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Souls And Brains And IQs

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

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Nov 10, 2005
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Houston, Texas
Basic Beliefs
Strong Atheist
Hiram is the village atheist. Hiram has an IQ of 160. Danny is the village idiot. Danny has an IQ of 50. If we accept both have souls, we must ask this question. Is it the IQ that has an IQ? Or the human brain that matters? Could it be all mankind has a potential IQ of 200, but our human brains may not allow us to exhibit the full IQ of our souls? Why then would God inflict Danny with a brain limiting Danny's IQ to 50? How do we correlate the theory of human souls with IQ? Why then are some people geniuses, some average, some of notably low intelligence?

Question Number 677 of "1,001 Questions To Puzzle And Irritate Theologians".
 
Not sure my ramblings will strictly address your post, but this is where I end up:
1- I can just hear our friends in the clergy telling us that our human intelligence is so miniscule compared to His that we are all inconsequential in brain power; furthermore that Jesus says in Matthew that "except ye...become as little children, ye shall not enter in the kingdom of heaven." Therefore, intelligence is of no consequence to God; he needs childlike faith -- and the drawback to taking pride in one's intelligence might be a doubting mind and thus hell. (This pairs in my mind with a Gore Vidal passage I read the other day that tickled me: "If I were dictator...I would not allow any religious group to have schools. And without schools, there would be no Catholic Church in two generations because their doctrines are so insane that nobody in his right mind would accept them.") Anyway, the Christians, I think, would decouple intelligence from the concept of the soul.
2- My problem with the soul and those who believe they possess one stems from the last visit I paid to my great-aunt Pearle, who by 1995 was in the last stretch of Alzheimers. I'd visited her twice before, when she could still hold a conversation (although she could not hold on to any new memories or information.) At that last visit, she was mentally gone. One of her symptoms was logorrhea, or non-stop speech, but it was actually torrents of disconnected, nonsensical verbalizing, extremely rapid bushels of words with occasional recognizeable phrases but an awful lot of word chowder. She went on, excitedly, for the half hour we stayed with her. Christians believe that, somewhere inside that poor woman was an intact identity, a soul, which would necessarily have a memory of all her past deeds, good and bad, and be accountable to God and capable of worshipping Him if she was one of the elect? Show me. That's a doctrine that no one in his right mind should believe. Our consciousness depends on a physical plant, a nourished brain, and we can now map in that brain where the various functions reside. When you're brain dead, every part of your identity has vanished for good.
3- I don't believe we all have the capacity for a 200 IQ. Just as we're physically diverse in height, muscle power, etc. When I contemplate works of genius -- say, a novel by Dostoyesvsky or George Eliot, a painting by Van Gogh or Bruegel, a piece of popular music like Potato Head Blues or A Day in the Life that instantly expands it own field -- I respond with wonder but no sense that I could create at that level.
 
That sounds like what would have been a serious theological debate of past centuries.

Christians believe the body and 'soul' are separate entities don't they?

I imagine there are all sorts of theological responses along with biblicalquotes.
 
The roots of the concept of soul as we understand the term goes back to Aristotle. In his book, De Anima, On The Soul, Aristotle speculates about something called hypomorphism. Substance + Form. For example, plants have a substance, plant bodies, plus form, appetitive form. Plants use sunlight and water the grow. Animals add movement to their substance. Humans add intellectual form to their form.

This is what one gets when one has no real science, no microscopes, no chemistry, no real biology, one speculates. Substance + Form has a long history and can be found in the works of Thomas Aquinas. It still is important to Catholic Thomist theologians.

But it is meaningless. It can mean anything but only as theologians chase after science and re-adapt their hylomorphic theories to science as that progresses. Hylomorphism adds nothing to science. It predicts nothing, explains nothing, it is a zombie idea that lingers on. But allows one to assert a soul can exist.

Aristotle assures us that intellectual form is immortal and infinite and can exist apart from a human substance. Here then is a poor theory that supports the existence of a soul apart from a mortal body. I occasionally post at the blog of Professor Ed Feser, a Catholic philosopher and Aristotle champion.
Feser just published his new book on the soul. He has published books on Aristotle, and claims Aristotle was a scientist. Feser is a loyal Thomist.

I posted my thoughts on IQ and soul some time back on his blog. Feser did not answer my ponderings.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
The roots of the concept of soul as we understand the term goes back to Aristotle.
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I've always assumed it antedates Aristotle and can be found in Plato. The Phaedo has Socrates going on and on about the immortal soul, which he relates to the concept of ideal forms. I found this stuff daffy as a college kid, and still do. Here is a chair, and there is a chair, but they are only expressions of Chairness. Really? The materialist and sociological explainers of religious beliefs make more sense to me, but of course we've had millenia to work this stuff over.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
Hylomorphism adds nothing to science. It predicts nothing, explains nothing, it is a zombie idea that lingers on. But allows one to assert a soul can exist.
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Perhaps Hylomorphism adds nothing to science because most people lack familiarity with both the word and the philosophical doctrine.

