Q&A: The Soul and Evolution
The Soul and Evolution
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael Abraham!
I read your wonderful book The Science of Freedom, and I was indeed inclined to be convinced by the dualistic view presented in the book, according to which there definitely is a “ghost in the machine.”
One point that is not clear to me is how those who maintain the existence of a soul can reconcile this view with evolution. At what point in the evolutionary process did the soul enter the picture? Seemingly, according to the evolutionary picture, the mind too is a physicalist factor that we simply have not yet managed to understand how it works (whether through emergentism or in some other way).
Answer
Thank you.
I have no idea. What I do know is that there is a soul, and I know this no less clearly than I know about evolution. Now one can propose various possibilities:
The Holy One, blessed be He, breathes a soul into a human being starting from some stage onward (when he reaches a level of bodily development suitable to receive it).
The soul too undergoes a kind of evolution/upgrading (of course not necessarily through natural selection and genetics). After all, animals too have a soul in some sense.
As I explained there, evolution cannot explain mental phenomena in any way. It is not that there are gaps. There is currently no way at all to do so, even in principle (see the raspberry-juice parable). The emergentist hypothesis is a baseless speculation, and I do not see why it is in any way preferable to the simple conclusion that there is a soul there.
In a certain sense, the materialist here is guilty of what he accuses the believer of: the “God of the gaps” argument. Because of a gap in our knowledge (how the soul entered the body), he draws a philosophical conclusion.