Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

of Thomas Hobbes, at the dawn of modernity, we had the image of the hierarchy of the sciences. This image fit into a system with atomism in physics and a belief 18 Alwyn Scott, ‘A Brief History of Nonlinear Science’, Revista delNuovo Cimento 27, nos. 10-11 (2004), pp. 1-115. 19 Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p.139. How to Keep the ‘Non’ in Nonreductive Physicalism 15 in the determinism of all physical laws. Reductionism was (apparently) inevitable. So I would go beyond Scott’s claim that the shift from reductionism to systems thinking is a paradigm change across the sciences. I would describe it as a worldview change as well. Conclusion The topic of nonreductive physicalism is an important one for those engaged in contemporary theological research. In the modem liberal Protestant tradition it has been common to argue that science is intrinsically irrelevant to religion and theology, because their aims are so different. However, in the case of theories of human nature this division is clearly untenable. For centuries Christian theology (and often Jewish and Muslim thought as well) has taught (or presupposed) a dualist account of the human being, largely under the influence of Greek philosophy. Informal surveys show that the majority of lay believers in the West hold either a dualist or trichotomist (body, soul, and spirit) account of human nature. Meanwhile, science has increasingly made dualism and trichotomism untenable. The development of modern physics created the problem of mind-body interaction, and most philosophers now judge this problem to be insoluble. Evolutionary biology established the continuity of humans with other animals. If animals have no immaterial minds (as most modern thinkers have assumed) then it is difficult to see why one should think that humans do. Finally, the cognitive neurosciences are increasingly explaining all of the capacities once attributed to the mind or soul in terms of very specific brain regions and systems. Christian and Jewish biblical scholars and historians have long argued that dualism was not a part of early Jewish or Christian teaching. The biblical account portrays humans as unitary beings, although manifesting a variety of dimensions or aspects - physicality, emotion, rationality, spirituality - all understood in relational terms. So one important role for the discussion of nonreductive physicalism is to bring to popular awareness the large-scale rejection of dualism among Western Christian scholars. And, as I have argued here, it is crucial to argue against reductionism, since a reductive physicalism, denying the genuineness of all higher human capacities, would be entirely unsatisfactory from a religious point of view. However, while the arguments over reductionism in the human sphere are of primary interest to theologians, I am suggesting that there is a 16 Journal of European Baptist Studies whole new worldview in the process of bei