Could Adam and Eve Have Been the First Embodied Persons Within an Existing Homo sapiens Population?

Conversation
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Hello,

My name is Roman. I am developing a philosophical and theological hypothesis about how the Genesis text, the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, and the emergence of human personhood might be understood within a single coherent framework.

English is not my native language, and I am using translation assistance. Please let me know if any part of my wording is unclear.

I would first like to clarify the status of the proposal. I do not regard it as an established scientific conclusion, nor do I present it as an alternative to evolutionary biology. It accepts a long evolutionary history and the existence of a developed Homo sapiens population before the appearance of the first embodied persons.

The scientific background of this proposal is limited to the evolutionary population history of Homo sapiens and the distinction between genetic and genealogical ancestry. The Edenic Self, the personal imprint, and the proposed transition to embodied personhood are philosophical and theological claims rather than scientific conclusions.

By an embodied person, I mean a biological human being who possesses a unified first-person perspective and is capable of experiencing life as his or her own moral biography, recognizing himself or herself as the author of an action, accepting responsibility, and entering into a conscious relationship with the Creator.

The central question is this:

Can we coherently distinguish between the biological emergence of Homo sapiens and the emergence of such a person?

I do not mean merely a being with high intelligence, language, complex behavior, or social organization. The central capacity can be expressed in the following words:

“I did this. I understand the moral meaning of my action, and I am responsible for it.”

The hypothesis allows that a population of Homo sapiens with a developed sentient psyche may already have existed before the appearance of the first embodied persons. Members of this population may have experienced pain, fear, pleasure, and attachment. They may have learned, used language, formed stable social bonds, and cared for their offspring.

The proposed distinction is therefore not between the presence and absence of consciousness, feeling, or inner experience. It is between a developed sentient psyche and a fully moral-autobiographical self capable of recognizing itself as the author of an action, relating its desires to what ought to be done, accepting responsibility, and entering into a conscious relationship with the Creator.

I am not claiming that this transition can be identified from fossils, artifacts, or behavior alone. The distinction is conceptual and metaphysical, and the model does not provide a method for identifying or dating the transition within human evolutionary history.

The theological part of the hypothesis is connected with a nontraditional reading of the Edenic section of Genesis.

I understand the events of Eden as real, but not as ordinary physical events within terrestrial history. At the Edenic level, Adam and Eve are understood not yet as two earthly biological human beings, but as two differentiated personal principles (or aspects) within a single created pers onal ground.

At the transition from Edenic to earthly history, Adam and Eve become two distinct earthly persons. Each bears a complete personal imprint of the single Edenic Self. They are not two parts into which that Self has been divided, nor do they share a single empirical consciousness. Each has a distinct first-person perspective and an individual earthly biography.

To describe the relationship between this single ground and the plurality of later persons, I use a seal-and-imprint metaphor.

A single seal can leave many complete impressions without being divided into parts or losing its own form. Similarly, each embodied person bears neither a fragment of a common soul nor a share of a collective consciousness, but a complete personal imprint expressed through a distinct body, memory, biography, experience, and free choice.

Each human being nevertheless remains a distinct person with a unique first-person perspective. The seal metaphor does not explain a spiritual mechanism or prove the existence of such a ground. Its limited purpose is to hold together the unity of the original personal ground, the completeness of each individual imprint, and the real plurality of human persons.

A possible historical framework for this part of the hypothesis is provided by the Genealogical Adam and Eve model developed by S. Joshua Swamidass and discussed extensively on Peaceful Science.

This model distinguishes genetic ancestry from genealogical ancestry. A couple living within a wider population need not be the sole source of its genetic material in order, through descent, intermarriage, and the mixing of family lines, eventually to become genealogical ancestors of everyone in a later population.

My proposal uses only this genealogical possibility. It does not automatically adopt all the scientific, historical, or theological claims associated with Swamidass’s model, and it does not identify genealogical descent with the transmission of a soul.

Genealogy does not transmit a soul as a substance, particle, or genetic trait. It is treated as a possible historical path by which the genealogical line of embodied persons could eventually extend to all humanity.

In the present version of the hypothesis, I make the following provisional working assumption: a child with at least one parent who is already an embodied person also bears the complete personal imprint.

Genealogical relatedness serves as a condition for the continuation of the personal line, but it is not a mechanism by which a soul is transmitted. The model neither explains nor claims to explain why this particular condition should hold, because such an account would require knowledge of the spiritual mechanism and of part of the Creator’s purpose—knowledge that human beings do not possess.

This condition is therefore an internal assumption of the model, not a description of an established biological or spiritual law. I recognize that it is one of the most vulnerable claims of the hypothesis.

A firm ethical boundary is necessary here. The hypothesis provides no empirical criterion by which any living individual, people, or human group could be declared to lack personhood. It affirms the full human and personal status of every living human being and cannot legitimately be used to construct a hierarchy of human value.

The proposal therefore attempts to hold together four claims:

  1. the biological history of Homo sapiens is genuinely evolutionary;
  2. the emergence of morally responsible personhood may represent a real qualitative transition;
  3. Adam and Eve need not have been the first biological members of our species;
  4. the genealogical line of embodied persons could eventually have extended to all humanity without the soul being genetically inherited.

I would especially welcome criticism of the following points.

