Introduction

In the contemporary academic setting, it is widely believed that mental entities—mental subjects of consciousness, subjective experiential conscious states, and, most importantly, mental acts/causation and their results—cannot be empirically detected or rationally inferred from empirical data. This belief is ubiquitous in psychology, neuroscience, and the hard sciences, including biology. And as I hope to show, it has had disastrous results for those fields and theology.

No matter how widespread this belief is embraced, I do not think it can withstand rational scrutiny. I believe it is sustained, not by evidence, argument, or justified claims about methodological naturalism as the proper background constraints that sets the limits for what counts as real science, but by theological concerns and the sociology of the scientific community. Accordingly, my purpose is to provide reasons to reject this view and to offer some suggestions for a better understanding of a scientifically informed theology. My paper is divided into three parts: I. The Epistemology of the Mental; II. Ontology, the Aristotelian Soul, and Information; III. Implications for a scientifically informed Theology.

The Epistemology of the Mental

In 1979, A. R. Peacocke wrote the following,

I would suggest that this problem of the human sense of being an agent, of being a self, an “I,” acting in this physical causal nexus, is of the same ilk as the relation of God to the world. How can God act in a world in which every event is tied to every other by regularities which the sciences explain with increasing power and accuracy?[1]

Peacocke’s non-interventionist solution (if it can be called that) is not of interest to me here.[2] But taken in context, what is important and spot-on is his realization that there is a very tight analogy between the epistemology/ontology of divine and human action. Accordingly, it is important to begin our exploration of these matters by focusing on human persons and their actions.

The Nature of Consciousness

Elsewhere, I have defended the immateriality of conscious states and will assume this in what follows.[3] There are at least five states of phenomenal consciousness (hereafter, consciousness): sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and exercises of free will. The best way to define consciousness is by ostensive definition. Ostensive definitions are used to characterize a fundamental entity that cannot be reduced to something more fundamental, and conscious states are fundamental. Suppose someone is recovering from surgery. Suddenly, one feels a pain in the knee, has the thought “I don’t know where I am”, then forms the belief “Oh, I am at the hospital.” Subsequently, he feels thirsty, desires a drink, and exercises his free will by saying, “If anyone can hear me, I need some water.” The person is regaining consciousness. Conscious states are like these.

Besides ostension, there are three essential traits of conscious states, none of which characterize any physical state whatsoever:

1. Phenomenal Qualia: A state C is a state of consciousness iff there is a what-it-is-like that essentially characterizes C.
2. Private Access: A state C is a state of consciousness iff the subject of C has private access to C.
3. Intentionality: A state C is a state of consciousness iff C has or strongly entails a possible state that has intentionality (ofness, aboutness, directedness towards an object).

Regarding our knowledge of conscious states and their effects, Physicalist William Lyon goes so far as to announce that

there is no doubt at all, that by the last decades of the nineteenth century and during the first [three] decades of the twentieth century, the new scientific psychologist’s view of the correct way of finding out about minds, and implicitly of the nature of minds, was deeply Cartesian.[4]

Lyon is spot on. But there were two problems that converged in the 1920s that flagged the end of property and substance dualism in psychology. The first was characteristic 2 above. The private-access feature meant that only the subject had direct awareness of his/her conscious states/self from a first-person perspective. Among other things, this entailed that these mental entities are occult ones from an external third-person perspective. The second was the impetus among psychologists to make psychology a strictly empirical discipline as were (allegedly) the hard sciences. Fueled by logical positivism, the confluence of these two factors led to a radical shift in the nature of psychology, a shift away from the mental to body movements and physiological responses.

Behaviorism and the Disappearance of the Mental

It is important to recognize that this shift was epistemologically driven, particularly by logical positivism, roughly the idea that the meaning of a sentence is either a tautology or identical to the sentence’s verification conditions.[5] Sentences that did not conform to this criterion were regarded as semantically meaningless. When applied to psychology, three forms of Behaviorism resulted

Logical/Analytic Behaviorism

Every meaningful psychological sentence of expression is to be defined solely in terms of behavioral and physical expressions, expressions that refer solely to behavioral and physical phenomena. Three quick comments are needed on this version of behaviorism. First, it was a thesis, not about mental states themselves, but about the meanings of terms used to refer to mental states. Consequently, it was a recommendation that we adopt behaviorist meanings over commonsense ones. Thus, “pain” =_def. “the tendency to grimace and shout ‘Ouch!’” Second, the use of behavior to characterize Behaviorism is a mistake. The problem is that for something to count as a behavior, for example, writing a thank-you note, it must be constituted by the intentions, motives, and purpose of the writer. Unfortunately, these are all occult mental states. Accordingly, Behaviorism is limited to empirically measurable body movements and physiological reactions. Third, it quickly became obvious that logical/analytic behaviorism was false since “pain” could be truly ascribed to a person with no tendency to grimace and shout “Ouch” and conversely; also, “pain” refers to what causes one to grimace and shout “Ouch!” and, thus, they cannot mean the same thing.

Ontological Behaviorism

 Mental states are themselves identical to behavioral states. It was a short move from Logical/Analytic to Ontological Behaviorism with its shift from the meaning of mental terms to the nature of mental states themselves. But Ontological Behaviorism went the way of the dodo bird for the same reasons that were leveled against Logical/Analytic Behaviorism. Both forms of Behaviorism flourished from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, when it was replaced by another physicalist theory. However, the real importance of the shift to Behaviorism for my purposes is the rise of the third, Methodological Behaviorism, of which there were three versions, all applied to psychology.

Evidential Methodological Behaviorism: The only admissible evidence for the science of psychology is observable behavioral data concerning the observable physical behavior of organisms. The problem with this view is that it fails to rule out unobservables, especially mental states, as part of the theories and explanations of observable behavioral data. Especially problematic are verbal reports, which, if they are to be taken as verbal reports and have truth values ascribed to them, then the reports most naturally should be taken to express propositional content/semantic meaning intentionally expressed by the report. All of these are mental.

Theoretical Methodological Behaviorism: Psychological theories must not invoke the internal states of psychological subjects in their explanations or predictions. This view fails due to the wide scope of being internal. As stated, it not only rules out a subject’s mental states, but also internal physiological states (for example, changes in the rate of one’s heartbeat, blood pressure, gastric juices) as inappropriate for psychological theories. What is needed is a way to rule out the former and keep the latter, so the final view is now the accepted one.

