How Does God Make Souls?

5 Views on the Nature and Origin of the Mind/Soul

Talk of souls is back! Where did it go? Why did it go? How did it come back? Well, that’s a bit of a long story. Watch my latest Parker’s Pensées Podcast episode if you want answers to those (link below).

But we’re back!

Now that we’re back, old questions are back as well. Questions like “what is the origin of the soul?” To which many reply: “well God is the origin of the soul. God makes souls.” But how exactly does God make souls? Now that is a great question and it’s the topic of a new Routledge book called The Origin of the Soul: A Conversation ed. by Joshua Farris and Joanna Leidenhag.

In this book 5 philosophers put forward 5 different answers to the question “how does God make souls?”—plus there’s a bonus forward by Charles Taliaferro and a bonus afterward by Peter van Inwagen.

I’ll give a quick characterization of each of the 5 views below, but make sure to watch my full conversation with Dr. Joshua Farris as we discuss the 5 disparate positions here:

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When thinking through how it is that God creates souls, there are a couple basic questions. Does God specially create each of our souls in our mothers’ womb? This is what “Creationists” say. Or does God make one soul, Adam, splinter off another from his rib, Eve, and then set up some kind of natural, biological process by which our souls are generated by and inherited from our parents leading all the way back to those two? This is what “Traducians” say (from the Latin tradux: a shoot or a sprout, i.e., our soul sprouted off the souls of our parents). Do souls preexist somewhere prior to their being placed in or associated with a body? This is what Plato says. Are souls weird monads? Is everything just a weird monad or a collection thereof? This is pretty much what Leibniz says. Most folks who believe in souls and seek to give an accounting of how they come about leave off Plato and Leibniz and opt for some form of Creationism or Traducianism (though some panpsychist traducians think their view fits with Leibniz’s).

In this volume under consideration, the 5 philosophers each give an essay laying out their view, then they each respond to eachother’s essay, then they each get a final rejoinder to objections. It’s how these x views books out to be.

First up, Joshua Farris’s Theistic Neo-Cartesianism is a form of creationism. Farris gives some arguments in favor of Neo-Cartesian substance dualism and argues that since these kinds of spiritual substances are unique and mysterious, a theistic explanation is a better explanation for grounding the origin of the soul than a biological one. Joshua has been on my podcast before to discuss this view in more detail here:

Bruce Gordon puts forward a view called Theistic Quantum-Informational Idealism. Gordon argues that both Creationism and Traducianism are needed to explain the phenomena. He argues that souls are each unique, indivisible, immaterial, metaphysical simple with no proper parts. As such they are each directly created by God alone in His eternal act of creation (Creationism). But each soul’s capacities, structure, consciousness, and sense of self are constrained and generated through quantum information transfer which happens through the sexual union of two parents (psychobiologically) and through their environment and place in history (psychosocially) (hence, Traducianism).

Joanna Leidenhag puts forth a view called Panpsychist Traducianism. This view, which is actually pretty similar to Leibniz’s monadological view, claims that God created souls as a fundamental feature of the universe from the very start. Souls are baked into creation as ‘fundamental souls’ which aren’t anywhere near as robust as the souls of human persons. However, after a long process of biological evolution, reproduction, embryonic development, etc., fundamental souls (or fundamental ‘soul’ because maybe a priority monist panpsychism is the way God did it instead of a priority microphysicalist way (think one big soul verse tons and tons of micro souls)) combine and complexify (or decombine in the case of the priority monist panpsychist view) and a human soul is indivituated (either built up of fundamental souls or carved off thee fundamental soul).

William Hasker puts forward a view called Emergent Dualism. On this view, the soul is an emergent mental substance which is generated by the human brain and also sustained by the human brain. So it’s still a substance dualism—there is a mental substance, the mind/soul, and there’s the physical substance, the body—but there’s a very tight connection between the body and the soul, such that the soul is actually produced by the body and sustained by it, though Hasker does say that God could continue sustaining the emergent soul after the death of the body. This one is clearly not a Creationist view of the soul but is it Traducian or a third thing? I’m not sure. Dr. Hasker has been on my podcast before to discuss the details of his view here:

Lastly, we have James Turner’s Hylemorphist view. You can always tell a theologian from a philosopher by how they spell this word. Philosophers spell it ‘hylOmorphism’ and theologians speall it ‘hylEmorphism’, and while James Turner is both, you can see we can see where his loyalties are. Turner’s view is simple(ish), souls don’t exist and as such they were not created by God. On Turner’s hylemorphist view, we aren’t, nor do we have, a soul, but rather we are a form matter composite (hylo/hyle = matter, morphe = form). So while the other views in the book would have our souls being their own substance, Turner demurs. Souls are not substances, souls are forms. You are a substance, but you are not a soul, you are an organism, enformed (ensouled) matter. I don’t quite get why we can’t say that God created forms even if forms aren’t substances, so I’ll need to follow up with JT. JT has been on my podcast before to discuss the details of his view in more detail here:

So enjoy these resources and grab the book from my affiliate link here to support my work: The Origin of the Soul ($$$)