Let us imagine two people of similar economic status, one of whom donates a considerable amount of money to a charity organization willingly, while the other hesitates but eventually donates the same amount of money with relative difficulty. Which action deserves the real moral praise? Intuitively, the willing donor seems to get our praise and sympathy more than the other; yet, it might require more virtue to choose the right action in the face of adverse inclinations. Acknowledging that this question is more difficult than it first appears lets us go back several millennia to hear what Aristotle, the great philosopher and ethicist, has to say on this issue.

Aristotle use the terms virtue, continence, incontinence, and vice in order to account for diverse attitudes present in individuals when confronted with ethical dilemmas. “Virtue” is an excellence of the soul that helps one to achieve complete harmony between one’s reasoning and desires. Whenever the virtuous person chooses an action as the rationally best option, he performs this action pleasurably. Yet this is a pleasure of a higher status, a noble joy, one that stems from appreciating the intrinsic value of the virtuous action and thus coming to love it. In other words, the virtuous person’s emotions and reason point at the same direction and there is no inner conflict that haunts his soul. This results in a noble and complete joy; a cultivated ability to see the intrinsic value embedded in the virtuous act through gaining a second nature. This second nature begins with having joy in doing the right thing rather than primarily being after the satisfaction of the bodily desires.

Unlike the state of virtue, the cases of continence, incontinence, and vice all include conflict to some degree between one’s reason and desires. Within this spectrum, some people better resist these counter-rational desires than others, and they are able to act in the same manner as a virtuous person, as in our example above. Aristotle calls such individuals “continent” (enkrates) and he distinguishes them from the fully virtuous. Their distinctive characteristic is that they struggle inside, but they end up doing the morally right thing. Yet, unlike the continent, some people are less successful in resisting their inner desires, and they end up doing the wrong action even though they are rationally aware of its wrongness. These individuals are called “incontinent” (akratês). Their reason and appetites drift them in opposite directions, and they find themselves in a miserable position. In the very last category, vice, are the individuals who refuse to do what an ethically virtuous person would do because they have become convinced that justice, temperance, generosity, and the like are of little or no value; Aristotle calls such people evil (kakos). This last category is demarcated from other categories sharply by the lack of any struggle against the dark side of the soul. These people both begin and end up on the negative side. Despite the fact that vicious people might seem to possess an inner harmony since both their wills and acts are in accord, Aristotle portrays them as deeply divided, because they cannot help but become dissatisfied as a result of the over-dominance of the irrational part of their souls. Aristotle assumes that if someone is in the habit of making bad decisions about how to live his life, his failures are caused by psychological forces that are less than fully rational. It is probable that his desires for pleasure, power, or some other external goal have become so strong that they make him care too little or not at all about acting ethically. It can be claimed that the vicious person lacks internal harmony because he cannot implement his rational side properly in making decisions. This reminds us of the famous chariot allegory of Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, in which he paints the picture of a charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two winged horses: one of them representing the rational and moral impulses and the other irrational appetites. The charioteer is like the human soul that needs to balance and keep the chariot going in the path towards enlightenment. While it is not easy to keep the two fighting horses in check, a human soul is better off whenever it is guided through reason, the charioteer. Yet, the evil person suffers from an imbalance and is perpetually drifted away by the whims of the bad-behaved horse. This, in the long run, results in unhappiness and sickness of the soul.

Cultivation of dispositions

Now that a brief sketch of Aristotle’s four types of ethical subjects is drawn, there is an inevitable question that awaits us. We have seen that all three of these positions involve some lack of integrity; it is only the life of a virtuous person that possesses internal harmony, and all other lives deviate to some degree from this ideal. Yet, one cannot help but wonder how we could attain this ideal state? According to Aristotle, in order to achieve the state of virtue, we need to develop proper habits and emotional responses starting from early childhood. Although full virtue is a rare achievement for human beings, it is only attainable through employment of continence persistently in life. Aristotle divides the virtues into two categories, the natural and the true virtues, and whereas the former comes by nature, the latter is cultivated through habituation. Aristotle’s truly virtuous man has cultivated (habituated) emotions rather than possessing immediate impulses to do good. Aristotle famously tells us that “action” leads to the corresponding character states; just as to be a good painter, you have to paint, and to be a good shoemaker you need to make shoes, you need to do virtuous actions to become virtuous. In Aristotle’s words, we become “just by doing just actions, and temperate by acting temperately.” (NE II.4.)

Virtue is “made perfect by habit and by practical wisdom,” and this makes the virtuous person’s position superior to that of the merely continent person. This conception of virtue as an ongoing, developmental process implies that individuals cannot typically will to feel certain emotions at a moment’s notice, but they can choose to cultivate certain emotions over time as a significant part of developing moral character.

