Neuroscience and the Non-Elimination of Theology

Abstract

The scientific activity and outputs of the neurosciences are fascinating and, for the most part, uncontroversial. However, there have been sustained claims that neuroscientific findings represent a powerful challenge to historic, orthodox Christian teaching concerning human ontology. While philosophers had long debated the “mind/brain” problem, the rise of “eliminative materialism” (in the specific form of “neurophilosophy”) in the last quarter of the 20th century evoked various responses to the proposition that a mature neuroscience would forever banish familiar “folk science” entities like beliefs and desires as well as immaterial souls or minds. These would all be shown to play no role in a thoroughly materialistic, mature, neuroscientific understanding of ourselves. One aspect of the response to such claims within Christian scholarship was a turn to non-reductive physicalism and theological monism prompting a reassessment of biblical teaching concerning human ontology, seeking a position that would be consistent both with neuroscience (or its alleged implications) and Christian teaching. The aim of this paper is to review neuroscientific, philosophical and theological developments in order to establish where theological anthropology currently stands. In part this requires an assessment of contemporary neuroscience (including the subfield of “consciousness studies”) because while the science continues to generate intriguing hypotheses and data, it has fallen some way short of the eliminative materialists’ hopes of forty years ago. Additionally, important methodological criticisms of the science have emerged concerning such issues as reproducibility and participant selection. This may have contributed to the twenty-first century resurgence of interest in the sort of dualism long a key component of theological orthodoxy, as well as highlighting the need for a reassertion of theological values, methods and perspectives. The apparent non-elimination of theology indicates a need to rebalance theological and neuroscientific perspectives in developing our understanding of the person.

1. Introduction

What is the relationship between the neurosciences (which, while in reality a family of techniques and targets, will hereafter be simply referred to as ‘neuroscience’) and theology? This is a specific version of the more general question of the relationship between science and theology. The same answer is occasionally given to both questions by both scientists and theologians: “none”. The claim of some in science (echoing the philosophical stance of Comte and his successors; O’Hear 1989, p. 202), is that science can answer all the important questions that need answering, a view that is commonly encountered in contemporary popular culture. Thus, O’Hear writes of “the tendency we find in the contemporary mind to think that science and science alone gives access to the ultimate truth about man and the world” (O’Hear 1989, p. 203; see also Harrison 2017, p. 179). In neuroscience specifically, such a tendency is manifest in the claim that “you” are the simply the neurons that compose your brain and nothing else (Crick 1994, p. 3). Given that neurons are a form of physical stuff and the proper way to study and understand such stuff is science (neuroscience in this case), there is no useful role for theology (or other disciplines such as philosophy; Crick 1994, p. 258). There is therefore no relationship between neuroscience and theology beyond that which might exist between mature explanations and children’s fairytales. Non-scientific accounts of such things as mind and consciousness “are easily dismissed as fantasy” (Doty 1998). As is discussed below, this “eliminative” approach (specifically “eliminative materialism”) was a particular feature of the last quarter of the twentieth century.

What is perhaps more surprising is that both before and in the face of such claims there were those within Christian theology (the intellectual framework within which science had originally developed) who essentially agreed. Thus Cupitt claimed that “people have found that scientific explanations are better explanations … This … does not mean the end of religion, but it does mean giving up some obsolete religious ideas” (Cupitt 1985b, p. 34; see also Kaufman 1995, p. 3). These “obsolete ideas” turned out to be what had generally been considered the core of orthodox Christian belief for approximately 1800 years (Cupitt 2000). And the perceived success of those aspects of science dealing with the mind (roughly speaking neuroscience in the guise of “the new biological approach to consciousness”) had clear theological implications such as the dismissal of “any disembodied or post-mortem self, abstracted from my life and my bodily history” (Cupitt 1985a, p. 65). It is the understanding of the human person both in the present and the future (i.e., the central concepts of theological anthropology and eschatology) that have perhaps been most impacted by neuroscience, or more particularly its claimed implications.

It should be noted that while in most recent discussions the target of reductionist and eliminative claims has been the “immaterial” mind, these should also be understood as applying to what, in theological discussion, is more often called the soul (as was understood by Cupitt). The meaning of the nouns “mind” and “soul” has varied over time. In Descartes’ day they could be used synonymously, and in contemporary discussion this is also often the case (Murphy and Brown 2007, p. 16; P. S. Churchland 1989, p. 320; Jeeves and Brown 2009, pp. 24–40). What determines which word is used is often the context rather than what is being labelled. Occasionally they are distinguished and given particular definitions (Carruthers 1989, pp. 39–40; Swinburne 2023, pp. 2–3). But for present purposes the alleged challenges of neuroscience to the immaterial will be taken to apply in the same way to both mind and soul. However, first it will be useful to consider further what is meant by neuroscience and some recent issues that have emerged around and within it.

2. Neuroscience and Its Discontents

Contemporary neuroscience is a vast and sprawling enterprise, operative at multiple levels of analysis across a bewildering array of species, topics and techniques. As in other areas of science, this endeavour demands focus and skill, and most practitioners spend relatively little time thinking about questions outside their immediate area of expertise. They tend not expend much effort on “metaphysics”, far less theology (Medawar 1984, pp. 79–80; Midgley 1994, p. 4), although there are notable exceptions (e.g., the likes of Sherrington 1955; Popper and Eccles 1977; Young 1987; MacKay 1991). For the most part data are collected, hypotheses tested, confirmed or refuted, papers written and published, progress (and occasional regress) occurs, with little fanfare. But some results, in particular areas, have led to claims the implications of which have provoked theological reflection, critique and response, whether viewed as valuable or not by neuroscientists themselves.