  1. Is the distinction between a developed sentient psyche and a moral-autobiographical person philosophically meaningful, or is it artificially imposed?
  2. Can a genealogical framework provide a coherent historical path toward the universality of embodied personhood without turning personal status into a genetically inherited property?
  3. Does the original-personal-ground model genuinely reconcile human unity with the distinct personhood of every individual, and can such an account be sustained within the Genesis text and Christian anthropology?

I am not asking whether science can experimentally detect a soul, and I do not regard this model as a proof of Genesis.

My question is more limited:

Is the proposed construction internally coherent, and where does it fail most decisively?

I would be grateful for reasoned criticism.

When Will We Have to Decide Who Counts as a Person?
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Hello @Roman , and welcome to Peaceful Science. :cowboy_hat_face:

How about we start with something simpler - can you tell us a bit about yourself?

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Hello, Dan. Thank you for the welcome. It seems I began my introduction in the wrong order: instead of first saying a little about myself, I went straight to the hypothesis. :slightly_smiling_face:

My name is Roman, and Russian is my native language. I am a Christian, and my professional background is in management. The hypothesis I am developing is not connected with my professional or academic work. It is an independent project that grew out of a personal interest in how the Genesis text, the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, and the origin of human personhood might be brought into a coherent relationship.

I do not regard the proposal as complete, and I came here precisely to test it through open discussion, identify its weaknesses, and better understand objections from people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise. More broadly, I am especially interested in the dialogue between science, philosophy, and faith. I am glad to be here.

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Welcome to Peaceful Science, @Roman.

You chose an interesting topic. I was trying to think of a good way to summarize where you are coming from and I will try–somewhat recklessly–to do so as follows: You are perhaps working towards a “synthesis” of traditional Christian theological (Adam and Eve in Genesis) with the Joshua Swamidass “genealogical Adam & Eve” and all from what I assume is a strong influence from Eastern Orthodox personalism. At least, when I was in graduate school, that was the standard religious studies terminology in my American university textbook circa late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I’m guessing theologian John Zizioulas might be among your “inspirations” for your topic and your questions. Am I getting close?

I will admit that I’ve forgotten far more than I remember from lifetime-ago-studies so I asked my Gemini AI subscription for an encyclopedia-like summary of Zizioulas’ work:

  1. The Radical Split Between Biology and Personhood: Zizioulas’s foundational work (most notably Being as Communion) is built on the absolute ontological distinction between biological existence (bios) and personal existence (hypostasis). Zizioulas argues that a human being can fully exist as a biological entity—complete with a brain, psychology, social instincts, and a “sentient psyche”—without yet possessing true theological personhood. For Zizioulas, true personhood is a relational, free mode of existence that cannot be reduced to biology. [This I think mirrors the exact axis of Roman’s argument: separating evolutionary Homo sapiens from the “embodied person.”]
  2. Ontology Over Psychology: Zizioulas shifts the definition of a “person” away from modern Western psychological traits (like self-awareness or high intelligence) and places it entirely in the realm of relationality and freedom. The insistence that personhood is not merely high intelligence or language, but a moral-autobiographical capacity and a relationship with the Creator, aligns directly with Zizioulas’s theological ontology.

Perhaps I could pose the question to you of whether you might consider it fair to summarize your topics and questions as “Zizioulas Meets Swamidass”?

In Western Christianity theological circles, I would identify a somewhat analogous question which is asked with increasing frequency in recent years: Though Adam and Eve came from a long line of hominins (and regardless of whether they were Homo heidelbergensis or Homo sapiens or something else within the hominin “tree”), were they the very first Imago Dei creatures and in some way capable of passing along those Imago Dei traits to their descendants?

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Allen, thank you very much for the welcome and for such a substantive attempt to locate my hypothesis among existing theological and anthropological approaches. Your comment touches on several levels of my model, so my response has turned out somewhat longer than usual. It was especially helpful to me because, before your comment, I was not familiar with the work of John Zizioulas and had not drawn on his ideas in developing my hypothesis.

After an initial and still superficial acquaintance with the main tenets of his approach, I do see a certain similarity. As far as I understand, Zizioulas likewise does not reduce the person to a biological organism, intelligence, psychology, or a set of individual properties. In this respect, the parallel you suggest points to a genuine conceptual neighbour of my hypothesis.

However, my impression is that the centre of his anthropology lies elsewhere. For Zizioulas, the fullness of personal existence is closely tied to being in Christ, ecclesial communion, and Eucharistic life. In my model, the personal ground precedes any ecclesial belonging. The Church may help a person understand and deepen their relationship with the Creator, but it neither creates the person nor serves as a necessary condition for personal status or moral responsibility before Him.

Central to my hypothesis is the moral-autobiographical self: a distinct first-person perspective, the capacity to experience life as one’s own biography, to acknowledge authorship of one’s actions, to bear responsibility for them, and to enter into a direct relationship with the Creator. This relationship is not confined to ecclesial space; it may be lived in prayer, conscience, repentance, moral crisis, or a life-altering experience. Therefore, in my model, the distinction between sentient biological life and the embodied person is tied primarily to the emergence of a distinct moral subject, not to entry into an ecclesial community.

