some additional thoughts about my demon-puppet objection

In the podcast Facebook group Skylar McManus asks some typically perceptive and insightful questions,

I’m hoping Dr. Dale Tuggy can clarify his “demon possession” thought experiment for us. If not here, then in his published statement in the (apparently) forthcoming book with Mr. Date.

The thought experiment is meant to show the following: For models of the Incarnation that hold Christ’s human nature is a concrete particular (both a human body and human soul), the divine Person who assumes a human nature is not truly human. That is because he is merely “piloting” a body.

A body and a soul – we’re not now discussing “Apollinarian” views.

Enter the thought experiment. Suppose a demon enters into a compositional union with your human body and soul, and deactivates your soul. This is supposed to be a state of affairs equivalent to that of the Incarnation. Here, Dr. Tuggy suggests, it’s just obvious that the demon is merely piloting a human body/soul, and therefore clearly isn’t a human.

Let me just interrupt here and say that I think you’re granting that in said scenario, the demon would not be a man. Good! But, you want to say that the scenario isn’t sufficiently or relevantly like the sort of incarnation theory mentioned above. The differences are great enough so that even if I’m right about the demon scenario, nothing would follow about the incarnation theory.

There are two problems with this thought experiment as suggested. The first is that this occurs, apparently, at a later time in the human’s (or “your”) life. I’ll return to this in a moment. The second is that the demon’s piloting your body isn’t like the hypostatic union because your human nature doesn’t subsist because of the union with the demon.

…Side note: Is “deactivating” a human soul even a coherent idea? Maybe, since I thought Dr. Tuggy’s conception of death is “the ceasing of all or most life functions.” Is that what occurs at this “deactivating”? Does the demon kill the human soul? If so, once again, how is this at all like the traditional tenets of the Incarnation?

Honestly, I don’t see why the first difference should matter. Imagine – now this is going to get weird – that God has lying around some extra bodies and souls. If and only if they’re assembled in the right way, they constitute a human being. But they’re just lying around disassembled. So our demon bribes some angel and gets one of each. And then he enters into a union with them, so as to operate through this “complete human nature” which is not a man. Does this make the demon a man? I would say not. Even if he lives out the life of Marilyn Manson. 😉

Now let’s add in the second change – now, the body and soul “subsist” – exist as a single substance/entity/thing – because the demon has assumed them. Somehow, he’s combined them, and thwarted the normal result of such a combination, which is the existence of a normal man. Would this, then, make the demon a man? I don’t see why! By hypothesis (I mean, according to this incarnation theory) that body and soul don’t compose a man. But even if they did, I don’t see why having a part which is a man would make you, the whole, a man. Nor would it make the other part a man. Is there a man in this theory at all?

Probably most dualists would say that the only essential part to a human is the soul. So there would be a man there in the demon scenario – a disembodied man. Would he be dead? It would seem so, if the “assumption” is not momentary, because he would have lost all or most of his normal life functions, e.g. breathing, talking, moving around with the body. Perhaps you think a soul won’t be an essential part of a human unless it is first united to a body. In that case, it matters whether the demon assumes a “fresh” or a “used” body and soul – in the former case there will be no human person at all in the scenario. Back to our friend Mr. McManus:

Why is that a problem? Because when the demon pilots your body, there are predicates that will be apt of you, as a subsisting individual, but will not be apt of the demon. For example, it is false that the demon has sensations through your human nature because *you* have them. You are the ultimate subject of predication (what the medievals called a “supposit”) even in this situation, not the demon. But on the Incarnation, the Person of the Son/Word *is* the ultimate subject of predication for all human predicates. How is this at all like what has been traditionally held about the Incarnation?

I don’t grant that this doctrine of “supposits” is even possibly true, as I think it involves individual properties which are had by more than one thing. I see “supposits” as purely motivated by a desire to solve problems with incarnation, and I think it is of no use whatever in metaphysics. No one even says they have any other use! (It’s even worse off in this respect than “relative identity” theory – and that is bad indeed.) BUT, if you think the eternal Logos can be the supposit (ultimate subject of properties) in the case of Christ, why not think that the demon would be a supposit in the demon scenario?

