ABSTRACT
On the basis of the previous chapter I develop a novel constructive option within the debate on the origin of the soul, which is an expansive option within creationism more broadly construed and has some initial plausibility. Herein, I posit that emergent-creationism (i.e. the view that souls are created by God but that souls only come into existence in conjunction with their bodies in time as emergent souls or as a distinct emergent nature; where bodies, having their own properties/powers, become causally necessary for souls and vice versa) is distinct from ESDMO (i.e. Hasker’s version of emergent dualism where the soul is produced by the body and brain) and simple-creationism (i.e. the view that souls are directly and immediately created by God and attached to a body). Calling this view emergent-creationism seems a helpful way of distinguishing it from the other substance dualist (or Cartesian) variants of the soul, but it may turn out that there is a more appropriate name – as the reader will see later on in the chapter. Given the intimate relationship the soul has to the body, I suggest that the
soul is a kind of soul, as I discussed early on, that has an integrated and holistic relationship to the body and the kind-nature of the soul is explanatorily made sense of in terms of the soul’s coming into existence via its structural relationship to the body. Some may see this variation of substance dualism as simply another variation of creationism, and, if it is, then it is a more finely grained construal of creationism that gives us a distinct picture of God, human origins, and God’s relationship with the world where the soul’s powers and/or properties are actualized in relation to the body/brain. Given this kind of story concerning the soul’s relationship to the body, calling
it creationist would not yield simple-creationism. Most importantly, I believe this gives us a picture of Divine action in the human world that upholds creationistintuitions and has the resources to accommodate a modern evolutionary story. Additionally, it appears that it has the virtue of uniting body and soul in a more holistic and integrated fashion in terms of a more finely grained dependence of
mind on brain, teleo-functions, and/or it posits a functionally supervenient relation between the mind and brain. Nearly all the variants of emergentcreationism I advance broadly fall under Cartesianism. With these in mind in the forthcoming chapters, I propose a variant of CSD and emergent-creationism that is Cartesian in character is the most plausible option with the resources to satisfy the Christian story of humans.2
