Neuroscience and the Soul – Dr. William Hurlbut

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. William Hurlbut explores the profound questions raised by neuroscience, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, emphasizing that the human soul—understood as the organizing principle of embodied, personal, and purposeful life—remains irreducibly distinct from animal, mechanical, and computational processes.

This lecture was given on October 7th, 2025, at The Ohio State University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

William B. Hurlbut is a physician and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University Medical Center. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the Dean of the Chapel at Stanford, and subsequently with the Rev. Louis Bouyer of the Institut Catholique de Paris.

His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology and philosophy of biology. He was instrumental in establishing the first course in biomedical ethics at Stanford Medical Center and subsequently taught bioethics to over six thousand Stanford undergraduate students in the Program in Human Biology.

Dr. Hurlbut is the author of numerous publications on science and ethics including the co-edited volume Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue (2002, Oxford University Press), and “Science, Religion and the Human Spirit” in the Oxford Handbook of Science and Religion. He has organized and co-chaired three multi-year interdisciplinary faculty projects at Stanford University, “Becoming Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Spiritual, Religious and Moral Awareness,” “Brain Mind and Emergence,” and the ongoing “The Boundaries of Humanity: Human, Animals, and Machines in the Age of Biotechnology.” In addition, he was Co-leader, together with U.C. Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna of “The challenge and opportunity of gene editing: a project for reflection, deliberation and education.”

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Biotechnology, Embodied Cognition, Human Dignity, Imago Dei, Neurobiology, Personal Identity, Rational Soul, Reductionism, Transhumanism

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.2	Several years ago, I gave a talk at Harvard for this really interesting conference
0:30.0	called Editorial Aspirations.
0:32.4	And you think about it, human hands, what Aristotle called the tool of tools, the symbol of our distinctive
0:43.7	body form and unique capacities of mind, our comprehension, our creativity, and our control over the world in which we dwell.
0:56.0	And these hands, these human hands, are now turning to operate on our very selves.
1:01.0	So the question of soul is extremely important in our era,
1:07.0	because now we, in a strange metaphorical sort of way, may have the capacity to do something
1:12.6	about it.
1:13.6	In other words, reshape the expressions of soul within our individual and species existence.
1:21.6	According to the National Intelligence Council report Global Trends, 2030, alternative worlds, we are at a critical
1:32.2	juncture in human history which could lead to widely contrasting futures.
1:37.2	So what is this era where in this amazing combination of converging technologies in biology
1:43.9	and information technology, leading to important,
1:49.0	urgent, indeed, advances in biomedicine, but also in more fundamental agriculture.
1:56.0	Nowhere is the statement by the National Intelligence Council more evident than the promise
2:03.3	and peril of advancing biotechnology and associated applications of information technologies.
2:09.4	We need to have a sense of who we are, what is our source, what is the organizing principle
2:15.6	of our existence, and where we're heading individually and collectively, and this is the organizing principle of our existence and where we're heading individually and collectively?
	...

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