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

of body-soul dualism in Christian history, and arguing that a monist-wholist-physicalist account of human nature is more consistent with the Bible than dualism, and I also argued that it is a position more congruent with anabaptist theology than dualism. In this paper, I want first to tie the dualism-physicalism issue to the modem-postmodern theme, and then present some of my own most recent work in philosophy that is a necessary accompaniment to biblical, theological and scientific arguments for physicalism. This is the issue of reductionism. The connection with the issue of modern versus postmodern thought is as follows. At the beginning of the modern period (approximately 1650) there were two major options for understanding human nature. One was Rene Descartes’s dualism of body and mind or soul. The other was Thomas Hobbes’s reductive physicalism. That is, Hobbes denied the existence of a nonmaterial element constituting human nature, and asserted that human thought and behaviour could all be reduced to physics. These two positions are still found today. However, in the past several decades, a new option has become available - non-reductive physicalism. This is the view that humans are indeed purely physical organisms, but their complex neural systems and culture are the sources of their rationality, morality, spirituality and free will. 1 The paper was presented as a public lecture at the Postgraduate Seminar in the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague, Czech Republic on 3 rd September 2008. Parts of this paper are adapted from material originally published in Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6 Journal of European Baptist Studies In this paper I shall present a tiny snapshot of the history of theories of human nature in the West, and then describe the exciting philosophical changes that are going on right now that make a thoroughly non-reductive account of human nature possible. A Bit of History To many a reader of today’s media, it would appear that Christians have once again bowed to the authority of science; they are renouncing the dualist anthropology that has characterised their teaching from the beginning in order to adopt the physicalism that is consistent with current science, particularly cognitive neuroscience. However, the issue looks quite different to those of us who attended seminary sometime in the late twentieth century, and, more precisely, a seminary of a liberal sort. We are aware of the fact that the dualism-physicalism issue is already a century old in Christian biblical studies and history of doctrine. In 1911, biblical scholar H. Wheeler Robinson argued persuasively that writers of the Hebr