In a 2015 video, I facetiously argued that, based on his own philosophical assumptions, Dr. Richard Dawkins does not actually exist. Of course, I firmly believe he does. But, my point was that, given his view of the universe, in which things are merely interacting aggregates of subatomic particles, there is no place for substantial unities above the level of whatever ultimate particles compose the cosmos.

A substantial unity is a thing whose entire nature is the same throughout. Every part of it has the same nature. The nature of my foot or stomach is not “foot” or “stomach,” but “human,” since my entire being shares the same human nature.

I will demonstrate that human beings are substantial unities. Only then can one rationally discuss whether we, as living substances, have spiritual and immortal souls. Since it is materialists who primarily reject the human spiritual soul, I shall address my comments primarily to their objections.

Cartesian Catastrophe

Sixteenth century philosopher, René Descartes, grafted a spiritualist view of the human person onto a materialist-mechanistic view of the human body. Typically understood as maintaining that mind (res cogitans) and body (res extensa) are two entirely distinct entities, this doctrine raises grave problems for any rational explanation of soul and body interaction. Such a radical distinction between mind and body is referred to as extreme dualism. Historically, this extreme dualism led to diverse philosophies such as transcendental idealism and positivism.

The Aristotelian-Thomistic view of man’s nature rejects Cartesian dualism. I shall offer arguments for the hylomorphic (matter/form) nature of man, which simultaneously refute (1) Cartesian extreme dualism and (2) the atomistic view (like Dawkins).

Why Man is a Single Substance

Basic metaphysics reveals that, just as non-being cannot beget being, activity (being, as proceeding from something) must manifest nature (the way something exists).

The standard argument for an organism’s substantial unity is that, since all its parts act for the good of the whole, rather than just merely for themselves, it must be because they are in fact parts of a whole. The function of a stomach or foot is not to care for itself, but rather to serve the good of the whole organism. Indeed, the liver “sacrifices” itself detoxifying all the poisons we ingest, for example, alcohol – even to the point of its own destruction. The intelligibility of a part, as a part, cannot be understood except that it is part of a whole.

“Actions for the sake of the whole” are manifested through multiple levels in the case of reproduction and development of organisms, for example, a human being.

At the moment of conception, the newly formed, single-celled zygote contains all the organs needed to keep this new, unbelievably-tiny human being alive. At the same time, all the genetic material within the zygote is co-acting so as to govern its development in precisely such fashion as to produce the next stages together with all the changes which will still entail each organ serving the whole of the organism at that later stage of life. Finally, this whole process, at each and every stage of its development is ordering all its parts to the production of the adult human being, in which, again, all of his organs will be acting for the sake of his being a complete and functioning living adult human being. Thus, at every moment in his development, the internal forces at work within the human organism are acting to assure the survival and function of the organism as a whole – both in the moment at hand, at every subsequent stage in its development, and simultaneously – from the first moment of its existence – to assure the well-being of the entire adult human being.

While the above argues forcefully for the human organism’s substantial unity, even more striking evidence abounds for that unity as we wholistically experience our personal interaction with the physical world.

Direct experience of the world tells us that “incoming” data are flooding our consciousness -- data that presents itself as a direct encounter with physical reality. We experience this through our five external senses of hearing, tasting, smelling, touching and seeing.

These sense data represent “incoming fire” from the various external senses – which we receive and unify into a total sensible experience of a real physical world filled with unified objects, such as an attacking vicious canine. The oneness of our own being is manifest in the unity of our experience as the subject being physically mauled.

But it does not end there. We also react to the world by marshalling all our various powers of thought and will and motor skills to react to the incoming data in a manner largely under our control and directed by our will commanding various mental and physical acts. We react to the world with our whole being, all parts acting together to produce a unified reaction to the external data. Thus, we respond with all the various powers of our being – mental and material – to drive this attacking canine away. Not away from just our mind, or hand, of foot, or whatever part of the body is most directly involved – but from our entire being, all parts being simultaneously engaged to bring all our various spiritual, mental, and physical parts and powers into the action of defending our whole selves against this viciously attacking dog.

This is not the mere internal images or ideas of Cartesian thought thinking itself, but the lived experience of a self -- unified in mind and body, experiencing external reality as a whole and reacting as a whole to engage and repel a dangerous external attacker.

That is the reason why everyone is so instinctively certain that he but a single being, with both mind and body, existing as a unified substance interacting with a real physical world.

Some reason for the unity of the whole self must be posited. Such a reason, according to Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, would be the substantial form, or soul, which animates the entire organism to be and to act as a single substantial unity.

In response to all this, the materialist might still object that everything I have described could just as well be explained in purely atomistic terms – as responses of complex biochemical systems to external stimuli. But the key to refuting that claim is the simplicity of the experience of wholeness that permeates the entire sequence of experiences described above.

“Wholeness” of Experience Reveals Immateriality, But Not Spirituality, of the Soul

Metaphysical materialism cannot explain how cognition unifies, in a single simple act, what, physically, is extended in space and multiple in parts. The essential insight, as I more fully explain in another Strange Notions article, is that purely physical things can never apprehend the “wholeness” of an experience for the simple reason that physical representations are always extended in space. They always “image” something by having one part represent one part of the object and another part represent another part – with no single part representing (apprehending) the whole.

The most obvious example is a TV screen on which an image of an object is presented – one pixel at a time by hundreds of thousands of pixels – each one digitally “on” or “off,” but with no single pixel “seeing” the whole. The screen sees nothing. But, a living, sensing dog looking at the screen can see the image of another whole dog and bark at it. Why? Because the dog, unlike purely material things such as a TV screen, has something not extended in space, which enables it to apprehend the image as a single whole. Specifically, the dog has immaterial sense powers.

That is why machines sense nothing -- and no computer will ever understand the synthetic wholeness expressed in the intellectual judgment, “Cogito, ergo sum.” An aggregate of mere physical parts can never experience anything as a whole. Yet, that is precisely what can be done by animals and men. Even a dog, which has no spiritual soul, perceives another dog as a whole. Still, I am not saying that this “immateriality” in cognition is the same thing as “strict immateriality,” that is, spirituality. But, I am saying that what is immaterial is neither extended nor locatable in space.

Some modern materialists are puzzled by “qualia,” properties of experience that are not physically detectable, yet subjectively real. But anything genuinely physical must be locatable in space. Either qualia are locatable or not. If they are, then they are merely material. If not, then immaterial things exist. But clearly, experiences of “wholes” are not locatable in space, as shown above. Genuine immateriality is real – and physical reality cannot account for it, since non-being cannot account for being. What is locatable in space cannot account for what is not locatable. The reality of experiences of wholes is incompatible with a purely atomistic metaphysics.

What is clear in the example given earlier is that we experience as a whole both the incoming sensory data of the various cognitive faculties as well as our unified cognitive and motor response to that same data -- as in that hypothetical confrontation with a vicious dog. Since (1) solely an immaterial principle can apprehend such “wholes” and (2) the entire cognitive and motor acts of the person are apprehended as a functioning whole in such situations, it follows that an immaterial principle, which is what we know on reflection as the “self,” is at the very center of our functional operations as a human being confronted by, and reacting to, the external physical world.

This principle, which unifies (1) the activity of the sense organs, (2) sensation itself, and (3) all the intellectual activities of man into a functional whole, must not only be immaterial, but must account for the living human organism acting and being as such a whole, since we immediately experience both (1) the passive awareness of external objects acting upon us and (2) our personal direction of our coordinated faculties in active response to such objects. Since mere atomistic material components lack all immateriality, atomistic explanations fail to explain adequately the unifying and immaterial aspects of human cognitive and physical interaction with the world.

Because we experience sense objects under their proper material conditions, that is, as with particular height, width, color, shape, and so forth, it follows that the soul has at least some activities intrinsically dependent on matter and using material organs – thereby manifesting that it is not simply the pure mind or spirit that Descartes’ extreme dualism alleges.

Aristotle’s doctrine of hylomorphism maintains that various types of things are composed of form and matter, where (1) form specifies the matter to be the kind of thing that it is and (2) matter quantifies and individuates the form into a particular instance of the form. Aristotle attributes human acts, such as described above, to the form of the substance – the substantial form, which he also calls the soul. The soul is the unifying life principle of all organisms.

From the points made above, it should now be evident that (1) atomism is false, because it fails to account for the immateriality of cognition, and (2) extreme dualism is false, because it fails to note the dependence of sense experience on matter. Since the extreme alternatives of atomism and extreme dualism are both false, hylomorphism becomes the intermediate default position, which must be the true doctrine.

Spiritual Nature of Intellectual Acts

Nonetheless, the human intellect manifests other operations demonstrably totally independent of matter – actions such as self-reflection, understanding, judging, and reasoning. Since lack of space prevents explanation of why all these acts are strictly immaterial, I shall present just one argument, based upon the radical difference between the image and concept.

Eighteenth century Scotch sceptic, David Hume, failed to grasp the essential difference between the image and the concept. Hume maintained that all we know are sense impressions. What we take to be external sense experience he describes as vivid and lively sense impressions. Ideas are taken from memory or imagination and are less vivid. All knowledge remains at the sensory level. So, too, for modern materialists, all knowledge, whether direct sensation or “intellectual” ideas, is merely sensory in nature, and thus essentially mere neural activity and patterns ultimately based in the brain. Ideas or concepts are not qualitatively superior to sense impressions or images. Sensism reigns supreme.

But for Aristotelian-Thomistic classical philosophy, image and concept (idea) are radically distinct entities. Sense impressions or images are either mere neural patterns or dependent on them. In any event, being radically immersed in matter, they are expressed under conditions of time and space. This means that they are always singular, particular, concrete, and having material qualities, such as shape, color, size, and so forth, which make them imaginable. Thus, one can imagine a horse or triangle, but always with a particular shape, color, size, and so forth. Recall, this was how we knew that the immateriality of sense knowledge was not actually spiritual in nature, since its object was always under the conditions of matter, and therefore, did not exhibit total independence of matter.

On the contrary, the universal concept or idea utterly transcends all material conditions. Thus, horseness or triangularity is not even imaginable. Because universal concepts must apply to each and every possible concrete actualization, they can express the concrete physical characteristics of none of them. Thus, “triangularity” must express every possible triangle’s essence – be they obtuse, acute, or isosceles. That is why idealized sculptures of something like “triangularity” never express every single possible triangle, but only some idealized, but concrete, representation of the concept. So, too, there is no concrete ideal of “horseness,” since it must express the essence of every possible concrete horse. Indeed, some concepts are directly of spiritual entities which inherently cannot be physically expressed, such as justice, beauty, truth, oneness, and so forth.

The fact that the human intellect can form such spiritual entities, demonstrates the spirituality of the human soul, since the less perfect cannot produce the more perfect.

Nominalists claim that no such universals exist, but are rather merely names for multiple associated things. Yet, ultimately, there is no way to know which items should share the same predicate unless one already sees what is common in nature to them. More strikingly, no matter how we form them, the irreducible difference between image and concept remains evident as shown above.

And yet, if universal concepts reveal the spiritual powers of man, how is it that animals seem to recognize the common qualities of sense objects, as when the wolf knows all sheep? Such knowledge is not that of a universal concept, but merely a “common image,” whereby similar sensible qualities are perceived as similar in a singular image. It does not prove universal understanding of the nature involved, but merely a response to sensible similarities through the common image. The fact that an animal responds in a common way is no more impressive than that a computer can be programmed to respond to similar sensible objects, since (1) the computer knows nothing and (2) the human understanding of the universal concept remains radically incommensurable with mere knowledge of an image. My article on ape-language studies explains this entire subject in far greater detail than is possible in this short piece. Suffice it to note that for a cat to know the common image of a mouse has far more utility than would be the intellectual understanding of the internal essence – even though a human biologist would prefer the latter.

Because sense knowledge is always dependent on the individualizing, concretizing nature of matter, nothing spiritual is evinced by the animal kingdom. But, the fact that man can form and understand universal concepts free of all such conditions of matter reveals the spiritual nature of human intellectual operations, and thereby, the spiritual nature of the human soul. Since the human soul is free and independent of matter, it must have existence independent of matter as well. Therefore, the separation of that spiritual soul from the material body at death does not entail the end of life for the human person. Man dies, but his spiritual soul is immortal.

