John C Pilkington: The soul stands for "the real me"

From a lecture on genetics and the soul by the winner of the 2002 Templeton Religion Prize, given at St Paul's Cathedral, London

My hope and expectation for the science of the 21st century is that an entirely new and fertile way of thinking about nature will develop, complementing the reductionist/constituent way in which we have thought over the last 350 years.

The physics of past generations was based on a bits-and-pieces approach, thinking in terms of exchange of the energy between particles. That approach was certainly not wrong, but it has turned out not to be wholly adequate. We need also to be able to think holistically in terms of overall behaviour, as well as reductively in terms of parts.

The key to the new thinking will surely lie in being able to deal with patterns of holistic behaviour, and the key to understanding such pattern-generation will lie in a suitably enhanced and generalised concept of information, the means by which patterned behaviour can be specified and described in dynamical terms. I believe that by the end of the 21st century, information will have taken its place alongside energy as an indispensable category for the understanding of nature.

We human beings are psychosomatic unities, a package deal with mind and matter in an inseparably complementary relationship to each other. This is a conclusion that would not have surprised the writers of the Bible.

In a famous phrase, they thought of human beings as "animated bodies", rather than "incarnated souls". We are risen beasts and not fallen angels trapped in the flesh. If Christianity has often seemed to have bought into a dualist account of human nature, that has been because of platonic influence on its development, rather than being drawn from its scriptural roots.

If human beings are psychosomatic unities, what then has happened to the soul? Has it been lost altogether? I do not think so. The soul stands for what one might call "the real me". The "real me" is not the matter of my body, but it is the almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern in which that matter is organised. That pattern is my soul , the carrier of continuity.