The Spirit as a Homunculus

Although we take them for granted, the details of how babies are made have only been discovered over the last 150 years or so. Prior to that not much was known about it--aside from the obvious. Also a mystery was the process of development, about which there were two general schools of thought. Tracing back to Aristotle, epigenesists held that development was a process of emerging formation from formlessness. In contrast, preformists thought that the sperm (or egg) contained a miniature person--a 'homunculus'--and that development consisted of the enlargement of this preformed anatomy.

Preformists had to deal with two outstanding problems: that children had traits of both parents rather than just one, and the absurd implication that all of humanity was contained in the body of Adam (or Eve) like miniature Russian dolls. As science has progressed it has become clear that preformatism is wrong. Each person inherits genetic information from both parents, and development from a single cell occurs through a process of emerging organization, structure, and differentiation as cells alter their gene expression in response to their local environment.

The homunculus may be an outdated scientific idea, but it lives on as the spirit body in Mormonism [1]. While searching for something totally unrelated a while ago, I ran across this passage written by Joseph A. West in the May 1920 Improvement Era.

The gospel teaches, however, that the life-giving, intelligent, and immortal part of man is the spirit, which is in the exact likeness of the body, the growth and development of which are occasioned, according to Orson Pratt [2], one of the former Council of the Twelve, by the elastic force of the spirit in its effort to expand the body to conform to its spirit dimensions, and that, if the body is not stunted or deformed by some abnormal act of nature, it becomes, in every function and feature, an exact counterpart of its spirit life.

Although West was more detailed than most in his explanation, it is not hard to find similar statements using D&C 77:2 and Ether 3:16 as support. For example, in Vitality of Mormonism James E. Talmage wrote (p.243),

The human body, so far as it is normal, undeformed and unimpaired, is a presentment of the spirit itself.

Other Church leaders such as President Joseph F. Smith said similar things in the context of the resurrection of children. These ideas can still be found in the Church, but often there is less emphasis on the degree of correspondence between spirit and body.

The statements referenced above were all made no later than 1920, a time when science had little to say about heredity and development. For comparison, the first two decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the field of genetics, followed by molecular genetics in the second half of the century. Embryology and developmental biology have seen great advancements as well. From today's perspective, there doesn't seem to be any role for the spirit to shape the body, which makes the comparison to a homunculus apt in another way.

Homunculus arguments are fallacious arguments in theories of vision or mind that account for a phenomenon by invoking the same phenomenon that they are intended to explain, resulting in an infinite regression. For example, if you explain vision as the result of a little person (so to speak) inside you who views the images gathered by the eyes, you have not really explained vision; you have merely added another viewer.

Thus the spirit can be compared to a homunculus in two ways. First, there is the idea expressed by West that the expansion of the spirit is what shapes the physical body. And second, attributing physical features to the form of the spirit not only clashes with the demonstrated truths of genetics and developmental biology, but it also adds another layer to the mystery without really explaining anything. (What determines the shape of a spirit? And what determines the shape of that? And so on.)

None of this is to deny that we have a spirit, but it does raise questions about doctrinal traditions that developed in a pre-scientific environment. At the very least, I think we should be cautious in interpreting D&C 77:2 and Ether 3:16. It may also be worth re-evaluating what these scriptures mean, or looking at a range of possible meanings (for example, see Kent Condie's article, Pre-Mortal Spirits: Implications for Cloning, Abortion, Evolution, and Extinction).


Notes:
1. I don't know whether any Mormon commentators directly borrowed preformist ideas. As far as I know, the similarities are at best indirectly related.

2. I have not yet found such a discussion by Orson Pratt. If anybody knows of one, please tell me.

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