Since some operations of the soul are dependent on matter and some are clearly independent of matter, it follows that the human soul is a hylemorphic principle – neither totally separated from the human substance in life, nor yet so existentially dependent upon that composite substance as to be destroyed at death.

Unlike extreme Cartesian dualism, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical psychology recognizes the intrinsic relation of the human soul to the whole of man’s being. The fact that the soul integrates both material sensation and spiritual intellection in the same psychic human acts shows that it must be, not a totally separated spirit during life, but rather the substantial form of the living human being. Yet, that substantial form is a hylemorphic principle whose spiritual operations and nature enable it to survive the death of the whole man so as to assure immortal life for the human person.

Whether that form is reunited to a material principle through a resurrection process belongs to the science of theology rather than philosophy. Still, the natural ordination of the form to matter suggests the possibility of a future resurrection.

In a recent post here, I asked, “Do You Need God to Know That Abortion is Wrong?” I was prompted by two things: on the one hand, a series of articles defending the idea that we can be moral without God; and on the other, articles like this one, suggesting that opposition to abortion can only be “because God.” Those two positions don't work together. As I explained in the post,

The pro-life argument is simple: (1) human beings are alive from the moment of fertilization, and (2) it is morally wrong (and ought to be illegal) to intentionally kill innocent human beings. The first point is a scientific one. The second is a moral and legal one, one that science can’t answer. You don’t find human rights under a microscope, and there’s no experiment capable of proving that murder is wrong.

Since the scientific point is clear-cut and settled (it's inescapable that unique human beings are created at the moment of fertilization), everything turns on point (2). But the intentional killing of innocent human beings is what the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe calls the “hard core” of the definition of murder. So to frame the question slightly differently, to say that abortion is okay, you have to say that (a) murder is at least sometimes okay, and that (b) abortion falls within this class of exceptions.

This has sparked a lively debate, as well as a rebuttal from Steven Dillon. I want to address the kind of arguments being raised generally first, and then look at what makes Steven's position frightening.

I. Do we need to believe in God to know that all murder is wrong?

Broadly speaking, there are four major types of responses to this question:

1. Only Theists Can be Anti-Murder: If you argue that abortion is wrong because unborn children have souls, or if you argue that abortion is okay (at least up to a certain point) because they don't, you're making arguments that are inaccessible to atheists. In either case, you're acting as if opposition to murder can only be predicated on the presence of the human soul. If killing someone is only wrong if we're sure they have a soul, why aren't atheists pro-murder?
2. Murder isn't Always Wrong: If you argue that abortion is okay because killing one life can sometimes save two, or because our being pro-abortion is necessary for us to justify euthanasia and organ harvesting, then we've got a slightly different issue. In these case, you don't believe that murder is always wrong. You might have personally-convincing reasons for your views, like utilitarianism or a rejection of impaired human life, but at least own your own convictions. If you don't – if you insist on paying lip service to being uniformly opposed to murder, while holding to these positions – your advocacy will necessarily be incoherent, because you're arguing for two irreconcilable positions.
3. It's Okay to Kill Fetuses: If you argue that abortion is okay because unborn children don't meet the requirements to be protected human life, you're not showing that unborn children aren't scientifically and materially human beings. Instead, you're either saying that they're not really humans, for some immaterial and non-scientific reason (like the first group), or that they are a group of humans that it's okay to intentionally kill (like the second). Here, the clearest way forward would be for you to spell out your presumptions and beliefs: e.g., “I think that murder is only wrong when your victim can feel pain at the time of death.”
4. Abortion is Always Wrong: this fourth group includes those, including both religious pro-lifers and nonreligious pro-lifers like Secular Alliance for Life, who treat the prohibition against murder as absolute. This opposition (most clearly in the case of secular pro-lifers) is not based upon their recognition of a human soul. If you reject the existence of the soul and reject all forms of murder, this is the only camp to which you can rationally adhere.

All of Steven's arguments seem to fall within the first category. He doesn't dispute the biological evidence. Instead, he assumes (but stops short of acknowledging) that abortion is wrong only if the fetus has a human soul. If he's right, and you don't believe that anyone has a human soul, then you've got a problem rationally holding to the prohibition against murder.

II. Do We Need Metaphysics to Settle the Abortion Debate?

In his response, Steven takes issue with my twofold formulation. Specifically, he accuses me of conflating terms, between biological humans in (1) and metaphysical humans in (2). I'm actually doing no such thing: I mean human in the same sense in both (1) and (2), and reject the whole idea of humans who are biological-but-not-metaphysical (or vice versa). It's immoral, and ought to be illegal, to murder those that we recognize, scientifically, as human beings. Furthermore, any sort of metaphysical definition of “human” that fails to capture the entire set of all humans is a bad definition.

If Steven wants to hold that you need metaphysics to know that killing innocent human beings is wrong, or if he wants to carve out an exception to the prohibition against murder for those that (according to a metaphysics of his own making) he considers biologically-but-not-metaphysically human, he's free to make those arguments. But recognize that in each of these cases, he's the one shifting the conversation into metaphysics, and the one creating two classes of human beings.

I mention all of this for a simple reason. The rest of this article will be getting into specific metaphysical questions involving the soul. It would be easy, especially for an atheist or someone who thinks that only the natural sciences produce factual knowledge, to write off this whole inquiry as bunk. I certainly understand. But if you're going to do that, recognize that what you're rejecting is not my original argument, but Steven's attempt to carve out a metaphysical exception to the prohibition against murder.

With that in mind, let's dive into the metaphysics directly.

III. Is the Fetus Metaphysically Human?

This is the meat of Steven's argument. He asks, but doesn't answer, an important question: “What gets aborted?” To the extent that he gives any sort of answer, it's by negation. He denies that the fetus is human or even an animal. Based on his trifold distinction, the answer to his questions seems to be that fetuses are now a type of plant, but (likely, for obvious reasons) he doesn't spell out this conclusion.

He is led to this conclusion by two arguments, one good and one bad. The good argument is that there is a threefold distinction between plants (which have metabolism), animals (which can sense), and humans (who can reason). The bad argument is in how he understands this distinction. When Aristotle first proposed this distinction (In Book II, Chapter III of De Anima), he was looking at types of things. That is, a plant is the type of creature that can metabolize, an animal is the type of creature that can move and sense, and humans are the type of creature that can reason. In each case, the higher creatures also have the powers of the lower ones. By this standard, you're a human even when you're not reasoning, even when you're incapable of reasoning, as long as you're the type of creature that's capable of reasoning (which, of course, you are).

When Steven applies this distinction, in contrast, he's looking at whether you can currently employ these powers. That is, an animal is only an animal if it can sense right now. By this definition, you can't let sleeping dogs lie. Having fallen asleep (temporarily losing control over their powers of sensation), they cease to be animals, and thus cease to be dogs. You, too, lose your humanity every night when you fall asleep, by this analysis. You also cease to be a human if you fall into a coma (either permanently or temporarily), enter a sensory deprivation chamber, or get so drunk that your reason is completely impaired. If you go blind or become infertile, you similarly become less human, because you're less capable of employing your sensory or reproductive powers.

It takes very little to see the problems with such a position. After all, if someone slips Rohypnol into your drink and you pass out, are you still a human being with rights that should be protected? If Steven is right that human rights turn on whether you can currently reason or sense, the answer would seem to be no.

IV. What Is the Soul?

This, I think, suffices to answer his arguments, but there's an additional point worth clearing up. We often think of the soul as a sort of “ghost in the machine,” but that's not a good understanding of the soul. The Latin term for soul is “anima,” because it's the immaterial animating principle of the body. This can be shown easily enough, quite apart from Scripture or even philosophy. Simply envision two identical twins, one of whom suddenly dies. On the level of the matter, they are still identical. The same particles are swirling around, as before, and the dead twin has the same body that existed while he was alive, moments ago.

So whatever distinguishes them, whatever separates living things from dead ones, can't be a material difference... even though we can observe its effects on a material level. This principle of animation, separating the living from the dead, is what we call the anima or the soul. It's the organizational principle of the body, the body's “form.” And this is true whether we're talking about humans, or (to use Kreeft's example) cows, or ferns.

In contrast, Steven's inquiry imagines that you can have an animated human being, growing and developing in the womb of her mother, and that at some point, a soul suddenly enters her body. Not so. If you've got a living human, you've got an ensouled human. So the whole thrust of Steven's investigation is founded upon misunderstanding the soul.

So if the question of abortion boils down to a philosophical inquiry into whether or not the fetus has a human soul, very well: he does. But this still leaves me with my original question: does the question of abortion, or murder more broadly, boil down to whether or not the victim is ensouled? If so, where does that leave atheists?
 
 
(Image credit: India Times)

NOTE: This is a follow-up article to Patrick's post on Wednesday titled, "Body, Soul, and the Mind/Brain Question".
 

 
Having laid the foundation of the human soul in Wednesday's post, let us now turn to its proper character and function. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, man’s soul comprises all those powers proper to lower organisms, namely metabolism, sensation, and locomotion; however, a still higher power remains that is non-existent in all other soul-possessors—intellection. “We must conclude that the nutritive soul, the sensitive soul, and the intellectual soul are in man numerically one and the same.”¹

Therefore, according to Thomas, the substantial form of the human body is the intellective soul, which, in the larger context of this question, is interchangeable with mind. It is by means of the intellective (or intellectual) soul/mind that man experiences an intellectual mode of existence in the world as an embodied creature, an existence entirely different than that experienced by plants, amoebas, frogs, or dogs. There is something it is like to be a knowing, human person, and this something is markedly different from what it is like to be a bat, for example.² Intellectual existence shapes every facet of our lives and inherently defines what it means to be human.³

This intellectual soul permits us entrance into the sphere of truths where we can apprehend absolute principles and act as responsible agents. It also allows us to encounter a world not populated by brute particulars, but particulars of a universal kind. This allows us to know not simply that things are, but on an even deeper level, what things are. It gives us the ability to paint and build houses, to fall in love, and do science.

As we noted earlier, the middle path of hylomorphism must avoid the pitfalls of dualism and its twin, materialism, and it must also account for world-access and presence. Where dualism wishes to assert the preeminence of mind/spirit/soul over and against the body and brain, hylomorphism adamantly maintains that they are not separable, except through the event of death. The body and the soul are “grown-together,”⁴ forming a concretized whole that has powers and capacities greater than the sum of its parts. While the substantial form of man, his soul, is the principle of actuality and thus possesses a type of freedom from the body as it persists through time, nevertheless the material component of man, his body, is an absolutely essential ingredient to the substance of man, for the very raison d’être of form is to inform some matter.

Hylomorphism also sufficiently guards against materialism. The hylomorphic alternative does grant materialists that matter is eminently important, concurring with them that the matter of the body is essential—especially so when concerning the matter of the brain. However hylomorphism maintains, in contrast to materialism, the real presence of personal subjectivity experienced by each person by insisting that the substantial form of man is the intellectual soul. There is something about man (human nature) that is properly transcendent, non-reducible, and subjective. Because of this, we are able to reach beyond the material constituency of our corporeality in a non-physical, spiritual way, especially when we come to know anything. This must be granted if one honestly assesses one’s life-as-lived experiences. “We go beyond the restrictions of space and time and the kind of causality that is proper to material things,” writes Sokolowski,⁵ when we make vows,⁶ use language, utilize words and symbols, create art, share ideas and thoughts, perform works of Shakespeare, propose mathematical formulas, debate and discuss, engage in politics, and much, much more.⁷

This is especially the case when we invoke the personal pronoun, I, and act as responsible subjects and agents of truth—there is truly an “I” to speak of, present in every human person, that serves as the center of all personal activity. This spiritual modality of man is his intellective soul. But all of these activities, powers, and capabilities which are spiritual in character, require, at least in part, that we be embodied as well. One cannot bring to life Shakespeare’s Hamlet—a spiritual activity transcending space and time—without having actors with bodies. Though this may seem obvious, it is important for this position.

When it comes to the brain and the mind, it is not a case of either/or, but rather both/and. The brain and nervous system, being informed by the downward causality of man's intellectual soul and thus existing in a properly intellectual way, have a critical role to play when it comes to consciousness and perception. This, however, does not prove that the brain is the seat of intellection, but on the contrary, simply reinforces the hylomorphic position. The brain and the mind are wedded together, or, as Kass says, “grown-together.” Therefore, the mind working in, with, and through the brain exists and operates in a truly spiritual and transcendent way, allowing for world-access.

