That’s actually a non-sequitur. Speaking only in terms of logical possibility, an immortal soul could in principle exist whether there is a God or not.
And you might be conscious, that doesn’t mean it’s immortal, much less that all the aspects of your personality that owe to your genes, experiences and upbringing, including your memories, come with “you” after death. There are just so many ways in which the concept of the soul fails to properly take account of the findings of neuroscience. Your personality develops, and your memories are physically stored. Worse, we also know that accessing them changes them.
One rather obvious distinction between them is that, at least in most forms of Christianity, the soul is thought to survive mortal death.
Also, “consciousness” has less of an implicit understanding of it being divinely-bestowed
Hence, in OED:
The spiritual part of man regarded as surviving after death and as susceptible of happiness or misery in a future state.
&
The spiritual part of man considered in its moral aspect or in relation to God and His precepts.
That may be a conflation of two different meanings of the word. From the OED, the older, more archaic is:
The principle of life in man or animals; animate existence. Obs. (freq. in OE. in Scriptural passages).
But less archaicly:
2.a The principle of thought and action in man, commonly regarded as an entity distinct from the body; the spiritual part of man in contrast to the purely physical. Also occas., the corresponding or analogous principle in animals. Freq. in connexion with, or in contrast to, body.
(This latter definition would appear to be the one that is most closely a synonym of “consciousness”.)
It should be noted that in some belief systems, e.g. Animism, even plants and inanimate objects are imputed with spiritual essence.
OED lists 26 varying definitions of ‘soul’.
This is why I have leaned heavily towards explicit definition of what people mean by “soul”.
if there is a God, and he chooses to bring me back when I die, then I have an immortal consciousness. It isn’t hard to imagine how God could be able to do this.
I disagree.
In order to maintain or restore my consciousness after I die, God would have to either activate my consciousness without a body/brain system (Puck has shown the problems with this approach), or resurrect me in the flesh, as historically both Christianity and Judaism asserted. Both options seem pretty hard to me.
Neil, when I refer to conflict, I mean conflict between ideas, not individuals.
Which is bigger. The sum total of our thoughts and memories and personality OR the data set in DNA. How all that is stored in our brain is still under investigation. But if you knew how it was and if thinking was something like a google search engine and Ai combined, possibly its a easy task to simply file the sum total of it and like Birth take a code and unfold it so that the whole things pops up complete again.
Its a very large miracle to have a single cell double and double and double an some choose to be part of a spine, some in the exact spot determine to become fingernail and some others weave nerves and arteries through the body intact without leaks. If DNA can open up like a picture book and create every sort of life on the planet without having it on a bench with a big light and a lot of intervention.
I cant see why the total of our conscience couldn’t be reduced to a code sent by some microwave frequency to the hand of God possibly on a moment by moment basis so recreating you is in no way a chore. Its a bag of popcorn. Poof out comes a new birth.
Yeah but Paul, God is by definition omnipotent. You can sweep anything under the rug with an omnipotent being as long as it doesn’t imply an obvious logical contradiction. To some of us this is a bug, to others it’s a feature.
No imaginable mechanical or physical difficulty can undermine theism short of logical contradiction, and wouldn’t you know it there’s a solution to that too: presuppositionalism - God is above logic and reason.
If we really want to go down a rabbit hole, I see no requirement that a soul be conscious, or that a consciousness have a soul. I see no way to answer this sort of question, and I am quire content to leave it as speculation.
The interesting thing, to me, is the weird way that ideas like the “by definition” omnipotence and pressuppositionalism work: they can, by their nature, be of NO use to anyone interested in the truth, but they can be employed as defenses by people interested in not having to scrutinize evidence.
Is it strictly impossible that such propositions are true? No, but it’s not strictly impossible that the patent medicine man’s product works. It’s not strictly impossible that when I declined the invitation, as a boy, to get in that man’s van and go to the party where there was a limitless supply of free candy, I made a mistake. When an argument is not so much a good reading of evidence as it is a get-out-of-jail-free card, this speaks volumes about the legitimate merit of the thing being defended.
I got a bit sidetracked with the semester starting and didn’t get to respond to all the posts after my last one. I think @swamidass did a good job of reflecting what I would have said. The soul in particular seems very nebulous, and while substance dualism seems to be pretty common, I can’t see it being a requirement to be a Christian so I really don’t feel like I have a particular position to defend here.
That said, I think I agree with you that the tools for the big/hard questions are probably pretty similar to the small/soft questions but that the questions can become harder and harder to formulate well. I also see a difference in the amount of certainty with which we can make assessments. If you can’t actively control variables, you can easily end up in passively observing correlations without any significant ability to look at casualty.
Take prayer, for instance. We can (and people do) set up an experiment where people pray for a particular outcome, and outcomes are observed. It would be very difficult to actually have much certainty that any slight correlation between prayer and desired outcome was actually causally created by the prayer. Conversely, if there is no correlation whatsoever, it also gives little certainty about God’s existence or the efficacy of prayer because the causal agent (God) is not the variable under control (that’s the people praying) and the causal agent has it’s own agency (desire, will, whatever). The molecules in my lab experiments don’t move because I wish them to, they move reliably (some replicable certainty) because they have no agency and are therefore “obeying a higher power” (i.e. the laws of physics) and have no choice in the matter. But when the thing under study is the higher power, then all we can do is infer based on what we see and hope that we get a comprehensive enough look to put things together.
