Do we have Souls?

In recent times, when the word soul is mentioned in an intellectual arena, the proponent is laughed out the room. The prevailing naturalism of pop philosophy, combined with the substance monism that pervades academics is a powerful combination which drives out any talk of a part of you which is immaterial and yet connected to a physical body. With religious overtones reminding us of a bygone age when Christianity ruled the waves, the soul is an unhelpful and potentially dangerous concept to those like Dawkins and Dennett, who believe everything is made of matter. If a strong argument could be brought forward to demonstrate that a soul, or something like a soul, exists, then it is clear that materialism, and thus, most forms of naturalism are false. In this article, I want to illustrate why I believe in the existence of the soul.

As there are many different formulations and variations of what the word soul means, I shall define it in the following way: the essential and immaterial part of a person. This is the view that Plato, most Christian theologians of the first millennium AD and Descartes, along with many others, have taken. Indeed, even the Aristotelian Aquinas held this, whilst emphasising that union with a body was the natural state of the soul. This definition is open to a wide variety of religions, and does not require a set of doctrines to be true, such as God's existence, for its own truth. By essential, I mean the part of a person which they need to exist in order for their own existence, and by immaterial something which is non-physical is substance or cause.

A few months ago, my friend Ben 'Headboy' Hampson and I went to see Professor Richard Swinburne of Oxford University give a lecture on an argument to demonstrate the truth of the idea that soul's exist (pictured below). The following extract is taken from the handout he provided, which outlines the argument.

Definitions:

Metaphysical necessity is the strongest kind of necessity, metaphysical impossibility is the strongest kind of impossibility, metaphysical possibility is the weakest kind of possibility. A sentence s is logically necessary (impossible) iff s is metaphysically necessary (impossible) and discoverable to be so a priori. s is logically possible iff it is not discoverable a priori to be metaphysically impossible. I shall understand these definitions as: s is logically necessary iff its negation (the sentence not-s) entails a contradiction, logically impossible iff it entails a contradiction, logically possible iff it does not entail a contradiction. It is often fairly obvious whether some sentence is logically possible, this can be shown by showing that the sentence is fairly obviously entailed by a fairly obviously logically possible sentence (or conjunction of sentences); and that involves showing this by plausible thought experiments.

A rigid designator is a word which designates the same thing (substance, property, or whatever), whatever properties that thing gains or loses, so long as that thing continues to exist. An informative (rigid) designator is a designator such that anyone who knows what the designator means (that is, has linguistic knowledge of how to use it) knows a set of conditions necessary and sufficient for a thing to be the designated thing. To know these conditions is to be able (when favourably positioned, faculties in working order, and not subject to illusion) to recognise where it applies and where it does not, and to be able to make simple inferences from its application.

I argue that:
s is metaphysically necessary (impossible, possible) iff s is logically necessary (impossible, possible) when informative designators are substituted for co-referring uninformative designators. Various thought experiments show it to be logically possible that I survive operations in which parts of my brain are transplanted, I lose much of my memory etc.- especially if we suppose that I have continuity of experience (overlapping conscious events) during crucial parts of the operations. 'I' or 'Richard Swinburne', as used by me, and 'I' or your proper name as used by you, are informative designators. So each of us can know that sentences asserting that they survive and sentences asserting that they do not survive such operations are metaphysically possible; and so that survival is metaphysically possible. Other thought experiments show that it is metaphysically possible that a person can continue to exist in a totally new body, or without any body at all. Hence the 'simpe theory' of personal identity: the continuing identity of a person over time is an ultimate brute fact, independent of any continuities of physical matter (e.g. brain) or properties (e.g. memory or character).

Given the Principle of the Identity of Composites (a substance of the same parts having the same properties (including past-related properties) arranged in the same way is (of logical necessity) the same substance as any other such substance), it can only be logically and so metaphysically possible both that I survive a certain operation and that I don't survive it, if I already have a non-physical part (my soul) which is necessary for my existence. Given that it is metaphysically possible that I become disembodied, that part is sufficient for my existence. The simple theory entails that each embodied human consists of two parts - body (non-essential) and soul (essential).

If you struggled to follow that, imagine sitting through an hour and a half of Swinburne talking! As it is abundantly clear some explanation is needed, the following part of the article will be dedicated to such a task.

It was Saul Kripke (pictured below), the American genius, who is to be credited with the idea of a rigid designator. It is a term to characterise an expression which has the same reference in every possible world in which it has reference at all. Names and natural-kind terms are rigid designators, whereas most definite descriptions are flaccid designators. Thus, whereas 'the inventor of bifocals' is non-rigid, designating Benjamin Franklin in the actual world and all other possible states of affairs is a term which can only be given to the person who is Benjamin Franklin. This is important for our concept of what the identity of an object or substance is: it is a set of properties which that object or substance has in any state of affairs it exists in. For example, to identify an object as God, it must be essentially omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, otherwise you are not referring to God. So what we are asking here is what part of the human person is required for that person to be that person, and not some other designated thing.

Most people think that what defines the informative designator 'I' is a collection of material particles which form a body. This the position held by atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and A C Grayling. But let us embark on a thought experiment. Imagine you go to bed, your body is the same, and you have a nice dream about meeting Mario and driving his kart. The next day you wake up, but instead of your body being human, you are now like Yoshi, with green skin, webbed toes and a tail. You see your old body lying on the floor. You panic, scream, and then realise Yoshi is so cool you don't mind looking like him. The point of this scenario is that if you and your body were identical (that is, what makes you is your composition of particles) then this scenario would be logically impossible, as you would not be able to inhabit another body. However, there seems nothing contradictory about this thought experiment: whilst it may be a bit silly, there is nothing inherently incoherent about you inhabiting another body. We see it in fiction all the time. This entails that your body is not identical with the properties which need to be in existence for you to exist. But that entails that what makes you you is non-physical.

But if it is not your body which is the set of properties which makes you you, what is? For Descartes, and  more recently Swinburne, this is what we call a soul: an immaterial substance which is independent of the body (for the body is not required for the rigid designator 'Nathan Hood' to apply to an object in a possible world). What this entails is a bare, immaterial essential nature, which is what is referred to when we say 'I' or 'Mr/s X'. Of course, a downside of this is that the descriptions of a soul religious people like to give i.e. fully functioning cognitive faculties etc. can not be evidence by this argument. The kind of soul which has a meaningful relationship with God post-death is not what is entailed by this argument. However, the fact that we are essentially immaterial is a large step forward for this conception of the soul, and gives a philosophical proof that monistic and naturalistic accounts of human identity are flawed, as thought experiments demonstrate. This is a conclusion which flies in the face of modern thought, and hopefully shall challenge you to think about what it means to be 'you' and whether you have a soul.

To summarise the argument put forward by Swinburne for the existence of the soul: it is possible my body is not required for my existence: if my body is not required for my existence, then it follows that what designates me is immaterial: the essential, immaterial part of me is my soul. This is a complex and hard argument to understand, which I appreciate. However, all I hope is that it challenges you to think harder about these issues and that you can see there is rationality and thus intellectual credibility in believing people have souls.