Explanatory Methodological Behaviorism: Psychological theories must make no reference to inner mental states in formulating psychological explanations. For this view, three observations are in order. First, it should be clear that this principle is an application to psychology of the broader principle(s) of Methodological Naturalism. Second, secundae facie, the principle is completely absurd from a first-person perspective, according to which we know that a pain causes us to seek relief, a belief causes us to avoid accepting certain propositions, a sensation of thirst causes a desire for a drink, and the desire influences us to go to a drinking fountain. Third, the principle places an arbitrary straitjacket on the practice of psychology. As a result, in the last few decades, many in the field have restored the notion of a self, a free agent, and a host of mental states as appropriate entities for psychological explanation. Still, we need to ask if there are positive accounts that epistemically justify an explanatory appeal to mental entities to explain certain results produced by those entities?

Two Positive Accounts of How We Know the
Effects of Mental Action and Causation

Richard Swinburne and Knowledge of Other Minds

 The private accessibility of conscious states raised what philosophers call the problem of other minds. Actually, this problem is two closely related problems: (1) How can we know that another object has consciousness? (2) How can we know the precise kind of conscious states possessed by another object?

In my view, the best answer to this question begins with one’s knowledge of one’s own conscious states and, based on an analogy between one and another object, employs an inductive Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to gain knowledge that answers these two questions.

For example, if one is stuck by a pin, one becomes directly aware of one’s own pain as a causal effect and, in turn, observes the pain to cause pain behavior, for example, rubbing the stuck area, grimacing, and so forth. At first, one has only knowledge by acquaintance of the pain. But after repeatedly experiencing a number of relevant bodily inputs, outputs, and the intervening pain state, one forms a concept of pain. Now, one can be aware of the pain as a pain. This allows the person to think of the experience as being a pain. After repeated experiences of being aware of a pain as a pain, one can eventually be aware that it is a pain. This is a mental judgment, “That my experience is a pain,” and can be true or false. In general, this knowledge of one’s own mind is first-person knowledge that starts with repeated direct awareness, along with noticing a temporal or causal sequence of bodily inputs/outputs before and after the intermediate conscious state, and leads to forming the relevant mental concept and the ability to make the relevant judgment.

Moving to third-person observation of another object, if one observes a relevant pain input followed by a relevant pain output, one infers the object experienced the conscious state of pain in between the two. And so on for all the other conscious states. The closer the object is analogous to the person, for example, the other object is also a person, the more justified the inference is. Ontologically, something, for example, a fish, either is or is not capable of feeling pain. But epistemically, the more the other object is disanalogous to the personal observer, the less justified he/she is in inferring the kind of mental states that the other object can have.

Swinburne has offered four principles that justify this sort of inductive inference, especially in cases of knowledge of other minds:[6]

1. The Principle of Credulity: Things are as they seem.
2. The Principle of Testimony: Trust others’ reports about how things seem to them.
3. The Principle of Simplicity: Other things being equal, prefer the simplest to the more complex theory.
4. The Principle of Charity: Other things being equal, we suppose that other human persons are like us in the mental life in which similar bodily input/output stimuli occur.

The first two principles provide data for an IBE, and the last two provide criteria for adjudicating among competing explanations. When applied to non-verbal animals, 2 is ruled out. 4 will need to be adjusted to something like this:

The Principle of Animal Charity: Other things being equal, the more analogous an animal is to us humans, the more justified we are in believing it is like us in the mental life in which similar bodily inputs obtain followed by isomorphic bodily outputs.

Two things are isomorphic just in case they are relevantly similar. For example, if a dog is stuck with a pin, the dog does not grimace and shout “Ouch!” But it does whimper and licks the stuck area. We may reasonably take the human and dog bodily outputs in this case to be isomorphic.

How does all of this relate to a science-engaged theology? First, it provides rational principles that are sufficient to avoid believing that humans and animals are bereft of mental states on the grounds that we could never know that this is the case. The aspects of an IBE regarding other minds are defeasible. They do not guarantee epistemic certainty, but nothing in science does this, if for no other reason than the Duhem-Quine Thesis:

It is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation because such a test requires auxiliary assumptions/hypotheses that, together with the hypothesis, are tested jointly. Thus, unambiguous scientific falsifications are impossible.

One need not be an antirealist to accept this thesis. Relevant to our discussion, it simply entails that hypothesis-testing in science is always defeasible and underdetermined by empirical data. So, there is no special problem with the defeasibility of detecting mental causation and its effects.

Second, given an analogy between divine and human agency, I see no reason why the detectability of divine causation and its results should be ruled out in science. Methodological Behaviorism was and is a failure, and so is Methodological Naturalism. Remember, the former is a specification of the latter. And the reductive nature of Methodological Behaviorism placed an arbitrary straitjacket on psychology that led to false conclusions, a failed opportunity to provide better and more reasonable theories/explanations by incorporating mental entities, mental causation, and their empirical detectability into appropriate scientific practice. In the same way, Methodological Naturalism harms the employment of these scientific practices in other fields where the conditions are met for inferring Divine mental causation. Thus, a science-engaged theology and an Intelligent Design approach to science should follow the evidence wherever it leads; adopting Methodological Naturalism is a demonstrable hindrance to scientific practice.

E. J. Lowe and the Results of Libertarian Free Action

The late E. J. Lowe provided another important contribution to the rationality of positing mental causation.[7] Lowe’s contribution was directed at human agency, but his arguments have a direct bearing on Intelligent Design theory.

Lowe’s fundamental point is that mental causes render physical events non-coincidental, which, from the perspective of physical causation, appear to occur merely by coincidence. For Lowe, a coincidence is an event that occurs when two or more events jointly obtain to cause that event and are causally independent, that is, when they have no common cause in their ancestral causal chains. For example, a man walking by hits a trip wire that dislodges slate on the roof renders non-coincidental the slate falling around him. Without the trip wire being triggered, the two events would occur coincidentally.

Lowe grants that mental causes are invisible among all the causally independent physical events that bring about an effect. So, even if one had discovered all the physical causes jointly sufficient to bring about an effect, this does not preclude there being a mental cause that could provide the best explanation for why that effect is not a coincidence. For Lowe, mental causation has distinctive features residing in the unique intrinsic mental content and intentionality of a particular mental cause. What is caused is intimately related to that content and intentionality. For example, an intentional movement of one’s body has among its causes a relevant mental cause whose intrinsic content and intentionality—for example, “that my arm should go up in order to vote”—is directed, not upon that particular event, but on that kind of event during a time interval.

