Is the Soul Immortal? | J.P. Moreland

J.P., I've been fascinated by the number of deeply believing Christian philosophers, theologians, who do not believe in the immortality of the soul. And it seems to me to be a trend that more and more very sophisticated Christians believe in what they call non-physical reductionism. They believe in the resurrection, but not the immortality of the soul. Well I think the majority of Christian philosophers still do believe in a substantial soul, but you're right. There is a minority, it's a vocal minority that's growing, that doesn't. And I think the reason is sociological. I think that it's physics envy. I think Christian philosophers and theologians are still too infatuated with the idea that the hard sciences are our primary guide to reality. You believe in the immortality of the soul, that there is a soul. I do believe that there is a substantial soul. Okay, I'm going to give you that, that there is a soul. What is it? Is it this sort of simple, vaporous, incorporable, immaterial stuff? The soul is an immaterial substance that contains consciousness and animates and makes living the body. It contains consciousness, it's not is consciousness. It has consciousness within it, and in fact the soul is a very complex thing. Okay, we're dealing with a lot of subjects here, let's try to tease out some and discuss them. Now you're throwing some terms out here. I want you to define for me the difference between three terms, mind, soul, and spirit. We're using all of them. Think of the soul like a chest of drawers, and think of the mind and the spirit like two drawers in the chest of drawers. I am a soul, I'm an immaterial substance. Within me are different faculties, different ranges of powers or abilities I have. My mind is a faculty of the soul. My spirit is a different faculty of the soul. Now you can't separate my mind from my soul like you can the legs of a table and put them in different places. So the legs of a table would be called separable parts. They can be separated from the whole of which they're parts and still exist. The mind and the spirit are inseparable parts. They're parts of the soul, but you don't want to think of the soul as composed of all these parts like a table. The soul comes first and then it has these faculties in it, and one faculty is the mind and another faculty is the spirit. And how many faculties are there? Have you counted them? No. I think what we have to do is to apposite a faculty to explain any range of genuinely different powers in the soul. So for example, I think very primitive animals clearly have faculties of sensations, but probably not faculties of thought. Higher animals like a dog would have a faculty of thought in addition to faculties of sensations. You're differentiating sensations from mind? Oh, yeah. Sensations are not in the mind, they're in the soul. They're faculties of awareness. And so it is because we have a faculty of sensation that we're capable of being aware of things. It's because we have a faculty of mind that we're capable of having concepts, thoughts, beliefs, things like that. The fundamental question is, are you defining things that really have independent existence? Or are you taking one thing and sort of describing different aspects of it? I'm taking one thing and I'm describing different components of it, or different faculties. Sensations aren't the same thing as thoughts. Thoughts can be true or false. Sensations can't. Emotions aren't the same thing as beliefs. Beliefs are things I take to be true. Emotions are things I feel. Even though all of these things can be represented in the brain by electrical activities in different ways. Well, I don't think they're represented in the brain because the concept of representation is itself a mental notion. I think they have causal correlates in the brain. We've now defined the soul as the superset and then some subsets. We don't know quite how many, but mind, spirit, sensations are some of these. That's right. I had a student whose grandfather died on the operating table and he left his body. He was watching a younger and an older doctor try to revive him. The younger doctor said, let the old guy go. He's had a good long life. The older doctor said, I can't do that. We've got to stick with him. His grandfather was watching all this. It's impossible to use any of that in any definitive argument because there's so much anecdotal material that it's difficult for me to, no matter how amazing the stories are, to give it any credibility. Well, I don't agree with you, Robert, but let's waive that point. You're missing the intent of the story. What I need for my story to work is not that it's true, but that it's possibly true. Here's why. Let's follow it. Because if there's something possibly true of me that isn't possibly true of my brain and body, I can't be my brain and body. I am at least possibly disembodied, but my brain is not possibly disembodied. So there is something true of me that is not true of my brain, and that's enough to prove I'm not my brain. What follows from this soul that you have, which is very richly defined? That soul, I assume, has necessary immortality? I don't believe it has necessary immortality. I believe that the human soul will never cease to exist, but only because I think God sustains it. God could annihilate it if he wanted to. So, no, I don't believe the soul is immortal if you mean by that self-existent. If you mean never ceases to exist, yes. But that has to be an affirmative act, a continuing act of God to keep it in existence having created it in the first place. It is not due to the nature of the soul itself. But it can exist forever because God sustains it. And it's different from the body. And its natural essence is to exist, because that's the way God created it in this non-physical aura. Well, its natural essence is to be embodied. So the soul functions best when it's embodied, but the soul can't exist without a body. All right, let's go to a different question. That is, what about animals? Animals have a graduation from simplest single cells, even without nuclei, very simple entities, all the way up to great apes and dolphins and cetaceans, whales that have brains many times our size and have very complex behaviors. How do you view the soul or consciousness in this great chain of life? Well, something either does or doesn't have a soul. But our degree of certainty as to whether something has a soul lessens to the degree that the thing is less analogous to us. Let me explain. This is a part of the problem of the knowledge of other minds. If I'm stuck with a pen, before I grimace and shout out, I'm aware in my own case of feeling pain. Now I notice that you're very analogous and similar to me. So I assume that when you're stuck with a pen, while I can't observe your feeling of pain, before you grimace and shout out, I ascribe to you a state called a pain state that is similar to the one I have. Because you and I are very, very analogous to one another in our inputs and outputs and behaviors, I'm justified in ascribing to you a mind very much like mine. To the degree that a living organism's behaviors, in light of their inputs, is different from ours, to that degree we are justified in ascribing a different soul to that organism. Are frogs conscious? Sure they're conscious. There's good evidence that they feel pain and are able to see flies. There's no evidence that they're capable of forming concepts and thinking thoughts, however. Dogs are different. And so our knowledge of the kind of a soul a living thing would have would be based upon an analogy with us and what we need to attribute to that living thing to explain its behavior. So from frogs to great apes, they all have souls, but the souls have different faculties among these different things? They would all have an immaterial substance that contains consciousness and animates its body and makes it living, that's right. But the degree of complexity, the number of faculties in that living organism, would vary depending on the organism itself. How far down the scale do you go? Do you go to the very definition of life? Does every expression of life have a soul? Whenever you have evidence that the parts of a living thing operate interactively in light of the demands of an ontologically prior whole, you have evidence of a soul. Let's define what that means. If you have a machine, the parts are prior to the whole, and the parts work together independent of the whole. You take the parts out of the whole, you take a radio out of a car or a steering wheel, it's still a steering wheel. If you have parts of a living organism, however, that are what they are in virtue of its relationship to all the other parts, then what you have are parts that are functioning in light of the whole. The whole is prior to the parts, whereas with inanimate objects, the parts are prior to the whole. Whenever we have evidence that the whole is prior to the parts, you have parts that are only functioning in light of an ontologically prior whole that gives them their definition and their interaction. So if a one-cell bacterium or amoeba reacts with its environment, we know it's alive, that it has some kind of soul. Maybe very, very, very simple compared to our soul. That's right. It's not conscious, but you can't explain the interaction of its parts mechanistically. You have to have a whole that is prior to the parts if you have evidence that the parts function and are what they are in light of that whole. So the very simplest forms of life, you would say, have a soul but do not have consciousness. That's right. Because consciousness may be the mind, and that's one of the faculties that is not existent at that level. Exactly right. I mean, I understand this now. Well, I hope so. I'm not sure I understand it.