[asa] seminar on the soul and the body: Fri. Sept. 28, 3:30

For the Grand Rapids, MI, area:

The next Christian Perspectives in Science seminar at Calvin College is

       Friday, September 28, 3:30 PM in Science Building room 110.

Speaker: John Cooper, Professor of Philosophical Theology,
             Calvin Theological Seminary.

Title: A Classical Christian Emergent Anthropology

Abstract:
  I'll argue that biblical anthropology presents a holistic or integral
view of soul and body, but one in which persons can exist temporarily
without earthly bodies. I'll then present a version of this anthropology
- the generically Thomist view that that soul is the subsistent form
(organizing, empowering principle) of the material body that constitutes
humans as one spiritual-physical substance (not two-substance dualism) - a
living organism with human capacities. But by God's supernatural power,
the soul can exist apart from the body between death and resurrection.
(It is not naturally immortal.) I modify Thomism by opting for a
traducian rather than a creationist view of the soul: the union of sperm
and egg is not merely biological but produces a new spiritual-physical
individual. The soul does not "emerge" and develop from mere physical
stuff by metaphysical magic (as in physicalism), but because the
person-spiritual capacities are potentially present from conception.
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Received on Sat Sep 22 13:54:38 2007