Even if the myriads of independent physical causal chains that cause a particular raising of one’s arm vary within the means of producing that kind of event, the mental cause unifies all these different routes within the relevant kind of event. In so doing, the mental cause explains why this myriad occurs as a non-coincidence since they are unified and brought about in order that the kind of event takes place.

For example, Lowe invites us to consider a case in which all the snooker balls fall into pockets. What caused this conjunctive event E to occur? Let us grant that there is a purely physical causal chain that is sufficient to explain each ball going into a pocket. If we left the matter there, says Lowe, we would end up with a very big coincidence. Moreover, there would be no explanation for why this kind of event took place. Lowe concludes that an appeal to the relevant mental intention explains both—it renders an apparently large coincidence of independent chains a non-coincidence and it explains why this kind of event occurred—but physical causes do neither. The mental event unifies all the physical causal chains by selecting them as a means to the intended type of end and it explains why an event of this type happened.

Consider the following two principles that constitute the Intelligent Design filter. Call this abbreviation the Intelligent Agent Principle (IAP): If some event satisfies these two conditions, then it is beyond a reasonable doubt that the event was the result of mental causation:

1. The event was a highly improbable one.
2. The event was independently specifiable: There is something special about the event independent of the mere fact that it occurred.

P is beyond a reasonable doubt: Believing P is more reasonable than believing not-P or withholding belief that P.

In Lowe’s examples, condition 1 is satisfied. Condition 2 is also satisfied in that the intrinsic content and intentionality of the mental cause independently specifies a kind of event of which the particular event is a token. However, IAP generalizes Lowe’s argument about individual persons and their mental causality to other branches of science. In this way, Lowe’s insights crucially inform a science-engaged theology. Note carefully that a complete account of a physical effect in terms of strictly physical independent causal chains that jointly produce that effect in no way rules out the explanatory power of mental causation.

Ontology, the Aristotelian Soul, and Information

We turn now to the metaphysical aspect of our inquiry. I begin with a focus on living organisms with special attention towards human persons. Regarding human persons, I hold to Generic Substance Dualism according to which (i) there is a substantial soul (self, ego, substantial form) that is wholly immaterial; (ii) the soul is not identical to its physical body; and (iii) the soul is that which grounds personal identity for human persons. But the specific incarnation of Generic Substance Dualism I prefer is a version of Aristotelian Dualism, aka., Staunch Hylomorphism.[8] I will begin with a brief metaphysical primer that is essential for understanding what follows in this section.

A Metaphysical Primer

Part/whole relations are important for treatments of substances, and there are two kinds of parts relevant to our discussion—separable and inseparable.

1. p is a separable part of some whole W =def. p is a particular and p can exist if it is not a part of W. (Example: a table leg, an electron in an atom—separable parts can exit independently on their own; they usually constitute mereological aggregates—see below.)
2. p is an inseparable part of some whole W =def. p is a particular and p cannot exist if it is not a part of W.

In contemporary philosophy, inseparable parts were most fruitfully analyzed in the writings of Brentano, Husserl and their followers. The paradigm case of an inseparable part in this tradition is a (monadic) property-instance or relation-instance (for example an instance of being red or being round in a particular ball.) Thus, if substance s has property P, the-having-of-P-by-s is (1) a property-instance of P; (2) an inseparable part of s which we may also call a mode of s. Assuming for the sake of argument that a lump of clay is a substance (most likely, it is an mereological aggregate, not a substance; see below) and that it has a spherical shape, then the lump is a substance, the property of being spherical is a universal attribute (several objects could have literally the same property at the same time), and the-having-of-sphericity-by-the-clay is a particular, not a universal; it is a mode (inseparable part) of the clay and a property-instance of sphericity.

Next, it is important to get clear on two different kinds of relations.

1. External Relation: R is an external relation between a and b iff (i) facts about R are not grounded in facts about the natures of a and b; and (ii) possibly R fails to hold between a and b, while at least a or b remain unaltered. Being-on-top-of is an external relation. If the relation R of aRb is external to a, then a can exist and retain its identity if Ø aRb. External relations stand in stark contrast to internal relations.
2. Internal Relation: R is an internal relation between a and b iff (i) facts about R are grounded in facts about the natures of a and b, and (ii) necessarily, if R fails to obtain, a and b are altered. If the R of aRb is internal to a (or both a and b), then for all x, if x does not stand in R to b, then x ¹ a. An internal relation is grounded in the nature/essence of the relevant relatum or relata. Being-darker-than is an internal relation between being purple and being yellow.

There are two kinds of wholes relevant to what follows.

1. A substance =def. an essentially characterized particular that (1) has (that is, exemplifies) properties but is not had by something more basic than it, (2) is an enduring continuant that remains literally the same substance through change in accidental properties, (3) may have inseparable parts (modes) but is not composed of separable parts, (4) is complete is species.Regarding condition (4), a thing’s species (that is, essence) answers the most basic question “What kind of thing is this?” where by “most basic” I mean i) an answer to this question is presupposed by an answer to any less basic question of this form (for Socrates, being human is presupposed by the answer “being white” to the more basic question “What kind of thing is Socrates?”); ii) an answer to this question is true of the object in every possible world in which it exists. A hand is not complete in species because “being a hand” does not adequately capture the sort of thing it is. Rather, being a human hand or a gorilla’s hand is required. But being human is complete in species.
2. A mereological aggregate (from “meros” meaning “part”, usually “separable part”) is =def. (1) a particular whole; (2) is such that it is constituted by at least substantial separable parts and external relation-instances between and among those substantial separable parts (taken together, this is the object’s structure which is nothing but an ordered mereological aggregate itself, composed of all the individual relation-instances between and among the object’s separable parts). A mereological aggregate like a chair, a molecule or atom, and an organism’s body (construed by physicalists and in accordance with the Standard Mereological Hierarchy) on physicalist accounts is subject to mereological essentialism: An aggregate’s parts are essential to it such that it could not have had different parts than the one’s it actually has and, a fortiori, cannot gain or lose a part and remain literally the same object.

Finally, here are definitions of an essence (aka, nature), accidental properties, and substantial form. An Essence =_def. If E is the essence of some particular object p, then E (1) is a unity of actualized and dispositional properties of p such that if p loses one of those properties, p ceases to exist; and (2) E answers the most basic question “What kind of thing is this?” An Accidental Property =_def. Property P is an accidental property of some particular object p just in case (1) P is a property of p; and (2) p could exist without P.