Here, I think, is where we get to the real problem with Pawl-type incarnation theories. If you really think the “human nature” really thinks, loves, suffers, get’s hungry, considers what to have for lunch, gets tempted, walks to Jerusalem (using a body), etc. – then you think that this thing (this combo of body and soul) is a man, whatever you decided to call it. You may, with Pawl and others refuse to call it a “person” or a “self” or a “human being” or “a man” – but at any rate, it is what the rest of us would call a man, a human self or human person. And so, this sort of theory terribly misfits the NT. It just doesn’t allow a man and also the Son of God. We can call it “Nestorian,” but I see no point in quarreling over that label. You just can’t read the NT that way, even though Origen did.

I think many who follow the tradition that “the human nature” is “anhypostatic” don’t think that properly speaking the human nature died on the cross, or got hungry, or cried. They think the one composite Christ did these things “through” that human nature OR that really the Logos/divine nature is the only agent and subject of those actions and states. In either case, I say, I don’t see a man here. Just as with Apollianianism – a god in a bod does not a man make – so here a god operating somehow through a soul and body would not thereby be a man, but just a god operating through a soul and a body. Now if you have a god operating through a man – now I see a man, be he’s not also divine.

Here’s one way to try to modify this: Suppose that instead of at a later time in your life, a demon “assumes” a concrete human nature from the moment of its conception. There is a truly human soul and body there, and hence a complete human nature. Through some compositional model of the Incarnation (like Katherin Rogers’ “action composite” model), we can say the demon is hypostatically united to the complete human nature.

But in this case, it sure seems like that demon really is truly human on the metaphysics presupposed by compositional models of the Incarnation we’ve been discussing. That person who is really an angel, and in fact a demon, is born, grows up, etc. Through it’s union with the complete human nature, it is true to say it has sensations, acts in the world, and that the human nature only subsists because of its union with the demon. But now the supposed obvious nature of the incoherence of the Incarnation disappears. Where’s the problem here?

I see a man in your scenario, but I don’t see a demon who has become a man.

Also, this thing (the demon) is neither a first human, nor does he exist because of any prior human. So it seems to me that he’s not a member of the human race, despite this remarkable use of a man (or of “a human nature”). I think something’s origin matters for this, not only its current qualities or what parts it has. Do you disagree? (I didn’t get in to this in the debate.)

Summary: If the “demon possession” thought experiment occurs at a later time in a human’s life, there are obvious disconnects that Dr. Tuggy ignores entirely that, it seems to me, make the intuitive feel of the thought experiment work.

When these disconnects are brought to light, it’s not at all obvious that the thought experiment shows what Dr. Tuggy thinks it does. And if we modify the thought experiment to be more like the Incarnation in all those ways, we end up with a truly human demon. So what? In that case, thanks for demonstrating the coherence of one way to understand the Incarnation.

Sorry, feel free to push back, but I don’t get it. If there was a man at the start of it all, then after the demon’s “assumption” we wonder what happened to the man. And possibly, in the modified demon scenario, where the body and soul never form a thing without being “assumed” by him, there never is a man, so we don’t wonder about his fate. But I don’t think either scenario is plausibly seen as the demon becoming a man.

Note that some here will just agree with me that there is no man in either the demon scenarios OR in the incarnation. They will say instead that the Logos becomes “man” but NOT “a man.” That is, “man” and “human” are now predicable of him because of his mysterious union with the human nature (which isn’t a man). In effect, they’ve traded the man of the NT for a being which is in some ways similar to a man and told us to call this “human.” But I take it this is not really consistent with the NT, but is docetism.

BTW I think Chris Date has to go in the direction of Pawl’s theory. He wants to have Christ be both timeless and yet in time – which requires that Christ has at least one part in time and at least on part outside it – and that’ll have to be the human nature and the divine nature, understood as two selves, one timelessly omniscient and the other temporally limited in knowledge. I would that all two-natures theorists would head in the direction of Pawl, as in my view that just puts them head-on against the NT – and then some will see that they need to make a choice: NT christology or this cherished two-natures speculation.