The mind is not some homunculus trapped within the Cartesian theater of consciousness and scanning the screens of sensory input. Rather, it is actively engaged with the world through the brain and the body as a whole. And just as hylomorphism maintains that persons are concretizations of matter and form grown together, so too does this anthropology grant that things existing in the world exist as matter-form composites. Our world is not populated by heaps of matter but rather matter as informed and as organized wholes. These matter-form composites, existing as intelligible wholes, are potentially knowable to man for he is an intellectual being capable of coming to know things by virtue of his intellectual soul. Moreover, through the brain—not by the brain but rather through it—the meaning, or the intelligibility, of things is conveyed.

Sokolowksi illustrates this idea further utilizing an innovative analogy. The brain and nervous system function, he maintains, much like a transparent lens. When a lens works properly, it refracts and presents that which is beyond it, whether that is a newspaper or the Andromeda galaxy light years away. Unlike a television screen that creates that which is seen, a lens serves as the physical medium through which what is seen is conveyed.

When I hold up a magnifying glass at arm’s length, and gaze into it looking at the wall opposite me through the lens, the image that seems to appear in the glass is not actually in the glass like the image on a TV screen, but rather is actually out there, beyond the glass. With the TV screen, I behold a representation, an image of the real thing, but not the thing itself. But with a lens, what I see in the glass is not something representing the wall, but rather the wall as wall, but in a specifically non-physical way. The lens, then, serves as a physical medium through which the external world of matter-form composites is conveyed and known.

Applying this analogy to the mind and the brain, we can begin to grasp the complex interrelation of soul and body. The brain and the nervous system are the physical medium through which the external world is accessible and knowable to the immaterial mind, not as the result of a secondary stage of re-presentation, but in a single, concomitant moment. The mind needs the brain for it is in accordance with human nature that we come to knowledge and understanding of the world through our physicality and the corporeality of things. This lensing analogy is also helpful in the negative sense, for if the lens is damaged, or misshapen, it cannot convey its object clearly or without distortion. So too when the brain is damaged, the extra-mental world of matter-form composites is not as easily accessible or knowable, and perhaps even opaque to the mind.

The intellect and the brain are wedded together, with the brain and nervous system acting like transparent lenses, not giving themselves, but rather giving that which is beyond them and other. It is only by being interwoven in the body that the mind, the I, can come to know anything, and, furthermore, it is only by encountering corporeal things, through the senses, that we are ever able to attain knowledge of the incorporeal. Therefore, to posit any separation between the mind and the brain, or, to posit any theory that considers the two identical, is incorrect. We conclude that the brain, though an absolutely necessary cause, is not a sufficient cause for the human mind.

This solution offered, however, may strike some as dissatisfying, still riddled with ambiguities. I would like to address that feeling of uneasiness. For many of us, our own intellects have been influenced by the categories and presuppositions of the Cartesian worldview that surrounds us in our contemporary culture. Because we live in a positivistic society that is more apt to follow the decrees of scientism, we almost unconsciously equate the true with the provable, or scientifically demonstrable. We want things to be, as Descartes articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy, clear and distinct.⁸ Because of this, we desire to know clearly and distinctly how the immaterial mind and the material brain relate exactly to the point that it could be modeled. However, this desire is misplaced and unwarranted. There are inherent limitations concerning the human person that do not admit of such clear and distinct conceptions.

One such instance concerns the very nature of conscious experience. According to philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers, there are easy problems concerning the mind, and then there are hard problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that are susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science.⁹ Essentially, the easy problems—which are in fact monumentally complex in scope and wildly ambitious in aim—concern the functionality and structural mechanisms of cognition, like the “ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to stimuli...the focus of attention,” and much more.¹⁰ In all of these cases, a clear cognitive or neurophysiological model can be employed to give an adequate account of what’s going on up there.

However, the real issue in explaining consciousness is the problem of felt experience. As Chalmers puts it, there is a co-relative subjective element (i.e., pertaining to a subject, a unique I) to all of our objective mental activities; with each and every perception of the color red, for example, there is a concomitant felt subjective experience of what it’s like to perceive the color red. In a word, “there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.”¹¹ I think Chalmers is correct to point out this perplexing quality of consciousness that is simply inextricable by recourse to material explanations and does not admit of clear and distinct answers. Why is it that when our visual or auditory systems engage in visual or auditory information processing, we have a visual or auditory experience? Why is it that when I hear “Amazing Grace,” or smell Dial soap I have an experience of these particular stimuli? His question, the hard problem, is this: “why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”¹²

I believe that Chalmers’ distinction between the easy and the hard problems of consciousness is merely symptomatic of a second, deeper dichotomy concerning the nature of the human person: the distinction between problem and mystery and the rampant confusion of the two. Problems are those things that can be objectified.¹³ For us today, the word objective connotes a sense of precision, exactness, or unbiased truth. It comes from the Latin word objectum, which means, “a thing put before (the mind or sight).”¹⁴ In its original usage, then, something objective was something placed before me, in front of and present to my powers of manipulation, capable of being solved or overcome. Problems are questions in which I am not involved, and because of that, I can solve them (at least in theory). They can be addressed and solved through a technique repeatable by others. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I myself am inherently a part of; I cannot be separated from it, in an objective sense.¹⁵ With mystery, I am both part of the problem and the problem-solver.

In our modern world—particularly the Western culture—everything has been reduced to the problematic, leaving no room for mystery; we Americans are good with problems—we put a man on the moon, for goodness sakes! Mysteries, are a different story. In our culture, mysteries are those things that we have not yet solved. Daniel Dennett announces, “Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don’t know how to think about—yet.”¹⁶ He goes on to equate the mystery of consciousness with other mysteries that eventually fell before the methods of science, such as the origin of the universe, the reproductive process, the nature of time, space, and gravity.¹⁷ Unfortunately, I do not suppose that the mystery of the human mind will give way to Daniel Dennett’s probing any time soon.

What I have been arguing for, and what I have proposed by way of a hylomorphic alternative, is a recapitulation of the mystery of the human person, revealed in the spiritual modality proper to him. The competing anthropologies of dualism and materialism each treated man as a problem to be solved: How, Descartes asked, can we clearly and distinctly conceive of the mind in relation to the body? Or, how, materialists wonder, can we prove that the mind is nothing but an epiphenomenon of the brain? Both positions fail, where they hylomorphic alternative maintains a both/and position that accounts for corporeality as well as intellectuality. It does not attempt to swallow up subjectivity into physical brain activity alone. It incorporates the brain and the mind in such a way that they are not only compatible, but also co-dependent and “grown-together.”¹⁸ The mind, or spirit, of man exercises definitive downward causality on the brain and the matter of the body, while the body and the brain are needed for the full flourishing and activity of the mind. Truly, man is not a problem to be solved, but rather a mystery to be lived. Let us insist on the mystery of the human person, and especially, on the mystery of the mind and the brain.
 
 
(Image credit: Kool News)

In addition to my recent article, “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Strange Notions has featured several related pieces, “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine” by Matthew Allen Newland, and more recently “Exorcising Epistemology” by Matthew Becklo. True to the spirit of the Areopagus and mission of Strange Notions, these authors and I have approached the much-debated topics of the mind-brain problem and consciousness from different perspectives, arriving at subtle and nuanced conclusions.

Digital dialogue, unlike its real life, real-time analogue of face-to-face debate, can limp when it comes to clarity and expression. My intention with the first piece was to point out the limitations of reductionist materialism—the effort to reduce subjectivity, consciousness, felt-experience, etc., to the brain’s material causality and it alone, to make shine the inherent limitations of an atheistic and materially-closed universe, and thereby to beg the God question. That aside, given what’s been written by Newland and Becklo (two marvelous pieces that I thoroughly enjoyed), and Philip Lewandowski’s most recent addition on the limitations of materialism, what appears needful at this point is a more thoroughgoing presentation of the mind-brain/soul-body problem according to the Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective, which holds to a hylomorphic (“matter” and “form” together) ontology.

According to this school of thought, the foundation and starting point is nature and its characteristic motions, changes, and growths—fish swim, trees grow, humans strive. The source of this motion, or principle of change or growth, is what Aristotle called soul, the substantial form of a living being. All living beings possess souls as their substantial form: bacteria, algae, amoebas, ferns, flies, fish, dogs, horses, and human beings all have souls. On the other hand, inanimate beings such as human artifacts, be they hammers, paintings, or super computers, lack a soul (substantial form) though they do possess form.

The distinction here is between the source and kind of the form present—for living beings, the soul (substantial form) is immediately given to the being itself at the moment it comes to be (in conception); for artifacts, however, the form is imposed gradually on some matter (and this is usually done by a human, albeit animals too impose form on matter, such as beavers imposing form on streams and marshes). A pile of bricks becomes a chimney when a mason imposes chimney form onto the raw material. Contra Descartes, the human soul is not a thing separate from and then inserted into a living body nor imposed from without, like Tony Stark stepping into his Iron Man suit (as handy as that analogy was in my last article). The ethereal Casper-the-ghost connotations conjured by the word soul distorts its etymological root meaning. Soul derives from the Latin anima, meaning animation or “animate,” i.e., alive. This etymology is helpful precisely because we are far less likely to conceive of “animation” all on its own; “animation,” as a property, inheres in a living being.¹

The soul (substantial form) of all living beings is that which makes the organism a substance, a living, integral, particular being. It is the principle that, from the very beginning of the organism’s existence, exercises downward causality on the matter, guiding, directing, informing the “stuff” of the thing, making it to be this substance and not that. For example, frog form (or the soul of the frog) informs froggy matter as it grows and matures from a fertilized egg, to a tadpole, and finally to a fully grown bullfrog in a way that dog form does not. Froggy soul actualizes itself in froggy matter, and doggy soul in doggy matter, each making the substance to be the whole substance that it is—from its bone structure, to the constitution of the organs, to the size, shape, and type of brain and sensory systems the organism has, etc. Although similar molecules—amino acids, proteins, carbohydrates, oxygen and carbon dioxide, etc.—are present in frogs and dogs alike, the matter of each organism as formed and as organized as a whole, integral organism is different according to the substantial form and soul of each.

Form is not merely the outward shape or contours of the thing in question; rather, form designates the essence, the what of the thing predicated. In addition, substantial form and soul cannot be reduced to DNA, as many materialistic biochemists would argue. DNA, as organized and structured matter, is itself informed and semiotic—the information that DNA bears is immaterial. It’s the difference between a Rorschach Ink block card and a newspaper page—in the first, you simply have matter (ink) unorganized; in the second you have matter (ink) organized in such a way that it bears immaterial meaning, letters combining to make words, words to make sentences, and sentences to convey meaning, none of which is in the ink on the page. These strands of nucleotide bases are themselves material, bearing an immaterial “sentence” composed of millions of “letters.”² Dr. Leon Kass, author of The Hungry Soul, provides a concise formulation concerning the relationship between form and matter. He writes: “Form and material [matter] are, in the first instance, relative and correlative terms: Form is the something made of certain materials; materials are, as materials, materials of and for the thing as formed.”³ Form, then, is the principle of actuality in the organism causing it to be.

Physiologically, the most fundamental life process that separates animate organisms from inanimate things is the metabolic system—the taking in of nutrients for self-maintenance and energy. Metabolism is the most basic prerequisite for a being to be animated, i.e., to possess a soul. Hence, the first function of soul as the substantial form is to metabolize. Food that is “originally outside and other…must be brought inside and transformed into same.”⁴ What persists through time, despite the continual exchange of old stuff for new stuff on the molecular and cellular level, is precisely the form, the soul inhering in ever-new matter. Despite the continual exchange of old cells for new cells, to the point that every cell in one’s body is different than the year prior, the organism remains the same. My dog, despite having all new cells a year later, still comes when called, sits when commanded, and prefers his favorite chew toy. In a word, he is the same dog despite having a completely new cellular make-up. To this point, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski from the Catholic University of America writes, “It is not true that all the causation [in living bodies] comes from the material elements in the body…rather, in living things the matter itself is shaped and reshaped by the thing as a whole, and hence by the animation [soul] of the thing.”⁵ From this, we gather that the soul does not emerge as a byproduct of trillions of neurons buzzing, or chemicals ebbing and flowing, or molecules splitting and dividing, but rather it is present from the beginning, actively making the body be an integral, unified whole through time.

