How do theistic evolutionists explain moral reasoning?
Upvote:0
The question implies theistic evolutionists do not hold that, at some point in time, God infused a spiritual soul in two individuals, biblical Adam and Eve, and, from that time on, in all their descendants at the time of their conception. This is not my understanding of theistic evolution.
As I understand theistic evolution, it is concerned with only the human body, and does not deny that each human being has a spiritual soul created ex nihilo by God at the moment of his or her conception, or perhaps at a later time in the case of the first two human beings.
It is the infusion of a spiritual soul which explains the appearance of abstract reasoning - including true human language, as described e.g. by Chomsky's universal grammar - and moral sense.
Upvote:3
AnswersInGenesis.com did a review of theistic evolutionists positions. One unedited excerpt pertinent to this question is below. The paragraphs in italics of book quotations give succinct answers.
On the one hand, according to theistic evolutionists, young-earth creationists make a mistake to read Genesis 1–3 in a literal sense. On the other hand, they cannot consult science on questions of the nature of the soul, spirit, and/or the mind to explain their moral sense and awareness, for science cannot tell us anything about the existence of entities that cannot be studied by their methods. I can put the dilemma which theistic evolutionists create for creationists slightly different. On the one hand, Scripture cannot make an appeal to knowledge, unless sanctioned by science. If it does, then it must wait until validated by or accepted by the methods of the scientific community. This point is clearly implied by Collins when he said: “Science is the only reliable way to understand the natural world...” (Collins 2007, p. 6). But on the other hand, immaterial entities such as God, the soul, spirit, and mind cannot be invoked to explain our moral sense, because “methodological atheism” (to use Murphy’s words) has already “discovered” that God, the soul, spirit, mind, self, I or me do not exist (see, for example, atheist psychologist Steven Pinker 2002, pp. 31, 42). Here is how Murphy expressed her agreement with methodological atheism:
[N]euroscience is now completing the Darwinian revolution, bringing the mind into the purview of biology. My claim, in short, is this: all of the human capacities once attributed to the immaterial mind or soul are now yielding to the insights of neurobiology... (N. Murphy 2006, p. 88).
Elsewhere Murphy (1998) concluded that there is a “massive amount of evidence” which suggests that we no longer “need to postulate the existence of a soul or mind in order to explain life and consciousness” (Brown, Murphy, and Malony 1998, p. 17).11 The real reason why she and fellow theistic evolutionists found such “evidence” in the neuro-sciences is very simple:
Immaterial souls just do not fit with what we know about the natural world. We human persons evolved by natural selection...[which is] part of the natural order, but immaterial souls are not” (Baker 2007, p. 341).
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