Neuroscience emerged as “a new academic discipline” in roughly the last third of the twentieth century and, according to some of its prominent practitioners, it enabled “unusually rapid progress in understanding the brain, mind and behaviour” (Meldrum et al. 2021, p. vi). It combined those parts of antecedent disciplines aimed at understanding the nervous system in both humans and other species, utilising the techniques of neurology, neuropharmacology, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, molecular biology and genetics, psychology and others, with the common goal usually now stated in terms of understanding “the structure and function of the normal and abnormal [human] brain” (Squire et al. 2012, p. 3). It benefitted from serial technological revolutions in microscopy, then in electronics, computing and in molecular and cellular biology. Single nerve cell recording became possible around the middle of the twentieth century and provided increasing detail about neuronal function. In the 1980s the development of imaging techniques (structural magnetic resonance imaging, MRI; positron emission tomography, PET) allowed both the structure and function of the human brain to be mapped. The imaging of brain activity in specific brain regions during carefully controlled behaviour (functional, fMRI; using the proxy measure of oxygenated blood flow) allied to methods of measuring and mapping electrical activity by means of either elctro- (EE-) or magneto-encephalography (ME-G) accelerated matters. Answers to previously intractable questions about brain function now seemed to be within grasp; the understanding of mind as well as brain was claimed as part of neuroscience’s remit (Kandel and Squire 2000). Such was the rising public profile of neuroscience that in July 1989 President George Bush (Senior), following a joint resolution in the US Congress, declared that the decade following 1990 would be the “Decade of the Brain” (Goldstein 1990; see also Goldstein 1994).

As is other fields, much of the professional effort in neuroscience was and is to the non-expert as obscure as many of its findings are fascinating. However, it is worth noting that as a human activity it is also necessarily afflicted by the fallibility of its practitioners. Given some of the claims made for neuroscience, and the apparent inevitability of a “mature” neuroscience which will answer some of humanity’s deepest questions (displacing or “eliminating” answers from sources with which it is claimed to be in competition such as theology), it is worth considering some recently discussed problems that have been identified in science in general or have that have arisen within neuroscience itself.

One of the hallmarks of science is that it is an open and transparent activity, producing reliable knowledge in the form of experimentally evidenced theories, where the evidence concerned is reproducible (O’Hear 1989, pp. 61–62; Polkinghorne 2008, p. 46). This is usually taken to mean that with appropriate training and resources one should be able to go to the scientific literature, find the details of a methodology that has yielded a result of interest, and by following the published methods be able to replicate the reported result. However, there is considerable evidence that not only is this infrequently done but that it often cannot be done (i.e., many reported results, even with appropriate effort, cannot be replicated). Beginning with key preclinical cancer studies (Begley and Ellis 2012) but quickly spreading to psychology (Open Science Collaboration 2015), it was shown that important, generally accepted results could not be replicated. This led to what has been referred to as a “reproducibility crisis” (Baker 2016; Nosek et al. 2022; see also Fanelli 2018). Based on an extensive statistical analysis of the psychology literature, Szucs and Ioannidis (2017) estimated that the “false report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature” with worse performance expected for the cognitive neuroscience literature. Similar concerns were expressed about precisely those brain imaging techniques (particularly fMRI) which had, in both professional and public minds, been seen as emblematic of the powerful tools available to study not merely brain and behaviour but also the mind (Bennett and Miller 2010; Eklund et al. 2016; Elliott et al. 2020). Active discussion continues in the neuroscience and broader literature about how to rectify the problems that have been identified (Dimitriadis et al. 2024). But there remains the possibility that we may not actually know what we think we know.

In addition to concerns about reproducibility, a related issue of applicability has been raised (Nastase et al. 2020). This has various components. One concern is that results obtained from a participant lying in the bore of a fMRI machine or sitting with their chin on a rest in a behavioural laboratory, pressing buttons in response to carefully crafted stimuli presented on a monitor screen, may not be generalisable with those contexts. This is similar to the concept of “ecological validity” in psychology, raised particularly by J. J. Gibson in the 1950s (Sedgwick 2021). Further, specifically related to cognitive neuroscience, Henrich and colleagues pointed out that most cognitive psychology and neuroscience results were obtained from a narrow sliver of humanity; the vast majority of experiment participants were drawn from western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (i.e., WEIRD) societies (Henrich et al. 2010; Henrich 2020). Despite this provenance, results were assumed to apply universally to the whole of humanity. And yet when different human populations are compared, differences are frequently reported (often attributed to the influence of culture on brain and behaviour) across a range of measures from those of lower-level sensory-motor function to higher-level cognitive domains (Segall et al. 1963; Knox and Wolohan 2014; Nisbett et al. 2001). The interplay between brain and culture has in fact spawned a new sub-discipline within neuroscience which seeks to examine and explain such differences and their implications—“cultural neuroscience”.