Limiting ourselves to living organisms construed as substances and not mereological aggregates, a substantial form is characterized thusly. A Substantial Form_: If SF is the substantial form of a substance s, then SF is the diachronic/synchronic unifier of s (and for some, the immanent principle of intrinsic teleology for s) such that SF is either (1) identical to s’s essence or (2) that which grounds the (especially essential) properties of s and from which those properties and their order flow. There is a debate as to whether a SF is a universal that, when individuated, is identical to a substance’s soul or is itself a particular that is the substance’s soul.

The Aristotelian Soul, Living Organisms, and Biological Information

Staunch vs. Faint-hearted Hylomorphism

 Robert Koons had distinguished seven versions of hylomorphism.[9] Before I list them, we must first clarify the distinction between faint-hearted and staunch hylomorphism. According to Koons, faint-hearted hylomorphism is a version of physicalism according to which substantial form is moved from the primitive category of natural kind or the category of (essential) property to the category of relation. Thus, a substantial form is identical to a set of relations, more precisely, a structural arrangement of elements/parts of the body. The acquisition of “substantial form” is the occurrence of certain relations and the autonomous cooperation of an organism’s separable parts. The resultant whole is a mereological aggregate and not a genuine substance. Koon notes that faint-hearted hylomorphists (for example, Kathrin Koslicki)[10] fail to distinguish genuine substances from non-substantial wholes. The matter of an organismic whole consists in a plurality of separable parts that stand together in the relevant external-relation instances.

Staunch hylomorphism stands in the historical stream of classic hylomorphism. There is a real difference between substances that have substantial forms and non-substances that do not. Further, a substantial form is either a natural-kind or species essence or that from which the essence “flows” and in which it is grounded in the category of property or, for some, in the primitive category natural-kind. As an expression of a powers ontology of causation (causation is the actualization of a power in the cause), a substantial form imposes fundamental powers on the substance’s parts, and the nature, identity and causal powers of those parts at least partially come from the substantial form of the whole. Moreover, the substantial form grounds the synchronic unity of the substance it informs, as well as the teleological, diachronic sameness of its informed substance as it grows teleologically towards its proper end. More could be said, but this is enough for our purposes.

Six Versions of Staunch Hylomorphism

 Koons lists seven versions of staunch hylomorphism, with his preference being the seventh version.[11]

1. Aristotelian Parts-Nihilism: Emergent substances have no actual parts at all.
2. Reverse ME: Parts of substances cannot exist except as parts of substances of the same kind.
3. Downward sustenance: The persistence and operation of the whole substance cause the persistence of its parts.
4. Upward sustenance: The persistence and cooperation of the substance’s parts cause the persistence of the whole.
5. Upward power migration: Some (or all) causal powers migrate from parts to the whole.
6. Teleological subordination: The powers and activities of the parts are teleologically ordered to some end pertaining to the whole.
7. Parts as sustaining instruments: The constraints of options 4, 5, and 6 are all jointly actualized.[12]

Again, my purpose in presenting these is to show that several versions of staunch hylomorphism exist, and to claim that precisely because they express a much richer, detailed, and pervasive ontology than do the standard mereological hierarchy (organisms are mereological aggregates) or systems theories, they have better resources for grounding synchronic unity, diachronic sameness, and teleological development towards a proper end set by an organism’s essence (or substantial form). Still, it may be worth stating my own preferences about staunch hylomorphism without denying that all are legitimate rivals to systems theory.

To begin with, I agree with Mariusz Tabaczek when he says that,

Koons fails to recognize the Aristotelian notion of primary matter, with the result that he defines the material aspect of hylomorphism in terms of mereologically understood elementary particles. Consequently, in light of classical Aristotelianism, his argument against options 1 and 2 (that Aristotle’s theory assumes the reality of material (mereological) substrates that endure through any substantial change) does not stand. For … what persists through each and every substantial change is primary matter.[13]

Second, versions 3-7 violate the classic necessary condition for something being a substance in distinction from an aggregate, a bundle, or a heap. This condition has been affirmed recently by E. J. Lowe and David Oderberg and it is the claim that no genuine substance has other substances (separable parts) as proper parts. Not only does this principle preserve the deep unity of substance according to which its parts are inseparable modes whose identity and nature derive from the substance of which they are modes, it also affirms that the fundamental substrate of substantial change is not a set of separable parts, but prime matter.

Finally, specifying the relation of form to matter in terms of a relational organization into which the separable parts are properly placed departs significantly from classic hylomorphism in which the relation of form to matter is analyzed in causal terms with respect to the distinction between potentiality and actuality.

The Soul and Thin Particular Hylomorphism

 Given these concerns, I offer my own version of hylomorphism, what I will call Thin Particular Hylomorphism, that has the following advantages (some of which are shared with a few versions of (1)-(7)): (i) It solves the three problems just mentioned. (ii) It preserves the mereological simplicity of an organism, particularly human persons, while retaining their metaphysical complexity by employing inseparable parts. (iii) It provides a framework within which the Aristotelian/Thomistic notion of essence or substantial form finds a very tight analogue with the contemporary notion of biological information. (iv) It explains (in particular, physics or chemistry) part incorporation into a substance in a way consistent with the fruitfulness of employing chemistry and physics in the study of biological substantial wholes.

Here, I will focus on the soul, but it should be clear that with proper adjustments, a substantial form could be easily substituted for my understanding of a soul. The human soul (hereafter, simply soul) is a simple (containing no separable parts), spatially unextended substance (or substance-like entity) containing the capacities for consciousness and for animating, enlivening, and developing teleologically its body. The faculties of the soul (for example, the mind, will) are inseparable parts of the soul containing a group of naturally resembling powers/capacities.[14]

The essence of the soul is in the category of property and not relation—especially external relation—given it grounds membership in a living being’s natural kind, it grounds diachronic identity as a principle of activity that directs an organism’s development towards its proper end, and it subsumes lower-level (for example, chemical/physical) parts, thereby transforming separable into inseparable parts whose identity/nature derives from the substantial form of the whole. In this case, these lower-level parts undergo substantial change, but still retain (i) various qualitative, quantitative, and causal features relevant to the new whole and (ii) its original essence as a virtual, potential entity that is restored if that part is removed intact from the substance. The late Medieval Aristotelians drew a distinction between a thick particular (the entire concrete organism; the thin particular plus accidents, including the body) and the thin particular (the essence, substantial form, the nexus of exemplification, and an individuator, in their case, prime matter).[15]

As we turn to an analysis of the body, some words by Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) provide a fitting transition,

A pure principle of thought, however, is not suited to inform the body…Therefore, for a rational soul to be a true form of the body, it must be the principle not only of thinking but also of the operations that are exercised by the body.[16]

In what follows, I offer two versions of Aristotelian-style dualism that provide two different understandings of the body and the body/soul relationship: first, a strictly a metaphysical thesis I shall call Metaphysical Aristotelianism (MAR); second, what I call Organicism, a more metaphysical/scientific thesis than MAR that, among other things, implies certain scientific theses that while currently in disfavor, are making a comeback in recent years.

