“I’ve married my soulmate.”
“Grandad’s with us in spirit.”
“I left my body and saw myself lying there on the surgeon’s table.”
One Person: Two Parts
It permeates our language and dominates the collective human thought. For some it comes through the conscious experience, for others dreams and/visions, but for many, perhaps even most, religious tradition. I’m talking about Dualism.
In my own words, Dualism suggests humans are more than a material self, more than meat suits, that the truest sense of “the self” exists separately, but connected for a time, to the housing of a physical body. It sees humans as fundamentally two parts: the body/physical/matter and mind/consciousness/spirit/soul.
While Dualism exists within secular thought and while a small minority of Christians claim a materialist worldview, it seems the vast majority of Western Christians are Substance Dualists. Substance Dualism is the belief that God fashioned human beings from two substances: 1) a physical body subject to decay and 2) a an eternal soul (one’s truest essence) which continues to exist after the body’s death. In this post, I’m concerned with this particular form of Dualsim.
Bible, Bodies and Souls
In the diverse books of the Bible, the authors express little interest in metaphysical explanations for a soul and body, yet Christians frequently use scripture as evidence for Substance Dualism. A few examples:
I Samuel 28: King Saul meets the Medium of Endor who summons the late prophet Samuel from the dead. She describes him as a a ghostly, spirit-like figure.
Luke 23:39-43: Moments before his death Jesus promises the crucified criminal next to him, “…today you will be with me in Paradise.” Some form of Dualism is necessary since the criminal’s body would either 1) be left to decompose on the cross or 2) placed in a tomb when he died.
Luke 16:19-31: Here Jesus tells a story regarding the death of The Rich Man, “…the rich man also died, and was buried; and in the hades having lifted up his eyes…” Since they buried the body, one might conclude something other than The Rich Man’s physical body was in hades.
These passages are but a small fraction of those used by many christians to argue for a Dualistic worldview, yet for me, Dualism was one of the Jenga pieces that created an unstable house which eventually collapsed into atheism. Below I give two examples as to why I cannot believe in Substance Dualism.
Inception & Conception
If the soul is fundamentally a different substance than the body and is not dependent upon the body for existence, then when does God fashion the soul and when does he unite the created soul to the created body? When does he join the two substances?
Does he create and join them simultaneously at conception? If so, then what about identical twins where a single sperm fertilizes a single egg which later divides into two cells which then become two embryos. One conception, two souls?
Some might argue God unites the body and soul at first breath, drawing on the Old Testament when God breathes the breath of life into Adam. Such a perspective creates a slew of issues for Right to Life advocates who believe Life begins at conception.
Perhaps the individual soul exists before conception? Does God have a bank of souls he matches up with physical bodies as he forms them? If so, why is there no memory, no sense of self before birth? If there is to be a sense of self after death and if a soul were preexistent to the body then would we not have a sense of self before conception?
For me, what we know about conception, pregnancy and the birth process creates significant issues for the Substance Dualism.
It’s a matter of hardware
Christian Dualism must also contend with the reality of how tinkering with with hardware (brain, matter, the physical) profoundly affects the notion of self.
One personal example: I spent a year as a chaplain for a long-term care facility. Many residents suffered some form of dementia. Dementia is attributed to brain (matter/physical/body) disease or damage which is far more common in the elderly. In my experience as a chaplain, it appeared the damaged and/or diseased hardware (the physical organ of the brain) profoundly affected the resident’s sense of self - which is typically associated with the spirit/soul.
On one particular occasion, I had an extensive conversation in the basement of a resident’s home, with her son in the nearby lounge-chair. We discussed, with great concern, the problems with the basement staircase. In reality this conversation took place in the long-term care facility’s dining room over a cup of fruit, the resident’s son absent. The resident was 100% certain of her location while being 100% incorrect. I had many such interactions during my time as a chaplain.
How does Christian Dualism satisfactorily explain dementia? If the soul is eternal and not subject to decay then why does the individual’s notion of self suffer significantly alongside a “decaying” brain? As the physical goes so does the part of the individual often associated with the spiritual. If there is a soul, what’s happening to it during various stages of dementia?
Dementia is only one example of the self-to-brain relationship: head trauma, Corpus Collosotomies and split-brain research, schizophrenia, psychedelics, and brain stimulation causing emotional states are other major challenges to substance dualism.
Just One
An understanding of Consciousness and Mind continues to challenge our greatest thinkers and research capabilities - it remains a great mystery. Perhaps the object itself will never fully understand the object, but we should keep trying. In the meantime, it makes more sense to me intellectually and experientially that our sense of self emerges from the physical organ of the brain rather than an eternal soul crafted by a divine designer.