On 2019/02/24, Roman Catholics who attended the Mass for Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time (Cycle C) heard St Paul telling the Corinthians:
It is written, `The first man, Adam, became a living being,’ the last Adam a life-giving spirit. But the spiritual was not first: rather the natural and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, earthly, the second man, from heaven. [The entire reading is 1 Corinthians 15:45-49.]
Let me put this in terms compatible with our current empirical and verifiable knowledge about human beings:
The man who is natural is the human animal who evolved from an ancestor common to humans and chimpanzees.
The man who is spiritual has developed a sense of wonder and a higher level of capacity for abstract reasoning. He has looked into the sky and has wondered if there is some meaning behind all of this confusion. He has detected the presence of some divine force though he misinterprets it as forces of multiple spirits, some of them more mortal than immortal. At some point, men at this level of evolution gathered into communities increasingly complex over time, communities which gathered and which stayed together to engage in the collective worship of moral gods. (See Is Modern Atheism a Result of High Loads of Genetic Mutations?.) Eventually, some such men began, and still begin, to worship the one true God. Eventually, the Son of God came to teach men a little about the internal life of this one true God, an internal life of interaction between Father and Son and Holy Spirit. He offered a share of this life to those who wished to be His friends.
The meaning of St Paul’s analysis is retained as it is re-interpreted in terms of what we now know about God’s acts-of-being, His acts of Creation and His acts of sustaining, acts described better by Einstein and Darwin than by those who saw the Almighty as a magician.
It’s time for us to move on and, in acknowledgment of God as Creator of this evolutionary and developmental world, to realize that the Church Fathers were wrong, though their error was understandable: we need to confess we are conceived and are born as human animals (human natures in some philosophical and theological terms) and are raised by God to the status of His friends, as we play our role by properly responding to the Almighty or, at least, to His Creation.
The soul isn’t necessary. What’s necessary to me as an individual is for God to choose me as a friend to share the life of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, in the world of the resurrected. Arguably, the conjecture of a soul is nothing more than a pagan-like attempt to guarantee our survival into an afterlife (the region of the damned or that of the saved). Wrongful metaphysics and wrongful theological speculation couldn’t see how we could survive without a part of us having continuous existence, though they couldn’t have told anyone what it meant to have such continuity between this part of Creation and the part in which the resurrected share God’s life. God created each of us one time in our mother’s womb and, yet, we continue to exist only because of acts of sustaining us in being, acts-of-being which aren’t so much different from an act of creation from nothingness. Each of us exists as a focus of God’s love. He can direct His love into the world of the resurrected and, then, we exist there as the focus of the same love, the same act-of-being which is us.