A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Philosopher and theologian Nancey Murphy argues for ‘nonreductive physicalism’: human beings are wholly physical creatures whose complex capacities for reason, morality, relationship, and spirituality need not require an independently separable soul. Engaging neuroscience, philosophy of mind, biblical interpretation, and Christian theology, she asks how agency, identity, ethics, resurrection, and divine action can remain meaningful without substance dualism.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
Murphy gives Christian travelers a serious alternative to the assumption that faith depends on an immortal soul temporarily housed in a body. Her proposal opens productive connections among embodiment, science, resurrection, disability, and care for material life. The Library includes it as an interdisciplinary theological argument—not as scientific proof that consciousness has been fully explained, a settled Christian anthropology, or a conclusion that eliminates every philosophical or experiential reason for dualism.
Good starting place if…
You want to explore an embodied Christian account of personhood that takes neuroscience seriously without reducing agency, meaning, or resurrection to simple mechanism.
Know before you begin…
Nonreductive physicalism names a philosophical and theological position, not a result directly read off neuroscience. Emergence, downward causation, free agency, continuity of identity, and resurrection remain debated, and the relevant sciences have developed since publication. Rejecting a separable soul can unsettle inherited hopes or seem to threaten the dignity of people with cognitive disability; neither conclusion follows automatically. Evaluate how any theory treats dependence, embodiment, death, and persons whose capacities differ from its assumed norm.