Last November, Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewed Fuller Seminary theologian Nancey Murphy at his YouTube channel Closer To Truth on the topic, “Do Humans Need Souls?”

Here’s the introductory question:

Is the ‘real you’ a special substance that is nonphysical and immortal? Most regular people would agree, but most scientists would not. What are you? A body alone that is dead forever once it dies? A soul temporally inhabiting a body? A body unified with a nonphysical entity of some kind? What some theologians think may surprise you. (6:48 min, November 4, 2024)

Indeed.

Here are some segments, with comments appended:

Kuhn: Nancy, do humans need souls?

Murphy: No they don’t. [0:05] Human beings are not composites of a body and some other sort of substance; they’re what I like to call spirited bodies and by that I mean we are physical organisms just like the rest of the animals. What makes us distinctive is our exceptionally large brain, the way it’s organized, that gives us the capacity for language and in consequence reasoning and cultural development.

Murphy, like most moderns, has rejected the early modern idea of the soul, popularized by philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), as a spiritual substance separate from the body. She has adopted a modern materialist perspective instead.

The traditional Christian view is quite different from both, as neurosurgeon Michael Egnor explains,

The soul is the form of the living body — the set of principles and abilities that constitute being alive.

A simple way to think about the soul is that it is the difference between a body just before and just after death. A soul is everything that is true of a living body that is not true of a dead body. Soul is the organization and activity of your cells and your muscles, your organs and your mind. The mind, in this sense, is some of the abilities of the soul — the ability to perceive, to remember, to feel emotions, to reason, etc.

“What is your soul doing when you are under anesthesia? (February 2, 2021)

So far, Egnor appears to agree with Murphy, right?

But, in the traditional view he espouses, the human soul has two aspects, mortal and immortal. The mortal aspect animates the body, as he describes, and we share it with other animals. The immortal one includes human reason and moral choice. These are imperishable qualities; they cannot die with the body in principle, any more than mathematics or justice can. Thus Egnor adds, “The body can work poorly or stop working and disintegrate but there is strong scientific evidence that the mental abilities of the soul survive disability and even the death of the body.”

Of course, in the traditional view, a complete human being must have a body as well as a soul — hence the soul awaits the resurrection of the body at the end of time.

Other religious traditions offer strikingly similar teachings. The outlier, intellectually, is not the Christian tradition but the modern materialist one. Having cast off Descartes’ soul “substance,” it is left simply with the body and the mortal soul that animates that body and dies with it.

Evolving to understand God?

Murphy draws on theistic evolution for understanding the human relationship with God:

Well, I [2:45] certainly believe that God has been involved with the human species, the previous hominid species, all along insofar as they were capable of being related to. But for God to be able to reveal himself to the human species, we have to be able to have a concept something like the concept of God, however primitive that would be. That requires language and so certainly God could not genuinely be revealed to hominids prior to the development of language.

And in fact it would have to be fairly sophisticated language in order to have that sort of abstract concept. And so I believe that God waited patiently until humans had developed the intellectual capacities to form concepts that would be at least rough rudimentary versions of our later concepts of divinities or deities.

Popular evolution theory tempts thinkers to fill in a history for periods for which we have little or no information. We know very little about human thoughts before the advent of writing, never mind language. We do not even know if there ever was a time when humans did not have language. And sadly, we may not learn much more. All we are left with is learned speculation, such as Murphy offers, about what God may have done in ages long past (“I believe that God waited patiently until…”).

How does Murphy believe that human beings survive death?

Early in the interview, she tells Kuhn,

Murphy: Other purposes for which we thought [0:40] we needed a soul was to be in relationship with God and for eternal life to be in relationship with God. All we need is for God to be in relationship with us for eternal life, for hope for eternal life at least, what we need is to believe in the fact that Jesus was resurrected bodily and so it’s bodily resurrection that the Christian tradition looks forward to.

But her sudden assertion of sheer faith makes little sense in the context. If we are merely bodies that disintegrate at death, how can brain-based chemicals that prompt an assertion of belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection amount to anything at all? “Relationship with God” means nothing. “God” means nothing. Meaning is precisely the sort of thing that has been cast off.

One can’t drain away the spiritual element from the human being and at the same time expect to save favored concepts. Murphy’s approach appears to reflect the slow morph of evangelical thinking into a modern materialist perspective that John West writes about in Stockholm Syndrome Christianity (2025).