Punctuation in the Bible. Can its lack be a problem?

[hauslern]

If the writer of the quote is correct, those contributors to the book Whatever Happened to the Soul are right in their claim we have no soul. The contributors are evangelical Christians; the editor Nancy Murphy teaches philosophy and theology at Fuller Seminary. They accept the resurrection of humans will take place.

[huckelberry]

Well, the question raised by a number of Christian philosophers, neuroscientists, and theologians is man does not have a soul so the thief will have to wait for the resurrection.

The question of the placement of the above comma can also be resolved by the semantics rather than the syntax of the passage. If the comma is placed before “today” (eg, as in most versions), then Jesus said that very day the two would share the joys of paradise. However, if it is placed after “today”, then Jesus employs a construction, which adds emphasis to the veracity of what He is saying. In order to choose between these two alternatives requires the answer to two more questions: What is Paradise? And, Where did Jesus and the criminal go that day?

Paradise: The word paradise, occurs only three times in the New Testament - Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 12:4 and Revelation 2:7. These references suggest that paradise is synonymous with heaven.

Jesus and the Criminal: Jesus did not go to heaven that day, Friday, because he told Mary Magdalene on the following Sunday morning (John 20:17) that He had not yet ascended to the Father. Neither did the criminal go to paradise that day because he was still alive at sunset and had to have his legs broken to prevent his escape over the Sabbath (John 19:31, 32).

Therefore, since Jesus could not have intended that He and the criminal were to be in paradise that day, he presumably intended the adverb today as emphasis as per Koine (common) Greek and Hebrew idiom. Thus, the correct place for the comma is after today thus making the passage read:

“I tell you the truth today, you will be with me in paradise.”

Thus, the passage does not (and could not) imply heavenly rewards immediately at death."

This is the only explanation I am aware of."

hauslern, I am convinced that the reading of today as emphasis and not date of paradise is a reasonable possibility. I have heard the speculation that paradise refers to an in-between state. I do not believe there is any clear Bible explanation of this. I suppose one could interpret today in a generalized or broad way, soon. But I have already noted my opinion that there are a number of things which the Bible does not contain clarification of.

I am inclined to like the thoughts Physics Guy has present about soul. He has observed that the who and what we are lie in the patterns and process not the particular atoms or substance. It would be conceivable that those patterns could be reproduced by God in a new substance (spirit or soul for lack any clearer word) That could happen anytime after death.

I could wonder if this soul could exist in us as we live instead of waiting for death to take form. I think Physics Guy does not like that idea suggesting a dualist concept of self. I think the problem with the idea of soul is that it avoids the complexity of self as a physical whole. That complexity is sometimes a problem but it is also a richness. I think the idea of a soul burdened and perhaps controlled by a body not oneself make something of a mess of trying to understand oneself.

I do not know of any way to be sure a soul or spirit is not part of who we are. Trying to make observations of a ghost leaving the body at death are likely to observe nothing.

I also find myself on occasion puzzled as to how consciousness and thought actually work.

[huckelberry]

https://www.fuller.edu/wp-content/uploa ... -Souls.pdf

. . . are the Mennonites, but my own little Church of the Brethren is in the same tradition. The reason why physicalism is easier to accept for an Anabaptist than for a Catholic or Calvinist is that both Calvin and the Catholic Church have given doctrinal status to the “intermediate state,” that is, a period of conscious awareness between the believer’s death and the general resurrection. The only way, it seems, to make sense of this doctrine is to assume that we have a soul that will continue to be conscious during that time. But this has never been an essential teaching for Anabaptists.
...........
A crucial distinction for understanding this comes from New Testament scholar James Dunn. Dunn distinguishes between what he calls “aspective” and “partitive” accounts of human nature. Many Greek philosophers were interested in a partitive account: what are the essential parts that make up a human being? In contrast, Dunn says, the biblical authors were interested in an aspective account. Here, each ‘part’ (“part” in scare quotes) stands for the whole person, thought of from a certain angle.4 What the New Testament authors are concerned with, then, is human beings in relationship to the world, to one another, and especially to God. Paul’s distinction between spirit and flesh is not our later distinction between soul and body. Paul is concerned with two ways of living: one in conformity with the Spirit of God, and the other in conformity to the kinship loyalties that were so powerful in the Mediterranean culture of the time.

The link is to an interesting article by Nancy Murphy explaining her view that there is no soul. I have not yet reviewed all of it thoroughly but am finding it interesting. She explains the point of view I have attempted to state a few times here. Free will does not exist if one is trying to free a soul from the control of the physical. But if the self to be free is the physical process that conflict disappears.

I think the point about Paul, flesh and spirit is important. I have seen the observation and interpretation above from a variety of sources. To interpret Paul as seperating self and body is to make a trainwreck of his thinking. It exaggerates his ascetic moments and buries his enthusiasm for life.

