Neuroscience, Neurotheology, the Soul, and Human Flourishing

Christianity Today Book Review: Christ Renews Our Minds, Not Our Brains, by Sharon Dirckx (PhD Neuroimaging, University of Cambridge) (reviewing Stan W. Wallace (President & CEO, Global Scholars), Have We Lost Our Minds? Neuroscience, Neurotheology, the Soul, and Human Flourishing (2024)):

What exactly am I? And what are you? The nature and essence of human beings is one of the most widely discussed and hotly debated topics not just of our time but arguably of all time.

Are we just advanced apes? Are we just machines one day to be artificially upgraded? Are we souls that will one day break free of our physical confines and float off to some higher state of being? Human beings have asked these questions since antiquity. In recent decades, they have been thrust back into the limelight through the advance of neuroscience and through the claims of scientists like Francis Crick, who suggests that humans are “nothing but a pack of neurons.”

The approach many scientists take, often unquestioningly, presumes that matter (atoms, molecules, and the forces of nature) explains everything—or will do so eventually, given enough time. And this approach carries over to larger questions about human nature. Many neuroscientific authorities argue that all aspects of our being are reducible to the workings of our brains.

Christian apologists often respond to this materialist outlook by showing its insufficiency. We don’t just have a brain, they argue, but also a mind, a self. There is a conscious you and a me that cannot be captured simply by measuring the activity of nonconscious neurons.

Stan W. Wallace is responding to a different kind of argument in his excellent book Have We Lost Our Minds? Neuroscience, Neurotheology, the Soul, and Human Flourishing. He contends that the “you are your brain” view has leaked into Christian thinking, albeit cloaked in spiritual language. …

For [Curt Thompson and Jim Wilder], neuroscience is more than a means to understand the workings of the brain during our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional experiences. In fact, they describe it as the new route to spiritual maturity.

On this view, growing in Christlikeness involves engaging and understanding the workings of our cerebral cortex more than being transformed by the renewing of our minds. As deeply relational beings, we find the key to growth in forming love attachments with God and others. According to Thompson and Wilder, this happens primarily through the brain. Wallace sums up their perspective like this: “In effect, the prefrontal cortex is me, and therefore it must be fully functioning for me to be known and know others in secure and healthy relationships.”

Wallace describes this endeavor as “neurotheology,” which he defines as integrating “the findings of neuroscience” with “the theology of spiritual formation.” He is keen to show that this trendy and seemingly innocuous project is potentially seismic at its core, and he speculates about two potential causes. Either it originates from a lack of philosophical training to understand the distinction between the brain and the mind or soul, or it stems from a belief that humans are not in fact an amalgam of body and soul, brain and mind, or physical and spiritual elements. They are just a body. Just a brain. Just a physical machine. Have We Lost Our Minds? is a response to Christian materialism.

What can we say in return? Brains don’t think. People think using their brains. Brains don’t form love attachments. People choose to love. As Wallace sat down to write his book, it was him doing the writing. Yes, his brain was engaged in the process, and a well-designed imaging study would have captured myriad neural networks at work. But even the most sophisticated measurements could not have captured what he had in mind to write.

People—not brains—write books. This is an important but often misunderstood point. The self, or soul, and the brain are very closely connected. But this doesn’t mean they are identical or conceptually interchangeable. Mind and brain are, in fact, two very distinct entities. …

Wallace argues that a proper understanding of human nature, spiritual formation, and human flourishing ought to come from the combined insights of theology and philosophy, as well as from neuroscience. If humans are made in the image of an immaterial God, then there must be an immaterial dimension to our human makeup, which Wallace—in alignment with J. P. Moreland, Dallas Willard, and others—describes as a soul.

In Willard’s words, a soul is “that in us which combines all the dimensions of the person to form one life.” The Bible regularly refers to an unseen dimension of the self with words like heart, soul, mind, spirit, and inner being. Scripture tells us we are outwardly wasting away but are inwardly being renewed each day (2 Cor. 4:16).

Biblically speaking, then, there are certainly dualities to our human makeup. Wallace’s book revolves around defending what he calls holistic dualism—the belief that body and soul are distinct substances, both of them able to bring about causal change in the world, yet in a deeply integrated way.

As Wallace puts it, “The Scriptures teach that we are a functional unity of soul and body but also an ontological duality, with the soul being the more fundamental aspect of what we are.” He goes on to suggest that this view makes best sense of neuroscientific discovery. Wallace takes time to address misunderstandings about dualism, arguing that the holistic version differs from various predecessors, such as Cartesian dualism (named after René Descartes, known for the iconic phrase “I think, therefore I am”), which infers a much more token interaction between soul and body. …

We are best placed to love God and grow into the likeness of Christ when both body and soul are engaged. Worship, in this view, extends beyond spiritual activities like prayer to encompass embodied practices like fasting and service. On the other hand, spiritual formation is not something we can passively allow our brains to do on our behalf. Brains don’t form love attachments. People do this, which is why the thinking that takes it out of our hands is potentially harmful. The soul and will must choose to engage with God and with the spiritual disciplines that provide the vehicle for transformation.

C.S. Lewis Institute, Making Sense of Science and Faith: Sharon’s Story:

Cambridge educated Dr. Sharon Dirckx was raised in a secular culture where religion played a minimal role. Intellectual authorities led her to believe that science and belief in God were incompatible until she began investigating the verifiable claims of Christianity. She came to see that a robust, intellectually grounded faith was possible.

Sharon Dirckx’s books: