This is the second part of last week’s episode. Joe asks Jamie about some of the practical implications of all of this.
Jamie Dew: Hey, everybody, this is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie: And again, we welcome you to the Towel & Basin podcast.
Joe: And this is the second part of our question-
Jamie: The rubber meets the road.
Joe: The rubber meets the road. So if you haven't listened to last week's, it might be helpful to go back and listen to that. It is on what it means to actually be a person. So we looked at a lot of the technical side of it, like a lot of what you did your dissertation on, your second dissertation on. Second dissertation?
Jamie: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: Okay, I forget which one it was. So a lot of what you did that on, that was the most recent one. So now we're going to take that really practical. And what I'm most interested in learning is like, a mom comes to a pastor looking for advice because the teenager has this problem in school because they're hearing conflicting or whatever. And so I think there are probably three main issues that we had talked about, that come out of this. One is the transgender.
Jamie: That's right.
Joe: You know, which for people who are a little bit older, that's like, that's a no brainer, but for younger people, it's really not.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: That's a really confusing issue. The second one is race, like what are the implications of that, right? And then the third one is abortion.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: Some people, that's again, a very clear-cut, like that's killing babies, that's wrong.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: But there is a very strong opponent view to that. And I'm kind of curious to see how this view of personhood from your own research-
Jamie: Sure, sure.
Joe: ... affects that.
Jamie: Yeah. So maybe circle back just very quickly on the transgender thing. One of the things we said in the last podcast was, to illustrate the point that how you answer this question will be determined in large part about what you think human persons are.
Joe: Right, right.
Jamie: So a little bit of history here. So the Western view had largely been a very substance dualist view. Then it goes materialistic in the enlightenment, and then we go postmodern. And the postmodern tradition has enabled a sort of returning back, a defining, a dissolving of definitions, a dissolving of demarcations of male, female. You will hear people today talking about binaries and things like that, these standard binaries and that they're all social constructs, okay? Now that's sort of the flavor of the day, we're in a postmodern world of how people talk. What I think that's enabled people to do is really sort of try to redefine everything now. So like, what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman and stuff like that.
Joe: Marriage, the whole ... yeah.
Jamie: Yeah, that's right. So you have folks now and this isn't new, this isn't unique, that have a difficult time, a great level of anxiety or discomfort living life within their biological gender. And it causes all sorts of turmoil for them, and so on and so forth. And because of that, they just now think given our cultural moment that, hey, those things are all social constructs. I'm free to define that for myself. So they might now, male and by male, I mean in this case, you're a person in a male body and you say, or you think of yourself as a female trapped inside a female body. So what I want evangelicals to see is that, that whole move, all that to say this, that whole move of the transgender community to redefine their sexuality, their gender, and such is all being built on a substance dualist chassis, right? So they're essentially affirming I have a physical body that is male, but I, myself-
Joe: The essence of me.
Jamie: That's right, is different from my physical body. So there's some kind of spiritual substance or entity or something else like that. This is just substance dualism all over again.
Joe: And you know what I think is so tricky about that? I think on the face of it, a lot of people are like, so?
Jamie: Right, right. But what I would say to evangelicals is I'd say, well, look by advocating for that substance dualist perspective, we've essentially handed them the philosophical machinery or the tools to make the very case that they're making. If, however, that view's not right, and one of the other two is right, say materialism or even a hylomorphic perspective, which I outlined in the last one, if one of those is right, then the whole argument from the LGBTQ movement can't be right. So if materialism is right, that you just are your physical body, well, then you are your gender by definition.
Joe: What you were born with, by definition.
Jamie: That's right. You are a male if you have male DNA and male body parts, and you are a female, if you have female DNA and female body parts. So what's really interesting, we're in a moment where in this environment, the spirit of materialism, which was very rebellious to all of these traditional ideas, is what people want to hold onto. Yet they're advocating for an ontology of human persons. It's actually very traditional. I think a better approach is this hylomorphic perspective.
Joe: Because it's neither.
Jamie: That's right. I think the hylomorphist has the advantage of still being able to say, yes, there's body and soul, but with the materialist, we can say, no, my biology matters. You're a male because you have a male body. You're a female because you have a female body. So what I hope to do just in this little podcast is, once again, illustrate that your ability to interact on these issues, these very current moral issues, depends in large part on what you say a human person is. So there's how it happens and manifests itself on the gender front. Now there's also two others as well, say abortion and race issues. Maybe we'll tackle abortion first. Is that-
Joe: Sure, yeah.
Jamie: Okay. So we'll go there first. Think about with evangelicals, I, too champion a pro-life position. I, too, want to speak against abortion and advocate for the unborn, absolutely. What's interesting though, is that there are some, the majority would hold that's morally right to hold this pro-life position and it's morally wrong to abort unborn children. So they're against abortion and they will make those cases on, again, the chassis of a substance dualist perspective. So there are some philosophers that would argue the only possible way you could hold this ethical view, evangelicals, is if you adopt a substance dualist perspective.
And the argument goes, something like this. Look, the fetus in the womb is constantly forming over time. It's vague as to exactly when it's fully formed or when you could say, now it's a person. But we want to say personhood starts at the moment of conception. So what do we do? We go back and say-
Joe: They're separate.
Jamie: Well, they're separate and it's a person because it has a human soul.
Joe: Yeah, right.
Jamie: So the human soul arrives at conception and that's the mechanism by which we say, it's a person from the moment of conception here. All right, now I think that part of it works, but here's the unfortunate part of that argument. If the human person just is the immaterial thing, right, then what exactly is being murdered? Because the argument is this is murder, right? What exactly is it then that's being murdered in an abortion? I mean, think about it. The scissors go into the back of a physical skull.
Joe: Not a soul.
Jamie: That's right, and suck out the physical brain. So technically speaking, if you adopt that ontology, technically speaking, you haven't killed the person at all because the person isn't the body. The person is the immaterial soul, which is untouched by the scissors and the abortive equipment, right? So inadvertently what I'm afraid of is that this ontology, instead of helping our ethical arguments over here, are actually going to cut the legs out from under it. And so a better approach would be one that says yes, body and soul, right? So we can still say those types of things about souls showing up at the very beginning, but we also have a physical organism to attach personhood to as well.
And granted, in the very moments of conception, it's not fully formed, I'll grant that, but at least the nucleus of that person's physical body is there, body and soul are together, this is a human person. You cram the scissors in the back of that skull, you perform an abortion, you're murdering a person now. So I think the other views enable us to hold those ethical views better.
Joe: I also think, too, there's like this underlying inconsistency, right? It's kind of the difference between conscious and subconscious. Subconscious, we can't always put our finger on it, but we can sort of feel it somewhere and just know it exists, right?
Jamie: Right.
Joe: Like you just have this feeling about something. And I do feel that by having this substance dualism approach, we kind of don't put forth such a strong witness because we're kind of being inconsistent in that way, right? So if you take the abortion and the transgender, if you say, well, I'm going to be substance dualism on the abortion one, right? Or vice versa, however that works, you know. I feel like we're kind of having our cake and eating it, too.
Jamie: Yeah, potentially. I mean, I do think most of the folks I know that are substance dualists, that would argue against abortion and stuff, I mean, these are faithful brothers and sisters.
Joe: Sure, sure.
Jamie: So I just think that inadvertently by adopting a view that detaches personhood from the physical organism completely, that what you're doing is cutting the legs out from under your arguments on both of these fronts. So when you try to push back on someone like a Caitlyn Jenner and say, no, I'm sorry, you are a male. Then I think you don't have the ontology necessary to really make that case. I think when we try to say abortion, the act of killing the physical organism in the womb, that's murder, I think you don't have the ontology to do that, either, on the substance dualist chassis. And that's why I pushed for that. So that's how I think through both of those two issues.
Now on the race front, there is this moment where there is a pushback against any type of emphasis on race. There are some that want to say, well, we shouldn't pay attention to the color of skin at all. It's all spiritual.
Joe: Colorblind kind of thing?
Jamie: Yeah, and I don't think, if I'm right, that human persons are body and soul, then the physical stuff matters too, right? Including my physical body, your physical body, my brothers' and sisters' physical body. White, black, Asian, you name it, that stuff matters to their personhood, which means that this is part of who I am and part of what I am and, therefore, it matters. And we therefore have to care about those things at that point to minister well, and to be faithful stewards of what God's given us to do.
Joe: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I wonder, too, about like the materialism view of that. So I feel like you could go too far in the other end, if you say that I am completely defined-
Jamie: Right, sure.
Joe: ... by the color of my skin or where I come from and so forth, because then you're almost saying that that's more important by implication than say you're a member of the family of Christ.