These issues are not raised to undermine much of the undoubted scientific progress that neuroscience has made in recent decades which, along with progress in other sciences, has generally been a benefit. But in assessing theological responses to “it” one should be clear what is being responded to. Neuroscience is an empirical and theoretical science. In a sense the issues raised above are evidence of normal, self-critical and self-correcting scientific activity. The reproducibility crisis was identified by scientific effort and methods, and scientific methodological adjustments are being discussed and no doubt will be implemented to correct it (study endpoints and objectives along with statistical methodologies often now have to be publicly preregistered if results are to be subsequently published). The challenge of the WEIRD “issue”, having been identified, has led to new avenues for scientific study (e.g., comparative studies of different human populations) and changes in reporting requirements (studies now often provide information about the ethnicity or culture of participants). Thus there has been an active response to these various concerns. However, it is important to note that neuroscience does not occupy an epistemically privileged position, progress is not inevitable and what is currently considered to be certain and immutable truth may be overturned tomorrow. This is the nature of scientific enquiry.

With regard to human ontology, assertions that neuroscience is the ultimate authority, that it has clearly and finally declared that we are merely collections of neurons and that there is nothing more to say, are not “scientific”. These are not hypotheses or theories based on empirical evidence but are metaphysical claims (with theological implications). This last observation would no doubt draw an impatient sigh from some neuroscientists and some of their philosophical allies. This is partly because such metaphysical assertions, made during a period of rapid progress in neuroscience, were also made within (and interacted with) a particular philosophical context that emerged in the 1980s.

3. Eliminative Materialism, Neurophilosophy, and a Theological Response

The context in question was provided (or perhaps evidenced) by eliminative materialism (EM). Whether we are dealing with cause, correlation or consequence is difficult to establish. While by common consent the roots of EM are to be found in the work of Paul Feyerabend (Feyerabend 1963) and Richard Rorty (Rorty 1965, 1970), it is Paul (P. M. Churchland 1981; see particularly P. M. Churchland 1988, pp. 43–49) and Patricia Churchland (P. S. Churchland 1989) that developed and brought it to broad philosophical, scientific and public attention. For both Churchlands, neuroscience in its contemporary and future (“mature”) forms played a critical role. As P. M. Churchland (1988) noted in the preface to the revised edition of his “Matter and Consciousness”, what prompted the revision was primarily “the dramatic progress” in neuroscience, cognitive science and artificial intelligence and “their expanding relevance to issues in the philosophy of mind”. Fully one-third of the revised edition was a descriptive account of those scientific disciplines. Similarly, in P. S. Churchland’s (1989) “Neurophilosophy”, Part 1 was entitled “Some Elementary Neuroscience”, and along with the later chapter on “Theories of Brain Function” this material took up well over half of the book. The import was clear: the results of neuroscience were key to a reshaping of the philosophy of mind. This was neurophilosophy in what has been called its “revolutionary” phase (Bickle 2018).

The central thesis of EM/neurophilosophy was “that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience” (P. M. Churchland 1981). This “radically false theory” was labelled “folk psychology”; defining it as an empirical theory (and therefore in competition with other empirical theories) was described as a “crucial first step” (P. S. Churchland 1989, p. 395). Hence the importance of neuroscience becomes clear; it is neuroscience that now provides the alternative and appropriate methodology for approaching issues (among them the mind/brain debate in its various forms) that had previously appeared to be intractable. Such things as belief (along with “desire, fear, sensation, pain, joy and so on”; P. M. Churchland 1988, p. 44) belonged to an “older framework” that would “simply be eliminated, rather than reduced, by a matured neuroscience” (P. M. Churchland 1988, p. 43). Folk psychology, as a “theoretical framework” was one “whose adequacy can be questioned and assessed” (P. S. Churchland 1989, p. 311). If folk psychology was in competition with other scientific theories, it was appropriate to ask how well it competed. The answer was not well at all. Under examination it appeared to be “folkishly inept, soft and narrow” (P. S. Churchland 1989, p. 395). It was explanatorily weak in that it failed to explain phenomena like sleep, learning, memory and mental illness. Thus “the most central things about us remain almost entirely mysterious” (P. M. Churchland 1988, p. 46). It is interesting to note that the concepts habitually listed (those “central things”) happened to be those where important progress was being made in neuroscience, for example the discovery of cellular and network mechanisms for brain plasticity that might plausibly underlie learning and memory, and progress in biological psychiatry which provided new explanations and treatment avenues for various mental illnesses.

The eliminative aspect of EM was a matter of considerable debate, partly because it was maintained that it was often misconstrued. And in an illuminating aside, the Churchlands made clear that it was a term that they were not particularly attached to, although they also maintained that the elimination they had in mind was valid and would, probably, come to pass. What was never a matter of debate, and rarely if ever highlighted, was that they were advancing a version of materialism (P. M. Churchland and Churchland 1996, p. 298). This background framework is metaphysical rather than empirical and is largely shared with other approaches to the mind/brain problem and large swathes of contemporary culture. When assumed to be the only viable approach to particular (or indeed all) problems, it rules out other sources of data and non-empirical methods which might have a contribution to make. But, if there are problems with materialism, or indeed a different framework is adopted (and here there is a choice to be made), then the likelihood is that neuroscience is being pressed to deliver what on its own it cannot deliver.

While folk psychology and its various constituent aspects were the main target of EM/neurophilosophy, religion and theology were occasionally commented upon specifically. They were part of the old, to-be-eliminated, framework (and not a very useful part at that) and were in any case incompatible with EM’s materialist framework. Theologians were simply one part of a large group identified as opposing the reduction of mental states to brain states (P. S. Churchland 1989, p. 277) or as those who provided support for substance dualism with its high price and low plausibility (P. S. Churchland 1989, p. 320; P. M. Churchland 1988, p. 13). Biblical anthropological views were “cartoonlike conceptions of homo sheepicus and homo infanticus …. Portraying humanity as sheep guided by a supernatural shepherd, or as children beholden to a supernatural Father”; these were a “deception” (P. M. Churchland 2007b, p. 57). The proper course of action was clear: “professional scientists and philosophers concerned with the nature of mind generally do their best to keep religious appeals out of the discussion entirely” (P. M. Churchland 1988, p. 15). There can be no appropriate theological response to neuroscience because theology springs from socially conditioned beliefs which are precisely the sort of things that have no real existence and will be eliminated by neuroscience and its anticipated advance. We might not be there yet but the touching faith of the neurophilosopher was that we inevitably would be one day.

