Naturalism

Okay. This blog will most likely not make any sense and will just be the overflow of some of my thoughts lately. I must admit, I am a philosophy wannabe. If you wish to hear the inspiration behind these thoughts, go here http://www.sebts.edu/chapel/chapelSchedule.cfm and listen to the lectures by Dr. J. P. Moreland.
Scientific Naturalism works off of two main beliefs: 1) scientific reality, and 2) the physical world. According to Naturalism, there is no soul. You are your brain and your central nervous system. In other words, you as a human being are controlled by chemcial synapses.
In contrast to Naturalism is Dualism. Rather than believing that human beings have no soul, Dualism adopts the belief that consciousness and the soul are different than the body and not physical. In other words, you are more than your brain.
Lastly, the Postmodern worldview states that you are your social self. In other words, you have no control over your personality or the way you think. Your environment and society cause you to develop into the person you are.
Dr. Moreland argues that your brain and your person are two separate things. According to Moreland, it is your "I," or your soul, that has consciousness. Persons (consciousnesses) are invisible, but we are placed within a body. For example, there is more than one kind of person. God is a person, yet He does not have a body. Angels and demons are persons, but they live in a different realm than humans. Consciousness is defined as having five parts: sensations, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and volitions. Although each of these things is different, yet they all work together in order to consist a full consciousness.
In Medieval times, the soul was divided into a hierarchy of three parts. In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis defines the hierarchy as follows: the rational soul, the vegetable soul, and the sensitive soul. Man's rational soul makes him distinct from the animals. Without a rational soul, man would not have the ability to think, reason, and speak. The sensitive soul has sentience, separating man from the animals by his ability to feel and express his feeling. The vegetable soul contains the powers of "growth, nutrition, and propogation" (Lewis 153). These three aspects must be in existence in order to constitute a human being.
In addition to the human soul being arranged hierarchically, human reason was also seen to be hierarichical. Reason was seen to control not only the emotions and passions but also the will. The Medieval philosopher Photius states, "Every other creature is guided by one principle, but we are pulled in different directions by our different faculties."
Medieval philosophy has been much on my mind lately because it makes sense to me. I like the concept of being controlled by reason and of having it hierarchically broken down into its various components. I also like the idea of the soul being directly related to our reasoning faculties. According to this philosophy, it is the ability to reason that gives man free will, or the capacity to make choices.
I don't really have a way to neatly tie up all of my thoughts and present them to you as a prettily wrapped package. These are just things that have been bouncing around in my mind lately. What do you think?