Board index ‹ Soul, Souls, and Ensoulment

[Goat]

What evidence do you have that we have souls, and that there is a spiritual realm?

[jimwalton]

Here's a good starter for a conversation about the reality of the soul.


1. Evidence of our thoughts and feelings betrays that we are more than just material objects.

2. Our sense of self (and perception of self, not just in thought, but as an entity) gives evidence that we have a conception of an immaterial self.

3. Our perceptions of truth and falseness (necessary for scientific inquiry) betray a belief that among the random and chance happenings of evolution and naturalism, content (apart from natural phenomena that we can empirically experience) has arisen that we can trust to be reliably true. (The conditional probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism together with the proposition that we have come to be by way of evolution, is low.) The reliability of cognitive content in addition to self-perception gives evidence that something besides pure materialism is present in our beings.

4. J.P. Moreland makes the argument from Leibniz's law of the indiscernibility of identicals: For any X and Y, X is identical to Y if for any property P, P is true of X if and only if P is true of Y. It's a variation of A = A: for two things to be truly identical, they must be truly identical, in which case the argument can go like this:

a. You are a body and a soul, or you are just your body.
b. It is possible (by which I mean it is strongly conceivable, therefore I have good grounds to believe it is possible) for you to survive the death of your body (as evidenced by genuine "near death" experiences).
c. It is not possible for your body to survive the death of your body.
d. Therefore, you are not identical to your body.