One area of doubt I have struggled with for a long time was the issue of the soul. Don’t get me wrong, I believed it then and still do, but the question of why I believed it was the issue. I’ve had supernatural experiences and events happen around me and through me, but I still had this nagging question of whether I really believed that when my heart stops beating and brain stops functioning that I will keep on going with full mental awareness. After some time in prayer, research, and conversations with people much smarter than I am, God gave me a few gifts to relieve my doubt. The first was supernatural. If you want to hear that short story you can contact me directly, but the argument below solidified the experience for me.
While there are a lot of Christians who would simply default to a blind faith with regard to the soul or consciousness, there is also a growing branch of the scientific community that is attacking the nature of the soul-body distinction through neuroscience. If Christians are to remain faithful to the Gospel, then they cannot punt the ball on supernatural topics simply because the other side is making naturalistic claims about the human person. We have to give a defense of our faith for the immaterial nature of God and ourselves if we are going to give an unbelieving world a reason to consider our message. Fideism (or blind faithism) does nothing to help, but the Bible and philosophical reasoning can grant us an immense amount of evidence to make our case. The two major views that I will contrast here are physicalism and substance dualism.
The physicalist would argue that we are all purely material, and that we do not possess a soul. Our bodies and brains are simply all that there is, and each emotion and thought we carry is reduced to the neurological impulses of the brain. Dualism, on the other hand, is the view that the soul is the immaterial part of the person. A human cannot be reduced to a body or a brain, but the actual consciousness of the person is the soul. These two views are in contrast to each other, but modern science cannot claim that physicalism overrides substance dualism on empirical evidence, since both appeal to the same material. J.P. Moreland said,
Strict physicalism cannot be established by showing that mental states and brain states are interdependent on, causally related to, or constantly joined with each other in an embodied person. Physicalism needs identity to make its case, and if something is true, or possibly true of a mental substance, property, or event that is not true of a physical substance, property or event, then strict physicalism is false.
This is therefore a philosophical and theological matter, and not a purely scientific issue. This is not to diminish the importance of scientific discoveries of the brain, but neuroscience alone cannot account for the issues of consciousness and the soul.
Leibniz’s law of identity states that if X and Y are identical (X=Y), then the two are the same. Therefore if there is something true of X, then it will be true of Y. But, if there is something true or possibly true of X that is not true of Y, then they are not the same (X≠Y). So, Moreland states, “If we can find one thing true, or even possibly true, of the mind and not of the brain, or vice versa, then dualism is established.” With this in place, we are able to explore the similarities and the possible differences between the mind and the brain. And, as we will see, there are some aspects of the mind that cannot be explained by the physical body and brain alone.
Arguments for the Soul.
Since we have a very self-explanatory basis for our own conscious thought (i.e. I think therefore I am), the question of how self awareness could have developed out of a chaotic natural process is very difficult to explain. Atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel makes this point: “Given what is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through operation of the laws of physics and chemistry?” If we are all simply a product of a blind physical process, where do we ground the idea that our rational thoughts can correspond to the reality of the outside world? How could we ever come to a knowledge of what is true? On the basis of physicalism, we are only our brains, so why are our internal thoughts trustworthy? Nagel goes on to say,
The likelihood that the process of natural selection should have generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances—as we take ourselves to have done and to continue to do collectively in science, logic, and ethics… The difficulty of understanding naturalistically the faculty of reason that is the essence of these activities.
So, the very idea of consciousness coming from an unconscious natural source proves to be the largest difficulty for physicalists to account for. “Consciousness is what you are aware of when you engage in first-person introspection [or thoughts].” Origins of the universe aside, how the universe came to understand itself through conscious creatures is a puzzle that no naturalistic explanation could solve.