Although Aristotle advises that virtue be our ultimate aim, he still esteems the continent person to some extent. A lack of complete harmony between reason and desires is often inescapable for human beings. We can only want or choose to do the virtuous thing, but we cannot make ourselves take pleasure from doing it. In fact, continence is often the only state we are capable of achieving, even though we might want to do the right thing cheerfully. To make an analogy, Aristotle encourages the cultivation of virtues just like the flourishing of a flower. Growing flowers require time and great care; likewise, virtuousness does not always come by nature but it is gained through cultivation and care.

Reason as the guide

The Aristotelian virtuous person is the one whose rational part overrides and guides the appetitive part. Accordingly, as long as the person is guided by his rational part, his actions are virtuous; whenever the rational side of the person is weaker than his appetitive side, it leads to moral weakness (incontinence). The idea of acting from the rational part of the soul is pivotal in Aristotle’s ethics; he ties human arête (virtue) to reasoning. For Aristotle, virtuous action must definitely originate from reasoning since it is the human arête (virtue) to be guided by the rational part of the soul. “Like every other creature in the world, man has a particular nature and the best way to live is to live up to his nature, which is to be directed by a rational soul.” Therefore, by “desiring to do the virtuous thing” Aristotle does not claim that this person should have a natural inclination to do the right thing; instead, it requires adoption of rational desires that are in line with virtuous actions.

One-way road to happiness: From continence to virtue

How can we make ourselves enjoy doing the virtuous things according to Aristotle? For instance, how can we “enjoy” giving to charity? As Aristotle proposes, we become just by doing just actions, we become temperate by acting temperately; so, the only way to arrive at true virtue goes from acting in conformity with duty even if we do it with continence. Aristotle assumes every individual begins the journey by continence and tries to arrive at virtuousness, which is a complete harmony of will and reason. In a way, Aristotle’s virtuous person is someone who walked up the ladder from continence to virtue. No one ascends to the state of virtue without first being continent. It is important to note that, for Aristotle, doing the better thing willingly is a better position to which we should aspire, but climbing up the ladder of virtue is already sufficient to make someone a good person. Full virtue and complete harmony could only be the destination we reach after a long journey of cultivation of emotions.

Yet, the question still remains: how can we make our souls come to love and enjoy being virtuous? Aristotle’s answer is that when your will and reason are in complete harmony, you do the desirable thing with pleasure. Otherwise, it is continence, which is a state with a lesser degree of moral worth. Let us assume we have cultivated our emotions and habituated ourselves to do the virtuous thing. Now, I always “want” to do the right thing. Still, one cannot help but wonder how we can make ourselves “enjoy” being virtuous. Aristotle’s reply would be simple: the virtuous person, upon moral deliberation, rationally chooses the virtuous thing to do, and because he is acting in conformity with his rational part and because his rational part has supremacy over the emotional part, he is expected to perform the action pleasurably. However, this is not totally convincing; no matter how many times we “choose” or “want” to do the right thing, we might still not be able to “take pleasure” from doing the right thing. I might be able to acquire the habit of sleeping less after considerable effort, but I cannot get myself to “enjoy” this. If we define a virtuous person as the one who both “wants” and “does” the virtuous thing, then this is understandable. Yet, when it comes to “enjoying” or “taking pleasure from” the virtuous action, we are usually short of actualizing this at will.

Then, is it ever possible to be truly virtuous? Evidently, Aristotle is optimistic on this issue. He believes true virtue is possible as long as proper cultivation is provided. Nonetheless, virtue does not come without effort; it requires time and tender care — being virtuous is not possible without persistently doing the right thing and trying to strengthen our rational part so that it will have supremacy over the appetitive part. Only then can people ascend to true virtue rather than staying at the level of continence. And this journey is not something we could afford to overlook, since it harbors true happiness.

Despite Aristotle’s invaluable contribution to ethics, he falls short of providing satisfactory answers to many intuitive questions regarding how and why the human soul enjoys being virtuous. His ultimate answer revolves around the happiness of the soul and there is no greater gain other than having the best possible life that is characterized as the eudaimon life. This is not a bad ideal, but its significance is quite negligible compared to the greater ideal of gaining an immortal life of happiness and beauty. Yet, since Aristotle does not believe in an immortal soul, his arguments do not include references to eternal happiness. Given this, no matter how convincing the ethicists’ arguments are, there will always remain a question: Why would I care so much about a life that is doomed to end? Why should I take the trouble to fight with my desires and make myself a so-called virtuous person? Moreover, complete happiness is almost impossible to attain in a life that we know to be short. Even though we could lead a happy life through virtue, knowing that it will last merely for this life makes it bittersweet at best. Without immortality, we are like birds that are kept in cages in this finite world, trying to find the best way to lead a good and happy life–a small and finite goal. Instead, finding the real eternal Divine source of why our souls find happiness and peace in virtuous actions and knowing that this joy is to last forever, can grant us true happiness. Whenever we act virtuously, say, giving to the poor without expecting anything in return, we are actually imitating and aspiring to the character of the Divine who is the most Generous. Similarly, whenever a person forgives another, he would be acting in accordance with the Divine mercy that is exemplified in the name of the All-Merciful. Hence, engaging in such virtuous acts gives the person unprecedented joy of the soul because such participation in the Divine goodness is greater than other sorts of pleasure. Furthermore, with immortality such acts do not merely stay in this life; on the contrary, performing these virtuous acts become the key to eternal happiness. Acting virtuously is good because these acts derive from God’s character Who is the source of all goodness, truth, and beauty. As long as a human soul can reflect this beauty as a mirror, his actions gain intrinsic value, and she can reach true happiness, not only in this life but also in the eternal afterlife.