I think this is where the big questions are both fascinating and humbling at the same time. I think it’s great to ponder and wrestle with them, but at the end of the day, I usually come away with “what I’ve seen is amazing, but I know so little”.
Christians don’t feel the same way when they make uncontrolled prayers and see desired outcomes.
I hope this applies to every other God besides the Christian one. When Baal refused to answer his prophets, Elisha did not apply your reasoning above but had those prophets slaughtered.
Of course we can imagine either of these possibilities, in the same way that we can imagine all kinds of utterly implausible or even impossible things. I just said that they were hard to do.
Regarding the problems of an incorporeal consciousness, I cannot improve on what Puck said. Regarding the resurrection of the body, that would require ten billion (and counting) quite extraordinary miracles, together with obvious questions of identity and of the age and state of body to be resurrected.
You may reply that a sufficiently powerful deity could overcome such problems. If so, I can only respond that I find the idea of a deity with such powers completely incredible. I don’t see how to move on from there.
Not all Christians believe in incorporeal human consciousness. Some argue quite strenuously against it. It doesn’t seem like this is a belief on which orthodox Christianity hinges.
I know that Christian beliefs are extremely diverse. What are the minimum features of a soul that all mainstream Christians would demand? I had thought these included the ability to survive death, to be individual (rather than some kind of merging intothe Cosmos), and to experience.
I think the best way to understand this is that there are some “mere Christianity” requirements that most would affirm and would seem to be required for a coherent reading of Scripture and the salvation story. But the precise mechanism or reality by which these requirements are satisfied is almost entirely up in the air. There are a range of possible solution that can be more or less plausible or implausible in light of science.
There is disagreement about whether or not human souls are intrinsically capable of surviving death.
That’s where the rub might be.
Some philosophers argue that the human soul (and any rational soul) logically entails immortality. This idea is visible in the Scholastic school, and is a somewhat Aristotelian idea from what I can gather. (@dga471 might correct me). Many of the arguments you are making may hit home on this conception of the soul, but this is a storied debate, and I’m doubtful there is any new challenge being offered here. You’d really have to look at how these scholars have responded to scientific challenges on these matters.
Personally, for both scientific and Scriptural reasons, I don’t find that school to be very convincing. Instead…
Others argue that the human soul is not intrinsically immortal, but can be made immortal by God’s action if he choose. In that sense the human soul is conditionally immortal. In this conception, the problem really reduces down to the question of whether or not God exists and cares about any of enough to bring us back from the dead. In principle, it’s logically possible that he could. The fact that it seems we dont’ have immortal souls from a scientific perspective is because, in fact, because we don’t have immortal souls by any natural process or mechanism.
I don’t think this second school is just a dodge from the scientific challenge. It follows from some key passages in Genesis on conditional immortality and the Tree of Life, and its an idea that’s visible in Church history, long before the challenge of science. I think also it leads to a very coherent understanding of the nature of human persons that’s consistent with what we know from science.
And, getting back to the beginning, it satisfies those baseline “requirements” of mere Christianity quite easily.
If we can imagine a possibility then it isn’t a logical contradiction. That doesn’t mean its true, but does show that there isn’t logical impasse.
The same sort of reasoning comes in evolutionary though all the time. Dawkins talks about this. There is a value in showing an imaginary stepwise path for the evolution of, for example, the eye. Even if that isn’t actually the path taken, the imaginary path demonstrates that the evolution of the eye isn’t in principle impossible or implausible.
In terms of judging the plausibility of answers, it is important to clarify precisely what make something implausible. If you think that the idea of God is entirely implausible, of course you are going to think that the account of the soul based on the Mind of God (as I put out) is implausible. But that isn’t saying much at all. It’s just restating your presuppositions. I’m making a different point untouched by this.
Given the existence of God (which you might still dispute, but not for the purpose of this statement) then X (an immortal soul granted by His decision to bring us back from the dead) isn’t implausible or impossible.
There is no logical contradiction there. That’s and true and plausible claim, even if you think that the existence of God is implausible.
Yes, I but I would worry if their belief in prayer was only because “it works”. I think the story of the Bible indicates that the purpose of prayer is not to be like a jeanie in a bottle, to simply command wishes. Prayer can be treated similar to a horoscope or sports superstition for sure, but I don’t think that’s the historic doctrine of Christianity.
That is true. I’m glad we don’t settle theological disputes that way anymore (or shouldn’t anyway).
If we can imagine a possibility then it isn’t a logical contradiction.
Not so. People imagined the possibility of an algorithm to solve the general quintic until Galois showed that this was indeed a logical contradiction. But I don’t think that’s the real point.
I think we’ve reached an impasse. I say I find the reconstitution of the body of Spinoza at some future time utterly implausible (Spinoza would have agreed). You say it isn’t implausible at all if you already believe in a God powerful enough to do this and who wants to do this. I see no way forward from here.
But in a sense we’ve already passed the winning post. I proposed that evolution from very simple organisms led to a problem with the idea of an immortal soul. Puck argued, IMO convincingly, that this problem is already there if all human sensory experience and purposeful action depends on a physical brain/body system. So no, I was wrong. My argument does not show that evolution poses any problems for belief in the existence of a soul that weren’t there already.
I think, however, that you have scored a Pyrrhic victory. You will not agree.