Therefore, although the soul can be conceived as distinct from the body, to conclude that they are in fact actually distinct is a deep intellectual error the consequences of which modernity is deeply entangled. The error consists in treating the soul as if it were a piece in the whole of the body, like an organ. The soul and the body do not form a unity of parts “placed with each other side by side, like bricks in a building.”⁶ The soul is not one part among many in the body. On the contrary, soul and body are united in an essential, not accidental, way so that they are “grown-together.”⁷ They are non-independent components of the human person that, while existing in life, are intrinsically conjoined, causally so, with the soul actualizing the whole. A part such as the liver, for example, cannot subsist on its own apart from the unified body, nor would it make sense in its own right.⁸ A liver only makes sense when it is seen within the larger whole.

Dualism errs in separating the body from the soul, treating the soul as a part in the body. Likewise, materialism errs by eliminating form altogether, and insisting that bare, brute matter stands alone and can account for self-identity through time and the manifest organization of a whole, integrated being. The hylomorphic view synthesizes the two positions so that the soul, or substantial form, and the body are “grown-together in the enmattered form or the informed matter that is the given thing; the dog and its flesh, the oak and its roots…are each inseparably related and…mutually interdependent.”⁹ Therefore, the form or soul of living organisms is not some ghostly thing residing in the body for a period of time. Nor is it merely the outside surface of the skin, and yet, this epidermal boundary is intrinsically related to and caused by the unity and wholeness achieved by the form. It is neither visible nor tangible, and yet, through the matter it informs, the soul becomes, in a sense, visible and tangible. In short, the soul, the principle of animation, is that which makes a thing to be the thing it is through time as a unified whole.
 
 
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article on Friday.
 
 
(Image credit: Untamed Science)

Bad news, friends. You have no soul, according to a few professors at Fuller Theological Seminary. I say this after happening upon a copy of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, edited by Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, all full-fledged Fullerian professors. They say the soul is now scientifically, and hence theologically passé.

What happened to the poor soul, that it should suddenly be shuffled away? According to Murphy, the theologian-philosopher of the group, it's been downsized by science, for "nearly all of the human capacities or faculties once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain" (p.1). Therefore, we are invited to embrace what Murphy, Brown, and Malony have dubbed "non-reductive physicalism," a form of materialism that includes all the benefits of having a soul—"rationality, emotion, morality, free will, and, most importantly, the capacity to be in relationship with God" (p.2)—but just without the soul.

This, however, is an impossibly contradictory position. You cannot deny the existence of the soul, and then appropriate all of its capacities, as if nothing happened. All physicalism is reductive. "Non-reductive physicalism" will show itself to be an impossible compromise.

What accounts for their attempt to offer such a compromise? That will take some explaining, and hence some patience on the part of the reader.

I would like by proposing that human beings are rational animals, a fundamental unity of an immaterial, rational soul and material body. This is a view as old as Aristotle and as common as common sense.

It sits in the seat of sanity between two extreme views of human nature. One extreme holds that we are essentially spirit-rational but not animal. This extreme may be called "Gnosticism," and its devotees claim that human beings are purely intellectual creatures sitting incongruously in their bodies like ghostly drivers in alien machines.

The other extreme believes human beings are merely animals, and that the rational soul is a fiction. This extreme, commonly known as "materialism," insists that humans are purely material beings. Murphy, Brown, and Maloney are in the grip of this latter view, and it has caused them to heave the soul overboard. Yet, as we have seen, they are trying to avoid the inevitable reductionism.

"No, no! You misunderstand!" I can hear them shout. "We were forced to jettison the soul by science."

In my book, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, I show how despite many of its founders' intentions, modern science came to be defined by materialism. According to this extreme, the belief in immateriality, especially the immateriality of the soul, was illusory. The goal of science, as defined by materialism, was to strip away such illusions by reducing everything to purely material causes. In regard to the soul, then, the entire research program was aimed at showing that all thinking, willing, and acting could be reduced to bodily causes. It aimed, in sum, to replace the soul with the brain or some other material thing.

"Why then," you might ask, "has modern science found so much evidence of the material nature of our thinking, and no evidence, so it seems, of our having a rational, immaterial soul?"

That is quite simple. It is difficult to find what you are not looking for. Modern science, defined materialistically, has made grand progress in examining the intricacy of our animal nature precisely because its goal was to reduce us to mere animality.

If, however, scientists suddenly decided to examine the ways in which our rationality cannot be reduced to our animality, they would also discover the forgotten half of our nature. If scientists began to search for proof that our reasoning capacities extend beyond the material instrument of the brain, and indeed control the brain's activities even while relying on them, then they would discover the immaterial soul. But insofar as they continue to hold to the materialist belief that only material things exist, they will only find what they are looking for.

Further, if we realize that we are rational animals, then the latest brain research poses no real problem. It is simply a half-truth distended illicitly into a whole truth. If we are indeed rational animals, we should expect to find that thinking depends on our animal nature, including our brain, in the same way that our rational volition, for its execution, depends on the use of our hands, legs, eyes, or ears. If our thinking didn't depend on the brain, then we truly would be angels trapped in animal suits.

So, I don't need to poke about in the brain to realize that a good cup of coffee makes thinking a whole lot easier after a bad night's sleep. Of that a good jolt of java helps me approach near angelic intellectual clarity (for a couple of hours, anyway). Then again, I also experience my control over my entire being. My acts of volition are real, and I use my body, not like an alien machine, but as part of my unified being. I am able to think new thoughts, muddling and musing my way to discovery and new insights, and I use my brain to do it. I am often lost in thought, and forget to eat on time, utterly abstracted from my body, but after a while, I find I am so hungry that I have become weak and I can't think until I eat.

In short, my everyday experience undermines both extremes, and sets me firmly back in the seat of sanity. I am neither a Gnostic angel with no need of a brain or body to think, nor am I a slightly elevated ape for whom thinking is merely an elaborate form of sensation. I am, to repeat, a rational animal, an essential unity of immaterial soul and material body. If we try to cling to either extreme, and neglect this golden mean, then we are forced into denying what we actually know and experience.

And so, speaking to Nancey Murphy in particular (since she is the lone philosopher-theologian of the three), I offer the following. Again, the position of non-reductive physicalism is contradictory. To begin with, as you yourself rather curiously assert, "no amount of evidence from the neurosciences can ever prove dualism of soul and body to be false, or physicalism true" (p. 127). This amounts to saying, it seems, that materialist science cannot prove either that the immaterial soul does not exist or that materialism is itself true. Given this strange assertion, it would seem less than reasonable to offer a new and improved soulless theology.

Finally, as Murphy admits, "The concept of the soul has played a major role in the history of Christian ethics for centuries, for example, as justification for prohibition of abortion and euthanasia, and for differential treatment of animals and humans" (p. 24). So true, so true, and it has become increasingly clear, as the exclusively materialist account of human beings has taken hold of society, that abortion has become commonplace, euthanasia will soon follow suit (along with infanticide), and any distinction between human beings and other animals is fast fading away. Knowing this danger, it causes me to wonder if there is some other reason Murphy is bending her theology to a particular view of science.

In summary, the latest scientific findings concerning the brain should not be startling. We are indeed animals and our thinking depends on our brain even while it transcends it. Such a "discovery" is parallel to the ancient argument that all human knowledge begins with sensation. But, in the same way that you destroy knowledge itself if you reduce knowledge to sensation, you will destroy the soul and all its capacities, if you simply replace "soul" with "brain."

And so, I am happy to report, the death of the soul has been greatly exaggerated.

The overwhelming majority of atheists today are also materialists. Ousting God implies an evacuation of all things “spiritual,” leaving behind only blind, brute, bits of matter. Whichever one arrives at first—whether materialism or atheism—is really inconsequential; one usually follows the other.

Concerning galaxies and stars, materialism seems unthreatening. After all, these are material, natural phenomena that we can understand, explain, and model according to material causes; there’s nothing supernatural about supernovas. But when atheistic-materialism trains its lens upon the human person, something quite puzzling (and frightening) occurs—human subjectivity disappears; that which makes humans human is explained away. The personal pronoun “I” is swallowed up.

Francis Crick called it “the astonishing hypothesis,” namely, that all our thoughts, dreams, imaginings, sensations, joys, and pains are entirely (and without remainder) the product of physiological processes and events occurring in the intricate folds of the brain.¹ Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University, explains further: “The intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive ‘I’ that sits in a control room of our brain scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion.”²

According to the conclusions inherent in the atheistic-materialistic premises, individual subjectivity, the personal pronoun “I,” turns out to be the illusory byproduct of trillions of crackling neurons. As Carl Sagan once put it, “I am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label.” Thus, according to their own worldview, all thoroughly honest atheists and materialists must consent that they themselves, as selves, do not exist. What an odd conclusion!

While Rene Descartes built the edifice of modern philosophy on the bedrock foundation of the individual subject with his famous cogito ergo sum, I want to propose another use for the “I”: a doorstop. While atheistic materialists seek to slam the door of the universe shut, expelling all that is non-material, the fact—and I mean fact—of personal subjectivity, our ability to say “I,” acts like an intruder’s foot that gets wedged between the door and the frame, stubbornly preventing materialism from enclosing the universe within. Who or what is the “I” that declares Carl Sagan to be nothing but a collection of molecules? Does he not speak and assert this truth from a real center, a real subjective focal point? The common experience of being a subject, an “I” in the world, resists the spirit-draining power of the atheistic-materialistic worldview.

This is no incidental fact. Many apologetics projects have been launched to combat the New Atheism in the effort to show the reasonableness of Christian faith. But, before we can dialogue about faith in the Triune God whose nature and essence is union and communion, or in Jesus, who died an ignominious death for the sins of all, or in the very idea of Goodness, Truth, or Beauty itself, a critical step must be taken, one that is often overlooked. Because of the contemporary phenomenon of aggressive materialism, theists must persuasively show that there is more to this world than the mere matter to which scientists and the New Atheists want to reduce it.

In addition to the material stuff of the universe that scientists study and model so well, there is an equally real and infinitely more efficacious force at work that is intrinsically spiritual. There is a spiritual order that eludes scientific investigation or modeling. Recourse to material causes alone is insufficient to account for the universe and the human person. It must be shown that this materially-closed universe, this “nothing but” worldview, inadequately captures reality and lived-experience.

It is my firm contention that for our modern sensibilities, which prioritize the individual, there is no better starting point for this project than with personal subjectivity, with our unique ability to say meaningfully, “I...”

While the atheist-materialist may be able to reduce all being to the level of matter, void of spirituality, he is unable to explain himself away. There is an inherent contradiction built into the atheistic-materialistic worldview that can and ought to be noted. What does that look like?

Take Daniel Dennett for example. He is a philosopher of consciousness and director of the Center for Cognitive Sciences at Tufts University and a staunch proponent of the atheistic-materialistic worldview. He writes in his book, Consciousness Explained:

"Materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon."³

Dennett’s definition of materialism turns out, upon closer examination, to be a metaphysical claim regarding the ultimate nature of things. His materialism, one will notice, is not a discovery or conclusion of science but rather is a methodological presupposition that guides his science and determines what kinds of answers are acceptable. In other words, the scientific project, beginning centuries ago, was launched with an a priori limitation: to only consider and investigate material causes and to only accept material solutions. Naturally then, under this rubric, scientists like Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett himself are forced to draw the following conclusion regarding the brain, the mind, and personal subjectivity:

"The trouble with brains, it seems, is that when you look in them, you discover that there’s nobody home. No part of the brain is the thinker that does the thinking or the feeler that does the feeling...There is no longer a role for a centralized gateway, or indeed for any functional center to the brain...The brain is Headquarters, the place where the ultimate observer is, but there is no reason to believe that the brain itself has any deeper headquarters, any inner sanctum, arrival at which is the necessary or sufficient condition for conscious experience. In short, there is no observer inside the brain."⁴

To state their conclusion another way: there is no for whom consciousness exists; there is no “I” in the brain; there is no dative of manifestation to whom the external world is disclosed—all is sheer brute matter operating according to determined physical force laws, and consciousness happens to be an epiphenomenon of the interplay of specific materials and specific force laws. Scientists, gazing into the brain are unable to locate the thinker of the thinking, the feeler doing the feeling, and so conclude that there must not be a thinker or a feeler...or by extension, a scientist doing the science or a surgeon doing the open-brain surgery. This conclusion should rightly strike us as untenable. Why?