M&B: Dr. Mitchell, you have been teaching your course on the Bible and Modern Science for the last nine years. Could we start with the contents of this course and why you were interested in teaching it?

Dr. Mitchell: I’ve been teaching this advanced course in the religious studies minor since 2000, and it’s been a longtime interest for me. Since I started teaching at universities in 1974, I have included a study of the relationship between science and the Bible in almost all of my courses because I think that is probably the least understood controversy.

With the attempt to have a little epistemological humility-that is, I am not a scientist, I don’t claim to be a trained scientist-I am not trying to convert anybody, whether they are atheist or Christian to any particular point of view. My primary approach to this topic is to help both Christians and atheists to read the Bible because I think a lot of the confusion and a lot of the controversy about science and the Bible is the result of somebody not sitting down and explaining to people how to read the Bible. This debate is very heated in America. It splits families, it splits schools, and it splits churches.

So the course is unashamedly an attempt to help people incorporate what they are learning about science with their Christian faith, or with their faith, whatever it is. In a sense I lean in the opposite direction to some of the science teachers, in that many of them tend to lean toward mocking or making fun of the faith of people who believe, for instance, some of the more recent writers like Dawkins and Hitchens. I feel my job is to be a person on the campus who offsets that influence. So, first of all I focus on how to read the Bible. But the importance of learning how to read the Bible arises because the history of science in Europe and in the United States has been based on a conception of what science is and what faith is and how to relate the two which is really not based on knowledge; it’s just based on some poorly known incidents between Galileo and the Church.

M&B: Historical experiences?

Dr. Mitchell: Yes, historical experiences. One of the things I read when I was at Rice University was W.T. Stace’s Religion and the Modern Mind. The conclusion he came to is one that I think is very important for people to know-that among the basic things that were discovered in the Scientific Revolution, there was nothing which should have had the slightest tendency to either prove or disprove faith, or even the existence of God. So, the fact that in the West, there was an Age of Faith, followed by an Age of Reason, then an Age of Unbelief is not for any scientific reason. It’s because of a psychological transition that took place, or because people misunderstood what was really discovered in the Scientific Revolution.

The modern conception, or the modern myth, is that Christianity and other religions just went along through the Middle Ages being totally ignorant of science, which of course is a historical nonsense. If they had been totally ignorant of science, there never would have been a Scientific Revolution. People believe that science was actually suppressed so much by the Middle Ages that it took an explosion of unbelief in order for modern science to develop. So, I make sure that people understand that all of the revolutionaries of modern science were religious believers and the idea that somehow some atheist dropped out of the sky and won the battle with the Church is nonsense. There was no battle between science and the Christian faith in history. The only battle was a battle that occurred among Christians about how the Bible should be read in the light of modern discoveries. And that continued for a long time.

M&B: What was the nature of the conflict that occurred between Galileo and the Catholic Church?

Dr. Mitchell: The battle within the Catholic Church was not primarily over the Bible or over faith; it was a political battle based on the fact that the Catholic Church knew that it was then losing its hold over the entire Christian faith and was also losing its control primarily over political power.

That’s what scared them, and so when they talked about being afraid of what Galileo said, it wasn’t primarily because they necessarily disagreed with it. It was because of their fear of the confusion that it would cause among the faithful, the Christians who were not well-educated. But they obviously could not hold that back. It was going to burst. But a part of the Roman Catholic church, a very small part of the Roman Catholic church, namely the Pope and the Office of the Inquisition, treated Galileo very badly. There are some things that people need to know about Galileo, and one is that he was a very ornery person, very difficult to get along with. That’s one of the reasons they had a problem with him. The Pope was a friend of his and didn’t necessarily disagree with him; he just thought that he was being obnoxious. Galileo would never recognize the description of him as this giant anti-Christian, anti-faith person who stood up to the Church and the Church punished him for it. He considered himself to be a good Catholic, he considered himself to be in conformity with all basic Catholic doctrine. The only reason he wrote was to try to show Catholic people that they did not have to reject the new knowledge that was coming about. Not only that, the main battle was not over the Bible; it was over Aristotle. The Pope and the Inquisition did not try to punish Galileo because he was a Christian or a Catholic or because of the Bible. They tried to punish him because he was too hastily critiquing and trying to do away with Aristotle, and Aristotle had become the scientific philosophy of the medieval Church. Now, Aristotle is not a Christian, and I take a little time to point that out. So, they were fighting about Aristotle’s view of the universe, not the biblical view because the Bible doesn’t have a scientific description of what the universe is. That’s the reason why we Christians, just like Muslims, started working on science; they adopted Aristotle because Aristotle was the scientist, and Ptolemy too. One of the main points I’m trying to get across is that there never has, in the history of the world, been a battle between Christianity and science.

