So just a week or so ago I posted this video of three of the Republican presidential nominees giving their two cents on evolution, them being (in order of appearance), Huckabee, Brownback, and McCain. Then back in late May, before these debates, Brownback wrote an opinion article for the NY Times (that bastion of liberal New Yorky nonsense) entitled ‘What I Think About Evolution,’ (which could’ve also been titled ‘What I Think About Evolution, Even Though I Don’t Think That Much About Evolution’).
Now this week The Times has released a whole Science Times section which could be titled ‘What Scientists Think About Evolution.’ How interesting it was to find a reference in one of the articles, ‘Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force,’ not only to Brownback’s comments at the Republican debate, but to his opinion article that had run in The Times just months before. Ahem, and I quote:
“Nevertheless, the idea of a divinely inspired soul will not be put aside. To cite just one example, when 10 Republican presidential candidates were asked at a debate last month if there was anyone among them who did not believe in evolution, 3 raised their hands. One of them, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, explained later in an op-ed article in this newspaper that he did not reject all evolutionary theory. But he added, “Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.’”
Anyhoo, aside from the politics of it all, the ‘Science of the Soul’ asks a lot of questions about what a soul even is, like, maybe it doesn’t have to just be your spirit. Does it have to be something separate from the physical brain? If not, then does anything with a brain have a soul? Can all our physical brain functions and machinery end up creating our soul, thus being more than the sum of its parts? As philosopher Dan Dennett playfully puts it, “Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”
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