My delineation of these two distinct Aristotelian-style views has been noted by what is most likely the most authoritative treatment of the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance in the late Middle Ages—Robert Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671. Says Pasnau,

Scholastic authors do offer metaphysical entities as principles of explanation on a concretely physical level, as efficient causes in competition with a corpuscular-mechanistic account of the natural world. The hylomorphic theory admits of an alternative formulation, however, as an explanatory schema at a different level of analysis, not competing with a corpuscular-mechanistic theory, but accounting for abstract, structural features of the world—in particular, the unity and endurance of substances…One diagnosis of the decline of scholastic thought…is that the scholastics lost their grip on hylomorphism as a metaphysical theory, conceiving of it instead as a concrete, physical hypothesis.[17]

According to MAR, a living organism is not an aggregate or system composed of separable parts, bundles of properties, nor is it a concrete organism construed as some sort of whole. Rather, it is a thin particular, viz., an essence/substantial form exemplified by an individuator (usually prime matter), standing under (sub-stands) the accidental features of the organism, including its body.[18] The thin particular is identical to the organism’s soul, it is mereologically simple (not composed of separable parts), metaphysically complex (containing a complex essence of properties and dispositional causal powers, exemplification, and an individuator), and it is holenmerically present throughout the organism’s body (that is, fully present to the body as a whole and fully present at each part of the body.)

The thin particular played four central metaphysical roles: (1) it metaphysically grounded the special sort of synchronic unity of living things, especially compared to aggregates and systems; (2) it metaphysically grounded a living thing’s ability to be a continuant, retaining teleologically sustaining strict, absolute identity through certain lawlike changes (including constituent replacement in the organism’s body); (3) It provided the metaphysical ground both for placing the organism in its natural kind and for unifying that kind; (4) Its essence included an unextended structure—a blueprint and order of assembly—for building a body—an extended, informed, ordered arrangement of inseparable, functional parts, systems, and so forth that was taken to be isomorphic with that internal unextended essence. The organism’s body is an essentially informed material structure modally distinct from the thin particular (the thin particular can exist without the body, but not conversely, since it is a dependent entity). Sans the soul and its substantial form or essence, the body is a corpse—an aggregate—and no longer a body.

MAR advocates clearly distinguished attempts to provide an ontological classification of the nature of various capacities and their possessors from proffering an explanation of the bodily conditions required for the exercise of those capacities; and MAR advocates were clearly interested in the former, not the latter. As Dennis Des Chene points out,

The Aristotelians, while acknowledging, even insisting, on the necessity of a material basis for the instantiation and exercise of vital powers, did not seek to reduce them to complexes of powers found also in inanimate things…For them, the project was not to find a chemical basis for life, but to describe and classify vital powers, and then, in keeping with the scheme of Aristotelian natural philosophy, to define the genera and species of living things in terms of those powers.[19]

For MAR, then, the body is key for both the functioning of the thin particular’s (soul’s) powers and the actualization of its various capacities. Speaking of the human soul, Des Chene observes, “The human soul is not merely joined with the body in fact. It is the kind of soul which, though capable of separate existence … nevertheless by its nature presupposes union with a body, and moreover with a particular kind of body, a body with organs, in order to exercise all its powers—even reason.”[20] Elsewhere, Des Chene notes, “Even the intellect requires, so long as the soul is joined with a body, a certain disposition of the brain.”[21]

Thus, MAR remains consistent with and may even entail the search for specific neurological causal/functional/dependency conditions associated with the actualization of the soul’s capacities for consciousness. Such a search would not provide information about the intrinsic nature of the capacity or the property it actualizes (for example, pain) nor about the possessor of that capacity (the soul, not the brain). But it would provide information about the bodily conditions required for its actualization. This form of dualism (as with Organicism; see below) is quite at home with the existence of contemporary neurological findings. Moreover, while physicalism may be fundamental to a neuroscientific research program, in the specific sense in which this is true (there will be neurophysiological conditions in deep causal/functional dependency which ground the various capacities for life and consciousness), the thin particular is also fundamental to an MAR research program.

A second view among the late-Medieval Aristotelians, distinct from MAR, which I call “Organicism,” has certain things in common with vitalism, though classifying it as such is a serious mistake. Pasnau notes that on this view, the soul qua substantial form “plays a straightforwardly causal role, explaining both the behavior and the physical structure of an animal’s body.”[22] In this sense, the soul is not only the formal/essential cause of the body, but also becomes (1) an internal efficient first-moving (immanent) cause of the development and structure of the body, and (2) the teleological guide for that development and structure (thus, form determines function). As with MAR, Organicism identifies the organism with the thin particular, viz., the soul.

Here, the soul is a substance with a spatially unextended essence or inner nature containing, as a primitive unity, a complicated, structural arrangement of capacities/dispositions for developing a body. Taken collectively, this entire ordered structure is unextended, holenmerically present throughout the body, and constitutes the soul’s principle of activity that teleologically governs the precise, ordered sequence of changes the substance will (normally) undergo to grow and develop.

The various subsumed physical/chemical inseparable parts and processes (including DNA) are tools—instrumental causes—employed by higher-order biological activities to sustain the various functions grounded in the soul. Thus, the soul is the first efficient cause of the body’s development as well as the final cause of its functions and structure, which, along with the body’s inseparable parts, are internally related to the soul’s essence.[23] The functional demands of the soul’s essence determine the character of the tools, but they, in turn, constrain and direct the various chemical processes taking place in the body as a whole. Organicism, then, implies that the organism as a whole (the soul) is ontologically prior to its bodily parts. Along with the soul’s holenmeric presence in and to the body, this understanding of the soul’s essence makes it very similar to the notion of information, as used in biology today.

Many scientists take information to be a nonphysical, sui generis entity. While scientists can usually explain what (nonpropositional) information does or how it is measured, they find it difficult to define it. At a minimum, (Shannon) information is the reduction of possibilities.[24] If Roger explains that he lives in California, for example, that small bit of information leaves many possibilities open. But if he explains his town and street address, this new information eliminates a significant number of possibilities.

