(no subject)
I'm listening to the audiobook version of "Spook" by Mary Roach (best known for her previous book, "Stiff"). It starts slow (the entire first disc is a vaguely ethnocentric look at Hindu reincarnation beliefs), and the woman who reads the text is smarmy as hell, but Disc 2 is an interesting hodgepodge of stuff about echinoderm sex and Le Petomane and the white batter between your teeth.
Anyway, she quotes a modern philosopher who argues that a zygote/fetus/whatever can't possibly have a soul any earlier than day 15, since it's still possible for it to cleave into twins up until that point. If the "ensoulment" happens before the split, then obviously we've got a bit of a theological problem, what with twins apaprently being left with only half a soul each.
Boy, wouldn't that have been a great antidote to all the fawning over the McCaughey septuplets a few years back? Especially if the public could be convinced that fraternal multiples were also splitting a single soul among them? Imagine Katie Couric opening her interview with the parents by dubiously eyeing the children, wrinkling up her nose, and saying, "Seven kids from one pregnancy? You might as well have given birth to gerbils."
Anyway, she quotes a modern philosopher who argues that a zygote/fetus/whatever can't possibly have a soul any earlier than day 15, since it's still possible for it to cleave into twins up until that point. If the "ensoulment" happens before the split, then obviously we've got a bit of a theological problem, what with twins apaprently being left with only half a soul each.
Boy, wouldn't that have been a great antidote to all the fawning over the McCaughey septuplets a few years back? Especially if the public could be convinced that fraternal multiples were also splitting a single soul among them? Imagine Katie Couric opening her interview with the parents by dubiously eyeing the children, wrinkling up her nose, and saying, "Seven kids from one pregnancy? You might as well have given birth to gerbils."