To whom does this thought occur: “there must be no thinker within who does the thinking”? Somebody is thinking this thought! Whose name is it that appears on the front jacket cover of Consciousness Explained, or atop any of their published journal articles, or outside their office door, or on the cover of their syllabi? Is it not their names? When they sign checks, make promises, or marry their spouse, what signs? What promises? What vows and loves?

From out this cloud of whirring, buzzing atoms, somebody acts, speaks, wills, dreams, and loves. What is the nature of this center from which all activities flow? It is obvious: this center is subjective (not in the sense of being relative, but in the sense of belonging to a subject, a person). Springing from Daniel Dennett’s irreducible “I” flow all his thoughts, theories, and books that, strangely enough, seek to prove that he does not exist. Carl Sagan’s quote is not attributed to a collection of molecules that happened to be called, by convention, “Carl Sagan.” No, his words are rightly attributed to him! The adherents of the atheistic-materialistic worldview are a living contradiction, and every time they act, speak, or write, they prove their own theory to be woefully inadequate.

For those encamped within the confines of the atheistic-materialistic universe, all that exists are mechanistic bodies—like Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit; the only problem is, there is no Tony Stark inside or anywhere for that matter within the atheistic-materialistic universe.

Suits without Starks; iron without men.

A theory or worldview that eliminates the possibility of the theorist existing is a bad theory and an incomplete worldview. There may be parts of it that are true, but taken as a whole, the atheistic-materialistic thesis is inadequate and incoherent. So why will the door not close? Because in addition to the matter that comprises my body is a soul, an animating principle that organizes the matter that I am to be the matter of “me,” unique, unrepeatable me. In addition to my stuff, there is a soul, I have an “I,” that persists through time, that began at my conception, and will persist beyond my mortal life. There’s more to me than my mere meat. When I say “my brain,” I really mean my brain, not just any brain belonging to any body, but to a specific body, a somebody, namely me! And you too!

Doorstops do not do anything positive; rather, they prevent something from happening, namely the door being shut. In this case, the atheistic-materialistic worldview cannot close in on itself because the “I” gets in the way. Getting rid of God and spirituality isn’t as simple as it seems at first blush.

It cannot be maintained that the only stuff that exists is matter—the stuff of physics, biology, and chemistry—precisely because this assertion eliminates the theory-making subject. The “I” of every atheist holds the door of the universe ajar, permitting some non-material, spiritual “stuff” to sneak in. If immaterial “I’s” exist, then that begs the question: whence come the “I’s”? Perhaps God? That’s a topic for another article. I thank you!
 
 
(Image credit: Mirror)

What is a soul? Or to be more precise, what is a human soul?  Or to be even more precise, what is a human being?  For that is really the key question; and I sometimes think that the biggest obstacle to understanding what the soul is is the word “soul.”  People too readily read into it various erroneous notions (erroneous from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, anyway)—ghosts, ectoplasm, or Cartesian immaterial substances.  Even the Aristotelian characterization of the soul as the form of the living body can too easily mislead.  When those unfamiliar with Aristotelian metaphysics hear “form,” they are probably tempted to think in terms of shape or a configuration of parts, which is totally wrong.  Or perhaps they think of it in Platonic terms, as an abstract universal that the individual human being participates in—also totally wrong.  Or they suspect that since it is the form of the living body it cannot coherently be said to subsist apart from that body—totally wrong again.   So let us, for the moment, put out of our minds all of these ideas and start instead with the question, what is a human being?

To ask what a human being is is to ask what the nature of a human being is.  What makes human beings the kinds of things they are?  What makes them distinctive?  What sets them apart from other kinds of thing?  To answer this it is useful to consider those kinds of thing which, on the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, come just below and just above human beings in the hierarchy of reality: non-human animals, and angels.

An animal is something which by its nature not only exercises vegetative powers like taking in nutrients, growing, and reproducing, but is also capable of sensation and imagination, of appetite, and of locomotion or the ability to move itself in response to the promptings of appetite and in pursuit of what it senses or imagines.  Particular kinds of animals will, given their natures, exhibit this repertoire in their own distinctive ways.  For instance, land animals will exercise their locomotive powers by walking, hopping, or slithering, fish by swimming, and (most) birds by flying; and each will do so by means of its own distinctive organs -- legs, fins, wings, and so forth.

Now of course, not every single individual animal will perfectly exercise the capacities that are natural to it, or even actually possess the organs that are its natural means of exercising them.  A dog might injure or lose a leg, or even fail to develop legs in the first place because of some prenatal defect.  But it is still of the nature of such a dog to have legs, and to walk and run with them.  In the extreme case, we can even imagine a dog which (as a result of an accident, say) has lost not only its legs, but its sense organs and higher brain functions, and is kept alive through intravenous feeding -- reduced, in effect, to a portion of its vegetative functions.  All the same, the nature of such a dog, no less than that of a healthy dog, is to have sense organs, legs, and all the rest.  That the dog has been prevented from realizing that nature doesn’t change the nature itself; and should the dog be somehow restored to health and functionality, it is precisely those doglike attributes that it had lost that would be restored to it, rather than some other attributes.

Consider now an angel, which stands on the other side of the metaphysical divide marked by human beings.  An angel is, by nature, a creature of pure intellect, which entails—given that, as Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers argue, intellect is necessarily immaterial—that an angel is essentially immaterial.  (The wings, white robes, and long blonde hair are symbolic—suitable for children’s prayer books but not for metaphysics!)  Being immaterial, angels cannot be damaged or physically malformed the way an animal can.  (Of course, angels can be morally defective—there are fallen angels, after all—but that is a failure of will, which is an immaterial power that follows upon intellect.)   Indeed, being immaterial, they have no tendency toward corruption at all.  They are of their nature immortal.

And now we come to human beings.  A human being is by nature a rational animal.  That is to say, a human being is something which by its nature exercises both the animal powers of nutrition, growth, reproduction, sensation, appetite, and locomotion, and the intellectual and volitional powers possessed by angels.  Hence it exercises powers of both a material and an immaterial sort.  For that reason it is to a large extent capable of damage and malformation, as an animal is; but not completely so.  In particular, a human being can be damaged to such an extent that it completely loses the organs of its animal and vegetative powers, and thus cannot exercise them at all -- to such an extent that only its intellectual and volitional powers remain.  But those intellectual and volitional aspects of human nature, precisely because they are immaterial and thus do not depend on any corruptible material organ, cannot themselves perish, any more than they can in the case of an angel -- though they would be impaired given that the human intellect’s normal source of data is the sense organs, which are material, and given that its activity is normally carried out in conjunction with imagination, which is also material.

Now what we’d have in the case of a dog which had lost its legs, its sense organs, and its higher brain functions is the stub of a dog, the bare minimum consistent with the dog’s surviving at all.  The nature of such a poor creature would not have changed, but it would have been reduced to realizing only the smallest fragment of what would naturally flow from that nature.  You might almost say that it had been reduced to little more than the nature itself, with almost nothing in the way of a manifestation of that nature.  And a human being damaged to such an extent that it could exercise none of its animal capacities and retained only its intellectual and volitional faculties in an impaired state would, you might say, be a stub of a human being, the bare minimum consistent with a human being’s surviving at all—a human being reduced to little more than its nature, with almost nothing in the way of a manifestation of that nature.  The key difference would be that whereas the severely damaged dog of our example could also go on utterly to perish, this stub of a human being could not.  It is immortal, though the full human being is not, which is why resurrection is necessary.  (To be sure, God could annihilate this “stub,” just as He could annihilate anything; but as with an angel, nothing in the natural order could destroy it, because, being immaterial, it would have no inherent tendency toward corruption.)

Now such a stub of a human being is what a soul is, or a disembodied soul anyway.  This is why Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers often call a disembodied soul an “incomplete substance”—not because they are trying incoherently to fudge the difference between a Cartesian res cogitans and the idea of the soul as a kind of form, but because a disembodied soul relative to a living human being is like a legless, senseless, brain-damaged dog relative to a healthy dog.  The severely damaged dog is in an obvious and natural sense an incomplete substance, and the disembodied soul is an incomplete substance in just that sense—it is an incomplete, damaged human being.

This is also a way to understand the sense in which the soul is the substantial form—that is to say, the nature—of a human being.  A nature or substantial form is not a Platonic abstraction.  It exists in a concrete individual thing, as its principle of operation and the source of its properties.  It is there as long as, and only as long as, the individual thing itself is there.  But when the operations and properties in question are prevented from being manifested, what we are left with in effect is the principle or source without that which flows from it.  Thus to reduce a human being to the bare minimum consistent with its being there at all is to reduce it as far as possible to its nature or substantial form—that is, to its soul alone.

Some might insist that if the intellectual and volitional powers of a human being persist in even an impaired form after the animal powers have been destroyed, this must be because the former inhere in a substance distinct from that in which the latter inhere, as Descartes held.  But this is like saying that since the stub of a dog would continue to exist in the absence of its legs, eyes, ears, etc., it follows that the stub in question (an eyeless, earless, brain-damaged torso) and the legs, eyes, ears, etc. are all distinct substances.   And they are not; rather, they are all aspects of one substance—the dog itself—and can be made sense of only by reference to that one substance.  Similarly, that the impaired intellectual-cum-volitional stub of a human being would continue to exist in the absence of its animal powers does not entail that the stub in question and the animal powers must be grounded in distinct substances.  They are not; rather, they too are aspects of the one substance—the human being himself—and can be made sense of only by reference to that one substance.

I've noted before that those beholden to scientism tend to reify abstractions—to abstract the mathematical structure of a concrete physical system and treat it as if it were the entirety of the system, or to abstract the neurobiological processes underlying human action and treat them as if they were the whole source of human action.  I also noted that while those prone to scientism are notorious for this, Cartesians are guilty of reifying abstractions too.  Specifically, they abstract from the one substance that is a human being its intellectual aspect and its animal aspect and make of them two substances—putting asunder, as it were, what God and nature had joined together.  And when they finally recombine them, what they are left with is nothing human at all, but a bizarre shotgun marriage of angel and animal, or ghost and machine.  But sometimes a man is just a man.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
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The late Dr. Antony Flew—perhaps the greatest atheist thinker of the last hundred years—came to faith in God largely through his studies in philosophy and, most especially, science, as he recounted in his book written with Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

It was in 2004 that Dr. Flew rocked the world with his confession that he had come to believe in God. He made clear that he accepted deism, and not the God of the Bible, or of any other of the great world religions. But this in no way lessened the impact of his startling declaration. The reactions ranged from surprise, to disbelief, to even questioning whether Dr. Flew's mental capacities were diminished, perhaps because of his age. He was 81 at the time of his "conversion."

Let me assure you, as one who knows personally one of the men who walked alongside Dr. Flew on his journey toward truth, and who helped him to write the above-mentioned book, Roy Abraham Varghese, his radical change was very much real, his faculties were not diminished, and he was entirely free in his decision-making process.

It is interesting to note that in the second appendix of There is a God, there is a fascinating dialogue between Dr. Flew and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright on whether or not God has revealed himself to man, where Flew had this to say about Christianity:

"I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honored and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation is true. There is nothing like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul...If you’re wanting Omnipotence to set up a religion, this is the one to beat." (pp. 185–186)

Dr. Flew never came to accept Christ or Christianity, or any of the distinctively Christian teachings like the inspiration of Scripture, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the incarnation of Christ, etc. This is almost to be expected as they are dependent upon supernatural assistance and the acceptance of divine revelation. As a deist, Flew would have accepted none of these teachings.

But interestingly enough, Flew also never came to accept the immortality of the human soul. And this is a truth that is knowable by the natural light of reason apart from revelation. This makes me wonder if this may well have been the linchpin that, if understood and accepted, might have completed the foundation for Dr. Flew upon which the entirety of the revelation of God may well have been able to rest. Perhaps then Dr. Flew would have been able to accept the further light of revelation?

