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Spirits, souls, and clones: biology's latest challenge to theology.

Article Excerpt
Since both John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) have vigorously sought to suppress embryonic stem cell research and human cloning, it may be instructive to consider the real reason popes have to oppose this branch of humanitarian science: the certified reproductive cloning of a human being would be the reductio ad absurdum of the theological notion that there is such a thing as a soul. For this reason we are reprinting this article by Frank R. Zindler that appeared in these pages back in 1997 when the cloning of Dolly the sheep was first reported.

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Since the time of Charles Darwin, biology has been theology's worst nightmare. The challenge of Copernicus and Galileo--even though it took the Church of Rome almost five centuries to adjust to it--was trivial compared to the frontal assault unleashed upon Christian theology in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. Although it took less than a century and a half for theology's chief mystagogue publicly to 'accept' the reality of evolution (without naming Darwin!), the acceptance was only conditional. Indeed, in October of 1996 when Pope John Paul II declared the theory of evolution to be "more than just a hypothesis," he stopped far short of accepting the principle in its major implication: that humanity in all its aspects and in its essence is the product of blind, unthinking, physicochemical processes of nature. Catholics may be permitted to accept the obvious fact that their bodies evolved, but not their spirits or souls. Even if it is no longer true that "only God can make a tree," Catholics must believe that only a scheming deity can make a human soul. They must believe that it is this soul that makes a body human.

The reality of biological evolution poses an insoluble problem for theologies that posit the existence of an undetectable commodity called the soul--an entity that despite its insubstantiality makes us human beings possessed of the unique, unanimalian faculty of 'free will,' and allows for the survival of our personalities beyond the grave. Why the resurrection of our physical bodies is also scheduled in most theological time-tables is a curious mystery. If our personalities fly off at death with the soul's release, the body seems to be a redundancy unneeded in the afterlife. As Omar Khayyam put it so long ago in his Rubaiyat:

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside, And naked on the Air of Heaven ride, Were't not a Shame--were't not a Shame for him, In this clay carcass crippled to abide?

Of course it might be argued that disembodied spirits could not feel pain, and without bodies capable of being tortured physically hell's fury would be lost. But this raises a Cartesian question of how an immaterial soul can be affected by a material body--and vice-versa. Despite Descartes' suggestion, it doesn't seem that the pineal gland is up to the challenge.

To return to the threat to theology posed by evolutionary biology: if what really counts about us is our souls and not our bodies, why did the god of Christendom wait so many billions of years for our inessential bodies to evolve by the bumbling, painful, and wasteful process of natural selection? Why didn't he just zap our souls into existence at the dawn of the Precambrian Era (right after he allegedly separated light from darkness) and forget about our bodies? Why did Superspook wait so long to bring the spiritual dimension into the physical framework of space and time?

If it be admitted that our bodies evolved from the bodies of animals possessed of neither souls nor spirits, and that injections of souls or spirits are unitary acts of a god operating within the limits of space and time, embarrassing questions leap to mind.

It is certain that we are descended, generation after generation, from ancestors who are less human-like as the line of descent is traced back to Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Australopithecus, or even more primitive primates. Nevertheless, it is also clear that no particular generation in this line differed any more from its parent generation than do we from our parents. So how did the god in charge of evolution decide which generation had become just human enough to warrant the infusion of souls?

We moderns are prone to lament the "generation gap" that separates us from our parents or (more frequently) from our children. But imagine the magnitude of the generational chasm the pope must believe appeared somewhere along the line between Pithecanthropus erectus and Priestus paedophilius. There must have been a generation that could have told its parents: "Hey, mom and dad! We just became human beings, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. We have souls, you don't. We'll go to heaven after we die. You, however, will rot like rutabagas when you die. There's no transfer option on your trolley ticket!"

Indeed, Darwinism is an embarrassment to theology. (a)

Spirits and Souls

Since it is the theological doctrine of spirits or souls that is most affected, before we consider the implications of developments in modern biology it is necessary to remind ourselves of just how it is that theology came to be saddled with the burden of belief in spirits or souls in the first place.

Sometime in the course of prehistory after language had evolved, our ancestors began to puzzle over the question "What is life?" or its inverse "What is death?" Not a one of those benighted people had ever had a single course in biochemistry or molecular biology. They didn't even know that the main function of human beings was the production of carbon dioxide and urea! The invisible chemical marriages and divorces that constitute the process known as 'living' were unsuspected. Our predecessors even thought they thought with their hearts, and that their consciences were in their kidneys. (b) Most of them couldn't tell the difference between brains and bone marrow--a distinction unrecognized in many languages to this day! The supposedly god-guided authors of the Judaeo-Christian scriptures also were ignorant in this regard, and so they mention brains not even once in their Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek compositions--making the Bible a truly brainless piece of literature!

There must have been many occasions where a person died suddenly, without benefit of anatomy-altering knives, spears, or projectiles. Today we would suppose such a person to have suffered a heart attack or stroke. To the ancients, however, there was no obvious anatomical difference between the newly dead individual and the person who a short time before had been a sentient, active human being. The only obvious difference between the live and dead bodies was the presence or absence of breath. Breath was the elan vital, the vital force.

The vivifying function of breath came to be depicted in...

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