Re: a question for monists

>  The Incarnation is a central mystery of the faith, with no easy
>explanation under ANY view of what it means to be a human being.  I don't
>think dualism does any better than monism here.
>  Suppose, for example, one imagined something like this:  A normal human
>being is a material human body with an integrated nonmaterial human soul;
>the Incarnate Christ was a material human body with a divine
>second-person-of-the-Trinity immaterial soul.  But in this picture, Christ
>is not fully human; instead, Christ is some mixture -- part human, part
>divine.  The church fathers explicitly considered and rejected those sorts
>of pictures, insisting that Christ was both fully human and fully divine.
>  So to do justice to that teaching under dualism, one should picture the
>Incarnate Christ as having a material human body with an integrated
>nonmaterial human soul, who is nevertheless also fully divine.  Is that
>really any less of a mystery than a monist picture of the Incarnation?

It would be important as Penrose points out, that the brain
is not simply algorithmic. The reason is that if everything
about us algorithmic (and not just that algorithm that makes
me lust in the heart), then there would not be much of a way
to say that the "algorithm" that thinks of God is not just a
bug in the otherwise functional set of routines. But more to
the point is that it would mean we are simply programmed
machines.

It may be possible to make a computer that immitates belief in
God, but unless the computer has something other than a cpu,
memory, hard disks, and some complex programming, none of it
actually means anything and it's belief in God is all illusion.
That may not be the case for a robot built on some other
principle, but consciousness probably requires more than
a complex array of algorithms.

by Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
Received on Sat Mar 26 08:55:37 2005