EM evoked criticism from both fellow materialists/naturalists and non-materialists alike. Searle (who described himself as a “biological naturalist”) listed it as “the most extreme” among implausible, materialist theories of mind (Searle 1992, pp. 1, 6). It was criticised for being self-refuting and inconsistent and thus “not a serious option” (Bennett and Hacker 2003, pp. 376–77; see also Cling 1989; Slagle 2020). In 2007 Paul Churchland himself wrote “Of the several major positions in the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism is the focus of the least attention”, and in 2018 John Bickle published a paper entitled “Lessons for experimental philosophy from the rise and ‘fall’ of neurophilosophy” (P. M. Churchland 2007a, p. 160; Bickle 2018).

EM was but one (neuroscientifically stimulated) aspect of a remarkable reorientation in philosophy that progressed through the twentieth century. At the beginning of the century, idealism (to simplify, essentially the notion that the only reality was mental or spiritual reality) dominated (Taliaferro 1994, pp. 23–24). In the case of Great Britain before the Great War, “British Idealism seemed as firm and enduring as the British Empire” (Brown 1968, p. 123). However, by the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century materialism, “the view that the only reality that exists is material or physical reality” had become “the religion of our time, at least among most of the professional experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and the other disciplines that study the mind” (Searle 2004, p. 48). E.L. Mascall in his 1956 Bampton lectures saw “no theoretical problems for the Christian faith” in contemporary developments in neurology, neurophysiology and psychology (Mascall 1956, p. 252; see chapter 6 entitled “The body and the soul”). Yet by the beginning of the twenty-first century Nancy Murphy was arguing that three major scientific advances in “Western” history “called for a reappraisal of theories of human nature”—the displacement of Aristotelian physics in the seventeenth century, the Darwinian revolution in biology and “the influences of contemporary neuroscience” (Murphy 2006, p. 40). And for Murphy the reappraisal that was required had to be performed within the framework of materialism, albeit under a different name and appropriately qualified.

Murphy preferred the term “physicalism” to “materialism”, and as she was well aware of, and wished to counter, reductionism (the “you are nothing but your neurons” view), she deliberately qualified it with “non-reductive”. Writing from an explicitly theological perspective (although professionally a philosopher she was based in Fuller Theological Seminary), Murphy explained that in her view “physicalism” and “materialism” were interchangeable with the former being more “fashionable”, more theologically acceptable and more “appealing to Christians” (Murphy 2006, p. 2). This is because an overarching materialist world-view is at odds with the classical theistic claim that there exists at least one being who is immaterial and therefore not physical. It was also necessary for her to claim that her non-reductive physicalism (whether with reference to persons or minds) does not entail a commitment to that wider materialistic world-view (Murphy and Brown 2007, p. 7; see also Murphy 2008, p. 49). Whether this claim can really be maintained is clearly a challenge for a theist who is a physicalist. It was particularly difficult for Murphy given that she favoured a reductionist ontology with regard to persons and brains while equally explicitly rejecting “causal reductionism and reductive materialism” (Murphy 1998b, p. 130).

While definitions of physicalism and its relationship to materialism differ (in contrast to Murphy, Crane and Mellor (1990), viewed them as distinct), one notable area of agreement is the prominent role attributed to science (usually the physical sciences specifically; see Papineau 2007). Only the physical exists and this is often defined in terms of those entities appropriately investigated and established by the physical sciences. Specifically with regard to science, Murphy was not only clear that thanks to neuroscientific advances there was a need for a theological reassessment of human ontology but made a further methodological argument reminiscent of EM. She argued that with regard to opposing views of souls and minds, her preferred view of nonreductive physicalism (and the conclusions that flow from it) was as a scientific theory, or better, the central core of a Lakatosian research program (Murphy 1998b, p. 139; Murphy 2006, p. 115; see P. M. Churchland 1981, p. 75). In part, she takes the success of neuroscience in providing neurobiological accounts of functions previously attributed to the soul as support for this. The claim is that a physicalist (materialist) approach has been shown to be part of a successful, progressive research program, in contrast to one particular dualistic example (of a scientific research program), that of Eccles (Murphy 2006, p. 116; see also Brown and Strawn 2016, p. 91). The implication is that other non-physicalist schemes will be similarly deficient. Thus, in common with Churchland above, she argues that this explanatory success is evidence of a superior approach to the phenomena in question. And that Christianity has been able to “incorporate a physicalist account of human nature in order to accord with contemporary biology and neuroscience” is, for her, one of Christianity’s strengths (Murphy 2008, p. 58). Note again the prominence given to neuroscience in particular, and a preferred methodological approach that is based on a particular model of scientific methodology (for a critique of the adoption of scientific methodology in theology see Grenz 2000).

