Have We Lost Our Minds?, Stan W. Wallace. Foreword by J. P. Moreland. Wipf & Stock (ISBN: 9781666789133)

Summary: Have we lost our minds to neuroscience? A challenge to neurotheology’s eclipse of the soul and reduction of mental events to brain events.

Classically in Christian thought, human beings have been thought of as embodied souls. We believe that an immaterial nature is joined to our physical bodies. The advances of neuroscience have ushered in the new field of neurotheology. This field seeks to foster the spiritual flourishing of human beings by drawing upon the findings of neuroscience. In doing so, neurotheologians accept the premise that our mental processes are simply expressions of brain processes. There is no soul or “mind.” At best our sense of this is an emergent property of what is going on in the brain.

This book arises as an attempt to engage the expression of these ideas by two popular Christian authors, Curt Thompson and Jim Wilder. Both base their work of counseling and spiritual formation on an understanding of how the brain functions, and the spiritually re-wiring those functions when they are awry. Wilder even appropriates the spiritual formation work of Dallas Willard, saying his work extends that work. Stan W. Wallace contends that their work is contrary to Willard, who understood spiritual formation as something that occurred with the soul. He makes a case for our two natures as embodied souls or what he calls holistic dualism over against the physicalism of neurotheology.

Wallace lays out a careful biblical and philosophical argument to make his case. Before he begins the argument, he reviews the findings of neuroscience. His point is not to challenge these findings but rather to challenge the conclusions neurotheologians derive from them. Firstly, he considers the biblical argument on what we are as human beings–everlasting souls united with bodies. Then Wallace shows how the neurotheologians view differs in assuming an identity between mental and brain processes.

Refuting this identity, Wallace observes our first-person subjectivity, our free will, and our use of reason. Additionally, the assumption that mental and brain processes are identical leads to physicalism and the eclipse of the soul. But this ignores both our unified experiences at a given moment and the unity of our sense of self through time.

From here, Wallace discusses further from philosophy the nature of the soul, noting the correspondence with biblical ideas of us as individuated human nature, a “spiritual substance.” But how does the soul relate to the body? Against Cartesian dualism, where there is a sharp divide between soul and body, Wallace proposes “holistic dualism,” which he defines as “a form of substance dualism in which the body is caused by the soul, and therefore the two are deeply united.”

In the next two chapters, Wallace considers and refutes three arguments neurotheologians advance, and three arguments against holistic dualism and defenses against these arguments. I was most interested in the defense of holistic dualism against the challenge that neurotheology provides a simpler answer to understanding our nature. Parsimony or “Ockham’s Razor” is a fundamental principle in science. Wallace defends holistic dualism as the simplest answer for all the relevant data, including reason, free will, unified experience and unity through time. The most surprising objection was one that if we posit human souls then we have to admit animal souls. Wallace affirms the objection, noting the application of soul language to animals in the Bible and the belief that animals had souls of some sort until the seventeenth century!

Finally, in the last two chapters, Wallace applies all this to loving God and loving others. He draws on the work of Dallas Willard to show how important the soul is to our spiritual formation. Then he illustrates how important affirming the soul can be across the professions.

I found Wallace’s approach both compelling and winsome. It was compelling because of his step by step logical argumentation. It was winsome because he sought a middle way in addressing neuroscience. Unlike some, he neither outright accepts or rejects. Because he offers a model that highly values embodied life, he can affirm neuroscience while challenging the conclusions of neurotheology.

While Christians have been fighting hundred-year-old battles about science, neuroscience has crept up unawares, posing important questions about our nature. Wallace shows that some Christian neurotheologians have adopted assumptions contrary to what we learn about human nature both from the Bible and philosophy. He shows why this may be harmful rather than helpful in our formation. In so doing, he offers a helpful corrective for all who care about the spiritual formation of God’s people.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.