[hauslern]

Some time ago I visited a cousin and her husband in a nursing home. I have known her for years and yet when she saw me she asked was I a confident and assertive person slowly becoming frightened. In the book The Brain that Changes Itself the author writes about change in personality when some part of the brain is damaged. For example a man who was cheerful becomes morbid and angry.

Nancy Murphy in a paper she shared with me wrote "Neuropsychologist Malcolm Jeeves tentatively suggested that neuroscientific studies correlating specific brain regions or systems, with equally specific cognitive processes, was increasingly calling dualism into question" and "For my own position I’ve been particularly influenced by James Dunn. In his massive study, The Theology of Paul the Apostle, he devotes a whole chapter to Paul’s anthropology. In particular, I use Dunn’s distinction between partitive and aspective accounts of human nature. Partitive accounts are more typically Greek – that is, philosophers ask what are the essential parts that constitute a human being. Aspective accounts are more typically Hebrew, and consider what are the essential dimensions or types of relations in which humans, as wholes, participate. It is these aspects, not parts, he claims, that are designated by biblical anthropological terms.

Note that English and other related languages have a strong tendency toward ‘nounification’ – I’ve just coined a new term, and it’s of course a noun.

What most struck me in re-reading Dunn’s chapter is his warning that in our day, soma will almost inevitably be taken as a noun, referring to a particular physical organism. Until recently, I did make that mistake. So Dunn is saying that soma is but one aspect of our being. It is in light of Dunn’s work that I’ve adopted the term ‘multi–aspect monism’ to describe my position. And it’s multi-aspect because of the numerous biblical terms referring to aspects of human life: cardia, nous, pneuma, and of course sarx and soma.

So ‘multi-aspect monism,’ as I’ve decided to use the term, means that humans, in this life and the next are wholistic beings, with capacities for heart-felt yearnings, emotions, passions; for rationality; for entering into relationships, the most important of which is with God. They are also capable of attachment to kin, and material possessions; and the embodiment that makes fellowship with others possible. In this life, our embodiment is physical, but we shall be transformed, and we can have no literal knowledge of the ‘stuff’ of the transformed body."

Multi-Aspect Monism and Resurrection of the Body
by Nancey Murphy
Evangelical Theological Society, San Antonio
Nov. 15, 2023

[huckelberry]

hauslern, you have presented in the previous post what appears to be multiple voices or sources which is a bit confusing. You could add quote distinctions to help it read. I find the material interesting.

[Physics Guy]

I'm not up on philosophical terminology. Even just within physics, though, there are real phenomena that are all about their own special kind of stuff, and there are real phenomena that don't have their own kind of stuff, but are instead about special kinds of behavior of ordinary stuff.

If you scuff your feet on a carpet and make yourself staticky, so that your hair stands up a bit and you get a zap if you touch a hard surface, then that is because a special kind of stuff has soaked into your body, namely, electrons. Or maybe electrons have leaked out of your body, so that now you're positively charged. Anyway, getting electrically charged is indeed a matter of having this special kind of stuff in your body, interacting with it and with the world around you.

If you rub your hands together and they get warm, though, then this warmth you feel is not any kind of special heat-stuff getting into your hands. Instead it's that all the ordinary particles that are always there in your hands are now shaking and jostling around more vigorously than they normally are.

In the 18th century they didn't understand that about heat. They thought that heat was a kind of stuff, as electricity really is, and in fact they thought that heat and electricity were pretty similar kinds of things. That belief that heat was a substance turned out to be an illusion; but heat isn't an illusion. It's real and important, and can be incredibly powerful.

Heat is nothing but motion. If you take a really quick video clip of a water molecule moving in a mass of hot steam, then the motion of that molecule only differs in a few details from the motion of a baseball across home plate or of a planet around the sun. The differences of detail are that the molecule is small; that it's moving at something around the speed of sound; and that in a very short time it is going to bump into another molecule and the two will zing off in different directions. When you also consider that there are really a lot of these molecules in the mass of steam, then all these differences in detail have some important implications.

Heat is real, but it's not a kind of stuff. Mind is real, but it's not a kind of stuff, either.

[huckelberry]

Nancy Murphy's article puts into fairly center place one Alasdair MacIntyre who I am not familiar with but perhaps I will try to change that. He seems to be leading in a path of thought which I favor.

From Wikipedia:

Engaging with scientific texts on human biology as well as works of philosophical anthropology, MacIntyre identifies the human species as existing on a continuous scale of both intelligence and dependency with other animals such as dolphins. One of his main goals is to undermine what he sees as the fiction of the disembodied, independent reasoner who determines ethical and moral questions autonomously and what he calls the "illusion of self-sufficiency" that runs through much of Western ethics culminating in Nietzsche's Übermensch.[22] In its place he tries to show that our embodied dependencies are a definitive characteristic of our species and reveal the need for certain kinds of virtuous dispositions if we are ever to flourish into independent reasoners capable of weighing the intellectual intricacies of moral philosophy in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre

[Physics Guy]

I don't think I have anything good to add to that but I'm sympathetic.