This raises important issues for both the theologian and the Christian scientist. As far as the Christian scientist is concerned, Murphy’s view was that in practising their science they should adopt (at least) a methodological naturalism/materialism. This appears to be very similar to the views of Churchland and is widespread although it continues to be debated (P. M. Churchland 1988, p. 15; McDonald and Tro 2009; Mallary 2024). But it is both historically and, in some of its forms, theologically problematic. Historically science developed and successfully operated within an explicitly theistic framework, and the view that naturalism or materialism are indispensable to its practice is a nineteenth century innovation (Harrison 2024, p. 343; Keas 2023). And Christian theology has historically looked to distinct “data sources” (Scripture and other sacred writings; for some Christian traditions conciliar and creedal sources) and methods (largely shared with other disciplines in the humanities). Exactly what role these data and methods play in generating understanding and how they relate to scientific methods and results is a continuing matter of debate. There are some within theology, specifically those interested in theological naturalism, who argue that the classic, orthodox tools and methods of theology do not provide an adequate view of reality and are therefore of uncertain value (Farris 2023). But the proposition that they have no role, that theology (thus practiced) now has no value in contributing to our understanding of both reality and human ontology has rightly been met with considerable resistance (A. B. Torrance 2017; Tyson 2022). Murphy knew well (as an academic at Fuller Seminary) that the displacement of what had previously been theologically acceptable by claimed scientific advance, particularly with regard to human ontology, and the physicalist assumptions and conclusions drawn, would strike many as strange. Particularly within the context of the students and audiences she was familiar with, belief in an immaterial soul within a thoroughly dualist framework, apparently inimical to the results of modern neuroscience, remained (and remains) a widely accepted view (Murphy 2006, p. 1–4; Murphy 2013, 2024).

Indeed it is common ground that both the idea of an immaterial soul (or mind) and the dualism thus implied have been and are held by most Christians across traditions (Inwagen 1995; Plantinga 2007; Murphy 2013; Green 2008, p. 13), not to mention “most people in the Western world” (Searle 2004, p. 12). Yet in large parts of the theological academy, by the middle of the 20th century such views had become very unfashionable, and by the end of the century Jewitt writes that in “contemporary theological anthropology, “dualism” is not a popular word” (Murphy 1998a, p. 21; Jewett 1996, p. 35). Murphy’s physicalism was thus complemented by a number of twentieth century developments in Biblical studies and theology which (implicitly or explicitly) represented a shift from a dualist to a monist human anthropology. According to Joel Green (a theologian and a colleague of Murphy’s at Fuller), “biblical studies as a whole in the twentieth century moved away from body-soul dualism” (Green 2004, p. 187). More widely, he traced much of this shift to Bultmann, and particularly his work on Pauline anthropology, while noting important dissenting voices such as Robert Gundry (Green 2008, pp. 3–6. See footnote 17, p. 6 on Gundry). Green himself, while viewing the change as primarily originating within theology, and prior to the advent of EM, was nevertheless also influenced by what he termed “the emerging discipline of ‘neurophilosophy’” referencing Patricia Churchland, along with Thomas Metzinger and Francis Crick (Green 2008, pp. 16–17). And it is presumably this he refers to when later he writes that “the neurosciences impinge on many of the classic loci of theological anthropology” providing “a context within which to struggle with biblical-theological claims regarding the human person” (emphasis added; Green 2008, p. 21; see also Green 2004, p. 182). Of course, he was aware that there are alternatives to such an approach. He briefly discusses Barth, whom he claims saw theology and the natural sciences as “non-interactive disciplines”; he characterises this as a “minority position” (Green 2008, p. 22; see A. Torrance 2019 for a more extensive discussion of Barth’s views on science). But Green, with Murphy, appeared to respond to science generally, and specifically neuroscience (or at least a particular view of neuroscience and its supposed implications) by ceding a framing authority both in terms of methodology (in Murphy’s case) and content. This then shaped the interpretation of other key sources of data which normally figure in theological reflection, such as the Bible (and for some, creeds and councils).

4. Neuroscientific Expansion and Materialist Fraying

The position of the eliminativists as materialists necessarily ruled out a transcendent, immaterial God, as much as it dismissed immaterial minds/souls. If only the material (physical) exists, then there is no such being or/and entities to talk about. Therefore, theology, its categories and methods, critical to discussing such beings and ‘things’, has no useful role and is thereby effectively eliminated. What is left is a purely empirical approach to those phenomena that are agreed to exist. But historically there had been a struggle to accommodate subjective, first-person mental states (consciousness) within the empirical approach. These are exactly the sorts of things, as Descartes famously pointed out, that intuitively human beings consider to be the most certain. Not having a satisfying material explanation for them was a serious weakness. Claiming that things like mental states did not exist, as arguably the behaviourists had done at the beginning of the 20th century, was not a viable approach and fell out of favour (Searle 1992, p. 35). Given the powerful new tools of neuroscience, these phenomena too had to be explicable. Such considerations explain, at least in part, the rise of a new empirical subdiscipline within or at least closely connected to neuroscience, that of consciousness studies.

Writing 10 years ago in the inaugural editorial of the journal “Neuroscience of Consciousness”, Seth et al. (2015) credited a 1990 paper by Crick and Koch as marking “the rebirth of consciousness science as a serious exercise” (Crick and Koch 1990). The publication of the new journal reflected “the maturity of this rigorous and empirically grounded approach to the science of subjective experience”. They themselves made no claim that this was necessarily the only available approach to subjective experience; that had already appeared in Crick’s book, published the previous year (Crick 1994). Crick and Koch claimed in their paper that “Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness” and avoided a “precise definition”. This, along with other knotty issues, was left to one side, “otherwise much time can be frittered away in fruitless argument”, implicitly criticising what had gone before. Philosophy (and certainly theology) had had its day. It was now for science to explain the previously inexplicable, even consciousness (see Chemero and Silberstein 2008).