Perhaps.

Because Dr. Flew, unfortunately, died in 2010, just six years after his declaration of faith, I also wonder if time simply ran out. Dr. Flew was truly a fascinating man. And, according to my friend Roy Abraham Varghese, he was a good man as well.

Our Reason Tells Us So

 
Dr. Flew was certainly not alone in his struggle with the concept of the natural immortality of the human soul. (I say "natural" because human beings uniquely possess an immortal soul by nature. That means, according to Catholic teaching, man does not need grace in order for his soul to live forever. It would do so naturally, even if he ends up in the isolation and emptiness of hell forever.) This is a difficult point for many atheists.

If someone already believes in the Bible, and in the Church that has the authority to definitively interpret it, then the natural immortality of the human soul follows easily. But, obviously, not everyone accepts the Bible as God's word.

Yet that's okay, because this truth can be demonstrated through reason alone, i.e., through philosophy. To do so, we must first establish the fact that humans have souls at all, and define our terms.

Does Fido Have a Soul?

 
The soul is, by definition, the unifying and vivifying principle that accounts for the life and what philosophers call the “immanent action” of all living things. The word “immanent” comes from two Latin words that mean “to remain” and “in.” “Immanent action” means the multiple parts that comprise a living being are able to act “from within” in a unified way, and in accordance with its given nature, for the good of the whole being. The soul is what accounts for this unified action that is essential for there to be life.

St. Thomas Aquinas argued, and it follows from our definition of the soul above, that not only humans, but non-rational animals and plants have souls as well. Man alone possesses what St. Thomas called a "rational" or "spiritual" soul. Plants and animals possess "material souls" that, unlike human souls, are dependent upon matter for their existence. But they possess souls nonetheless.

To be precise, there are three categories of souls:

1. Vegetative - This category of soul empowers its host to be able to take in nutrition and hydration, grow, and reproduce others of its kind. A rock can't do this.

2. Sensitive - An animal with a sensitive soul can also acquire sense knowledge and use locomotion to both ward off danger and to gather goods it needs to survive and thrive.

These first two categories of souls are material in nature. By that I mean they are entirely dependent upon the material body for their existence. As St. Thomas says, “They are adduced from the potency of the matter.” When the host dies, the vegetative or sensitive soul ceases to exist.

3. Rational - Capable of all the above, the animal possessing a rational soul is capable of acquiring intellectual, or "spiritual," knowledge as well, and of choosing to freely act toward chosen ends.

The question now becomes: how does any of this demonstrate the soul of man to be immortal?

What is Death?

 
In order to get where we need to go, we first have to define death. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it as “...the separation of the soul from the body”—an excellent definition. But perhaps a more precise philosophical definition is: “The reduction of a composite being into its component parts.” This is why I would say when Fido dies, you might want to get him out of the house and bury him. It won't take long for him to start the process to becoming “reduced to his component parts.” And that process gets a bit messy!

However, a spirit, by definition, has no parts. There is nothing to be “reduced to its component parts.” Thus, that which is purely spiritual cannot die.

So for my first four proofs for the immortality of the soul, I am going to demonstrate it by showing the soul to be “spiritual” in nature. If I can do this, I will have accomplished the task at hand.

For my fifth, sixth, and seventh proofs, I will make my appeal through what we find in human experience down through the millennia that points us in the direction of man possessing an immortal soul.

The Soul, the Person, and the Body

 
The two principle powers of the soul are its power to know and to will. Why do we say these powers lie in the soul? In simple terms, it is because it is the entire man that comes to “know” or to “love” (love being the highest purpose of the will) not just “part” of him. This would seem to indicate that the same "unifying and vivifying principle" that explains man's life, would also explain his power to know and to will.

But man is more than just a soul. He also directly experiences the “I” that unifies all that he is and all that he has done down through the decades of his life. This "I" represents the individual “person” that constitutes each human being.

Is there a distinction between the soul and the person? Yes. But it can be a bit tricky to demonstrate.

Perhaps it would be best to demonstrate the distinctions by laying out some of the differences between the body, soul, and person.

There is no doubt that the body contributes to the soul’s ability to come to know. A damaged brain is a clear indicator here. The soul needs a properly functioning brain to be able to come to know anything, ordinarily speaking.

Yet, it is also interesting to note that man is much more than a body as well. Philosopher and theologian J.P. Moreland writes:

“...neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk or swallow...”

But yet, Moreland says, the “patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.”’ Further, no matter how much probing and electrical prodding, Penfield found there is no place in the brain that can “cause a patient to believe or decide” (Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, p. 258.).

Thus, the “I,” or, the person, seems to use his body, or here his brain, to be sure, but “he” is not determined by it.

We can also say with confidence that the “I” is not synonymous with the intellect and will, or the soul, either because “I” can struggle to remember, to know, or to exercise my will. There seems to be more to a person than just a body, or even just a soul. Man seems to be a body/soul composite. Both his body and soul contribute to the great and mysterious “I.”

The Proofs for the Natural Immortality of the Human Soul

1. The Intellect Possesses the Power of Abstraction

 
St. Thomas Aquinas explained, “The operation of anything follows the mode of its being” (Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Q. 75, art. 3). To put it in simpler terms: action follows being. One can tell something of the nature of a thing through examining its actions. Hence, the spiritual nature of the human soul; and therefore its immortality, can be proven through the exhibition of its spiritual power in human acts. One such "spiritual action" is the power of abstraction.

To use Thomistic language once again, when a human being comes to know something or someone, let’s say, he sees a man, “Tim,” his senses engage the individual; “Tim,” through the immediate "accidental" qualities that he sees. By "accidentals," we mean the non-essential, or changeable, aspects of "Tim" like his size, color, weight, etc. From this conglomeration of accidentals, his intellect abstracts the “form” of “man-ness” from that individual (This reminds me of a philosophy professor I had in college who seemed to have an inability to pronounce a noun without adding a “ness” to the end of it.).

This "form" the intellect abstracts is an immaterial likeness of the object thought about or seen. It is ordinarily derived from a particular object, like the man, “Tim,” as I mentioned above, but it transcends the particular individual. The form gets at the essence of "Tim." It is that which is universal concerning "Tim," the man. He is risible (he laughs), he reasons, and more. This is that which is changeless and applies not just to "Tim," but to all men. And very importantly for our purpose, we must remember that this essential “form” abstracted by the intellect is a spiritual reality. It transcends the individual.

Now, there is a material likeness, or image, that is concrete and singular, impressed in the memory of man, but that is not what we are talking about here. Dogs, cats, birds, and bats have memory. Non-rational animals do not have the power to abstract the form of “man.” Only human beings can comprehend “man-ness” or “dog-ness.”

This is not to say the soul of a dog is not real. It is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, a "real principle," and it is “adduced from the potency of the matter.” This is analogous to elements formed into a compound or an atomic explosion caused from the potency of the matter used in the formation of a bomb. Certain kinds of matter exist in potency to other kinds of matter that when joined create elements, atomic explosions, or Fido! But only man (among animals on earth) has this power of abstraction that necessarily involves a spiritual principle.

Why is this crucial to understand? Well, let’s introduce yet another “form” here: “tree-ness.” “Tree” is defined as, “A woody perennial plant, having a single main stem or trunk arising from the soil and having branches and foliage.” This would represent “the form” that is common to all trees apart from any particular. I could burn the individual tree from which I abstract the form of “tree-ness,” and reduce it to ash so that there is no longer this particular “tree” in existence, but I can never burn “tree-ness” because it is “spiritual,” or “universal.”

Remember our philosophical principle? "Action follows being?" If the soul has this spiritual power to “abstract” the form of “tree,” or “man,” it must be spiritual. And if the soul is spiritual, it has to be immortal. It cannot be “reduced to its component parts.”

2. The Soul Forms Ideas of Realities That Are Immaterial

 
The human soul not only abstracts the forms of material entities encountered, but it also has the power to know the ideas or “forms” of immaterial realities like logical sequence, moral goodness, property rights, philosophical categories like “substance,” cause and effect, and more.

Where are these realities? What color are they? How big are they? How much do they weigh?

They have no color, size, or weight because they are spiritual—and by definition—immaterial. Sense image alone (like the Empiricists John Locke and David Hume say is the only source of knowledge) cannot account for these. We are not talking about the material world here.

To form an idea of something spiritual, again, requires a spiritual principle, i.e., the soul. If it's spiritual, it can’t die.

3. The Will Strives for Immaterial Goods

 
Closely related to my first two proofs, just as the intellect has the power to abstract the “spiritual” forms of the things and beings it encounters, and to form ideas of immaterial realities, the will also has the power to strive for immaterial things, like prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, etc. One cannot produce what one does not possess. There must be a spiritual; and therefore, immortal principle (the soul), to will these spiritual realities.

4. The Intellect Can Reflect Upon Its Own Act of Knowledge

 
It could not do so if it were material. A material faculty, such as the power of vision, only reacts in response to external stimuli. It could only be said to “perceive” inasmuch as one “part” was acted upon by another “part” of something else. When our intellect reflects on its own act of knowing, and we could add its own act of being as well, it is both subject and object of knowledge. The soul can only do this if it has no parts. A dog cannot reflect on its own act of knowing, or being. It just scratches! That is sense knowledge.

5. Man Has a Natural Desire to Live Forever

 
Aristotle gave us an extremely important philosophical principle when he said, “A potency without the possibility of actuality destroys nature.”

The existence of acorns necessitate the existence of oak trees. It is not that each individual acorn will be actualized and become an oak tree. That is clearly not the case. But if no acorns could be actualized, there would be no oak trees.

We could multiply examples here. A digestive system in animals necessarily means we can know there is food… somewhere out there. A female dog necessitates the existence of a male dog. If there's not, then "dog" will be eliminated in fairly short order.

Thus, the non-rational animal seeks self-preservation, food, and sex. Each of these is conditioned by time. Man has intellectual knowledge which is absolute. The “forms” are not conditioned to time as material knowledge is. Remember? The individual “tree” will die, but not the “form” or “idea” of tree that man alone possesses among creatures of earth. From this knowledge of the eternal springs a spontaneous desire to live forever. And this potency cannot exist in vain. That would be contrary to everything we see in nature.

6. The Testimony of Mankind Over the Centuries and Millenia 

 
From ancient Egypt's Book of the Dead, to Western Civilization's Bible, every civilization, every culture, in all of human history has attested to the existence of an after-life.

Some will point out the very few exceptions—one being Hinayana (or Theravedic) Buddhism—that deny the existence of "spirit," or the soul, to discount this our sixth proof. But to no avail.

Actually, the exception tends to prove the rule. And this, I would argue, is certainly the case with Hinayana Buddhism. Not only is this ancient form of Buddhism an anomaly in the world of religion, but the appearance of Mahayana Buddhism (that restored belief in “God” and “the soul”), very early in the history of Buddhism, and the fact that it is today by far the largest of the three main traditions of Buddhism, tends to demonstrate that man is so ordered to believe in the afterlife that errant thinking here or there over millenia can never keep its truth suppressed for very long.

7. The Existence of the Moral Law

 
My final proof for the natural immortality of the human soul is derived from the existence of the Moral Law that we can know apart from divine revelation. This is a true law knowable to all, and a law that man did not give to himself. And yet, it is often unpunished and the sanctions of law not carried out.  Hence, there must be an eternity where all is rectified.

Even Plato understood the necessity for the Moral Law to be rooted in the justice and wisdom of God. Without the immortality of the soul, Plato noted, there is no justice, which would be absurd. Yet if there is a God who is just, then there must be final justice. Since final justice so often does not occur in this life, there must be a next life in which justice will be served. Thus our souls must be immortal.
 
 
Originally posted at Catholic Answers. Used with permission.
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Can you prove life after death?

 
Whenever we argue about whether a thing can be proved, we should distinguish five different questions about that thing:

1. Does it really exist or not? "To be or not to be, that is the question."
2. If it does exist, do we know that it exists? A thing can obviously exist without our knowing it.
3. If we know that it exists, can we be certain of this knowledge? Our knowledge might be true but uncertain; it might be "right opinion."
4. If it is certain, is there a logical proof, a demonstration of why we have a right to be certain? There may be some certainties that are not logically demonstrable (e.g. my own existence, or the law of non-contradiction).
5. If there is a proof, is it a scientific one in the modern sense of 'scientific'? Is it publicly verifiable by formal logic and/or empirical observation? There may be other valid kinds of proof besides proofs by the scientific method.

