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

ew scriptures were not dualists; their concept of human nature was monistic. 2 Later translators had read dualism back into the texts by employing, first, Greek anthropological terms, and then later translating these Greek terms into modern languages in ways that reflect their use by Greek philosophers. By the middle of the twentieth century it was commonplace to argue that New Testament authors also presupposed a monistic and physicalist account of human nature. Nonetheless, already in the second century, dualism began to appear in Christian teaching. The Epistle to Diognetus (written in approximately 130) described humans as possessing an immortal soul. By the time of Augustine, in the early fifth century, dualism of a modified Platonic sort was taken as the orthodox position. Contemporary Jewish scholars appear to be divided on the question of dualism versus physicalism. A persuasive book, though, is Neil Gillman’s The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought . 3 Gillman argues that the only conception of human nature that fits comfortably with the Jewish understanding of life and of Jews’ relation to God is a physicalist account, along with an emphasis on afterlife understood in terms of bodily resurrection. So Christians have plenty of historical precedent for accepting a physicalist account of human nature, and it can be argued that in so doing 2 H. Wheeler Robinson, The Christian Doctrine of Man (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1911). 3 Neil Gillman, The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1997). How to Keep the ‘Non’ in Nonreductive Physicalism 7 they are not bowing to science at all, but are instead recovering a more authentic version of their own early teachings. What all religious believers need to worry about, however, is the extent to which a physicalist ontology is believed to entail a reductionistic account of human life. In the (in)famous words of Francis Crick: ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’. 4 As already noted, it is this reductionist view that I shall address here. Defeating Reductionism Philosopher Richard Rorty claims that it is mental images and metaphors, rather than explicit theories, that most influence our philosophical positions. One image that has dominated modem thinking is that of the hierarchy of the sciences, with physics at the bottom, because it studies the most basic components of the physical world. Each science above it studies more complex composites or systems of these entities: Chemistry studies the atoms in compounds; biochemistry studies the highly complex compounds involved in living organisms. The various layers of biology study increasingly complex components of organisms. Psycho