What do you think of Nancey Murphys non-reductive physicalism?
(Assuming you’ve followed her discussion.) Dr. Barr: I haven’t followed her writings, but I know that there are many people who would argue that “spirit” is an “emergent” property of matter. I look askance at such theories. As far as I am concerned, to say that the spiritual is “physical” is reductive. “Non-reductive physicalism” sounds to me like a contradiction in terms. While the spiritual can be incarnate in matter, it cannot emerge from matter. The spiritual powers of man, i.e. his intellect and will, cannot be explained as growing out of the natural potentialities of matter, in my view. As I argue in my book, matter cannot understand and the merely physical cannot have freedom. I think the late pope was saying the same thing when he said that between man and the lower animals there is an “ontological discontinuity”. And I think that Pope Pius XII was saying the same thing when he insisted that the human spiritual soul cannot have evolved by material processes. And I think that Ge