Now, several decades on from the high point of EM, there appear to be relatively few eliminativists, although the faith of materialism is alive and well and has many adherents. But thirty-five years on from the “rebirth of consciousness science”, where stands that part of the project that in its maturity, according to EM, would “eliminate” folk psychological entities like beliefs (which are a type of conscious mental state)? Francken and colleagues conducted a survey among consciousness researchers who attended two consecutive annual meetings of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (established in 1994 and later the sponsor of Neuroscience of Consciousness) to investigate “the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research” (Francken et al. 2022). Among the issues they identified were “a lack of consensus regarding the definition and most promising theory of consciousness” and “that many views and opinions currently coexist in the consciousness community. Moreover, individual respondents appear to hold views that are not always completely consistent from a theoretical point of view”. Lest it be felt that this is a rather slim basis on which to form a view as to the current state of the field, Seth and Bayne (2022) reported in a recent extensive review that “in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished”. They recommended “the iterative development, testing and comparison of theories of consciousness”. Francken et al. (2022) used ten different theoretical constructs in their survey, Seth and Bayne (2022) identified a “selection” of twenty-two “theories of consciousness” (see their Table 1) which they grouped into four broad categories, and Kuhn (limiting himself to “materialism” theories) identified fourteen neurobiological theories, to which he added lists of philosophical (N = 12), electromagnetic (7) and computational/informational (4) theories (R. L. Kuhn 2024).

An attempt to follow Seth and Bayne’s advice, using a “large-scale adversarial collaboration” to experimentally compare predictions made by two of the major competing theories of consciousness (“global neuronal workspace theory”, GNWT vs. “integrated informational theory”, IIT), recently reported results in Nature (Cogitate Consortium et al. 2025; see also the accompanying Nature Editorial). The evidence that emerged partially supported and partially challenged both theories. However, the aftermath is perhaps more revealing. In response to the preprint and media coverage of the paper (the actual Nature paper was submitted for publication in June 2023, accepted for publication in March 2025 and published in April 2025), a long list of researchers (including recognised leaders in neuroscience) put their names to an open letter on the PsyArXiv preprint server condemning the exercise as flawed, calling IIT “pseudoscience” and objecting to its characterisation as a leading candidate theory for explaining consciousness at all (IIT-Concerned et al. 2023). Proponents of GNWT also called into question the discussion of the results in the Nature paper and the conclusions drawn (Naccache et al. 2025). All of this suggests that what flowed from Crick and Koch’s avoidance of a definition of consciousness was basic conceptual confusion, consistent with the charge made against the field by Hacker not long after its “rebirth” (Bennett and Hacker 2003, pp. 239–44; see also Hacker 2012).

One important class of mental states (or aspects of human consciousness) are those often labelled as religious (e.g., meditative states; see Kapogiannis et al. 2009). Around the time that the term neurophilosophy appeared, the term neurotheology also emerged (Ashbrook 1984; or possibly re-emerged, see Gaitán and Castresana 2021) and was subsequently taken up and developed by Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newberg (d’Aquili and Newberg 1999; Newberg et al. 2002; Newberg 2016). Newberg conducted several empirical studies of religious experience and practice using neuroimaging techniques (Newberg et al. 2001, 2003, 2010; see also Beauregard and Paquette 2006; for discussion and critique see Jones 2018) that are best understood as belonging to the wider “neural correlates of consciousness” project (Crick and Koch 1990). Newberg later produced a more discursive and extensive account of neurotheology, published as “Principles of Neurotheology” (Newberg 2016; originally published in 2010, references in this paper are to the later Routledge edition).

Newberg’s fifty-four principles of neurotheology can be difficult to relate to established philosophical (or theological) positions. There is an ambiguity (perhaps deliberate) as to how mind relates to brain. In early accounts mind and brain were used interchangeably with occasional references to the “mind/brain” (d’Aquili and Newberg 1999, pp. 21, 47, see also 18, 58, 65; Newberg et al. 2002, p. 33). But in general mind appears to name a subset of brain functions, “The mind is the name for the intangible realities that the brain produces” (d’Aquili and Newberg 1999, p. 47), or more recently, “the mind should be considered the less tangible functions of the brain” (Newberg 2016, p. 27). These various functions were described in terms of seven “cognitive operators” which in “Principles” become six “specific cognitive processes” each of which is “localized to certain areas of the brain with varying degrees of accuracy” (d’Aquili and Newberg 1999, p. 52; Newberg 2016, p. 73). Although experience and thought are not formally reduced to the activity of neural circuits, it is ultimately from the neuroscientific perspective that religious thought and experience are considered such that “…it might be possible to consider major theological or philosophical principles from the perspective of various brain processes acting on reality. Several possible neuropsychological mechanisms might be postulated that could have a direct impact on theological conceptualization” (Newberg 2016, p. 223). Some of the language is again problematic. In the question “how does the brain read and interpret the Bible?” or the consideration of “the brain’s striving to understand the ultimate questions of the universe”, activities are attributed to the brain which properly belong to persons or agents (Newberg 2016, pp. 222, 223). Bradford (2012) takes this to be a (minor) example of “theoretical incoherence”. However, this is not peculiar to Newberg. It is a further instance of the mereological fallacy which was identified as a problematic and pervasive feature of neuroscientific discussions (see Bennett and Hacker 2003, pp. 68–107). This again indicates a family resemblance with other neuroscientifically inspired argumentation of this period.

