“The body’s the hardware and the soul
is the software – makes everything work.”
Eve S2 E9, ‘Giving Up the Ghost’ (2016)
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| A computer hard disk, apparently. Ideally, I’d have a picture of some software, but it kind of doesn’t look like anything. |
The following are some of the many
reasons why I’m a huge fan of CBBC drama:
1)
It’s enormous fun. Dramas intended for an adult audience
so often lean towards a kind of dark, moody, intense seriousness, devoid of
jokes and frequently rather depressing, so that one can appreciate them
well enough, but it’s hard work actually enjoying them. CBBC drama, on
the other hand, tends to blend seriousness and humour in what I would consider
more appropriate proportions for creating something genuinely entertaining.
2)
The storylines tend to be very good, because they have to
be. They have to carry the programme: it simply hasn’t got enough budget to get
by on high-octane action scenes or really good visual effects or big-name
actors. Neither is it allowed to render itself appealing by means of excessive
sex and violence. On which note…
3)
I’m quite keen to avoid the sex and violence and swearing
which drama for adults so often seems, for some reason, to feel the need to
contain. Mainly the sex, if I’m honest, because I know the kinds of sins my
brain is prone to and the content I would therefore do well to steer clear of.
4)
Episodes are usually half an hour long – I don’t think
they’re ever longer – so keeping up with a series doesn’t take up too much of
one’s time. This, I tend to feel, is an important consideration when one is in
one’s final year of university and has also been mad enough to start a weekly
blog.
5)
It’s on the BBC, so there are no adverts.1
Many of my favourite CBBC dramas
revolve around pretty much the same premise: a bunch of teenagers with
something to hide spend their time solving mysteries, pulling off elaborate deceptions,
and generally getting into scrapes. It’s the ‘something to hide’ that gives each
programme its unique flavour: they might use an attic in Ealing as a base for
fighting alien invasions (The Sarah Jane Adventures); or pursue a
desperate desire to bring their traditionally-minded vampire family into
something resembling modern human normality (Young Dracula); or try to
keep the genius inventions of one of their number out of the hands of a rather
cultish underground organisation in fifteenth-century Florence (Leonardo);
or juggle the life of an average schoolchild with that of the wolf into which
they are capable of transforming at will, and compelled to transform when there
is a full moon (Wolfblood).
 |
| The whole double-life, going-to-school-as-normal-while-hiding-some-huge-secret premise is frankly always a winner. |
But today I’m talking about Eve,
in which the ‘something to hide’ is that the title character is a sentient
humanoid robot masquerading as the niece of one of the technicians who worked
on her. The second series of the programme recently finished airing;2
its overall story arch consisted of the threat posed to Eve by an
anti-artificial-intelligence organisation called PRICE. Towards the end of the
final episode, ‘A Change in the World’, Eve and another robot, KT, manage to escape
a wide-range EMP blast that would have destroyed them both, only to be
confronted by the man who arranged it, Mr Gwenlan, who is brandishing another
EMP device. Although Eve as a programme raises plenty of interesting
ethical questions, as one might expect from its subject-matter, I thought the
conversation that follows was particularly worthy of consideration.
Eve: KT, we did it. We outran the EMP.
Gwenlan: And why would two human girls need to run from an EMP? … I
should have known from the moment you stopped my car. But you just looked so human.
Eve: I
am human.
Gwenlan: You’re a machine.
Eve: I
am both, as are you.
Gwenlan: I’m not a machine.
Eve: Your
body is – a machine made of flesh and blood – but you are not your body, any
more than I am mine.
Gwenlan: What am I, then?
Eve: You
are your memories. You are what you believe yourself to be. That is what makes
you human.
Gwenlan: A human being has a soul.
Eve: And
where is your soul, Mr Gwenlan? You cannot see it, or touch it, but you believe
that it’s there. Why should we be any different?
Gwenlan: You could have left KT and saved yourself. You helped her.
Why?
Eve: Because
I believed that I should, just as you believe that you are a good human. Does a
good human kill? Did you ask your son how he felt when he killed Adam?
At that point, Mr Gwenlan lowers the
EMP, the scene shifts, and we infer from their later showing up unharmed that
he let Eve and KT go. (He himself makes no further appearance.)