The most significant difference in my hypothesis, however, concerns the reading of the Edenic Adam and Eve. I do not regard them in Eden as male and female or as masculine and feminine metaphysical principles. They are images through which the Genesis text conveys a real differentiation within a single Edenic Self. What exactly this differentiation means within the Edenic mode of being, I do not know. An answer would require knowledge of the Creator’s purpose, which I do not possess. I therefore do not consider it possible to identify this differentiation with earthly biological sex or to assign it a metaphysical content that the text does not directly disclose.

Differentiation by biological sex appears only at the transition to earthly history. The single Edenic Self becomes the ground of two distinct earthly persons: Adam, embodied in a male organism, and Eve, embodied in a female organism. Each has a distinct first-person perspective, an individual biography, a moral self of their own, and the possibility of a direct relationship with the Creator as a distinct person.

At the same time, they are not two parts into which the Edenic Self has been divided. Each bears a complete personal imprint of the single Edenic Self, not one half of it. The Edenic images of Adam and Eve are not assigned to the two earthly persons as separate shares of a common ground. Therefore, the earthly Adam and Eve do not share a single empirical consciousness and are not two incomplete fragments of one person. Each is a complete and distinct personal subject.

The role of Joshua Swamidass’s model in my construction is considerably narrower. I do not use it as evidence for my anthropological hypothesis, nor do I derive from it the concepts of the Edenic Self, the personal imprint, or the moral subject. Only one historical-genealogical possibility is relevant to my construction: a couple within a wider population may, over time, become genealogical ancestors of all later human beings without being the sole source of all their genetic ancestry.

For this reason, the expression “Zizioulas meets Swamidass” strikes me as a useful first approximation, but not as a complete description of my position. It correctly points to two related contexts: the irreducibility of the person to biology and the genealogical possibility just described. However, the claims concerning the Edenic Self, the differentiation within it that is not a differentiation by biological sex, the complete personal imprint, and the emergence of distinct moral-autobiographical selves remain separate theses of my hypothesis.

As for your question about the Imago Dei, I do not regard it as a set of traits that Adam and Eve pass genetically to their descendants, nor as a spiritual substance transmitted from parents to a child. In my model, genealogical relatedness is a condition for the continuation of the personal line, but it does not itself transmit anything and does not explain how the complete personal imprint arises. Why precisely this condition holds, I do not know and do not claim to know. An answer would require knowledge of the spiritual mechanism and of the Creator’s purpose, which I do not possess.

More generally, I do not present this hypothesis as the result of special revelation or secret knowledge, nor do I present it as a proven system. I do not have answers to every question, and some of its claims remain explicitly hypothetical. I offer it as a model to be tested for internal coherence, consistency with the Genesis text, and compatibility with the scientific history of humanity. Where the model encounters questions that would require knowledge of an unknown spiritual mechanism or of the Creator’s purpose, I consider it right to mark the limit of knowledge explicitly rather than fill the gap with assumptions presented as answers.

Your comment has given me an important direction for further study. I would be grateful if you could correct my preliminary understanding of Zizioulas or suggest which of his texts would be the best place to begin, specifically regarding the distinction between biological existence, the person, and ecclesial communion.

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This, to me, raises a number of questions:

  1. Is “a moral-autobiographical capacity” ubiquitous in humanity?

  2. Is this capacity binary (you either have it or your don’t) or scalar (ranging from a vestigial capacity to a highly-developed one)?

  3. Does it require, as a prerequisite, a capacity for abstract thought?

  4. Does abstract thought require, as a prerequisite, the development of reasonably sophisticated language?

  5. How then does “a moral-autobiographical capacity” relate to intelligence and language?

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Yeah, all of this seems pretty squishy to me. And I suspect that if one could properly define it one would find that all of it is present in a lot of mammals; just not expressed in language. Was there an Adam and Eve pair of horses? Ocelots? Chimps? And if the rise of these traits in other species did NOT require that the horse-gods imbue a pair of soulless horses with souls, why did humans need that? I know we are inferior to other creatures in many ways, but that one seems like a stretch.

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Tim, you raise important questions. But before answering them, I would like to state clearly the moral boundary of my hypothesis.

Within this hypothesis, all people currently living on Earth are, without exception, affirmed as having full personal status and as bearing the complete personal imprint. Neither age, sex, skin color, ethnic origin, health, disability, level of intelligence, language ability, education, religious affiliation, moral conduct, capacity for self-reflection, temporary loss of consciousness, persistent cognitive impairment, nor any other biological, psychological, or social difference can serve as grounds for denying anyone’s personal status.

At this point, I should also clarify my terminology. Within this hypothesis, the complete personal imprint borne by an individual human being is the same reality that Christianity traditionally calls that person’s soul. In the remainder of this reply, I will therefore use “soul” and “personal imprint” as equivalent terms. This is a terminological definition within the model, not a claim that every Christian tradition formulates the doctrine of the soul in exactly the same way.

My hypothesis does not propose a test by which the presence or absence of a soul—that is, of the complete personal imprint—could be established in any particular person. The absence of observable self-reflection, linguistic expression, or manifestation of the moral-autobiographical self is not evidence that the soul is absent.

A sleeping adult does not outwardly display abstract thought, moral reflection, or a conscious account of their own life. Yet we do not conclude that, while asleep, this person ceases to be a person or loses their soul. For the same reason, the absence of such observable manifestations in an infant, a person with dementia, severe cognitive impairment, brain injury, or loss of consciousness does not allow us to conclude that the personal imprint is absent. The conditions and their causes differ, but the moral and logical boundary remains the same: lack of manifestation does not prove absence.

My answer to your first question is therefore yes, provided that “moral-autobiographical capacity” is not understood as an observable performance test. Within my hypothesis, every currently living human being has a soul—that is, bears the complete personal imprint.

As to your second question, personal status is binary, while the observable expression of intellectual, linguistic, and reflective capacities may vary greatly. The personal imprint has neither parts nor degrees; every currently living human being bears it in full. Differences in the manifestation of cognitive capacities do not create differences in the fullness of personal status.

Questions three through five move to a different level of inquiry. They concern the relation, in embodied life, between the soul and abstract thought, language, and intelligence. In other words, they ask how the soul is related to the cognitive functions of the organism. My hypothesis does not explain this relation, and I do not possess the knowledge required to give a substantive account of it.

The workings of the brain, language development, memory, abstract thought, and observable behavior can all be studied. Such research, however, provides neither a criterion for establishing the presence or absence of a soul nor an account of the relation between the soul and the organism. A substantive answer would require knowledge of the nature of that relation and of the Creator’s purpose—knowledge that I do not possess and do not claim to possess.

The boundary of my position is therefore clear: intelligence, language, and the capacity for abstraction are not tests for the presence of a soul or for the fullness of personal status. My hypothesis makes no further claim about how the soul is related to or expressed through the organism.

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It seems that our disagreement begins at the level of our starting premises. My hypothesis begins with the Genesis text and considers a more limited question: whether the anthropological claims it contains can be coherently related to the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens. If you do not accept that starting framework, then the hypothesis will probably not be persuasive to you.

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I don’t think the disagreement really has to do with starting premises about Genesis. I’m not very interested in that, since the tale of Adam and Eve is quite unlikely to be anything other than folklore in any event. The disagreement is that you appear to assume that certain core aspects of mammalian life require the active insertion by a god of those elements into our psyches. But if that’s so, one then has to explain why other animals have apparent self-awareness, moral sense, et cetera. The likeliest answer is that our inner experience arises from our biology; it’s not something layered on top of our biology.

Why does a dog feel shame? Why does a monkey react badly to being treated unfairly? Why would anyone ever, ever, ever assume that moral sense, moral responsibility, self-awareness, and things like that, which appear to be widespread among animals, for some reason could NOT have arisen in our ancestors naturally (even though their nearest relatives have them), and had to be injected by a paranormal entity? What you’re suggesting is so patently contrary to everything we know about animal life; why would you start there?

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Hi Roman, and welcome to the forum.

It would seem that we have (at least) two approaches to the underlying question of personhood.

We can assign personhood a priori to “every currently living human being”. This has the advantage of not requiring some (potentially arbitrary) qualification before assigning that status, with that qualification potentially leading to some people being excluded, with the potential for their having less or no rights. It does however raise the question where to draw the line, with respect to more archaic hominid lineages, and even (potentially) to non-human lineages (such as the great apes and dolphins), and whether we can establish a non-arbitrary criteria for that boundary?

Alternately, we can propose criteria for personhood, with “a moral-autobiographical capacity” having been proposed (albeit by an LLM’s summary of a third party’s proposal). This in turn raises two questions. (i) Does this criteria exclude any “currently living human being”? (ii) Is this exclusion defensible?

Moral-autobiographical thought would appear to be a form of abstract thought, so a capacity for the former would appear to necessitate a capacity for the latter. However, it is not clear that a capacity for abstract thought generally is sufficient to establish a capacity for moral-autobiographical thought. Contemplation of visual aesthetics is likewise a form of abstract thought. Somebody who had been blind since birth would appear likely capable of abstract thought more generally, but I would be hesitant to ascribe them a capacity for contemplation of visual aesthetics. In a similar manner, I’d be hesitant to ascribe a sociopath a capacity for moral-autobiographical thought.

(Parenthetically, as it is only the capacity that is the criteria, it does not matter that the person is not engaging in moral-autobiographical thought continually. They can be sleeping, ‘living in the moment’, or engaging in contemplation of visual aesthetics instead, without failing that criteria.)

This gives at least the appearance that Zizioulas’s framework may deny personhood to sociopaths. This would appear both potentially problematic, but also providing an interesting test-case allowing for deeper contemplation of how and why we assign personhood, and the potential consequences of that decision.

Is it the personhood of sociopaths that is problematical, Zizioulas’s framework, or both? Is there a less problematical framework?

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Similarly to Puck, I don’t base my own conceptualisation of these questions on Genesis, or on any religion’s sacred scripture.

I don’t think you even have to move beyond a theistic viewpoint, in order to feel a need to ask these questions.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that God created all life, and created humanity in His image (imago dei). Given that many non-human species display signs of morality (albeit in perhaps less nuanced forms), and are biologically (to lesser or greater extent) similar to humans, wouldn’t it be reasonable to consider the possibility that they received an echo of this image? Wouldn’t be charitable to act towards the rest of God’s creation on that assumption – and arguably ungrateful to do otherwise?

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Puck, I think it would help to separate two questions here, because at the moment they are effectively being merged into one.

Let me begin with Adam and Eve. You regard this text as folklore. Fine. For the moment, let us not argue about the word «folklore» at all. I would suggest a small experiment.

