one level of explanation of the human person.
Moreover, the intimacy recently discovered between the brain and mental functions has made it clear that a metaphysically dualist position does not accurately describe the relationship of consciousness to the brain. For this reason, this essay has argued for the psychosomatic unity of the human person, and that it is an emergentist monism that helps delineate the appropriate philosophical and scientific foundations of a contemporary theological doctrine of personhood. With that in mind, we saw how Ward’s soft identity theory, which non-reductively identifies the mind/soul with the brain, manifests the effectiveness of the type of bridge that emergentist monism can build between Abrahamic theology and psychology today. This essay also advocated Ward’s ‘dual-aspect idealism’ position,61 which suggests that although the mind/soul has emerged from the body in this world, it can be transferred to a new and different body in the next world.
As Clayton observes, emergence theories on the human person suggest that there is no actual ‘line of demarcation’ between metaphysics and science, and hence easily invoke philosophical reflection.62 It is important to remember, however, as stated earlier, that emergentist supervenience does not require a theological interpretation – it can only serve to show the coherence of theological assumptions. Furthermore, emergence is not without its critics. Among the challenges it faces are, as Jaegwon Kim has noted,63 that the mental causation being argued for has only thus far been negatively characterized. With the constant emphasis of emergentists on the irreducibility of mental properties, we are currently only being told how mental properties do not relate to the neurones. Yet, what is truly needed is a positive characterization – we need to learn more about what the mind’s relationship to the brain actually is.64
Nevertheless, my position is that human knowledge is now at a point at which it is coherent to argue both philosophically and scientifically that a comprehensive bottom-up explanation of the natural world – and, in turn, the human person – is unlikely to be attained.

As Watts notes,65 the successful reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics in the world of physics has allowed for the emergence of both bottom-up and top-down accounts; consequently, our understanding of both has been considerably developed and restructured. He argues that such an approach is even more necessary in the realm of biology in order to facilitate the much-needed integration of the nervous system with consciousness – a similar revolutionizing of both concepts might very well ensue.66 This essay is arguing that it would be more constructive for contemporary psychology to incorporate the complexity, causal efficacy and thus the existence of human mental phenomena into its accounts of the human person. When understood as only one level of explanation among many others, psychological accounts of the human person are both compatible with traditional Abrahamic theological assumptions, and, as this essay has sought to demonstrate, of tremendous complementary value to

them.