Also, I like to remind people that Copernicus was published by the Church, and that Galileo was published by the Church. There was nobody else to publish their works. Indeed, the foreword to Copernicus was written by the Pope-though a different Pope than Galileo’s. There is no doubt that there were ignorant people and hostile people, but they were all Catholics arguing. It wasn’t science versus faith. The same thing happened with Protestantism, as science in the west was transferred primarily through Protestants because the people in England and Holland and places like that who carried on the scientific tradition were the Puritans. The Puritans were the ones who carried science forward. In other words, to put it bluntly, science is a gift of religious people to the modern world. Religious people should know that so that they do not think that they have to be reactionary. In fact, we don’t ordinarily think that way. I would say a good portion of the people who teach science, and even philosophy, at the universities in the area where I live are faithful people.

Now, as for specific areas that Galileo dealt with, he told some folks, for instance, that he had a telescope that could see that there are more than seven planets. According to the story, Archbishop Bellarmine refused to look through it because the Bible says there are only seven planets. In fact, the Bible doesn’t discuss the subject. It was Aristotle who said there were only seven planets. Again, that was a fight between Galileo and Aristotle. But some of the Bible people would throw out things like a passage in the Book of Joshua which is taken from a poem from the Book of the Wars which we don’t have. The only thing we have from this book are quotations like the one in Joshua, and it’s poetry. In this poem in the Book of Joshua, it says that the sun stood still in the valley of Aijalon, and then Joshua was able to complete his battle against the enemies of God. Well, some of the Bible people said, “Well, that’s just absolute scientific proof that the sun moves around the earth.” But there were a lot of medieval theologians who knew that wasn’t the way you should interpret the Bible. So, Galileo did a lot of speaking on that subject when he wrote his letters to defend his case, particularly his letter to the Grand Duchess.

A lot of people today think that one of the things that bothered the Church at the time of Galileo was that they believed that the earth was flat. The Church did not believe the earth was flat at the time of Galileo or at the time of Columbus, but that’s still the street talk. In fact, Thomas Aquinas knew of only one theologian in all of the history of the Church who argued that the earth was flat. Thomas Aquinas said that he was an ignoramus because Aquinas believed, as did Aristotle and Ptolemy, that the world was round. The picture many people have of medieval science is as if it were done by ignorant people and that in order for modern science to win they had to overcome the ignorance of all of these medieval scientists including those in Seville. But of course that’s where Aquinas had gotten his science-from the Muslims in Andalusia. That’s where he’d gotten his Aristotle. So the High Middle Ages was not the Dark Ages. That’s a mistake lots of Americans make, including PhDs in universities, talking about the Middle Ages as the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages preceded the Middle Ages. And that was a dark age. But the High Middle Ages was not a dark age. It was an age of the most intense intellectual ferment in human history, and certainly in contrast to every place else in the world, except the Muslim world, where the same thing was going on. So, you see, those are ideas that I’m trying to let people know about. For instance, to explain that the idea that the sun stood still in the valley of Aswan is from a poem that’s taken from a non-Biblical book.

M&B: How about the genealogy of Prophets in the Bible?

Dr. Mitchell: There is genealogy in the early part of the Bible, which treats genealogy as if it were chronology, which is all you can do if all you have is genealogy. They treated genealogy as chronology. All traditional cultures have these genealogies, but they cannot really be used as chronology. First of all, their purpose is different from chronology. Their purpose is to keep the genealogy or lineage. So, for instance, there are some genealogists in the Christian Bible that say, “Jesus was the son of David that was the son of Abraham.” It’s a genealogy. Obviously, it is not very complete.

M&B: So, by “son,” it means “grandson”?

