The Soul Part 2

 

 

 

          When does the rational soul’s presence in the body begin? At conception. For the soul is the form—the essence, nature, structure, organizational pattern—of a living thing, an organism.

Of course, the features essential to human beings as rational animals are not fully developed until well after conception. Rationality, locomotion, nutrition, and the like are present even at conception “in potency” or as inherent potentialities. But a zygote is not a “potential human being” or a “potentially rational animal.” Rather, it is an actual human being and thus an actual rational animal, just one that hasn’t yet fully realized its inherent potentials.

          All of this is confirmed by science. The reason is that the notions of DNA, of the gene, and so forth are utterly suffused with goal-directedness and potentiality. It is no accident that terms like “encoding”, “information”, “instructions”, “blueprint” and the like are often used to describe the workings of DNA; therefore involve directedness of something toward an end beyond itself, and thus final causality.

Being the form of the body, the soul is necessary as long as the living organism is. Hence it leaves when the organism dies, not severe brain damage and not a person’s lapsing into a “persistent vegetative state”. As Plato and Aristotle agree, for something to fail to instantiate a form or essence perfectly does not mean that it fails to instantiate it at all. For a zygote, being a human organism and thus in possession of the form or essence of a human organism(i.e. a rational soul), has the same right to life that any innocent human being has. If one agrees that every innocent human being has a right to life, then you cannot consistently fail to take a “pro-life” position and thus favor outlawing all abortions  (and all forms of euthanasia also) just as you’d favor outlawing any other form of murder.

          The rational soul functions and exists independently of matter, so could not have been generated by  purely material processes. In principle, evolutionary theory could explain how living things got to such a level of complexity that it was possible for an animal to exist which was capable of having a rational soul. We have already shown that there is a God, and that the rational soul, unlike any other kind of soul, is ordered toward the knowledge of God. Thus we have a ready explanation of the existence of rational souls: direct creation by God. An evolutionary process itself, like everything else that exists, would have to be sustained in being by Him from moment to moment anyway. An appeal to God is thus theoretically natural, even inevitable.

          At every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious.