> Allen Roy wrote:
>
> It is life that was
> put
> into the body, not a soul into a body.
>
> I say (thinking hard):
>
> This is crucial, and I think Allen is right. If we
> take a non-dualistic view of personhood (which is,
> again, debatable), and if we hold evolution to be near
> to true (which is not very debatable), then every
> animal, every corporate being, must have a soul
> (life). That has to include dogs, caterpillars,
> spiders, amoebes, or at least all animals in the
> evolutionary line of descent to human beings. We are
> holding for true that God did not on any occasion in
> the history of life put or breathe a soul into man,
> but merely that life itself (that somehow is from
> God), inherent in all animals including man, is what
> make out for what we today name 'soul.'
This is truly a sticky subject. I ran into the following today and like it
or not, we need to deal with things like this from the point of view of the
'soul'.
"Tell someone they have the intelilgence of a slime mold and you will
actually be giving them a compliment.
"Scientists in Japan and Hungary have shown that the slime mold Physarum
polycephalum can figure out the shortest distance through a maze. The
research appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
"The researchers placed portions of the mold throughout a tiny maze. Over
time, the mold portions grew toward one another forming a large organism
with many extensions that snaked through the maze.
"Next the scientists put food at the entrance and exit to the maze. The
mold responded by retracting many of its extensions. Eventually, the only
ones that remained were the extensions that lay along the shortest route
between the entrance and the exit.
"Finding the shortest distance between two sources of food is advantageous
for the slime mold, the scientists said. It is the most efficient way to get
food and increases the chance for survival.
"The scientists wrote that 'this remarkable process of cellular compuation
implies that cellular materials can show a primitive intelligence.", Sue
Goetinck Ambrose, "Mold's Amazing Feats Suggest a Primitive Sort of
Intelligence," Dallas Morning News, Oct. 2, 2000, p. F1.
>
> But this does not at all solve my problem. Still we
> have to ask; what makes man unique (compared to all
> other animals from which he has descended, and from
> which he has life/soul)? Even worse to explain; what
> makes it possible for man to communicate with God?
Language is what separates us from the animals. Our language is unique and
occurs in a different part of the brain than animal calls and
communications. Pinker writes:
"Language is obviously as different from other animals' communication
systems as the elephant's trunk is different from other animals' nostrils.
Nonhuman communication systems are based on one of three designs: a finite
repertory of calls (one for warnings of predators, one for claims to
territory, and so on), a continuous analog signal that registers the
magnitude of some state (the livelier the dance of the bee, the richer the
food source that it is telling its hivemates about), or a series of random
variations on a theme (a birdsong repeated with a new twist each time:
Charlie Parker with feathers). As we have seen, human language has a very
different design. The discrete combinatorial system called 'grammar' makes
human language infinite (there is no limit to the number of complex words or
sentences in a language), digital (this infinity is achieved by rearranging
discrete elements in particular orders and combinations, not by varying some
signal along a continuum like the mercury in a thermometer), and
compositional (each of the infinite combinations has a different meaning
predictable from the meanings of its parts and the rules and principles
arranging them).
"Even the seat of human language in the brain is special. The vocal calls
of primates are controlled not by their cerebral cortex but by
phylogenetically older neural structures in the brain stem and limbic
system, structures that are heavily involved in emotion. Human vocalizations
other than language, like sobbing, laughing, moaning, and shouting in pain,
are also controlled subcortically. Subcortical structures even control the
swearing that follows the arrival of a hammer on a thumb, that emerges as an
involuntary tic in Tourette's syndrome, and that can survive as Broca's
aphasics' only speech. Genuine language, as we saw in the preceding chapter,
is seated in the cerebral cortex, primarily the left perisylvian region." ~
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, (New York: Harper/Perennial, 1994), p.
334
And I would re-iterate here, that any ancient hominid, be it Neanderthal, H.
erectus or Australopithecus which possessed language, even a primitive
language, is human!
glenn
see http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
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