This scene really got me thinking. Actually
how much is there in Eve’s argument if we lay it against a Biblical view of
what it is to be human?
Eve declares that Mr Gwenlan is not his
body any more than she is hers – as if the essence of a person really were like
software that could theoretically be downloaded onto any machine, aka body,
unchanged. The idea that body and soul are analogous to hardware and software
was already expressed a few episodes ago, when Eve took an interest in the possible
existence of ghosts after fellow robot Adam (imaginative, I know) was destroyed
by an EMP at the hand of Mr Gwenlan’s son Cain (they really enjoy pilfering
character names from the book of Genesis on this programme). I can’t say,
however, that I’m very convinced by such an analogy.
The Hebrew for ‘soul’ is ֣נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh)
and it’s a word that pops up all over the Old Testament, but, if your favoured
Bible translation isn’t rather archaic, you probably miss it most of the time.
Compare Leviticus 5:2 between the King James and English Standard Versions:3
“Or if a
soul touch any unclean thing, whether it be a carcase of an unclean beast, or a
carcase of unclean cattle, or the carcase of unclean creeping things, and if it
be hidden from him; he also shall be unclean, and guilty.” KJV
“Or if
anyone touches an unclean thing, whether a carcass of an unclean wild animal or
a carcass of unclean livestock or a carcass of unclean swarming things, and it
is hidden from him and he has become unclean, and he realises his guilt.” ESV
I suspect unclean
carcasses were not exactly where you were expecting this conversation to go.
Still, what I’m getting at is the way the word ֣נֶפֶשׁ is used.
It refers not just to the software but the whole self. It’s not one’s inner
essence or personality or consciousness or whatever that touches the carcass,
but one’s body, yet the KJV, translating literally, renders if a soul
touch. Note also that the bodily action makes the person unclean;
the scenario in question concerns someone who unknowingly touched an
unclean carcass. This is really more of a hardware than a software issue.
Of course,
elsewhere, ֣נֶפֶשׁ is used in a very ‘software’ way. Try
Psalm 42:5: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil
within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation.” So, from a
Biblical perspective, the soul can only be the whole shebang. To distinguish
body and soul as two separate components of the self – as hardware and software
– doesn’t work. The soul is the whole self, hardware and software. We actually
use it like this in some contexts in English too: think of the popular folk
etymology for the mayday abbreviation ‘SOS’, namely that it stands for ‘Save
Our Souls’.4 Presumably, the imperilled quite want their physical
bodies to be saved along with their mental consciousnesses. Or one might say of
a deserted place that there wasn’t a soul there, meaning that there weren’t any
people full stop.
So Eve’s
assertion that she and Mr Gwenlan are not their bodies doesn’t stand up. They
are their physical selves as much as they are their mental selves, because the
two cannot be plausibly divided. And her subsequent statement that Mr Gwenlan
is his memories and what he believes himself to be – I shudder at the sheer
postmodernist subjectivism – rather falls down as well. I could believe that I
were a good runner or a magical fairy or a creature not naturally deserving of
God’s wrath,5 but in truth I am none of those things. Moreover, the
beliefs I hold have not the slightest effect on that truth. And as for these
things making one human, well, what if I were to believe myself not to be
human? Or what if I were to lose my memories? Would I really no longer be a
human being?
Mr Gwenlan
then offers his own idea of what humanity is, namely having a soul. It’s not at
all apparent where he picked up this notion, but in any case, he seems to be
taking more of a soul-as-software line of argument than the Biblical
soul-as-whole-shebang one I outlined above. Eve reminds him that he can’t see
or touch the soul he believes himself to have and he seems unable to refute
her. In fact, Eve actually has a point here: if that which supposedly
(according to Gwenlan) makes one human is completely impossible to sense or
measure, why should she and her fellow robots be any different? Is there
some kind of acid test for humanity that can be applied here?
 |
| I of course use the term ‘acid test’ metaphorically. |
The
Biblical accounts of the creation of humanity would seem to be a good place to
look for clues on this subject. Genesis 1:26-27 says that humans (specifically,
as opposed to animals) are created in the image of God, so that would seem to
be a distinctive feature of humanity – but there doesn’t seem to be any way one
can prove whether one is made in the image of God. So, moving on, Genesis 2:7
says that, when God first created a human being, he “breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” (For the record, ‘creature’
there is actually ֣נֶפֶשׁ again. Letting the side down, ESV.) Again,
how does one prove whether one has the breath of life in one? Well, this time,
I reckon we do actually have a way.
