2008 Woodie Awards
Bodies and Soul: How do you count?
Fred Bauer
Issue date: 12/4/04 Section: Viewpoint
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How many things are you? Do you feel as if you are one, single thing? Do you refer to your self in the singular as "I"? If some thinkers are right, you are really more than one thing. Perhaps, then, you (plural) should avoid "I" and get in the habit of using "we."
Absurd, right? "I feel like an absolutely, unequivocally-one, single thing," is our common-sense answer to "How many things are you?" Why then do those 'thinkers' claim that this feeling is an illusion? To understand them, as well as to resolve the challenge they raise for common sense, requires large but equal portions of intellectual honesty and theoretical boldness.
First, we Christians are introduced to "One or many?" perplexities at an early age. We are taught that there are three persons in one god. To deal with what seems like a contradiction, we are taught to regard it as "a mystery." Later on we are taught that, besides the body we see, we also have an unseen soul. But if we are both a body and a soul, then we are two, not one. Another mystery?
Socrates, like millions who believe in reincarnation, solved the problem by deciding he did not have a soul, because he was a soul using a temporary body. However, the single thing I feel like is not a soul, but an undivided body whose legs, arms, torso, and head, all together, make up one 'me.'
Saint Thomas, quite honestly, proposed an impossible compromise. The impossibility is easily exposed by a single question: "What is the 'I' that does the thinking?" Half the time, he insisted that the thinker is the one, unified human being who also does the seeing. Other times, to defend the soul's separate immortality, he insisted that it is only the soul, not the whole human being, that thinks. The I who thinks am not the I who sees.
But those older perplexities were mild compared to the new ones. The microscope reveals that trillions of distinct red and white blood cells are swimming in a pellucid 'fluid.' The discovery of Brownian motion revealed that apparently continuous 'fluids' are really quadrillions of distinct, ricocheting molecules. Rutherford's research revealed that cells and molecules are zillions of individual electrons orbiting individual protons in empty space. It is absurd to think we are both one gross body and also zillions of discontinuous, infinitesimal bodies.
Absurd, right? "I feel like an absolutely, unequivocally-one, single thing," is our common-sense answer to "How many things are you?" Why then do those 'thinkers' claim that this feeling is an illusion? To understand them, as well as to resolve the challenge they raise for common sense, requires large but equal portions of intellectual honesty and theoretical boldness.
First, we Christians are introduced to "One or many?" perplexities at an early age. We are taught that there are three persons in one god. To deal with what seems like a contradiction, we are taught to regard it as "a mystery." Later on we are taught that, besides the body we see, we also have an unseen soul. But if we are both a body and a soul, then we are two, not one. Another mystery?
Socrates, like millions who believe in reincarnation, solved the problem by deciding he did not have a soul, because he was a soul using a temporary body. However, the single thing I feel like is not a soul, but an undivided body whose legs, arms, torso, and head, all together, make up one 'me.'
Saint Thomas, quite honestly, proposed an impossible compromise. The impossibility is easily exposed by a single question: "What is the 'I' that does the thinking?" Half the time, he insisted that the thinker is the one, unified human being who also does the seeing. Other times, to defend the soul's separate immortality, he insisted that it is only the soul, not the whole human being, that thinks. The I who thinks am not the I who sees.
But those older perplexities were mild compared to the new ones. The microscope reveals that trillions of distinct red and white blood cells are swimming in a pellucid 'fluid.' The discovery of Brownian motion revealed that apparently continuous 'fluids' are really quadrillions of distinct, ricocheting molecules. Rutherford's research revealed that cells and molecules are zillions of individual electrons orbiting individual protons in empty space. It is absurd to think we are both one gross body and also zillions of discontinuous, infinitesimal bodies.