The fifth point is especially important when asking whether you can prove life after death. I think it depends on what kinds of proof you will accept. It cannot be proved like a theorem in Euclidean geometry; nor can it be observed, like a virus. For the existence of life after death is not on the one hand a logical tautology: its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, as a Euclidean theorem does. On the other hand, it cannot be empirically proved or disproved (at least before death) simply because by definition all experience before death is experience of life before death, not life after death.

If life after death cannot be proved scientifically, is it then intellectually irresponsible to accept it? Only if you assume that it is intellectually irresponsible to accept anything that cannot be proved scientifically. But that premise is self-contradictory (and therefore intellectually irresponsible)! You cannot scientifically prove that the only acceptable proofs are scientific proofs. You cannot prove logically or empirically that only logical or empirical proofs are acceptable as proofs. You cannot prove it logically because its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, and you cannot prove it empirically because neither a proof nor the criterion of acceptability are empirical entities. Thus scientism (the premise that only scientific proofs count as proofs) is not scientific; it is a dogma of faith, a religion.

1. No Reasonable Objection

 
The first reason for believing in life after death is simply that there is no compelling reason not to, no objection to it that cannot be answered. The two most frequent objections are as follows:

(a) Since there is no conclusive evidence for life after death, it is as irresponsible to believe it as to believe in UFOs, or alchemy. Perhaps we cannot disprove it; a universal negative always is difficult if not impossible to disprove. But if we cannot prove it either, it is wishful thinking, not evidence, that makes us believe it.

Now this objector either means by 'evidence' merely empirical evidence, or else any kind of evidence. If he means the latter, he ignores all the following proofs for life after death. There is a lot of evidence. If he means the former, he falls victim to the self-contradiction argument just mentioned. There is no empirical evidence that the only kind of evidence we should accept is empirical evidence.

In most supposedly scientific objections of this type, an impossible demand is made, overtly or covertly—a demand for scientific proof—and then the belief is faulted for not satisfying that demand. This is like arguing against the existence of God on the grounds that "I have not found Him in my test tube," or like the first Soviet cosmonauts' "argument" that they had found no God in outer space. Ex hypothesi, if God exists He is not found in a test tube or in space. That would make Him a chemical or a meteor. A taxi trip through Cleveland disproves quasars as well as a laboratory experiment disproves God, or brain chemistry disproves the soul or its immortality. The demand that non-empirical entities submit to empirical verification is a self-contradictory demand. The belief that something exists outside a system cannot be disproved by observing the behavior of that system. Goldfish cannot disprove the existence of their human owners by observing water currents in the bowl.

(b) The strongest positive argument against life after death is the observation of spirit at the mercy of matter. We see no more mental life when the brain dies. Even when it is alive, a blow to the head impairs thought. Consciousness seems related to matter as the light of a candle to the candle: once the fuel is used up, the light goes out. The body and its nervous system seem like the fuel, the cause; and immaterial activity, consciousness, seems like the effect. Remove the cause and you remove the effect. Consciousness, in other words, seems to be an epiphenomenon, an effect but not a cause, like the heat generated by the electricity running along a wire to an appliance, or the exhaust fumes from an engine's tailpipe.

What does the observed dependence of mind upon matter prove, if not the mortality of the soul? Wait. First, just what do we observe? We observe the physical manifestations of consciousness (e.g. speech) cease when the body dies. We do not observe the spirit cease to exist, because we do not observe the spirit at all, only its manifestations in the body. Observations of the body do not decide whether that body is an instrument of an independent spirit which continues to exist after its body-instrument dies, or whether the body is the cause of a dependent spirit which dies when its cause dies. Both hypotheses account for the observed facts.

When a body is paralyzed, the mind and will are still operative, though deprived of expression. Bodily death may be simply total paralysis. When you take a microphone away from a speaker, he can no longer be heard by the audience. But he is still a speaker. Body could be the soul's microphone. The dependence of soul on a body may be somewhat like the dependence of a ship on a dry-dock. Ships are not built on the open sea, but on dry-dock; but once they leave the dry-dock, they do not sink but become free floating ships. The body may be the soul's dry-dock, or (an even better metaphor) the soul's womb, and its death may be the soul's emergence from its womb.

What about the analogy of the candle? Even in the analogy, the light does not go out; it goes up. It is still traveling through space, observable from other planets. It 'goes out' as a child goes out to play; it is liberated.

But what of the need for a brain to think? The brain may not be the cause of thought but the stopping down, the 'reducing valve' for thought, as Bergson, James and Huxley suppose: an organ of forgetting rather than remembering, eliminating from the total field of consciousness all that serves no present purpose. Thus when the brain dies, more rather than less consciousness occurs: the floodgates come down. This would account for the familiar fact that dying people remember the whole of their past life in an instant with intense clarity, detail, and understanding.

In short, the evidence, even the empirical evidence, seems at least as compatible with soul immortality as with soul-mortality.

2. Argument From Authority

 
According to the medievals, the most logical of philosophers, "the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments." Nevertheless, it is an argument, a probability, a piece of evidence. Forty million Frenchmen can be wrong, but it is less likely than four Frenchmen being wrong.

1. The first argument from authority for life after death is simply quantitative: "the democracy of the dead" votes for it. Almost all cultures before our own have strongly, even officially, believed in some form of it. Children naturally and spontaneously believe in it unless conditioned out of it.
2. A second argument from authority is stronger because it is qualitative rather than quantitative: nearly all the sages have believed in it. We must not, of course, answer the challenge 'How do you know they were sages?' by saying 'Because they believed'; that would be begging the question pure and simple. But thinkers considered wise for other reasons have believed; why should this one belief of theirs be an exception to their wisdom?
3. Finally, we have the supreme authority of the teachings of Jesus. Belief in life after death is central to His entire message, "the Kingdom of Heaven." Even if you do not believe He is the incarnate God, can you believe He is a naive fool?

3. Conservation of Energy

 
Arguments from reason are logically stronger than arguments from authority. The premises, or evidence, for arguments from reason can be taken from three sources, three levels of reality what is less than ourselves (Nature), ourselves (human life), or what is more than ourselves (God). Again, we move from the weaker to the stronger argument.

We could argue from the principle of the conservation of energy. We never observe any form of energy either created or destroyed, only transformed. The immortality of the soul seems to be the spiritual equivalent of the conservation of energy. If even matter is immortal, why not spirit?

4. The Nature of Man

 
The next class of arguments is taken from the nature of Man. What in us survives death depends on what is in us now. Death is like menopause. If a woman has in her identity nothing but her motherhood, then her identity has trouble surviving menopause. Life after menopause is a little like life after death.

4a. The simplest and most obvious of these arguments may be called Primitive Man's Argument from Dead Cow. Primitive Man has two cows. One dies. What is the difference between Dead Cow and Live Cow? Primitive man looks. (He's really quite bright.) There appears no material difference in size or weight immediately upon death. Yet there is an enormous difference; something is missing. What? Life, of course. And what is that? The answer is obvious to any intelligent observer whose head is not clouded with theories: life is what makes Live Cow breathe. Life is breath. (The word for 'soul', or 'life', and 'breath' is the same in many ancient languages.) Soul is not air, which is still in Dead Cow's lungs, but the power to move it.

Life, it is seen, is not a material thing, like an organ. It is the life of the organs, of the body; not that which lives but that by which we live. Now this source of life cannot die as the body dies: by the removal of the soul. Soul cannot have soul taken from it. What can die has life on loan; life does not have life on loan.

The 'catch' in this argument is that this 'soul' may in turn have its life on loan from a higher source, and transmit it to the body only after having been given life first. This is in fact the Biblical teaching, contrary to the Greek view of the soul's inherent, necessary and eternal immortality. God gives souls life, and souls can die if they refuse it. But in any case the soul survives the body's death.

4b. Another quite simple piece of evidence for the presence of an immaterial reality (soul) in us which is not subject to the laws of matter and its death, is the daily experience of real magic: the power of mind over matter. Every time I deliberately move my arm, I do magic. If there were no mind and will commanding the arm, only muscles; if there were muscles and a nervous system and even a brain but no conscious mind commanding them; then the arm could not rise unless it were lighter than air. When the body dies, its arms no longer move; the body reverts to obedience to merely material laws, like a sword dropped by a swordsman.

Even more simply stated, mind is not part of the system of matter, not measurable by material standards (How many inches long is your mind?) Therefore it need not die when the material body dies.

4c. A traditional Scholastic argument for an immortal soul is taken from the presence of two operations which are not operations of the body (1) abstract thinking, as distinct from external sensing and internal imagining; and (2) deliberate, rational willing, as distinct from instinctive desiring. My thought is not limited to sense images like pyramids; it can understand abstract universal principles like triangles. And my choices are not limited to my body's desires and instincts. I fast, therefore I am.

4d. Still another power of the soul which indicates that it is not a part or function of the body and therefore not subject to its laws and its mortality is the power to objectify its body. I can know a stone only because I am more than a stone. I can remember my past. (My present is alive; my past is dead.) I can know and love my body only because I am more than my body. As the projecting machine must be more than the images projected, the knower must be more than the objects known. Therefore I am more than my body.

4e. Still another argument from the nature of soul, or spirit, is that it does not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space. You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut.

Since soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed, as a body can. Whatever is composed (of parts) can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul. But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable. It could die only by being annihilated as a whole. But this would be contrary to a basic law of the universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply pops into existence with no cause.

But if the soul dies neither in parts (by decomposition) nor as a whole by annihilation, then it does not die.

4f. One last argument for immortality from the present experience of what soul is, comes from Plato. It is put so perfectly in the Republic that I quote it in its original form, adding only numbers to distinguish the steps of the argument:

1. Evil is all that which destroys and corrupts. . .
2. Each thing has its evil . . . for instance, ophthalmia for the eye, and disease for the whole body, mildew for corn and for wood, rust for iron . . .
3. The natural evil of each thing . . . destroys it, and if this does not destroy it, nothing else can . . .
   (a) for I don't suppose good can ever destroy anything,
   (b) nor can what is neither good nor evil,
   (c) and it is certainly unreasonable . . . that the evil of something else would destroy anything when its own evil does not.
4. Then if we find something in existence which has its own evil but which can only do it harm yet cannot dissolve or destroy it, we shall know at once that there is no destruction for such a nature. . . .
5. the soul has something which makes it evil . . . injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance. Now does any one of these dissolve and destroy it? . . .
6. Then, since it is not destroyed by any evil at all, neither its own evil nor foreign evil, it is clear that the soul must of necessity be . . . immortal.

5. The Nature of God

 
We turn now to a stronger class of arguments: not from the nature of Man but from the nature of God; not 'because of what I am, I must be immortal' but 'because of what God is, I am immortal.' A possible weakness of this type of argument, of course, is that it does not convince anyone not already convinced, because it presupposes the existence of God, and those who admit God usually admit life after death already, while those who deny the one usually deny the other as well. Yet, though apologetically weak, the argument is theoretically potent because it gives the real, the true reason or cause why we survive death: God wills it.

5a. We could first argue from God's justice. Since God by definition is just, His dealings with us must be just, at least in the long run, in the total picture. ("The long run" is the answer to the problem of evil, the apparently unjust distribution of suffering.) The innocent suffer and the wicked flourish here; therefore 'here' cannot be 'the long run,' the total picture. There must be justice after death to compensate for injustice before death. (This is the point of Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus.)

5b. The next argument, from God's love, is stronger than the one from His justice because love is more essential to God. Love is God's essence; justice is one of His attributes—one of Love's attributes.

Love is "the fulfillment of the whole law." Each of the Ten Commandments is a way of loving. "Thou shalt not kill" means "Love does not kill." If you love someone, you don't kill him. But God is love. Therefore God does not kill us. We want human life to triumph over death in the end because we love; is God less loving than we? Is He a hypocrite? Does He refuse to practice what He preaches?