Try to describe the earliest stages in the history of the universe to someone who does not have the language of modern physics and cosmology available to them. You may not use the words «universe», «cosmos», «photon», or the terms «plasma», «quantum field», «space-time», «elementary particle», «inflation», or direct technical equivalents of them.

As an entirely optional hint, you may use the expression «the heavens and the earth» as a merism for the whole. For the purposes of this experiment, you may provisionally call «earth» that line of early physical reality from which ordinary matter would later emerge, and «the heavens» everything else that does not belong to that line. But you are equally free to ignore this suggestion entirely and choose any other ordinary words and images. There are no other restrictions: use any metaphors, any form, and any length you like.

Then post what you come up with. I think it would be interesting for all of us to consider its literary qualities and compare its structure with one well-known ancient work of folklore. What conclusion, if any, follows from that comparison I will leave to you.

Now to the animals.

I am not going to deny either the complexity of animal minds or their evolutionary history. What interests me more is the confidence with which you move from observable behavior to claims about inner moral experience.

You ask: why does a dog feel shame?

But that is not merely a question. It already contains a claim: that the dog is experiencing shame. How exactly did you establish that?

We can observe the dog’s posture, gaze, position of its tail, avoidance of contact with its owner, and response to the owner’s voice. But all of that is observable behavior. To move from those observations to the claim that «the dog is experiencing moral shame over its own action», one still has to show that the animal is not merely recognizing the owner’s displeasure, anticipating an unpleasant response, or displaying appeasement behavior, but is actually experiencing something like: «I did this; what I did was wrong; I am guilty».

And this distinction is not merely theoretical. In experiments on the so-called «guilty look» in dogs, such behavior depended more strongly on the owner’s response than on whether the dog had actually violated the prohibition. Similar behavior was displayed even by dogs that had done nothing forbidden but whose owners believed that they had. This does not prove that dogs are in principle incapable of experiencing shame. But it does show why an outward «guilty look» is not, by itself, evidence of an inner moral experience.

With monkeys and apes, the distinction becomes even more interesting.

Yes, there are experiments in which primates react negatively to unequal rewards. But there is also another kind of experiment in which chimpanzees were given an opportunity to punish an individual that had taken food. When food was taken from the observing chimpanzee itself, the animal reacted. When food was taken from a third individual, comparable punishment did not occur — even when the victim was related to the observing chimpanzee.

I think this is a very significant distinction. One thing is: «I was treated badly, and I react». Quite another is: «Nothing happened to me, but someone else was treated unfairly, and the violation of the norm itself calls for a response».

I am not concluding from one experiment that animals «have no morality». That would be the same kind of excessive certainty that I am questioning in your argument. My claim is much more modest: the word «fairness» cannot automatically be used as though all of these phenomena were the same thing.

And this brings us to one of the central problems in your argument. You group together «moral sense, moral responsibility, self-awareness, and things like that». But these are not simply different names for one property. Even if we find analogues of some of these capacities in animals, it does not follow that the entire set of phenomena you have grouped together is present in them, still less that there are no principled distinctions among them.

So I would separate the questions.

Is a reaction to unequal reward already moral responsibility?

Is anticipation of a negative reaction from an owner already shame?

Is self-recognition the same thing as the ability to judge one’s own action as morally wrong?

Is social behavior the same thing as regarding a norm as binding even when its violation does not affect you personally?

And finally: where in this sequence does there appear a subject capable of saying not merely «I feel bad» or «I was treated unfairly», but «I did this; this is my action; I am responsible for it?».

These are not rhetorical questions. If the differences among these phenomena are real, then they cannot first be collapsed into «and things like that» and then the presence of some of them in animals be used as evidence for the presence of the rest.

And now we come to the central mischaracterization in your comment.

I nowhere assume that natural evolution was incapable of producing self-awareness, emotions, sociality, sensitivity to inequality, or other complex mental functions, after which the Creator had to «inject» the missing elements into a pair of Homo sapiens.

That is not part of my model.

I am entirely open to the possibility that all observable cognitive, emotional, and social capacities of human beings have a natural evolutionary history and occur in various forms in other animals. My hypothesis requires no gap in the evolution of these functions that would have to be filled by supernatural intervention.

So when you ask why these properties could not have arisen naturally and had to be introduced by a supernatural entity, you are asking a good question — just not a question about my hypothesis. You first add a claim to the hypothesis that it does not make, and then show why that added claim seems implausible to you.

The real disagreement lies further on.

You write that «our inner experience arises from our biology; it’s not something layered on top of our biology». The first part of that statement presents no problem for me: in embodied human life, our mental life does not exist independently of our biology.

But the second conclusion does not follow from the first: that biology and the mental functions arising from it fully exhaust what the human person is.

That is no longer a result of observing a dog or a monkey. It is a philosophical conclusion.

The fact that memory has a biological mechanism does not make the human person identical with memory. The fact that language has an evolutionary history does not make the human person identical with language. And the fact that self-recognition, sensitivity to inequality, and complex social behavior have evolutionary histories does not by itself establish that the sum of these functions exhausts what we mean by a person.

This is where the question posed by my hypothesis begins.