In addition, biologist Jonathan Wells claims that information is a sui generis, irreducible entity that is an immaterial, unextended, multifaceted blueprint for organismic development.[25] As such, information is present/available to the organism as a whole functioning much like a formal and final cause, and fully present/available to each cell integrated into the organism (organisms have numerous bacterial cells that, while they play an important symbiotic role with organisms, they are not, strictly speaking, “parts” of the organism). In this way, the information-in-cell C “tells” C where it is and what role it is to play with respect to the whole organism. If information is not identical to an Aristotelian essence, it seems at least to be very close. A minority of biologists are returning to a type of Aristotelian essentialism.[26] And a growing minority of biologists are re-introducing irreducible teleology into the field.[27]

Moreover, an organism’s parts are inseparable parts that stand in internal relations to the soul’s individuated essence; they are literally functional entities constituted by their role in the whole organism. The body is developed and grows teleologically, by means of law-like developmental events, rooted in the internal essence of the soul. The first-efficient cause of the characteristics of an organism’s body is its soul (containing a blueprint or information in its individuated essence); the various body parts, including DNA and genes, are important instrumental causes the soul uses to produce the traits that arise. This sort of view, along with the holism with which it is associated is also gaining ascendency in biology.[28]

To summarize, Aristotelian-like Organicism entails (1) the organism as a whole (the soul) is ontologically prior to its inseparable parts; (2) the parts of the organism’s body stand in internal relations to the soul’s essence—they are literally functional (teleologically understood) entities (the heart functions literally to pump blood); (3) the body’s operational functions are rooted in the soul’s internal structure (substantial form); the internal structure or essence is the blueprint, the information responsible for the body’s structure and functions; (4) the body is developed and grows teleologically as a series of developmental events occurring in a law-like way, rooted in the internal essence of the human soul; this teleology is immanent; (5) the first efficient cause of the characteristics of the human body is the soul; various body parts, including DNA and genes, are important instrumental causes the soul uses to produce the traits that arise; (6) the body is a mode of the soul (the soul could exist without the body but not conversely; a body without a soul is a corpse), and as such it is an ensouled physical structure and thus, there are two aspects to the body—a soulish, immaterial and a physical aspect; 7) when becoming constituents of a living organism, chemical and physics parts undergo substantial change such that (i) many of their relevant qualitative, quantitative, and causal features are retained while being subsumed under and receiving their nature and identity from the organism’s substantial form, and (ii) retain their original substantial form virtually/potentially such that upon separation from the organism, that form becomes actualized.[29]

I close with two final reflections. First, on this view, the role of DNA and genes can be likened to the materials needed to construct a house. Three things are needed for such a construction: specified building materials, a complete floor plan or blueprint, and a specified order in which things will be assembled. In terms of this analogy, the role of DNA is to specify the patterns for making the materials (proteins) to be used in assembling the organism. Genes play a role in stabilizing certain aspects of the spatial and temporal order of growth and development, but they do not generate that order. Genes produce cell materials but not the overall plan or the internally related organization among the organism’s parts. According to Organicism, living organisms are wholes irreducible to and ontologically prior to their parts.

Considerable evidence supports an Organocentric view. First, the two main functions of DNA (being copied in the process of cell division and serving as a template for protein synthesis) require the coordinated activity of numerous complex molecules and can occur only within the context of an entire cell. In fact, as Richard Lewontin says, “DNA is a dead molecule, among the most nonreactive, chemically inert molecules in the living world. That is why it can be recovered from ancient plants and long-dead animals. It has no power to reproduce itself and, while it is promoted as producing proteins, in fact, proteins (enzymes) produce DNA.”[30] The feedback process between DNA and the rest of the cell is species-specific; that is, it is unique to each species and depends on the nature of the specific organism for its distinct activity.

Second, more than DNA is passed on in reproduction. A single-celled zygote contains intricate machinery without which the DNA is biologically inert. This extra material is always co-present with DNA, and DNA requires the former for its specific functioning. Experiments have shown that “if a nucleus [which contains DNA] of one species is transplanted to the enucleated egg [an egg from which the nucleus has been removed] of an unrelated species, the egg may continue to develop for a while, following the pattern characteristic of its own species, rather than the injected nucleus—but the end result is premature death.”[31]

Can Organicism explain how changing a gene can alter characteristics of an organism? Consider an artist using a fine paintbrush to produce a painting. If an artist altered the brush, say one used to paint houses, and replaced it with a fine brush or even an ice pick, this change would alter his product. But neither an altered brush (or ice pick) nor its correspondingly altered product means there is no artist. Instead, the brush is a tool used by the artist; if something happens to either, the result will change.

Similarly, genes comprising DNA sequences are tools—instruments—and that is all. As H. F. Nijhout notes, certain genes produce (via interaction with other parts of the cell) certain materials, which, in turn, help determine which of various possible developmental pathways is actualized. According to Nijhout, “Such genes can thus be said to control alternative developmental pathways, just as the steering wheel of a car controls the direction of travel. However, this is far from equating the steering wheel with the driver.”[32]

What plays the role of driver? Brian Goodwin says the organism is an autonomous, irreducible center of activity, a whole with its own internal nature, its own species-specific principle of development in which the various parts are genuine functional entities that exist for and by means of each other and the whole of which they are parts.[33] Clearly, this language implies that organisms are substances, not mereological aggregates or mere systems. If by “soul” one means an individuated nature—the thin particular—(or a substantial form qua particular), then every living organism is identical to its soul, and it is plausible to take the soul to be what Goodwin is getting at when he talks about the organism as a whole.

Second, my particular version of hylomorphism—Thin Particular Hylomorphism—along with views (1) and (2) above, retains the soul or organism as a mereologically simple entity. Thus, these versions in particular ground the diachronic endurance of human persons through inseparable-part (for example, physics entities, chemical entities, cells, organs, systems and processes) replacement. Moreover, I have suggested that whereas systems theory fails to ground diachronic endurance, all the versions of staunch hylomorphism are viable candidates for performing this metaphysical task, and for this and other reasons, they are superior to systems theory. Thus, compared to staunch hylomorphism, systems theory is an inferior way out of the mess created by staunch naturalist depictions of organisms.

Aristotelian Essences, Teleology, and Information

According to William Dembski, in ordinary life we identify two sources of information: intelligence and immanent teleology.[34] These are two different ways of getting information into matter. Obviously, the first source is relevant to ID research, but Dembski rightly warns us not to limit that research to intelligence by which he means cases in which intelligence is the external, proximate cause of an object that “functions teleologically” in such a way that a design inference is justified. Artifacts are paradigm cases. Note that the design/information does not enter into the very being of such objects, but the improbability and independent specifiability of such objects justify the design inference.