Jamie: Sure. And this is where an answer to that question ... I think this is where we could say on any one of these views, and by the way, you do have any number of Christian views of all three of these brands. Substance dualist, you have plenty of Christian perspectives on that. Materialist view, you have actually a lot of Christian views that are materialistic. And then the hylomorphist, that's almost always a Christian perspective these days, at least. On any one of those views, all of them would advocate for the imago Dei, right? So that's one of the things we haven't talked about in either one of these podcasts. And I haven't ... it's not because it's not important, not because it's not relevant, but philosophical anthropology is dealing with more the metaphysical question of what-ness. Is it body? Is it soul? What is it? What a Christian would add to this is the imago Dei. So in the case of race and things like that, there are real differences between people, right?
Joe: Yeah.
Jamie: God made us different. There's an intended difference in there. Shouldn't be minimized. It shouldn't be dismissed. There is an intended difference there that God designed and is there for good. But there is also unintended sameness in all of this, whether black, white, Asian, Hispanic, you name it, there is a sameness and that is the imago Dei. Each of us represents the image of God and our image bearers, and so that's an important thing to keep in mind as well. This is a common feature in all. Just very quickly, that notion of imago Dei of a human nature, of a human essence that we might ground in that imago Dei, has been pushed back on very strongly by the postmodern world.
So when you trace through what postmoderns think about human persons, they often deny that there's any such thing as human nature or essence or anything fixed like that, that's shared by all. What they'd want to say is that human persons are the amalgamations, the culminations of various kinds of pressures and structures from society that shape us all. So the human person, there is no such thing as a human nature, we're all just plastic and shaped by the forces around us. And there have been some that want to advocate that view because some of these more centralist views that say there really is a fixed nature, have been abused at times by Anglos. And what I would say as well, those abuses may actually very well be there. I don't have any pushback on that, per se, but any view that denies the existence of such a thing as human nature, I don't think is helpful and I certainly don't think it's Christian.
Let me start with the Christian. Consider the councils of the church, right? Consider the Nicene creed. Consider the Chalcedonian confession and such. What they were advocating for is that Christ our Lord shares with God in his Godness, Godness. And shares with us and our manhood, manhood. The language that's used there is that Christ is consubstantial with the father, according to his godhood, and consubstantial with us, according to his manhood. What that means is Christ is taking on human nature. If you deny that there's such a thing as human nature, you have now inadvertently denied the creeds and the confessions of the church, so that's why it's not Christian.
I think it's also not helpful because having that imago Dei, that fixed spiritual nature that each of us have, really does ground and undergird the dignity of all human beings everywhere. So it's not helpful to deny these fixed notions.
Joe: Which is essentially what everybody is arguing, that there is worth here.
Jamie: Right.
Joe: You know what I mean? When you look at the transgender debate, they're saying this person though they're confused ... We would say they're confused or they're struggling with something, whatever. But what they're saying is they are valuable. And we're saying that, too. We're just like, obviously, not coming at it the same way.
Jamie: Sure.
Joe: Yeah, okay, last question. Help give me a question to ponder for my own self to understand this better. Okay, so super quick recap. The last episodes, this one and the last one, we've talked about substance dualism, the body and soul are separate things. We talked about materialism. There is no soul, essentially. It's just your body. And then you've talked about this hylomorphism, okay?
Jamie: Right.
Joe: If I'm trying to process this, what is the central or some of the central questions that I should be asking myself?
Jamie: One of the questions I always when I lecture on this and teach on this, one of the ways I start is my asking the question. It's a really strange question that students immediately look at me like I have three heads, but it's just an interesting way of getting at the question, philosophically, is what is your relationship to your body? Is your relationship to your body a relationship of possession? You own it? You possess it? Is your relationship to your body one of identity? You are your body? You just are this physical organism?
See, if you answered the first way, possession, you're a substance dualist. If you answer in the second way, identity, well then you're a materialist. If you say, well, it's one of composition, that my body is at least part of what composes me, then I suspect you're somewhere in the neighborhood of a hylomorphist. So that's an interesting way of asking philosophically speaking, what's your relationship to your body?
Joe: Okay, good. That gives me some homework. All right, well, thanks so much for that.
Jamie: Hey everybody, this is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe: If you liked this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it?
Jamie: And, if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way, and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.