Only if God does not love us or is impotent to do what He wills, do we die forever. That is, only if God is bad or weak—only if God is not God—is death the last word.

6. The Nature of the World

 
Whether the premises be taken from the nature of the world, of man, or of God, the last three arguments were all deductive, arguments by rational analysis. More convincing for most people are arguments from experience. These can be subdivided into two classes: arguments from experiences everyone, or nearly everyone, shares; and arguments from extraordinary or unusual experiences. The first class includes:

1. The argument from the demand for ultimate moral meaning, or long-range justice (similar to the argument from God's justice, except that this time we do not assume the existence of God, only the validity of our essential moral instinct)—this is essentially Kant's argument;
2. The argument from our demand for ultimate purpose, for a meaningful end, or adequate final cause—this argument is parallel, in the order of final causality and within the psychological area, to the traditional cosmological arguments for the existence of God from effect to a first, uncaused cause in the order of efficient causality and within the cosmological area;
3. The argument from the principle that every innate desire reveals the presence of its desired object (hunger indicates the existence of food, curiosity knowledge, etc.) coupled with the discovery of an innate desire for eternity, or something more than time can offer-this is C. S. Lewis' favorite argument.
4. The argument from the validity of love, which insists on the intrinsic, indispensable value of the other, the beloved—if love is sighted and not blind and if it is absurd that the indispensable is dispensed with, then death does not dispense with us, for love declares that we are indispensable;
5. Finally, the argument from the presence of a person, who is not a thing (object) and therefore need not be removed when the body-object is removed-the I detects a Thou not subject to the death of the It.

From one point of view, these five arguments are the weakest of all, for they presuppose an epistemological access to reality which can easily be denied as illusory. There is no purely formal or empirical proof, e.g., that love's instinctive perception of the intrinsic value of the beloved is true. Further, each concludes not with the simple proposition 'we are immortal' but with the disjunctive proposition 'either reality is absurd or we are immortal.' Finally, each is less a demonstration than an almost-immediate perception: in valuing, purposing, longing, loving, or presencing one sees the immortality of the person.

These are five spiritual senses, and when one looks along them rather than at them, when one uses them rather than scrutinizing them, when they are innocent until proven guilty rather than proven innocent, one sees. But when one does not take this attitude, when one begins with Occam's razor, or Descartes' methodic doubt, one simply does not see. They are less arguments from experience than experiences themselves of the immortal soul.

7. Extraordinary Experience

 
Three arguments from unusual or extraordinary experience are:

1. The argument from the experience of medically 'dead' and resuscitated patients, all of whom, even those formerly skeptical, are utterly convinced of the truth of their 'out-of-the-body' existence and their survival of bodily death. To outside observers there necessarily remains the possibility of doubt; to all who have had the experience, there is none. It is no more deceptive than waking up in the morning. You may dream that you are awake and in fact be dreaming, but once you are really awake you are in no doubt. Unfortunately, this waking sense of certainty can only be experienced, not publicly proved.
2. A similar sense of reality attaches to an experience apparently even more common than the out-of-the-body experience. Shortly after a loved one dies (most usually a spouse), the survivor often has a sudden, unexpected and utterly convincing sense of the real here-and-now presence of the dead one. It is not a memory, or a wish, or an image from the imagination. It is not usually accompanied by an image at all. But it is utterly convincing to the experiencer. Only to one who trusts the experiencer is the experience transferable as evidence, however. And that link can be denied without absurdity. Again, it is a very strong and convincing experience, but not a convincing proof.
3. What would be a convincing proof from experience? If we could only put our hands into the wounds of a dead man who had risen again! The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the skeptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along!"

 
 
Originally published at PeterKreeft.com. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Vine and Branch)

"For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man..."
— Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

Last year, I found myself unexpectedly marveling at an album by Tom “It's Not Unusual” Jones, which featured covers of songs by Tom Waits, Paul Simon, and The Low Anthem. One track, "Soul of a Man," revived a bluesy 1930 song by Blind Willie Johnson that asks one my favorite philosophical questions: what is the soul?

Generally, people fall into one of the following three “camps” on the question of the soul. (Note: By soul, I mean the immaterial aspect of the human being which thinks, feels, and wills. By consciousness, I will mean something more rudimentary, but also apparently immaterial: rich subjective experience, or what philosophers call the “what it is like." This is an important distinction since people often use these words interchangeably. I’ll discuss both.)

1) Materialistic Monists (MMs) – A person is their body; the soul is reducible to the material or simply doesn’t exist.
2) Descartesian Dualists (DDs) – A person is their soul; the soul is a separable, non-material substance that inhabits the body.
3) Aristotelian Animalists (AAs) – A person is their body and their soul; the soul is the non-material form of the body, unified with the body.

MMs have been gaining ground in recent years, especially with advances in neuroscience and the rising prominence of the New Atheists. There are different sub-groups in this camp, but in general, they all doubt that there is anything spiritual or immaterial about man. They're convinced that poetic discourse about your or my “soul” is a form of “folk psychology.”

This view is not new, but in recent years, philosophers like Daniel Dennett have spun a far more sophisticated case with it. His 1991 book Consciousness Explained purports to show through a “multiple drafts” theory that there is no “center” of conscious experience (“I see a blue sky”), but rather a spreading of awareness “drafts” over subsystems in the brain that, through evolutionary and cultural conditioning, have resulted in an illusory unity of subjective experience.

Dennett's work suggests a question: are we gradually explaining with evolution and neuroscience what was almost always thought to be the work of divine providence? Is the soul just one more mystery-mongering domain of theologians to dispel under the hot white light of empirical science? According to Richard Dawkins, the answer is yes. “Science,” Dawkins says, “has either killed the soul or is in the process of doing so." Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker agrees: “Cognitive neuroscience has pretty much killed [the soul]...Many kinds of evidence show that the mind is an entity in the physical world, part of a causal chain of physical events. If you send an electric current through the brain, you cause the person to have a vivid experience. If a part of the brain dies because of a blood clot or a burst artery or a bullet wound, a part of the person is gone."

But philosophers have been more or less aware of this correlation between brain states and mental states since the ancient world. (You don’t need to be Socrates to see that the mind weakens as the brain decays, or malfunctions when the head is injured.) Yet, most have gone on believing in souls, because correlation does not imply causation. To use a computer analogy, the brain might be like the hardware of your iPhone which transmits the software of Words with Friends. When you smash your phone to pieces (say, because you keep getting all vowels), Words malfunctions and vanishes with it—but your game can continue on your iPad. Similarly, after brain death, the “software” of the soul may not die with it, because it was not caused by it—only transmitted. Pinker’s evidence seems to be a textbook case of the post hoc fallacy.

Neuroplasticity research further complicates the MM's position. There is growing evidence that—in patients with OCD, for example—the brain reshapes under the tutelage of new attitudes and behaviors. But if the soul is to the brain as digestion is to the stomach, why should mental effort execute any top-down causation? In response, materialists are forced to relegate the soul—with its rationality and will—to a sort of illusory, ineffectual middle man in the brain’s modification of itself.

But the biggest problem for the MMs are qualia, or distinctive conscious experiences of things (e.g., the “what it is like” to see yellow, feel hotness, etc.). Even Sam Harris, who like Dennett is one of the leading New Atheists, has emphasized this point. In his essay “The Mystery of Consciousness,” Harris (sounding very Cartesian) says: “[T]he only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself.” He concludes that “an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.” Harris indirectly cites the work of two philosophers leading this charge against the MMs: Thomas Nagel ("What Is It Like to Be a Bat?") and David Chalmers (the “hard problem” of consciousness), who are also both atheists. The work of these three eminent, non-religious thinkers yields an inconvenient truth: that the richness of subjective consciousness will not be subdued by materialism, not because the empirical tools of science have yet to advance on it, but because it is inescapably “stuff” of a different order. As Nagel puts it in his latest book Mind and Cosmos, “The existence of consciousness seems to imply that...the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything.”

The irreducibility of consciousness to physics and chemistry seems to push us toward dualism and the DDs: perhaps consciousness is the bulwark of something like the soul, demanding that we acknowledge it?

The notion of dualism stretches back to Plato's Phaedo (360 B.C.) and beyond; but French philosopher and mathematician Descartes, at the birth of modern science, incorporated Platonic dualism into a systematic division of the world between the res extensa (extended thing) and res cogitans (thinking thing). For him, the only thing one could prove existed beyond the shadow of a doubt was the thinking subject. As he famously put it: “I am only a thing that thinks” (which sounds a lot like Johnson’s line, “a man ain't nothing but his mind”).

Many Christian movements (e.g., Gnosticism, and later Puritanism) have been made up of committed DDs. In fact, De Tocqueville once remarked that Protestant America is “where the precepts of Descartes are best applied.” Religious DDs tend to speak of the soul and “the flesh” as one speaks of a prisoner and a jail, and to conceive of everlasting life with God in wholly spiritual terms.

But the trouble for all DDs, religious or not, are legion. The first and greatest is the snare of skepticism. In the DDs framework, where the person is reducible to his or her immaterial self, it seem inescapable that we’re doomed to doubt everything – the existence of other minds (philosophical zombies), the external world (world-as-computer simulation), even our own bodies (brain in a vat). Only philosophers like Chalmers are crazy enough to think about these things—common sense flies in the face of all three—but the problems remain.

Another problem is the relationship between soul and body. How does the immaterial soul or self “operate” the material body? When I decide to raise my arm, and I do it, where is the link between my immaterial thought and my material action? (Descartes’ guess was the pineal gland, which scientists have since deemed an endocrine organ.) DDs are stuck with the Cartesian catastrophe of the “ghost in the machine,” an incoherency that effects oscillation between the two extremes to this day (what novelist Walker Percy, inspired by Jacques Maritain, termed “angelism-beastilism”).

(In an effort to avoid these and other problems presented by dualism, philosophers like Nagel are increasingly considering a sort of Emersonian view called panpsychism, the belief that consciousness pervades all of reality, that it’s “awareness all the way down.” This view may have some explanatory power, but there are glaring difficulties: how could a mini-consciousness, which is simple and indivisible, inhere in the elementary particles which constitute the physical world? And how do the mental aspects of these infinite particles, which constitute even our brain, combine into our one consciousness?)

A third position, which avoids the pitfalls of both materialism and dualism, is that of the Aristotelian Animalists (AAs).

Aristotle wrote in De Anima that the soul is: “(a) the source or origin of movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of the whole living body.” For Aristotle, there are different kinds of souls (plant, animal, and human) with varying degrees of biological and cognitive activity. The human soul is the animating form of the matter of the human animal, the actuating “breath” of what a body is and does. Aristotle thus distinguishes the soul from the material body, but not as a ghost from a machine. Unlike Plato, Aristotle concluded that the soul is “inseparable from its body,” although the highest faculty of the soul—the mind—is “immortal and eternal.”

Aristotle's earthy notion of the soul was picked up by scholastic philosophers, most notably Thomas Aquinas. In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas agreed with Aristotle that “it belongs to the notion of a soul to be the form of a body,” and that although a human soul’s rationality points to its subsistence after death, the disembodied soul is a form without matter, and therefore incomplete. Death does not result in the final liberation and fulfillment of the soul, but a dislodging of the body’s essence, our being “not wholly at rest.”

Thomism, informed by this Aristotelian view of the person, has held to this unity of body and soul and fought fiercely against the two alternatives. As one Notre Dame philosopher puts it, the Thomistic view is that “dualism is just as wrongheaded and, in the end, just as pernicious as physicalism.” Why pernicious?

Because dualism “has the dire moral consequence of leaving the body bereft of more than merely external or instrumental moral significance.” Materialism, on the other hand, leaves the apparent “limitlessness and lucidity” of our freedom and rationality bereft of much significance at all. AAs, in contrast, account for the whole person—thought, freedom, will, as well as qualia—a philosophical account which has informed and paralleled Catholic theology (e.g., the sacraments, the resurrection of the dead, and the theology of the body). As the Catechism states it: “spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”

The position of the AAs seems to be the most coherent and plausible of these three camps, since it leaves us with the fewest problems and has the most explanatory power. Still, asking about the soul and answering it in philosophical terms is one thing. Hearing the question sung from the pit of a soul is another. I have to answer, after everything, “a mystery.”

Based on article originally posted at By Way of Beauty. Used with permission.