The ultimate leap of faith?

[MBPrata]

This ideia crossed my mind some years ago, when I was actually believing in the possible existence of the God of the Bible.

It goes like this: the boundaries between our brain and our soul are quite unclear (to the point of some people thinking we have no soul, just brain activity). Still, medicine has proved over and over that some changes in the inside of our body can change our entire personality, will and so on. Now, this idea would probably not be possible in our world, but let's pretend for a moment...that a person could clearly identify a specific part of our brain that contained all our will to sin. Like...a part of our brain that clearly controlled our moments of pride, rage, envy and any sort of will to confront God's will.

Then, let's assume that part of our brain, due to some kind of luck, had around zero importance to our survival as a human being. As if we could totally remove that part of our brain with a surgery and still work as a human with no major chances whatsoever.

Now, let's picture what a christian could do with this. (Again, this is just pretend, I'm not saying this could happen in real life.) Removing that part of his/her brain would be...an opportunity, maybe? A way to make sure he/she would never want to sin again? A way to "always" being in harmony with God, with absolutely no will of doing something that God might not appreciate? A way to feel no more the consuming agony sometimes caused by our inner conflict between listening to our will or God's will?

I think this in an interesting idea, but I'm not sure of how it would work when it came to the so-called "free will". I mean...according to some experts on this matter (which, in some cases, include mr. Deem), God sent us here so we could make use of free will to choose whether to accept God or not. This is already quite debatable, but the point is...technically speaking, doing that operation would end our free will?
I don't think we would, since we would still be able to choose between, let's say, fixing our friend's bike or suggesting he comes to work in our car (just an example, not necessarily the best). Still a choice to take, but both options would be helpful. And if we could still make a choice in our own, that means we would still have free will...wouldn't we?
Would God consider a sin to make an operation that could interfere with our free will? If so, why would He? After all, the decision to make the surgery had been done by "us" with all our free will. With all the possible choices we could make. Furthermore, it be a choice made towars God's will, not against Him. Wouldn't the possibility of totally removing our brain's "mean side" be the ultimate leap of faith? The ultimate action to fulfill God's will by making us not even feel like doing something He wouldn't wish?!

What are your thoughts on this?

[Jac3510]

I suppose it depends on your definition of "the soul" and how you think sin affects it. Regarding the former, you seem to have a Cartesian "ghost in the machine" idea driving your post, and regarding the latter, you seem (still with Descartes) to imagine that the soul (or at least sin) affects the body through some particular part of the brain. Descartes, for what it is worth, thought it was the pituitary gland.

I would reject both of those assumptions, so I don't think your pretend idea is even in possible in principle. I hold, as the Church has taught for about 1800 years at least, that the soul is not a ghosty substance that drives around a body but rather that it is the animating principle of the body, and therefore, fully present in every part of it. As such, there is not "part" of the soul in your brain and "part" in your hand and "part" in your heart, as if the soul were some liquid filling up your body. Still less is the soul this same ghosty substance "attached to" your body through the brain, in which case you would really be your soul and you just happen to drive around this thing called a body (as we have it in most movies . . . Ghost anyone?). I also don't think that sin damaged this or that part of the body, either. I think, for reasons I won't get into here, that the soul itself was broken or corrupted. And since the soul is the animating principle of the body, then if the principle is broken, then the body will be broken in some respects, too. But that means that while you can treat some of the symptoms of the brokenness, you can't, by treating the body alone, fix the underlying problem. In other words, sin doesn't affect the soul by affecting the body. That is backwards. Rather, sin affects the body by affecting the soul.