Genesis 2
isn’t the only occasion when God breathes on people to bring them into life.
Towards the end of John’s gospel (20:22, to be precise), Jesus breathes on his
disciples and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit. What does that achieve?
Have a look at what Jesus said to Nicodemus several chapters ago (3:3-6): “Truly,
truly, I say to you, unless one is born again … unless one is born of water and
the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh
is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” The disciples
receive the Holy Spirit and are thereby born of him, enabling them to enter the
kingdom of God. And why did they need that? Try Ephesians 2:1-5: “As for you,
you were dead in your transgressions and sins … but … God … made us alive with
Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.” The disciples needed to be
born again (spiritually speaking), because (spiritually speaking) they were
dead. How come? Scoot all the way back to Genesis 2 again, verses 16-17: “the Lord God commanded the man,
saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of
it you shall surely die.” Now, spoiler alert: Adam and Eve (talking about
actual Genesis characters rather than CBBC ones now) did eat from the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil, and in the day they did (spiritually speaking),
they died. Later, they died physically too. And in this way, looking at Romans
5:12 now, “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and
so death spread to all men because all sinned.” So in short, in the words of
Romans 8:10, “if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your
spirit is alive because of righteousness.”
Where am I
going with this? Well, if Jesus breathing on the disciples in John 20 is
equivalent to God breathing into Adam’s nostrils in Genesis 2 – both represent
being brought into life – and if having had God breathe the breath of life into
one, as per Genesis 2, is definitive of what it is to be human, then the
potential to the receive the Holy Spirit, as per John 20, is likewise
definitive of what it is to be human. That’s not to say that someone who hasn’t
received the Holy Spirit is not human – just not alive (spiritually speaking). Anyone
who has the potential to receive the Holy Spirit must be human: that is
my proposed acid test.
Unfortunately,
it seems doubtful that the creators of Eve will ever pursue any
storylines whereby Eve is proved capable or incapable of receiving the Holy Spirit.
Still, there is a hint that she might be capable in the fact that she displays a
genuine sense of morality, in having rescued KT because she believed she should,
and in asking Mr Gwenlan moral questions about murder. One receives the Spirit
by trusting in Jesus – check out Ephesians 1:13: “In him you also, when you
heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him,
were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” – and trusting in Jesus requires an
awareness of having done wrong and needing to repent. Jesus himself said so, as
recorded in Mark 1:15: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at
hand; repent and believe [or ‘trust’] in the gospel.” So Eve’s awareness
of right and wrong is evidence of her humanity, but not by any means
definite proof.
There’s
plenty more to be said on this subject, but it would be unfair on both of us, O
Commendably Persistent Reader, to make this post very much longer than it
already is. I shall therefore depart with one more reason why I’m a huge fan of
CBBC drama:
6)
In its own way, it deals with
matters no less current, controversial, important, and thought-provoking than
any adult drama you care to name. Whoever said this stuff was just for kids?
Footnotes
1 If I
have, by any chance, persuaded you to go and peruse the selection of CBBC drama
on offer, the following list may prove useful: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/programmes/genres/childrens/drama/all.
2 And is
currently available on iPlayer in its entirety: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b06g95c6.
3 I’ll give
you the King James so you can go on a ‘soul’ search through the rest of the
chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+5&version=KJV.
That’s it for Bible Gateway links today. There would simply be too many of them
and it’s getting extremely late. But you should still look this stuff up to
check I’m not just sticking some random numbers after a book of the Bible and
making up any old rubbish.
4 It was
actually just chosen because SOS is really easy to transmit and receive in
Morse code (it goes like this: … _ _ _ …) Believe Oxford Dictionaries if you
don’t believe me: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/sos.
5 Ephesians
2:3.
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