I also don't think I have any fresh insights about what exactly consciousness is. Whatever it is, though, I suspect that our tendency to think of it as the ultimate, topmost kind of thing is probably silly. It may be too complex for us to understand, even though we are instances of it, but whether or not we can understand consciousness, I think there are probably things beyond it, that we definitely can't understand. In fact there are probably all kinds of things that differ from consciousness in lots of different ways, but are all unambiguously more complex than consciousness. We, being merely conscious, simply cannot imagine these things.

I guess I was permanently impressed by Stanislaw Lem's Golem XIV.

Anyway, I imagine that there may be phenomena to which consciousnesses like ours are roughly as nerve cells are to human minds, or as organelles are to cells, or something. I like to ask, "What if fire is only the first of a million such things?" Perhaps we can be part of something much bigger than we are.

I have no strong conclusions to offer about anything like that, but questions like these certainly have not been settled empirically by quantum field theory or anything else. Asking about higher-order analogs of fire or consciousness is not traditional discourse in any religion I know; but of course it wouldn't be. Most religions are old. Back then people thought that fire was a fundamental kind of stuff, so of course they thought that spirit was a kind of stuff.

Could they have been getting at similar things to the questions that still remain now, in the clearest way they could at the time?

[huckelberry]

Nancy Murphy's article puts into fairly center place one Alasdair MacIntyre who I am not familiar with but perhaps I will try to change that. He seems to be leading in a path of thought which I favor.

From Wikipedia:

Engaging with scientific texts on human biology as well as works of philosophical anthropology, MacIntyre identifies the human species as existing on a continuous scale of both intelligence and dependency with other animals such as dolphins. One of his main goals is to undermine what he sees as the fiction of the disembodied, independent reasoner who determines ethical and moral questions autonomously and what he calls the "illusion of self-sufficiency" that runs through much of Western ethics culminating in Nietzsche's Übermensch.[22] In its place he tries to show that our embodied dependencies are a definitive characteristic of our species and reveal the need for certain kinds of virtuous dispositions if we are ever to flourish into independent reasoners capable of weighing the intellectual intricacies of moral philosophy in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre

My thoughts have tended along the line of thinking one needs to value and respect oneself, but to do that one must recognize that one's own existence is an interdependent process connected with neighbors, family, history, society, and material environment. If one is to respect oneself, one needs to respect all of these. This idea may be easy enough to be commonplace, yet some ideas tend against it.

from an Ayn Rand-based website:

Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue—and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. His soul gives up its self-respect. You’ve got him. He’ll obey. He’ll be glad to obey—because he can’t trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean.

https://www.atlassociety.org/post/ayn-r ... ism-part-3

This is basically from the Fountainhead which I read with conflicting feelings in high school. I had some suspicions that it described overly controlling religions or groups. Of course, Ms. Rand was thinking first of Communism and its illness but she thought of religion as well. I think she has a good point but it is grimly one-sided. Add years of amphetamines and you get the nearly endless rant of Atlas Shrugged. A year or so ago I forced myself to read the whole thing. There were occasional imaginative images and moments which allowed an escape. As a whole, the read was a dreary and seemingly endless march.

[hauslern]

Dos the science of genetics create a problem for those who argue for the existence of the soul?

https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics

This site seems to argue that humans have common DNA with the apes and that humans originated in Africa.

"No matter how the calculation is done, the big point still holds: Humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos are more closely related to one another than either is to gorillas or any other primate. From the perspective of this powerful test of biological kinship, humans are not only related to the great apes – we are one. The DNA evidence leaves us with one of the greatest surprises in biology: The wall between human, on the one hand, and ape or animal, on the other, has been breached. The human evolutionary tree is embedded within the great apes.

The strong similarities between humans and the African great apes led Charles Darwin in 1871 to predict that Africa was the likely place where the human lineage branched off from other animals – that is, the place where the common ancestor of chimpanzees, humans, and gorillas once lived. The DNA evidence shows an amazing confirmation of this daring prediction. The African great apes, including humans, have a closer kinship bond with one another than the African apes have with orangutans or other primates. Hardly ever has a scientific prediction so bold, so ‘out there’ for its time, been as upheld as the one made in 1871 – that human evolution began in Africa."

My brother attends a Lutheran church. He said his pastor had a DNA test on his ancestry. In the results there was found Neanderthal DNA. I am not scientific literate so I need a quote:

"Neanderthals co-existed with modern humans for long periods of time before eventually becoming extinct about 28,000 years ago."

https://australian.museum/learn/science ... thalensis/