Religion and science do not always disagree

„Our attitude to the free will question is intimately linked to the dualism-monism debate. Dualists believe that there are two separate entities, soul (or mind) and brain, and most maintain that they somehow interact, following Descartes. Monists deny a separate soul, saying that everything is matter. This links in with the question of free will, because if you believe in a separate nonphysical soul/mind that somehow influences the brain, you must assume that conventional physical and chemical forces do not completely determine brain function.

This debate is sometimes caricatured as a rearguard defense by religious or spiritually minded traditionalists against the attacks of modern science and atheistic philosophy, but there is not such a neat dividing line. The first philosophers to invoke physical indeterminism as necessary for free will were the materialists Epicurus and Lucretius, who denied life after death and supernatural intervention in the world. Judaism was monistic throughout the Old Testament era, and early Christianity appears likewise.

It is true that neo-Platonist dualism was incorporated into the philosophies of many leading Christian thinkers including Augustine, Luther and Calvin, but over the last couple of centuries these were opposed by equally Christian monists such as Joseph Priestley, the nonconformist minister famed for isolating oxygen, who argued that dualism was a contamination of biblical Christianity by Platonic philosophy. Over the last 60 years monistic philosophy of mind has gained ground among Christians because of increasing evidence that the biblical conception of man is monist, not dualist. For example, the Hebrew word Nefesh, traditionally translated as »soul«, does not refer to a separate, Platonic soul and is nowadays usually translated as »being«.”