It does not try to place the Creator into a gap in scientific explanation. It asks whether it is coherent to suppose that within an already existing and biologically developed population of Homo sapiens, the first embodied persons appear — not as bearers of one more new cognitive function, but as subjects capable of recognizing their own lives as their own, understanding themselves as the authors of their actions, taking responsibility for those actions, and entering into a conscious relationship with the Creator.

I do not claim to possess a neuroscientific test capable of identifying the moment of such a transition. Nor do I claim that I can establish the spiritual status of a chimpanzee, dog, or any other animal from its behavior. That lies outside the scope of my hypothesis.

But that is precisely why the existence of complex animal minds does not contradict it.

For your argument actually to refute my hypothesis, it is not enough to show that human mental capacities have a natural evolutionary history and that analogues of them occur in other animals. I already agree with that.

You would need to show the next step: why the evolutionary history of these capacities entails that they fully exhaust what the human person is.

And that step seems far less obvious to me than your comment makes it appear.

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To me, and I think to @Puck_Mendelssohn and surely to some others here, that’s a strange and loaded question. The question is motivated by various religious needs, and those needs are non-universal (even amongst Christians) and contested. Speaking for myself as a former Christian, I never had the need to separate “biological emergence” from other kinds of emergence, probably because I rejected dualism early in my life as a believer.

You are curious about the origins of human cognitive abilities and moral selves. I am curious about that, too. I don’t speak for @Puck_Mendelssohn but I suspect he shares our curiosity. What I don’t share is the apparent need to involve the supernatural or to need/assume that the development of the moral person can or should be uncoupled from the development of the biological person.

And to up the ante a bit: I don’t think this need should be linked so strongly to Christianity. It’s not a question that a Christian needs to care about. It is, I think, a question that a supernaturalist (dualist) needs to care about. And those of us who interact a lot with creationists and design apologists know this: supernaturalist apologists are often poorly connected to Christian ethics and teachings.

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The same way one establishes that other humans experience shame.

How do you know that other humans do that?

You can’t rely on what people say, because (as you put it) an outward guilty expression, spoken or gestural, is not by itself evidence of an inner moral experience.

Humans have been known to act the same way you describe dogs as acting.

The reasons you give for not being sure that dogs feel shame apply to other humans too. Your thesis seems to depend on all humans having this aspect, but no animals - yet neither can be demonstrated.

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Tim, it seems we have already gotten past introductions in the course of the discussion, so I will go straight to the substance of your questions.

It seems to me that the distinction you propose between two approaches to personhood does not quite correspond to what I am trying to formulate.

As I tried to clarify in my previous reply, moral-autobiographical capacity is not, within my hypothesis, a qualifying test that someone must pass in order to be recognized as a person. So I am not choosing between two alternatives: either assigning personhood in advance to every currently living human being, or establishing some observable criterion and then excluding those who fail to meet it.

I use the concept of the moral-autobiographical self differently: as an attempt to describe the personal dimension itself, rather than as a procedure for diagnosing it in a particular individual. That is why, in my previous reply, I emphasized that differences in intelligence, language, self-reflection, or the observable expression of these capacities do not create differences in the fullness of personhood. I do not think there is any need to repeat that entire argument here.

But your next question seems to me considerably more difficult and does, I think, touch a vulnerable point in the hypothesis: if we do not possess such a diagnostic criterion, where does the boundary lie with respect to more archaic hominins and, potentially, other animals?

Here I do not have an empirical criterion that would allow me to draw such a line. Moreover, in my original post I explicitly stated that the proposed transition to embodied personhood cannot be identified from fossils, artifacts, or behavior, and that the model provides no method for detecting or dating it within evolutionary history.

I think it is important to distinguish two things here. The fact that we have no way of directly detecting a certain boundary does not show that the proposed distinction does not exist. But it does mean that my hypothesis cannot claim to determine empirically where exactly that boundary lay.

The question of animals partly overlaps with my rather long reply to Puck. Judging by the timing of the posts, it probably became visible only after you had written your comments, so I will not reproduce the whole argument here. There I discussed in more detail why observable animal behavior does not, without an additional step, justify a definite conclusion about the character of the animal’s inner moral experience. But the reverse is equally important: my hypothesis gives me no basis for declaring in advance that a chimpanzee, dolphin, or other animal necessarily lacks any personal or spiritual dimension. It simply provides no way to settle that question.

So your suggestion that some animals might bear a kind of “echo” of the image of God is not something I see a reason to rule out. At the same time, I cannot derive it from my hypothesis. For me, this is a separate theological question to which the present model offers no answer. I find your formulation interesting precisely as a possibility, rather than as something that, in my view, already follows from observed animal behavior.

As for our moral treatment of animals, I do not see any substantial disagreement between us. I can regard cruelty toward animals as wrong and treat the rest of creation with care without first having to establish that an animal has the same personal status as a human being. For me, these are two different questions: how we ought to treat a living creature, and what its precise ontological status is.

As for your discussion of moral-autobiographical thought as a form of abstract thought, I would keep the boundary I drew in my previous reply. I do not possess knowledge of exactly how, in embodied life, the soul is related to abstract thought, language, intelligence, and other cognitive functions. I therefore do not want to construct a sequence of necessary and sufficient conditions among them, or derive one from another. Your question is logically legitimate, but my hypothesis simply contains no theory that would allow me to answer it substantively.