As a former science communicating-person on social media, who worked with others who had degrees; and the others had more scientific literacy than I had or have, I must say that none of the scientists I know, or science-area people who I have read, have ever used this word where I could read it.

I looked it up (I had to do so). It's a 19th century concept. I looked it up here on IIDB. It's your word; no one else uses it, or claims that hylomorphism adds anything to science.

A rare word or a rare philosophy adds nothing to science? You're right about that, @Cheerful Charlie . :)
 
When I was a college-age kid I had an older cousin, an Existentialist, who mentored me. "Existence precedes essence," he would say repeatedly in response to my musings. At the time I wasn't sure what that meant. These days I understand it as an answer to Plato and much of philosophy since Plato.
 
Tharmas said:
When I was a college-age kid I had an older cousin, an Existentialist, who mentored me. "Existence precedes essence," he would say repeatedly in response to my musings. At the time I wasn't sure what that meant. These days I understand it as an answer to Plato and much of philosophy since Plato.
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Perhaps he meant that everything's made up.


I can prove it with a song.

 
Believing in made up gods, believing in made up songs. Six of one half a dozen of the other.

Interesting how some quote pop music like Christians the bible.
 
steve_bank said:
Believing in made up gods, believing in made up songs. Six of one half a dozen of the other.

Interesting how some quote pop music like Christians the bible.
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With all due respect, @steve_bank , I quote nearly every genre of music, and different translations of the Bible.
 
Janice Rael said:
Cheerful Charlie said:
Hylomorphism adds nothing to science. It predicts nothing, explains nothing, it is a zombie idea that lingers on. But allows one to assert a soul can exist.
Click to expand...
Perhaps Hylomorphism adds nothing to science because most people lack familiarity with both the word and the philosophical doctrine.

As a former science communicating-person on social media, who worked with others who had degrees; and the others had more scientific literacy than I had or have, I must say that none of the scientists I know, or science-area people who I have read, have ever used this word where I could read it.

I looked it up (I had to do so). It's a 19th century concept. I looked it up here on IIDB. It's your word; no one else uses it, or claims that hylomorphism adds anything to science.

A rare word or a rare philosophy adds nothing to science? You're right about that, @Cheerful Charlie . :)
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It is a word only of much interest to Thomists. It gives rise to some rather amusing word games trying to pretend it is meaningful and deep.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:

It is a word only of much interest to Thomists. It gives rise to some rather amusing word games trying to pretend it is meaningful and deep.
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ehh, that's somewhat true of a lot of words :D
 
Janice Rael said:
steve_bank said:
Believing in made up gods, believing in made up songs. Six of one half a dozen of the other.

Interesting how some quote pop music like Christians the bible.
Click to expand...
With all due respect, @steve_bank , I quote nearly every genre of music, and different translations of the Bible.
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Well, religion was labeled 'the opium of the masses' by Marx.

From what I see today it is now music and pop entertainment in general. It is what people fill their thinking with.

This would be a thread on social science.
 
We are filling our thinking with online forum posts.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
IQ
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Sorry, Charlie.

THE EUGENIC ORIGINS OF IQ TESTING: IMPLICATIONS FOR POST-ATKINS LITIGATION
Ajitha Reddy*

Throughout the early 1900s, eugenicists labored to devise objective methods of measuring and quantifying valued traits, including intelligence, in order to substantiate their hypothesis of Nordic genetic advantage.10 Some of their more preposterous experiments involved measuring the crania of school children," analyzing the facial asymmetry of criminals, and sketching the toes of prostitutes. Eugenicists struggled for years to produce compelling results, until the advent of Alfred Binet's intelligence scale in 1909 gave rise to standardized intelligence testing, colloquially known as IQ testing.' 12

Armed with this so-called objective methodology, 13 American eugenicists advanced a straw-man rationale for large-scale testing. 14 They reasoned that society needed to identify, segregate, and sterilize the "feeble-minded,"' 15 initially defined as those with mental disabilities' 16 but later extended to include any "unfit" person of low intelligence, character, or ethnicity. 17 In both Germany and the United States, persecution of the "feebleminded"' 18 hastened a broader eugenic campaign against immigration, miscegenation, and other professed threats to Nordic ascendancy. 19
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Ajitha Reddy, The Eugenic Origins of IQ Testing: Implications for Post-Atkins Litigation, 57 DePaul L. Rev.667 (2008) Available at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/law-review/vol57/iss3/5
 
Just as some have powerful bodies and some have powerful minds, so there are individuals with well-developed souls. Why aren't all bodies, minds and souls immediately and always perfect? The imperfect is the necessary precondition of the perfect. Only through improvement, development and evolution is there activity and gain.
 
Isn't it written that the halt, the lame, the blind, deaf and dumb and the wicked (for the day of Evil) are created by God to fulfill His plan and purpose...?
 
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