Dr. Mitchell: Yes, it means descendant-or an ancestor-but there are other considerations. If we consider the genealogies to be scientific chronologies, then we’re still thinking of the Bible as primarily a scientific book. But, whether it’s true or not, it became fairly accepted by Christian geologists and others in the nineteenth century that geology certainly seemed to say that the world was older than six thousand years. At that time they thought it was maybe 200,000 years old, and every few years since then it has been pushed back. But they did not consider that change a threat to their faith because they understood that the Bible was written for a different purpose. They understood that if we spend all of our time trying to make it concordant with scientific theories, first of all, the two will never be concordant because scientific theories change every generation. Second, it would mean that the people to whom these books were originally revealed could not possibly have understood them because they would be scientific books and science is not something they were interested in; it was not something that they could comprehend. So, that argument about the sun standing still did not last very long, and even most modern-day scientific creationists do not try to argue that that poem has to be taken as a literal scientific view. Otherwise, you’d have to do the same thing to the Psalms and so forth. In fact, there are several creation accounts in the Hebrew Bible that are different from the creation account in Genesis because they’re for different purposes. In fact, all creation accounts are doxological; they are praise that God is the Only One-He is the One God, that the moon and the stars and the planets are not gods, that the animals are not gods, that human beings are not gods and so forth. Even though they are not gods, they are still good. So, that’s what we should have been carrying on, instead of carrying on this debate about science-especially with these ridiculous stories that are added to it.

M&B: So, it’s not right to read the Bible as a book of science to draw strict conclusions.

Dr. Mitchell: The point I want to make is that both Christian fundamentalists and atheistic fundamentalists are too uptight about this question, and that is detrimental to religious faith. Some people come into my office crying because they just learned that the earth is maybe more than six thousand years old, and they say, “Professor Mitchell, I’m losing my faith,” and I say to them, “What do you mean you’re losing your faith?”

“Well, the Bible says the earth is six thousand years old, and my professor says it’s more than six thousand years old.”

“Well, you’ve got a Bible,” I tell them, “and I’ve got a Bible over there, so why don’t you show me where it says that the earth is six thousand years old?”

What is changing is that you may be changing a belief, and that’s not the same thing as losing your faith. You’re changing a belief, and if you’re a forty-year-old person of faith or a hundred-year-old person of faith, you shouldn’t probably have all of exactly the same beliefs that you had when you were eighteen, and that’s very important to people.

To the atheists, I want to say that they should learn a little bit about history and the philosophy of science and logic, and learn what faith is, so that they have a little bit more respect for people of faith, even if they are the extremists, because every time they write about something that is going on in a school district or whatever, they act like they’re in a panic. That is, they seem to think that if we allow people to believe that human beings are the creation of God, science is lost. Well, the problem for that argument is that all of the people who were scientists up until their great grandfathers or their grandfathers were people who believe that human beings are the creation of God, and science didn’t die.

Yuksel A. Aslandogan is the editor of Muslim Citizens of the Globalized World: The Contributions of the Gulen Movement.

To begin with, we can agree, as pointed out by Mason and McCall Smith (1984, p.107), that what constitutes the state of being a person, or personhood, is a matter of moral decisions, not of scientific facts. The relevant arguments are therefore primarily based on some moral, philosophical and theological hypotheses. However, even these arguments are informed by the scientific knowledge we have recently obtained about the condition and development of the human embryo. Insofar as the question is a moral one, arguments fall broadly into two groups, those that follow a secular approach, and those that follow a theological approach.

According to the secular approach, the basic condition for being a person is being capable of valuing one’s own existence. And the moral difference between a person and non-person lies in the value that persons can give to their own lives. Through language a person can comment on and declare awareness of awareness or fully developed self-consciousness (ibid. pp.l9, 21). Command of human language is thus offered as the decisive criterion. On this argument, pre-embryos, embryos, fetuses and very young infants are living beings, even living human beings, but they are not human persons. So, morally, we owe them nothing.

In his widely read article ‘A defence for abortion and infanticide’, Tooley (1973) observed that it is important to be very clear about what makes an entity a person, what gives that entity a right to life. He went on to define five necessary properties: 1) the capacity to envisage a future state for oneself, and to have desires about it; 2) the capacity to have a concept of a self; 3) being a self; 4); the capacity for self-consciousness; and 5) self-consciousness. As unborn babies, very young infants and PVS patients do not fulfil these requirements; they would not qualify as human persons. Singer (1993, p.87), in a forceful line on personhood, made a point of comparing human ‘animals’ with non-human animals, arguing that there could be a person who is not a member of our species and, conversely, there could also be members of our species who are not persons.

Those writers who, by contrast, accept the spiritual side of being a human person, have used different arguments to define personhood but, generally, link it with the human embryological state. Keith L. Moore, one of the foremost embryologists of our time, answered the question ‘When does the embryo become human?’ as follows: ‘The scientific answer is that the embryo always had human potential, and no other, from the time of fertilization, because of its human chromosome constitution. Two things are definite: (1) human development begins at fertilization, and (2) the zygote and early embryo are living organisms. My personal view is that the embryo becomes human being during the eighth week when it acquires distinctive human characteristics’ (Moore, 1989, p.72). 