Finally, regarding your example involving sociopaths, I would not want to speak on behalf of Zizioulas. I first encountered his work through Allen’s comment, and my acquaintance with it is still far too superficial for me to say whether the conclusion you are considering actually follows from Zizioulas’s own framework. So I will leave the question of a possible problem specifically within Zizioulas’s framework open.

With respect to my own hypothesis, however, the answer is much more definite: differences in empathy, in the experience of guilt, or in other moral emotions are not tests of personhood. I therefore do not infer the absence of personhood from such psychological characteristics.

In the end, it seems to me that the strongest version of your question could be formulated somewhat differently. We need not ask whether we can find an observable feature that infallibly separates person from non-person. The more difficult question for my hypothesis is this:

Can the distinction between a developed psyche and a personal subject remain conceptually meaningful if the hypothesis simultaneously acknowledges that we have no independent empirical method for determining where exactly that boundary lies?

I regard that as a genuinely serious question. My present answer is that the absence of a method available to us for detecting the boundary does not make the distinction itself logically impossible. But it does remain a significant epistemic limitation of the model, and I would not want to conceal that limitation behind formulations more confident than the hypothesis itself warrants.

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Stephen, I agree with you on one important point: the question I posed is not worldview-neutral. It does indeed arise within a particular theological and metaphysical framework. I begin with the text of Genesis and ask whether that framework can be coherently related to human evolutionary history.

At the same time, I am not claiming that every Christian must accept my particular anthropological model, or even frame the question in the same way I do. But I think it goes too far to conclude from this that the question should therefore be associated more with supernaturalism or dualism than with Christianity.

Christian anthropology inevitably confronts questions about the human being as a personal subject: our relationship with the Creator, moral responsibility, death, resurrection, and the preservation of personal identity. The answers to these questions may differ greatly, and they need not take the form of classical substance dualism. But the questions themselves do not disappear. So my hypothesis does not claim to be the obligatory Christian answer, but I do regard the question from which it arises as entirely natural within a Christian framework.

The fact that, when you were a Christian, you felt no need to distinguish between the biological emergence of the human being and the emergence of personhood in the sense in which I use the term is not, in itself, a problem for me. Rather, it suggests that we begin from somewhat different anthropological assumptions. The more substantial disagreement comes later.

You connect the question I posed with the origins of human cognitive capacities and the moral self, and then ask why their development should be separated from the development of the biological human being. Here I would clarify the actual subject of the hypothesis. I do not assume that human intelligence, language, memory, self-awareness, complex social behavior, or other cognitive capacities require a separate supernatural intervention. Their natural evolutionary history is entirely compatible with my model.

So my question is not whether evolution could have produced these capacities. The question is different: does an account of these capacities and their biological history exhaust what the personal subject is?

Here I think it is worth being more precise about what I mean by this personal dimension. The first-person perspective and the moral-autobiographical self are not the same thing for me, but they belong to the same underlying problem of personal subjectivity. The first-person perspective points to the most fundamental level: there is not only observable behavior and processes occurring in the brain, but also a subject for whom there is a lived life of their own. The moral-autobiographical self marks a richer level: the subject experiences this life as their own, their actions as their own actions, relates themselves to those actions across time, and is capable of recognizing themselves as responsible for them.

I am not claiming that the existence of a first-person perspective by itself proves the existence of a moral-autobiographical self, still less do I derive my hypothesis from it. But this distinction shows why an account of cognitive functions by itself does not bring the discussion of the personal subject to an end.

Biology and neuroscience can describe in ever greater detail the processes associated with perception, memory, language, decision-making, self-awareness, and other aspects of mental life. I do not dispute this. But another question remains: does such a description exhaust the subject of experience and, still more, the moral-autobiographical self?

At the same time, I am not offering the soul as a scientific explanation for some unknown mechanism of consciousness. My hypothesis does not compete with neuroscience in explaining memory, language, intelligence, or the workings of the brain. The concept of the soul belongs here to the ontological question of the personal subject, not to the mechanism by which cognitive functions are carried out.

So I would describe somewhat differently what you call the uncoupling of the moral person from the biological human being. I am not trying to sever the biological history of humanity from its personal dimension: in embodied human life, the two are intimately connected. My question is narrower: does that connection entail their complete ontological identity?

This, it seems to me, is where what follows directly from evolutionary biology and neuroscience reaches its limit. It is well established that human mental and cognitive life has a biological and evolutionary history. But moving from that proposition to the claim that the personal subject is fully exhausted by that history already requires a philosophical position concerning consciousness and personhood.

If such exhaustion is assumed from the outset, then my question does indeed become unnecessary. But in that case it is a consequence of the metaphysical framework being adopted, not a neutral result of biology itself.

As for supernaturalist apologists who, in your experience, may be poorly connected to Christian ethics and teachings, you may well have good reasons for that assessment of particular people or movements. But I am not sure that this helps resolve the question under discussion here. Whatever the behavior or theological positions of other apologists may be, they do not in themselves tell us anything either for or against the internal coherence of the anthropological model I am proposing.

So I see our actual disagreement not as one between evolutionary biology and my hypothesis, but at the level of the metaphysical conclusion we draw from the biological and cognitive history of humanity that we both accept. My hypothesis does not regard that history as an exhaustive account of the human personal subject, and I do not present that answer as a conclusion of biology.

