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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.

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.

betty: "...since science cannot observe the "what is more than the physical" of man, it is stipulated that it doesn't exist. Reality is reduced to what man can measure. God is gone; the soul is gone; Nothing replaces them."

Spirited: The "science" in question is evolutionary materialism and/or naturalism and is in every way the antithesis of two-dimensional Christian theism, even to the denial of man's immortal soul:

"Materialism is of the worldview of (one-dimensional) monism which is held in common by pantheism and spiritualism and dates back to pagan antiquity and was or is taught by all non-biblical thought systems.

Greek Stoics and Epicureans, for example, were materialistic monists and these two schools of natural science and evolution held the ancient world of thought in allegiance well into the Roman Empire. Epicureanism reigns supreme in our own age through modern evolutionary materialism, which is merely revamped and revised Epicureanism.

The pagan philosopher Epicurus (342-270 B.C.) believed in an infinite number of worlds, or parallel universes in the words of contemporary 'new' pagan materialists. Like his modern counterparts, Epicurus taught that there was no god or gods, first principles, moral law, souls and afterlife as all things on earth had evolved from the earth material.

Epicurus preferred lower things to higher things, as do his contemporary followers, thus he taught that "all that exists" is an eternally existing void and animated matter. This made human beings, their intelligence and volition, an evolved accident of chance. Reason is left, but reason is active only because sensations (i.e., firing of neurons, chemical interactions) stimulate it." (The Fall of Mankind, Linda Kimball

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kimball/120620

As the taproot of modern evolutionary materialism stretches back to Epicurus, and beyond him to Egypt, it is correct to define it as "new" paganism. Materialism is nihilistic because it conceptually nihilizes all Higher Things as betty noted: "God is gone; the soul is gone; Nothing replaces them."

Man is Nothing:

“Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

The very air we breathe today is nihilism:

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” ― Flannery O'Connor

The practical result of evolutionary materialism is nihilism (spiritual impoverishment)...

"a void in which men vainly seek for meaning and purpose. Always seeking but never finding. When higher things disappear, only the despair of meaninglessness, the pleasure principle, hectic diversions, personal power, and toys remain. And all of this said Solomon, is vanity, for it ends only in death. There is always a grinning skull behind everything we do, including both the Conservative and Liberal struggle for control of secular society." (Ecclesiates: Vanity of Vanities--Western Society is Without Meaning

http://patriotsandliberty.com/?p=17723

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.

So very true!

"Philosophy" already knows this. When will "science" catch up?

I can't be soon enough for me.

Thank you so much for all your wonderful essay-posts, dearest sister in Christ!