Most of the writers who think that human personhood begins at some stage of embryological development base their view on various theological arguments. Before explaining these arguments it will be useful to give some historical background.

Aristotle (d. 322 BC), considered the first thinker to speak explicitly of human life as beginning in the womb, wrote: ‘the soul is the cause and the first principle of the living body’ (1957 edn. p.4l5b). He suggested that, when first formed, the embryo would have a nutritive or vegetative soul, replaced in due time, as a result of the causal influence of the particular semen’s pneuma, by the sensitive soul. Finally, in the case of a human, the rational soul would emerge to complete the generation of a human offspring. Aristotle associated quickening and differentiation into distinct stages of 40 days for the male and 90 days for the female, and so has been traditionally interpreted as placing the beginning of the individual boy and girl at those times respectively.

Aristotle’s ideas on this subject influenced many philosophers and scientists from prior to Christian times right through to the Middle Ages, notably Thomas Aquinas (d.1274), and for several centuries afterwards. His ideas also shaped the views of philosophers and scientists from the Islamic world and the East. For example, according to Musallam (1990), the method of lbn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) consisted of bringing Aristotle’s facts up to date, then re-stating the original Aristotelian arguments on the basis of the new facts.

Aristotle’s concept of the soul as the cause and first principle of the living body is confirmed by all monotheistic religions with little divergence. Despite significant differences on other points, these religions share the concept of life as sacred because given by God, and therefore forbid the termination of an innocent human life after it has been given its soul. However, they differ in their understanding of when this happens and what it means. Christian theology is definite that ‘immediate animation’ or ‘ensoulment’ is the instant at which our humanity is determined, but is uncertain when that instant occurs. Mahoney sums up the Christian theological position on the beginning of a human life as follows: In point of fact, current Roman Catholic teaching on the time of human ensoulment is one of uncertainty. Official Roman Catholic teaching is that we cannot be absolutely certain when animation takes place, or when the conceptus or the fetus is a human person; but it may well be precisely at the moment of conception’ (Mahoney 1984, pp. 6 7-9).

Evidently, in the monotheistic religions, certain topics can only he discussed knowledgeably after clear Divine guidance or Revelation. Without such guidance, human beings simply cannot know when ensoulment takes place. Because this information is not disclosed in the Christian scriptures, there is uncertainty on the subject among Christian authorities.

In the case of Islam, the situation is quite different. The creation of the human individual, fetal development and ensoulment are referred to in several dozen verses of the Qur’an in various contexts (32:8-9, 23:13-14, 71:14, 16:4, 75:37-9, 86:6, 77:20-1, 76:2, 22:5, 96:1-2, 40:67, 39:6, 53:45-6, 35 11, 3:6). Also, in the second source of knowledge after the Qur’an, namely the Hadith, there are a number of sayings of the Prophet, upon him be peace, which specifically address the subject of the embryological stages of a human being and the time of ensoulment.

From these texts, the great majority of Muslim scholars have understood that ensoulment takes place 120 days after conception (al-Nawawi, 1965 edn, p.189). However, when the relevant verses and ahadith are considered more carefully, the time for ensoulment should be put at between 40 and 45 days after implantation (the detailed textual discussion to support this view cannot be given here; see Aksoy, 199-) This means that. 49 or 55 days after conception, a human individual, with all the attendant rights, can be considered to exist, due to ensoulment having taken place.

Aristotle’s argument that ‘the soul is the cause and the first principle of the living body’ should not be dismissed as a religious myth. Something important is lacking in all our reflections on the subject if we take into account only the material existence of living beings. Although life is a continuous process, the physical existence of living beings is finite. If a human is taken as an example, every single cell in a human body has a limited (and programmed) lifespan. Some cells live a couple of hours, others a couple of days, weeks or months. After that they die and are shed. It is now known as incontrovertible fact that, with the exception of certain brain cells, all the cells in a human body are replaced with new cells every two years. Thus, in two years time, as regards my physical and material existence, I will be a completely different being from the one I am today. So, if I murder someone today and am caught after two years, I might say: ‘It was not me who did the crime. It was not exactly ‘this brain’ that planned it, not ‘these feet’ that walked to the scene, not ‘this finger’ which pulled the trigger’. This defence is logical and must be acceptable if I am only a material being. Of course, our current legal systems are not based upon the (false) assumption that a person is a merely physical being and therefore I would be unable deny responsibility on these grounds.

