If Scripture doesn't address it how was 40 days picked?
Greek philosophy mainly. The ancient Greek philosophers maintained that human life developed through several stages in the womb: vegetative, sensitive/animal, and finally reaching a stage of full human development. Without the right tools and science, it was the best guess many had in the ancient western world. Christian thinkers more-or-less took some of these things for granted as descriptive of the processes of the natural world. It wouldn't be until much later that scientific advancements would give us a full picture of how reproduction works and fetal development works.
Scripture does say when Adam became a living soul. The body alone wasn't enough. My interpretation is that we became a living soul at first breath.
The ancient Hebrew concept of the
nephesh ("soul") wasn't the same as the later Platonic notion of a distinct, separate ghost-like thing, rather it referred to the breath of life. The
nephesh or soul was that quality of a living thing that marked it as
living, as opposed to a lifeless corpse. The Greek word
psuche means about the same as the Hebrew
nephesh; both can be translated as "breath" or "soul". Platonic philosophy stated that the soul was a deeper, separate reality from the body and that fleshiness was a degenerate condition. Aristotle argued, instead, that the soul of a thing was it's fundamental function or property, the example Aristotle gives is that of a knife, the knife's "soul", it's
psuche, is
cutting.
So such raises the bigger question of what "soul" is. I would tend toward the Hebraic view, though Aristotle's isn't too far off I think. I don't embrace the Platonic view, as it denies the central importance of material existence, of the
body, which Christianity makes paramount in its view of creation and salvation (that is, the resurrection of the body).
That said, I still maintain that Scripture doesn't quite address the question of ensoulment, as that's probably not the sort of thing those who wrote Scripture were particularly interested in addressing.
If the act of independent breathing is the determinate factor of having "a soul", then that raises ethical questions concerning those who are dependent on a respirator for breathing. It may be argued that this is somewhat of an absurd stretch, but not necessarily; what is the fundamental difference between being dependent upon the biological machinery of the mother or being dependent upon the artificial machinery of a respirator? I think, therefore, we need something much more substantive than simply the mechanical act of independent breathing. Human life should be more substantive than that.
-CryptoLutheran
