Human Dignity and Bioethics

Commentary on Dennett | 93
order, such as freedom of the will and the special status of human
beings, even if they are unprovable or illusory. Dennett even speaks
sympathetically of Paul Davies’s view that freedom of the will may be
a necessary fiction for morality (like a combination of Plato’s noble
lie and Kant’s postulates of practical reason). Yet, Dennett insists that
belief in an immaterial and immortal human soul cannot serve as the
basis for human dignity any longer, as it did in the Western tradition
under the influence of Christianity and Platonism. Belief in the soul
is “discredited,” so we have to find something else to defend the human
dignity that even Dennett seeks to preserve.
In reflecting on Dennett’s provocative analysis, I would raise two
critical questions: Why is he so sure that belief in the human soul is
discredited? And what alternative does Dennett offer?
The first question is obviously a momentous one that I will answer
with a few brief points. The doctrine of the human soul will
never be “discredited” as long as the relation of mind to matter or of
conscious reasoning to the brain remains mysterious; and it remains
an awesome mystery. Most neuroscientists and philosophers honestly
admit that they have few clues about how mental activities such as
consciousness, free will, language, and even much of common sense
arise from the firing of brain cells across synapses. Therefore, some
kind of immaterial substance—call it “the rational soul”—must be at
work here; and since the soul is mysteriously connected to the body,
the best definition of man’s essence is “an embodied rational soul.”
This view of man is just as workable today as it was centuries ago in
Greek philosophy; and, in fact, modern science heightens the case
for the mysterious existence of man as an embodied rational soul
rather than dispelling it. Science properly done teaches us to “live
with mystery” rather than to embrace one-dimensional materialism
dogmatically.
Likewise in cosmology, the more we learn from science, the
more we see how mysterious the universe really is and how purely
naturalistic causal explanations are inadequate. Nature is not a selfcontained
whole because the laws of nature themselves are contingent
and had to be “selected” by some mysterious power outside of
nature; this is one way that science points toward God as the intelligent
selector of the laws of nature. In addition, Big Bang Cosmology
takes us back to a beginning point or “singularity” that preceded