Animal souls

I always look forward to the first of the month when new issues of my favourite 'e-zines' come out. The New English Review is one of those favourites and John Derbyshire has a good article in this issue which I haven't finished reading yet entitled, "The I's Have it." He cites a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary named Nancey Murphy and John F. Haught a theologian at Georgetown University who want to erase the traditional distinctions that set humans apart from the rest of the animal world. My own position on the matter is pretty close to Epictetus.' It's our capacity for self examination that sets us apart, and that's what leads him to reserve for man the possession of an eternal soul. However while I concur with the first part of the argument I have some doubts about the second part. The most important points in discussing the soul (the existence of which I haven't the slightest doubt) is will and sensation, both of which definitely set the lowest of life forms apart from inanimate matter. A rock doesn't care what happens to it but the meanest paramecium does. It seeks food, it reproduces, it prefers life over death, and presumably distinguishes between things that feel good and things that don't. Therefore it has purposive behavior. Darwinists by some tortured logic that has never made any sense to me seem to be saying that matter is inherently purposeful. And then they say it isn't, it's just random. Whatever that means. Maybe so, but it doesn't seem to have occured to them to propose any theories to account for it. Is it just complex carbon-based molecules that have this capacity or are other elements like aluminum or argon also able to spontaneously start moving about and striving to increase in complexity, or do the various constituents of living things we know about have unique properties? Because if just any old material can tranform itself into brain cells why don't we see it? Or why do we never see a Sahara sand dune spontaneously make itself into a medieval castle? I believe our material bodies are like machines that have been assembled and directed by a force or power outside what we normally think of as the universe and denying that possibility blocks our progress in understanding the makeup of our world.
Leaving that train of thought, I should mention that I have a bit of a problem with Christians who cite 'Christian thought' in arguments against animal souls. Although I read the bible regularly I don't even come within a mile of being an authority on it, but isn't the idea of a soul a fairly recent innovation in the bible? My guess is that the Hebrews got it from either the Greeks or the Persians. It was really at the time of the advent of Christianity when theories of the soul abounded in the Roman sphere, and the New Testament takes a definite position, but it is as a participant in a widespread debate. So I think it's perfectly fair to say that Christian thinking on the subject could be more accurately described as a variety of late classical thought on the subject. Thus I do not regard Christian teaching on the soul as the last and final word. It's something that has to be thought about a lot more than it has. The modern materialist view is that there is no 'proof' for such a thing. I am convinced they are wrong but they bring important ideas to the debate. And so does somebody like Nancey Murphy who wants to show that we aren't the only ones with souls. This may be wrong, too, but it's an extremely valuable line of thinking and should not be dismissed.
Derbyshire is rightly worried about the knee jerk deconstructionalist thought patterns of our wacidemics, but Epictetus dealt with that one almost 2000 years ago and his point is still valid. A wish to deny that there is any such thing as a lower or a higher form of life is at the root of the deconstructionist fad and it's so easy to demolish that logic it's almost proof positive that the academy has been taken over by cretins. In the navy we used to have a lot of Marine jokes. One of them was about the Marine Corps IQ test. It's just the same as all the other IQ tests except that if you score over fifty you fail. Some ideas are so stupid ridicule is the only response necessary. You do get tired of being polite.
Further along in the article Derbyshire takes us on a bit of a tour of some of the thinking that goes on behind the campus gates and an entertaining tour it is. It makes me think of the tours they used to have of Bedlam, the famous institution for the demented they had in the London of yesteryear.
It is important to point out that while the English language is well equipped with technical jargon it's metaphysical vocabulary is extremely vague. In contrast, Greek, which was the educated language of the Roman world, had a very precise metaphysical vocabulary. Many of our problems in modern metaphysical discourse can be traced to this deficiency in the English language.