There should be something beyond merely physical existence that makes me me. Parfit (1984, Part 3) has discussed the nature of a person and sought answers to such questions as: What makes a person at two different times one and the same’? and What is necessarily involved in the continued existence of a person over time? He defines two kinds of sameness or identity: qualitative identicalness (or exact alikeness), and numerical identicalness (or one-and-the-sameness). He writes: ‘Two white billiard balls are not numerically but may be qualitatively identical. If I paint one of these balls red, it will cease to be qualitatively identical with itself as it was. But the red ball that I later see and the white ball that I painted red are numerically identical. They are one and the same ball’ (ibid., p.20l). According to Parfit, a person is a separately existing entity, distinct from his brain and body, and his experiences. What makes an individual at two different times one and the same person is psychological connectedness and/or continuity, with the right kind of cause. The psychological connectedness is the holding of particular direct psychological connections. And the psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness. Parfit addresses these and similar matters extensively and intelligently in his Reasons and Persons (ibid.).

All the Divine religions and some philosophers name that which provides the necessary continuity to make a person as soul. According to the authority of religion, a living human being consists of body and soul. Soul cannot manifest its existence without a body, and a body cannot be animate and survive without a soul. They are like glove and hand: just as the glove is an inanimate piece of cloth until the hand enters it, so the body becomes a human person only when the soul enters it. Likewise, just as when the hand is removed, the glove reverts to a piece of cloth, so too the human body ceases to be identifiable as a human person when the soul departs. Aristotle expresses the soul in this famous, graphic image: ‘For if the eye was an animal, then sight would be its soul…. so that when sight leaves it is no longer an eye except homonymously, much as we might say of a dead body that it is our friend; in one sense it is but in a very different sense it is not’ (Aristotle, 1957 edn, p.412b).

In sum: when the body meets with the soul it comes to be a human person, with all the attendant rights, especially the right to life.

References

• AKSOY, S. (199-) ‘When does a human individual begin to be?: A philosophical, embryological and theological perspective’. (Unpublished paper)
• AL -NAWAWI. (1965 edn) Sahih-i Muslim Bi-Sharh-i Nawawi, Kitab al Qadar, vol.16, Matbaa-i Misri. Egypt.
• ARISTOTLE (1957 edn), On the Soul (De Anima), trans. W.S. Hett. W. Heinemann, London and Cambridge, Mass.
• MAHONEY, J. (1984) Bio-ethics and Belief Sheed & Ward, London.
• MASON, J.K.& McCAll. Smith, R.A. (1984) Law and Medical Ethics, Butterworths, London.
• MOORE, K,L..(1989)Before We Are Born, W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia.
• MUSALLAM, B. (1990) ‘The human embryo in Arabic scientific and religious thought’ in G.R. Dunstan, (ed.) 7 ‘The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, University of Exeter Press, Exeter. pp.32-46.
• PARFIT. D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• RISPLER-CHAIM, V. (1993) Islamic Medical Ethics in the Twentieth Century, E.J. Brill, Leiden.
• SINGER, P. (1993) Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• TOOLEY, M. (1973) ‘A defence of abortion and infanticide’ in J. Feinberg (ed.) The Problem of Abortion’, Wadsworth Publication Company, California, pp. 51-91.

The Qur’anic descriptions and those in the Hadith are remarkable for their accuracy in relation to what is known about the subject now. But, what was known then? Until 1688, among Muslim as well as European scientists, the Aristotelian account dominated, no one daring to question it. The two theories in Aristotle’s time were: (a) the embryo is preformed as a miniature in either the male semen or the female secretion and then grows in the womb; and (b) the embryo is actually formed and created out of the menstrual blood. Aristotle favoured the second view, adding that male semen caused the menstrual blood to coagulate, like milk curdling into cheese. The Qur’anic description tells us, by contrast, that (a) the embryo is not pre-formed but grows in successive stages (71.13-14, 23.12-14,22.5); and (b) is formed equally of male and female fluids (76.2). The relevant ahadith re-state what is in the Qur’an. Interestingly, while exegetes of Qur’an and Hadith did not fall into error in their account, many Muslim scientists and doctors, under the spell of Aristotle, repeated Aristotle’s (incorrect) view. Thus, about 700 years after the Revelation, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani commented: ‘Many of the anatomists claim that the semen of the male has no role in creation of the baby. Its role, they claim, is limited to curdling the menstrual blood… The saying of the Prophet denies what they say. The semen of the male actually participates equally to that of the female in formation of the embryo.’

The pre-formation theory lasted in Europe into the 18th century when it was believed that a full miniature existed either in the female ovum or in the male sperm, then simply got bigger in the womb. This theory was destroyed gradually and was no longer held in any form after 1900. Von Baer (1829-37), called the ‘father of embryology’, identified the human ovum. Subdivision of the egg, i.e. growth of the embryo in successive stages, was properly demonstrated and understood in 1839 by Schwann and Schleiden. And in 1875, Hertwig described the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. Then in 1883, Von Benden showed that male and female cells contribute the same number of chromosomes to the embryo.