By contrast, immanent teleology is an essential constituent within kinds of objects—living organisms—and, as such, it is like a guided search that selects certain pathways in probability space for the sake of building a mature organism. However, given that the universe and life had a beginning, we are forced with the question “Where did that immanent information/teleology come from?” A design explanation is far more reasonable than proffering a brute-fact answer. Accordingly, Dembski goes so far as to say that “Intelligent design aims to discover solid scientific evidence of real (immanent) teleology in nature.”[35] Again, “Intelligent design is open to whatever form teleology in nature may take.”[36]

I suggest that if one combines my treatment of hylomorphism—we should employ staunch hylomorphism (1), (2), or the thin particular view—with Dembski’s treatment of information and teleology, we can build a rich metaphysical/theological model of living beings that, when further specified, would yield both a philosophically/theologically informed science and conversely. Such a model would look very different from one generated by advocates of methodological naturalism who eschew immanent teleology and externally imposed information from scientific methodology.

Practical Suggestions for Future Research

I close our conversation with some practical suggestions that apply what I have argued to future research. My suggestions are far from exhaustive, but I hope that what follows is useful to our thinking.

Biology

If we combine Dembski’s insights above with an acceptable version of staunch hylomorphism, then certain things follow.

1. Organisms have essences/natures that we can identify with the fundamental information of different kinds of organisms. Two things follow about the nature of species. First, they are ontologically isolated in that each member of a species will have its own fundamental type of information that does the work of developing those members. It also seems to follow that evolutionary processes cannot explain the isolation and gappyness of species. It is hard to see how one irreducible essence/unit of information could evolve naturally from another. We would expect to find species-essences and their own kind of information to form irreducibly complex systems and so forth that are species-specific. Second, one should abandon similarity sets or cladograms in favor of a synchronic, ontological notion of a species.
2. The soul or substantial form is what makes something living. Minimally, it is an organism’s life principle. The various physical criteria for life—for example, metabolism, reproduction, getting/processing/eliminating nourishment—are just that: epistemic criteria for the presence of life; they are not identical to life. More work needs to be done on integrating this idea with organicism with an eye on distinguishing it from various versions of vitalism that were rightly rejected.
3. Organisms are substantial wholes. Synchronically, they are not built from the bottom up nor do they have separable parts. Instead, they have inseparable parts whose existence and identity are dependent on their ontologically prior wholes. These parts are literally functional entities. Diachronically, organisms exhibit immanent, irreducible teleology.
4. If we grant that a necessary condition for something to be living is that it is ensouled such that the species-specific essence that constituted the living being’s primitive unit of information, and if we grant further that the soul and its essence/information are not physical, then physicalist attempts to provide thoroughly physicalist accounts of the origin of life are in principle doomed to fail. This is especially the case if we reject all versions of panpsychism and accept the naturalist depiction of matter as entirely bereft of anything non-physical, including the potentiality of being living. If immaterial information arises from the “right” configuration of matter, the would be both a case of getting something from noting and an in-principle, inexplicable brute fact.

Neuroscience and Psychology

Given the private access of consciousness, then neuroscientific methodology already employs at least property dualism. In establishing correlations or dependency relations between conscious states and brain states, the scientist has third-person access to the latter, but no access at all to the former. Thus, he/she must receive a verbal report or interpret the body language of a subject in order to establish such relations.

Recognizing this and my case for the detectability of mental causation, more research needs to be done in the manner of Jeffrey Schwartz. Basically, Schwartz demonstrated the reality of so-called top-down causation. Indeed, by postulating a substantial self and libertarian free will, he showed that certain repeated ways of thinking changed the neuroplastic brain structure from being damaged in obsessive-compulsive individuals to healthy brains. The ID movement needs to investigate this kind of self/conscious state to brain state causation. Similarly, there is a movement in psychology away from an exclusive focus on behavior and physiological conditions to consciousness, the self, and agency. More work needs to be done in this area.

Medicine

Given the approach I am recommending, there are at least two implications for medicine. First, medicine becomes a normative discipline by relating its purpose to health. Health turns out to be normative in that it assumes there is literally a way, say, an organ or system of the body ought to function according to the essence and teleological movement towards a proper end of that organ/system’s function. But a naturalist physicalist may employ only a non-normative concept of health. For example, a healthy heart is one that functions within a certain range on a bell curve or functions in a way conducive to survival.

Another fundamental issue in medicine is the debate about the best criterion for death.[37] Ontologically, substance dualists and staunch hylomorphists will be inclined to characterize death as the irreversible departure of the soul.[38] However, substance dualists divide when it comes to the fundamental epistemic criterion of death. Along with physicalists, Cartesians and those who hold that the soul is characterized by the possession of the actualization or dispositions of consciousness will employ a higher-brain or whole brain criterion according to which there is the irreversible loss of whole or higher brain functioning.

Advocates of Staunch Hylomorphism will favor a biological or organic criterion (aka the cardiopulmonary view) according to which there is an irreversible loss of biological processes or functions of the organism as a whole. This criterion needs further clarification. It does not entail that if a specific organ, system, or process has irreversibly failed (and may be “sustained” by external devices), the organism is dead. Rather, if there is evidence that the organism is still capable of exhibiting immanent causation, of sustaining its own functioning independently of external devices, then death has not occurred.

While most today employ the brain position, often under the pressure to harvest organs for transplants, the debate is still a live one. I acknowledge that both are substance dualist positions, but I am advocating a staunch hylomorphist anthropology. And this anthropology favors a biological criterion. By the way, according to my view, once there is evidence that a new living whole has come into existence, for example, evidence that is listed under biology above, then a new human person has come to be. And this takes place at conception. I suggest that staunch hylomorphists do more interdisciplinary work in defending and teasing out the implications of their ontology.

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[1] A. R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 132, compare with 131-46.

[2] For the distinction between interventionist vs non-interventionist views of divine (and human) action, along with a critique of the latter that included Peacock, see Robert Larmer, “Defending Special Divine Acts,” in Philosophical Essays on Divine Causation, edited by Greg Ganssle (N. Y.: Routledge, 2022), 174-93, especially 175-84. For a response to Peacocke, see J. P. Moreland, “Complementarity, Agency Theory, and the God of the Gaps,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 49 (March 1997): 2-14.