Although Newberg stressed a dialogical approach, much of the discussion thus centred on how brain processes might give rise to, produce, shape or even constrain religious experience (and beyond that certain theological constructs). This is captured in Principle 17 (“The brain places functional restrictions on all thought processes, and hence how we experience religion, spirituality, and theology”) and the surrounding discussion but is found throughout “Principles” (Newberg 2016, p. 84). Neurotheology dwelt “substantially in the scientific domain” (Newberg 2016, p. 43). There is little movement in the other direction. Arguably this leads to there being few if any fundamental differences in approach between neurotheology and the broader field of the cognitive science of religion or (as mentioned above) the neural correlates project (Newberg 2014; Bennett 2019). Some of the more theological aspects of Newberg’s neurotheology will be discussed in the next section.

Returning from consciousness research (including neurotheology) to the wider materialist project, other concerns have recently emerged from within the materialist camp. The philosopher Thomas Nagel is perhaps best known for his classic paper “What is it like to be a bat?”. Regarding the problem of consciousness, Patricia Churchland called this paper a “watershed articulation” (Nagel 1974; P. S. Churchland 1996). The problem which Nagel sought to draw attention to was precisely that the “subjective character of experience” (the what-is-it-like-to-be-ness) was not captured “by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental”. The materialist or physicalist accounts (Nagel too appears to use these as synonyms) left something vital out. While from this Nagel argued that “It would be a mistake to conclude that physicalism must be false”, he also suggested that what was needed were new studies of the subjective and the mental (partially answered in subsequent development of consciousness studies described above).

But that was then, what about now? With the advance of neuroscience, with all that we now know, surely a thoroughly physicalist account of human ontology, which leaves the concept of the immaterial (be it mind or soul) lying redundant in its wake, is possible? Or at least given such progress, we should be able to see clearly how, in principle, such an account might be possible. Writing in 2012 Nagel was, if anything, more concerned. Notwithstanding the development of consciousness studies in the intervening period, consciousness remained one of the major sticking points causing his concern: “The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been inferred to explain the behaviours of the inanimate world. Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures…” (Nagel 2012, p. 20). And yet his concerns went beyond the existence of (as yet unexplained) consciousness to the wider materialist project: “The inadequacies of the naturalistic and reductionist world picture seem to me to be real” (Nagel 2012, p. 22). As he did not find theism (the “polar opposite” of materialism) “any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view”, he was thrown back to trying to imagine naturalistic accounts that were able to accommodate previously excluded elements like consciousness and purpose. But he concluded by accepting as conceivable that “the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations” (Nagel 2012, p. 128). Midgley took Nagel’s argument (along with those made by others) as providing evidence that the “credo of materialism” was “beginning to fray around the edges” (Midgley 2014, p. 14).

5. The Non-Elimination of Theology

Some, like Green and Murphy, viewed neuroscience (and explicitly in Green’s case, neurophilosophy) as having a role in framing their views of human ontology, requiring a degree of reinterpretation of classic theological texts and teaching. But while it is true that neuroscience has an important contribution to make to our self-understanding (particularly with the regard to our present embodied state), this risked at least appearing to hand to neuroscience (or the implications that were argued to flow from it) an overarching authority, even if this was not the intention. Other materialists/physicalists went much further and argued that science in general, and with regard to human ontology, that neurosciences in particular were able to provide, by themselves, a full understanding of who we are, what the universe is, and what our place in it is. Outside of theology there was a reaction to such claims which were criticised in the general case as scientism, and in the specific case of neuroscience as “neurohype” and “neuromania” (Midgley 1994, p. 108; 2014, p. 5; Tallis 2011; Lilienfeld et al. 2017). Rickabaugh and Moreland (2024, pp. 5–6) have recently claimed that in the twenty-first century “We are witnessing a resurgence in substance dualism” partly because “promissory materialism” has not delivered an explanation of everything, including consciousness. Given these observations and the “fraying” described by Midgley, might it be that far from being eliminated by the materialist project, and specifically by neuroscience, theology is in a position to make a positive contribution?

If theology is to make such a contribution then “it cannot allow its agenda and suppositions to be determined by current theories of mind or brain any more than by the prevalent sociological, philosophical, or cultural analyses of personhood”; there needs to be clarity “about what is proper to the theological and scientific fields of enquiry respectively” (A. J. Torrance 2004, pp. 213, 214). This is a view obviously at odds with, among others, Crick, summarised in the final chapter of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” which had the intriguing title of “Dr Crick’s Sunday Morning Service” (Crick 1994, pp. 255–63). Writing of religious beliefs, rather than theology (but in Crick’s view they surely amounted to the same thing), he asserted that “by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable”; “true answers are usually far from those of conventional religions. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong” (Crick 1994, p. 258). Hardly a recipe for a fruitful dialogue, but some thirty plus years after this was written neither should it be assumed to be representative (see for example Rodzeń and Polak 2025 and the various contributions in the Special Issue they introduce).