However, not until this century, have a number of discoveries established how and when the sex of the embryo is determined; how and when the hones and musculature, the organs of sight and hearing, the nervous system, and so on, develop. It is rather more than remarkable, therefore, that in Qur’an and Hadith we should find unmistakably accurate and detailed references to these matters.

The earliest of the successive stages of embryo development is the nutfah, in turn distinguished as male and female nutfah (in modern terminology, gamete), the two being commingled to form the nutfat amshaj (zygote). The Qur’an clearly and explicitly states (75.3(t), 53.45-6, 59. 58-9) that the sex of the embryo is carried in the fluid ejaculated by the male (X or Y chromosome in the fertilizing sperm). Also, in the Qur’an s emphasis that growth is from a lucre drop of fluid, we find a clear pointer to the fact that the spermatozoa make up a mere 0.5% of the ejaculated fluid, in which tiny quantity are carried an average 2 to 300 million individual sperms.

The nutfat amshaj (zygote) develops into ‘alaqah (that which clings) which attaches itself to the uterine wall. The stunning precision of the term ‘alaqah for the detail of how the zygote attaches, implants and is nourished in the womb, is striking in Dr Albar’s account. (For even more on the detail, see Sikander Hussain ‘Al’Alaq: the mystery explored’, Ark Journal, London, 1986, pp. 31-6.) The ‘alaqah is transformed into mudghah (chewed lump), the somite(s) from which hones and muscles are subsequently differentiated. The mudghah stage includes also the pharyngeal arches (out of which face, ear and neck are formed) – the marked indentations give the embryo the look of a ‘chewed lump’. The Qur`an’s allusion (22.5) to mukhlaqa and ghairu mukhlaqa, formed and non- formed development of the mudghah, is now readily understood as the critical period of organogenesis, when the embryo is most susceptible to factors which can cause congenital malformations. The Qur’an says (2.259): kayfa nanshuzu-ha thumma naksu-ha tahma, ‘how We erect them (the bones) then enclothe them in flesh’. Nanshuzu-ha, here inadequately rendered ‘We erect them’ is as informative as any modern textbook description, for example ‘With time a number of needle-like spicules are formed which progressively radiate from the primary ossification centres towards the periphery.’

The pre-formational aspects of embryo development are now understood as hereditary characteristics contributed by parental genes. In the Qur’an (81). 17-19), the nutfah (male and female gametes) is said to carry these predetermined characteristics. There are several ahadith confirming this reading. One, in the Sahih of Muslim, explicitly mentions 4O -42 days after fertilization as the moment when the angel enters the womb and ‘gives the nutfah its shape and form, creates its hearing and visual apparatus, builds up the hones, the muscles and forms the skin. He then asks, 0 God, is it a boy or a girl, what is its livelihood and what will be its lifespan? God gives His answer and the angel writes all that will come. ‘The textbooks tell us that ‘In the sixth week of development the Primordial germ cells invade the genital ridges; if they fail to reach the ridges, the gonads do not develop..’ The site of formation of the gonads is indicated in Qur’an 86.5-9 as ‘between the backbone and the ribs’. This is exactly right. Once formed the gonads differentiate into either male and female and make their progress in the body accordingly. Blood and nerve supply and lymph drainage remain connected, even in the adult, to the area ‘between the backbone and the ribs’.

In this review only a few of the great many correspondences between the Quranic text or ahadith and current knowledge about human embryo development have been mentioned. What is the point of noting these? Almost all of these Qur’anic verses have as their general context a reminder of the resurrection. The re-creation of individual human life after death. We are confronted with the fact of life as a stunning miracle of the Mercy and Omnipotence of the Creator. Knowledge of the successive stages of growth from the near-nothing of a spot of bodily fluid cannot but create a sense of awe at the responsibility one carries for the miracle of one’s life. And one carries it hack to Him whose care initiated, ordained, proportioned and sustained our life – the contrasted human contribution being that drop of ‘lowly fluid’. Then, what – except perversity – could allow us to doubt that the Creator has concern for how we use our lives, or doubt that He can and will bring us again to life so that we may ourselves understand fully the worth of our intentions and actions? Also, these verses, urging a meditation upon the fact of life rather than upon the fact of death, educate a positive temperament, a positive attitude. Religious responsibility can be awakened by reflecting upon the wonder of birth, as much as by reflecting upon the mystery of death.

No textbook about human embryo development can inspire reflections of this kind. Of course, it is also of the utmost importance to know that the information in the Qur’an, given in words which are extraordinarily precise and yet remain generally intelligible, is accurate. Most non-Muslims do not believe that the Qur’an is the Book of God verbatim, as Muslims believe. In trying to make sense of the phenomenon – so copiously illustrated by Dr Albar from the field of human embryology – of how so much accurate knowledge is there in the Book, they may be led to question the assurance with which they hold to their non-belief.