But here, I think, it is important to preserve the symmetry: the opposite thesis—that biological and cognitive reality fully exhausts what the personal subject is—is likewise not, in itself, a conclusion of biology.

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Roy, I think your counter-question is very much to the point. Moreover, it touches on the same epistemic principle that I was just discussing with Stephen.

You ask: how do I know that another person experiences shame at all—and, even more, that they experience it in the way they describe it? My answer is: directly, I do not. The first-person perspective of another subject is inaccessible to me. I directly know my own pain, guilt, or shame, but I can only infer another person’s inner experience indirectly—from their words, behavior, and other signs available to me. In this respect, the same fundamental limitation applies both to another human being and to a dog.

But it is important to clarify what I was actually claiming in my reply to Puck. I did not claim that a dog does not experience shame. My objection was directed at the stronger claim: that the observable behavior already allows us to conclude that the dog is experiencing shame specifically.

That is why I asked: if we observe the dog’s posture, gaze, position of its tail, avoidance of contact, and response to its owner’s voice, what allows us to prefer the explanation “I did this; what I did was wrong; I am guilty” over alternatives such as recognizing the owner’s displeasure, anticipating an unpleasant response, or displaying appeasement behavior?

In other words, my claim was much narrower: observable behavior admits of different explanations and does not by itself establish what inner experience lies behind it.

And here I am quite prepared to apply the same principle to a human being. Take an extremely dramatic human example: Judas hanged himself after his betrayal. Does the mere fact of his suicide prove his repentance? I do not think so. It is evidence of a profound inner crisis, but by itself it does not allow us to determine its content unambiguously: repentance, guilt, shame, despair, fear, self-loathing, or some combination of these states.

That is why, in the human case as well, we look not at a single action but at the totality of the evidence. In the case of Judas, this includes not only his suicide but also the return of the silver, his own words, the sequence of events, and the context. And even with all of this, we are interpreting his inner state rather than observing it directly. So on this part of your objection, I substantially agree with you: a person’s outward behavior is likewise not an infallible window into their inner moral experience.

But it does not follow, in my view, that our grounds for drawing conclusions about a human being and a dog are the same.

In human communication, we usually have a much broader range of evidence. We can not only observe a person’s facial expression or posture, but also ask what they did, what they intended, whether they understood the consequences, why they regard their action as wrong, and whether they acknowledge their own responsibility. We can ask follow-up questions, return to the event later, and compare what they say with their subsequent behavior.

Of course, words do not conclusively prove anything either. A person may lie, display an expected emotion, or be mistaken about their own motives. That is why what matters is not an isolated confession but the whole body of evidence: words, tone of voice, behavior, attitude toward the consequences of the action, willingness to accept responsibility, attempts to repair the harm done, and whether that stance persists over time.

None of this gives us direct access to another mind, nor does it provide absolute certainty. But it gives us substantially richer grounds on which to compare competing explanations of the person’s inner state.

So I would formulate the distinction this way: in both the case of another human being and the case of a dog, our access to inner experience is indirect. But the same indirectness of access does not imply the same evidential basis.

In that case, I would now formulate the original question about the dog more precisely: not ‘can we prove that the dog really experiences shame?’ but ‘what evidence would allow us to prefer the hypothesis that the dog is morally judging its own action as wrong over other explanations of the same observable behavior?”

If such evidence exists, I see no reason to reject it in advance. But the mere presence of behavior that looks to a human observer like an expression of guilt or shame is not yet enough to select that explanation.

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I think there may be nothing to talk about at all here. I have read your response thoroughly, multiple times, and I am convinced that you have fallen prey to our tendency to suppose that because we can describe something, the “something” we can describe is meaningful. Words have a way of combining and conspiring to make us see the things we can verbalize as meaningful when we are, in fact, referring to nothing at all.

The things you appear to be trying to address are largely inchoate and untestable. Subjective senses and experience are squishy to define, impossible to directly detect in others (which, as @Roy points out, is as true of other humans as it is of non-language-speaking animals), and, in some cases, freighted with questionable assumptions on an epic scale (“capable of
entering into a conscious relationship with the Creator.”). Taking slippery notions like that and trying to finely dice them to distinguish between different aspects of cognition – themselves not particularly well defined – is a fool’s errand. Are things which can be constructed in this sort of metaphorical and speculative way really reducible to anything that bears discussion? What does it even mean, for example, to suggest that something or other does or does not “fully exhaust what the human person is”? That has the superficial appearance of being some sort of deep and profound notion, but it actually says next to nothing. Such modes of expression lead to words upon words, and then further words upon those words, ad infinitum, without any reason to believe that all of that further verbal elaboration sheds any light upon anything. My sense is that these ways of talking about things obscure the truth more than they illuminate it, and that the word “hypothesis” should probably never be uttered within a hundred miles of the shadow cast by such a grand corpus of text.

I am sure that there is a frame of mind in which these things appear to be useful. It is fair to say that that frame of mind is not mine.

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Roman, I think I hold to a very similar view, so this is a friendly question. Maybe whether a certain biological life is a personal subject is not empirically testable. But can you define “personal subject” in this context without referring to its biological and psychological traits?

If not, then I suspect the different is not meaningful in this context — which I would hate, since that means my view is equally devoid of meaning. If you already have, I apologize — I haven’t read this thread super carefully.

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