When developmental psychologist Paul Bloom wrote:  "Children are natural-born dualists," and "we [scientists] should tell people the truth bout what we have found, without exaggeration or sugar coating," his statement was considered to be heretical by psychologists and anthropologists who "cannot conceive the mind apart from the concrete material --the brain --of whose function the mind is an effect."

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Such a person is psychologist Paul Harris who critiqued Bloom's groundbreaking article Natural-Born Dualist by declaring, "This is a neat story but I don't believe it."  Any evidence which pointed to a spiritual dualism, Harris the atheist reduced to "a neat story."  IDENTITY or PERSONHOOD, for Harris, was located in the brain, not the soul.

 

Theoretically, this implies that PERSONHOOD and LANGUAGE simultaneously came into existence when invisible, empty “units of  culture” structured in the brain were filled with meaning-content imported from the outside. In the words of structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, “it is only forms and not contents which can be common.  If there are common contents they must be sought......outside the mind” in SOCIAL EXISTENCE.

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While, as theologian Colin Gunton makes clear, stating that "social existence is not essential to our being as humans," for the naturalists it is foundational.  Before “naked apes” could become PEOPLE, meaning-content derived from SOCIAL EXISTENCE had to be imported and attached to the proper forms or “units of culture” structured  in the brain which Lévi-Strauss, the naturalist, called the “mind.”     

 

When the correct form structured in the brain and  the proper meaning-content generated by naked apes living together in trees were connected through a process called Natural Selection, a miracle took place. The precise moment when meaning-content was attached to units of culture and language,  apes began  to descend from the trees, shed their hair, began walking upright, and became PEOPLE.

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Like Harris,  Lévi-Strauss was a “secular dualists.”  But neither, as Richard Webster points out, was proclaiming a “fresh theory of human nature but Judaeo-Christian orthodoxies which have been reconstructed in a secular form, safe from the attacks of science precisely because they are presented as science.” They replaced a mind-body supernaturalism with a brain-body materialism as presently advocated secular dualists.

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For Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Language was born all at once. Whatever the moment and the circumstances of its appearing in the range of animal life, language has necessarily appeared all at one. Things could not have begun to signify gradually.  ...a change has taken place, from a stage where nothing has meaning to a stage where everything had [meaning.”

 

Despite the evidence of a mind-body based dualism, Bloom, as a committed materialist writes: “there is no consensus as to how mental life [and personhood, culture, and language] emerged from a physical brain, …there is no doubt [for the committed naturalist] that this is its source.”  For Bloom to doubt the “source” would be the first step is acknowledging the existential truth expressed in Genesis 3 of the Word of God.

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Now the source of what Bloom calls “common sense dualism" can actually be found in Genesis 2:7 which states that "the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living PERSON." The act of the LORD “forming” a PERSON contrasts with  the LORD’s act of “FORMING out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the air"(Genesis 2:19).

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“Common sense duality” has its source in the first act of “forming.” We note that in Genesis 2:7 were the referent is man, the Hebrew word wayyiser, ‘formed’ has two yods as marked by the arrow. In Genesis 2:19 where the referent is “BEASTS of the field” and BIRDS of the air, the  word ‘formed’ has only one yod.