The point, that man is greater than the sum of his parts, can be made easily by breaking a man into his parts and then reassembling him.
Obviously the result of the exercise would be quite dead.
Thank you so much for your wonderful essay-posts.
Even that project itself would be a most daunting enterprise to stage: the qualification of "parts" reaches, not only to the organic/systemic levels, but importantly, to the molecular, and sub-atomic levels as well.
But your main point was, for the scientific method to answer this question, one would have to kill the subject in order to abstract its parts for analysis. And if you do that, you are no longer talking about a living organism/living being. You are finally talking about the isolated behavior of "dead" molecules, and how that "sums up."
Such an approach entirely misses the point of what it takes to describe a fully living human being: We are not merely the sum-total of the configuration/deployment of an astronomical number of material molecules deploying (in their mutual relations) "randomly." The fullness of human experience/existence — the universal human condition — is finally not at all describable in, or "reducible" to such terms.
What we may call the "vagaries of actual human history" emphatically tells us that this presupposition is patently not true; and thus, meets a logical dead end....
"Philosophy" already knows this. When will "science" catch up?
Thank you ever so much for your excellent insights, dearest sister in Christ — and for your kind words of support.