[3] J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know Its Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody Press, 2014). For a rigorous, comprehensive defense of contemporary generic substance dualism, see Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2023).

[4] William Lyons, Matters of the Mind (New York: Routledge, 2001), 14. Compare with 1-36, especially 13-24. Brackets mine.

[5] For the best brief treatment of Behaviorism, see Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, 3rd ed. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2011), 61-90.

[6] Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 11-16. Compare with 180-86, 203-19.

[7] E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33-40.

[8] See Robert Koons, “Staunch vs. Fainthearted Hylomorphism: Towards an Aristotelian Account of Composition,” Res Philosophica 91, no. 2 (April 2014): 151-77; J. P. Moreland, “In Defense of a Thomistic-like Dualism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, edited by Jonathan Loose, Angus Menuge, and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2018).

[9] See Koons, “Staunch vs. Fainthearted Hylomorphism.”

[10] See Kathrin Koslicki, The Structure of Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Subsequently, Koslicki has further developed her view of hylomorphism in Form, Matter, Substance (2018). In it she defends the view that the matter of hylomorphic compounds is not prime matter or stuff; rather it just is the compound’s material parts. While she remains neutral on the ontological category to which a hylomorphic compound’s form belongs, she claims that a form is not merely having parts arranged in a specific way; a form must be able to ground a compound’s crossworld identity and, thus, forms must be individual and not universal. Clearly, on her new view, form is more than an arrangement of a compound’s separable parts. But she is noncommittal about a form’s ontological category and characterize it simply in terms of its function, namely, accounting for crossworld specific and general identity facts. Since a form is individual, it is an individuated entity in its own right, yet hylomorphic compounds also have particular structural arrangements of ordinary material (separable) parts. Koslicki, Form, Matter, Substance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[11] “Part” means “separable part.”

[12] Koons, “Staunch vs. Fainthearted Hylomorphism,” 151-77.

[13]Mariusz Tabascez, Emergence (Notre Dame: University Press, 2019), 223. Prime matter is far from an outdated idea and finds a contemporary analogue in bare particulars which Gustav Bergmann called “Aristotelian prime matter splintered.” See Gustav Bergmann, Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 110, compare with 25, 77. For a defense of bare particulars, see J. P. Moreland, “Theories of Individuation: A Reconsideration of Bare Particulars,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79, no. 3 (1998): 251-63. Jeffrey Brower has proposed a gunky, massy stuff view of prime matter. See Jeffrey Brower, “Matter,” in Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi, Paul Audi, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Brower, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). According to Brower, stuff is not an individual thing, but a mass that can be measured and exist in greater or lesser degrees of quantity. Brower’s position seems to entail the existence of atomless gunk, which I reject. For a brief critique of atomless gunk, see Robert C. Koons, Timothy Pickavance, The Atlas of Reality (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 494-97. Further, it would seem that a change in individuator is a sufficient condition for a change in the individuated. And since human persons are non-degreed, all or nothing kinds of entities, and masses/stuffs can exist in different quantities and, thus, “be identical to” an original mass to such and such a degree upon losing some mass, it seems that massy gunk cannot individuate human persons.  

[14] Compare with Dominik Perler, The Faculties: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3-17.

[15] Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 99-114.

[16] Francisco Suarez, Disputationes metaphysicae. 15.10.25 (Paris: Vives, 1866; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965; originally published in 1597).

[17] Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 100-101, compare with 558-65.

[18] Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 99-134.

[19] Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7.

[20] Chene, Life’s Form, 71.

[21] Chene, Life’s Form, 96.

[22] Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 558, compare with 549, 552-565. There is a debate about whether a substantial form exhibits efficient causality. For a defense of the rejection of efficient causality, see Matthew Owen, Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021), 153-56. For a defense of the affirmative position, see Mauricio Lecon, “Francis Suarez on the Efficiency of Substantial Forms,” The Review of Metaphysics 67, no. 1 (September 2013): 107-24. See also, David S. Oderberg, “Essence and Properties,” Erkenntnis 75, no. 1 (2011): 85-111.

[23] See Tom Kaiser, “Is DNA the Soul?” (Paper presented at the West Coast Meeting of the Society for Aristotelian and Thomistic Studies, Santa Paula, CA, June 14, 2014). Posted at www.aristotle-aquinas.org.

[24] William Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, Ashgate Science and Religion series, ed. Roger Trigg and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen (London: Routledge, 2014), 17-19.

[25] Personal email communication, Jonathan Wells (April 3, 2015).

[26] Gerry Webster and Brian Goodwin, Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3-100, especially 17-25.

[27] See Georg Toepfer, “Teleology and its constitutive role for biology as a science of organized systems in nature,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedic 43, no. 1 (2012): 113-19; Armando Aranda-Anzaldo, “Assuming in Biology the Reality of Real Virtuality (A Come Back for Entelechy?),” Ludus Vitalis 19, no. 36 (2011): 333-42.

[28] Michael Denton, Govindasamy Kumaramanickavel, and Michael Legge, “Cells as irreducible wholes: the failure of mechanism and the possibility of an organicist revival,” Biol Philos, 28, no. 1 (2013): 31-52.

[29] For a comparison between our staunch hylomorphic view and a faint-hearted approach, along with a critique of both, see William Hasker, “The Dialectic of Soul and Body,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 87, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 495-509.

[30] Richard Lewontin, “The Dream of the Human Genome,” New York Review of Books, May 1992, 28. Compare with Denis Noble, “A Theory of Biological Relativity: No Privileged Level of Causation,” Interface Focus 2, no. 1 (February 2012): 55-64.

[31] Jonathan Wells, “Two Dogmas of DNA,” Bible Science News 31.8 (1993): 13.

[32] H. F. Nijhout, “Metaphors and the Role of Genes in Development,” BioEssays 12, no. 9 (September 1990): 442.

[33] Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots (NY: Simon & Schuster: 1994).

[34] William Dembski, Being as Communion, 47, compare with 47-64, 77-102.

[35] Dembski, Being as Communion, 60 (parentheses mine).

[36] Dembski, Being as Communion, 62.

[37] See Settimio and Annette Rid, “Controversies in the Determination of Death: perspectives from Switzerland,” Swiss Medical Weekly 142, no. 3334 (December 2012); D. M. Greer, et. al., “Determination of Brain Death/Death by Neurologic Criteria: The World Brain Death Project,” Journal of the American Medical Association 324, no. 11 (September 2020): 1078-97.

[38] The clinical death in NDEs have all the relevant features of irreversible death to provide evidence supporting the claims of NDE advocates.