Moreland notes five states of consciousness that further the argument for the soul: Thoughts, desires, sensations, beliefs, and acts of volition. These states cannot be weighed by outside persons, so as to possess third person knowledge of them. This argument for the soul is found in our first person states of being. We have first person access to what is going on in our thoughts, but not in our brain. Neuroscientists know more than the average individual about what is happening in the brain, and can even estimate the probability of what they are thinking about based on the empirical data that the brain states produce, but they can never know what is going on in the patient’s conscious states, because conscious states are not the same as brain states. If they can possess some knowledge of the brain that they cannot possess in the mind, then the two are not the same thing (i.e. X≠Y). Moreland said, “There’s something true of the brain state, namely that it has geometrical and mass properties that is not true of the thought, so the two can’t be the same thing.” The mass of the brain can be weighed and we can understand what area of the brain represents what state the mind may be in, but again, the first person aspect of what those thoughts are belong exclusively to the individual alone. Moreland goes on to say, “Thoughts have the property of being true of false, but brain states don’t. It doesn’t make any sense to look at a brain state and say, ‘you see that brain state right there? It’s true.’ Brain states just exist; they are neither true or false, but thoughts have the property of being true or false. So a thought is not the same thing as the state of the brain.”
First person self-awareness is not able to be possessed by anyone but the individual, and this is categorically described as properly basic to human functionality. We live and operate as though this is true, and there is no way to argue against it without using first person self-awareness. So, you would have to use it to argue against it. Our awareness is also consistently about or of something. This is called the argument from intentionality or of-ness. We have thoughts, desires, and beliefs of or about x, y, and z, but brain states simply are. For example, I can have a desire for my wife, or I can think about theology, but a brain state cannot do such things, they simply are. Moreland said, “To grasp a mental act one must engage in an introspective act of self-awareness, but no such introspection is required to grasp a physical relation.” Brain states cannot be of or about something, they simply are, therefore it is not the same.
Based on the law of identity and the arguments above, we can conclude that the physical brain is not equivalent to the immaterial mind/soul. If we continue to maintain the physicalist position, the implications of doing so would run contrary to how we function as a society and this would have massive ethical consequences. If we were merely material, we could not logically continue to judicially condemn a human being after 30 years of their incarceration, since it would be a different person altogether with his or her physical state. Moreland points out that “bodies and brains are in constant flux.” Due to the dying of cells and cell reproduction in the body, we are never bodily the same minute by minute. If we are strictly physical, then we are never fully the same, but since we do have a non-physical mind, we are the same, though our bodies change. It is self-evident that we are the same person from one event to the next, and we therefore have a basis to judge a criminal for longer than a single moment in time.
Out of Body/Near Death Experiences
Further, the reports of out of body experiences give us a broader confidence that we will continue to exist after death. While Jesus spoke directly about this, and would be the leading authority on post-death experiences (since He came back to tell us), we can also see by near death experiences that this is an experiential reality for human beings today. Though there is no dogmatic truth that we can pull from these experiences, as many prove to be contradictory in the details, the incredible claims that have been made from people who have been declared dead and have come back give us justification to believe that there is life beyond the grave. The Scriptural claims and evidences of the resurrection of Jesus are sufficient to believe in life after death, but NDE’s can be an empirical means to show skeptics that there really is a spiritual dimension to life. For an empirical series of documented examples you can visit the National Center for Biotechnology Information https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/.
All this to say, we can trust in the promises of God, that through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have peace with the One who made us, and that for those who are in Christ death is merely a door to the next stage of our existence with Him and each other.
Bibliography
Hoekema, Anthony A. Created in God's Image. Reprint ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994.
Moreland, J.P. “Coffee with Scholars: An Evening with J. P. Moreland” (video). Lecture, Credo House, Oklahoma city, March 13, 2013. https://www.credocourses.com/product/200638/.
Moreland, J.P. The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014.
Nagel, Thomas. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
TLDR
-Thoughts have the properties of being true of false, but brain states don’t. *This coincides with the idea that the immaterial propositions our minds generate do not fit with mere brain states.
-First person self-awareness is not able to be possessed by anyone but the individual, and this is categorically described as properly basic to human functionality. We live and operate as though this is true, and there is no way to argue against it without using first person self-awareness. So, you would have to use it to argue against it. Our awareness is also consistently about or of something. This is called the argument from intentionality or of-ness. We have thoughts, desires, and beliefs of or about x, y, and z, but brain states simply are.
-Therefore the brain is the not the same as the mind/soul, the soul/mind is not the same as the brain, and this is a firm ground for why we believe the soul exists.
-We can trust God’s Word and His promises that when His people are absent from the body we are present with the Lord.