Further evidence that Crick’s negative attitude was, even at that time, far from the only one exhibited is provided by Newberg’s development of neurotheology. However, while Newberg was at pains to treat religious experience and teaching seriously rather than dismissively, this was for the purpose of study within a neuroscientific framework. The existence (or otherwise) of God and (the presumably immaterial) soul were live questions to be studied “from the neurotheological perspective” (Newberg 2016, p. 221), but this was a perspective distinct from theology (Newberg 2016, p. 222). The theology component of neurotheology turns out, in the main, to be “religious phenomena generally” (Bradford 2012). However, this is problematic for a number of reasons. There is no agreed definition of “religion”, a situation discussed in detail by Harrison (writing about how the categories of religion and science have been constructed historically) and McGrath (writing in the context investigating the interface between Christian theology and the natural sciences) as well as others (Harrison 2017; McGrath 2001, see particularly pp. 50–57; Griffiths 2005). What might be seen as an ambitious agenda (seeking the neurobiological basis of all religious phenomena) resulted in what some critics saw as confusion as to the content of what was being investigated (e.g., it was a search for “the neural correlates of something rather vague” Ratcliffe 2006, p. 407). Related to this was the issue that Newberg’s eclectic approach flattened out real differences in both content and practice between different traditions and philosophies, taking to be similar what experience, observation and in some cases literally thousands of years of reflection regarded as being different (see the conclusion in Bradford 2012). In contrast, McGrath found value in being “unfettered by the perverse and distorting controlling assumption that all religious traditions must be saying substantially the same thing” and so looked for points of convergence between (in his case) the natural sciences and historically orthodox Christian theology (McGrath 2001, p. 57).

Returning then to Christian theology, and specifically theological anthropology, this developed in ways during the twentieth century besides in the respect noted by Green (the shift from dualism to monism). And in one particular respect it is Karl Barth who figures predominantly and whose influence continues to be important (Anderson 1982, p. 18; A. J. Torrance 2004, p. 207). Barth grounded his anthropology in christology, a move he characterised himself as “deviating from tradition” (see Skaff 2019, p. 186). In doing so he brought about a “christological shift” in theological anthropology bearing directly on many of the issues discussed above. Cortez, who examined the mind/brain debate (including Murphy’s non-reductive physicalism) against the background of Barth’s theology, claimed that “the significance of this christological shift … cannot be overstated. Indeed a growing number of Christian theologians locate modernity’s inability to understand human nature in the fundamentally misguided attempt to derive a complete picture of the human person independently of the perspective provided by the person of Jesus Christ” (Cortez 2008, p. 4). With regard to Murphy, Cortez noted that there had been a movement in the opposite direction, explicitly working from the implications of the mind/brain debate (configured within a framework provided by neuroscience) to christology, with no consideration of movement from christology to anthropology (Cortez 2008, p. 5; quoting from Murphy 1998a, p. 23).

For those wedded to the conflict metaphor for the interaction between science and theology, such developments might indicate a recipe for further conflict. But the conflict metaphor has long been acknowledged by historians of science as a polemical Victorian myth, albeit with some recent popular proponents (Russell 1985; Harrison 2017). Precisely because christological anthropologies spring from theology doing a theological task using appropriate theological methods, the categories involved are distinct from those of neuroscience. This does not of itself mean incommensurability in a Kuhnian sense, which would apply to competing empirical theories (T. S. Kuhn, 1962). The “results” of christological anthropology may be related to contemporary debates usually configured in terms of neuroscience and brain functions in interesting ways. It is significant that the incarnation (a thoroughly theological concept) has been argued to be compatible with both physicalism and dualism by different proponents in the mind/brain debate (Cortez 2008, p. 5; see footnote 12). But it will take careful work and thought to relate the incarnational and the neural (if it can be done), and much of this work remains to be attempted.

There are other intriguing convergences between the development of this theological approach to human ontology (i.e., christologcial anthropology) and developments in neuroscience. In his discussion of “personhood”, John Zizioulas argued for the fundamental ontological importance of “a movement of communion”, where ontological identity is to be found “only in a being which is free from the boundaries of the ‘self’” (Zizioulas 1975). This strongly relational view, which both looks back to Barth and is consistent with the work of a long list of key figures in recent theological anthropology, parallels and potentially compliments developments in neuroscience represented by research into “theory of mind” and social cognition, both of which stress the relational (A. J. Torrance 2004, 208; Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs 2006; Frith 2008). How deep this convergence goes also requires work and thought.

6. Conclusions

In gaining a rounded understanding of ourselves, there is clearly an important role for neuroscience. It is able provide information from a third-person perspective about the physical brain mechanisms involved in the generation of human experience (now explicitly including conscious experience), how these mechanisms develop, the ways in which they change as we age and about aspects of what happens when eventually our current embodied existence fades. But this information is partial, not exhaustive, and it generates a particular kind of map guiding our self-understanding. Theology has the role of providing a different kind of map. The challenge is in aligning the different maps, not assuming a priori that one is right and one is wrong (Midgley 2005).

Perhaps theology can contribute something else. For much of Christian history, theologians have been aware that the challenge at the heart of their craft is that they are seeking to understand the incomprehensible. We are unable to know God exhaustively, although we can truly know those things which he has revealed about himself. Gregory of Nyssa, the 4th century Cappadocian Father, applied this apophatic approach to understanding humanity, arguing that “the nature of the human mind is as incomprehensible as the essence of God Himself” (Ladner 1958). Any theory will be only partial (all the “maps” will have blank areas), and none will be able to tell the whole story, which as Nagel was prepared to accept, may be beyond us in any case. E. Torrance (2025) wrote recently that “[a]n apophatic stance describes an attitude of humility and awe towards divine and human persons”. Neuroscientists and theologians alike would do well to manifest such an attitude.