Descartes

Critically assess the claim that human beings have an immortal soul. (40)

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The claim that human beings have an immortal soul is certainly ancient.  It is clear that Plato’s dualism was built on the foundation of Socrates’ belief in immortality and possibly reincarnation.  In addition, evidence from the Bible suggests that belief in an immortal soul predated Christianity – though the belief is not represented consistently in the Old Testament – and became increasingly important as hopes for an immanent eschaton faded with the 1st Century. Further, the idea that personal identity can survive trauma, aging and ultimately death fits with human experience and supports both morality and hopes for life after death which many of us want if not need to maintain.  Nevertheless, despite the persistence and appeal of these beliefs, claims that human beings have immortal souls lack credibility in the 21st Century.

Firstly, as Aristotle observed, “the soul is inseparable from its body” [On the Soul, Book II] He used the analogy of wax and a seal impression to make his point, writing “we must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.” [Aristotle “Psychology” translated by E. Wallace, p. 61, 1882]  While he accepted that human beings have PSYCHE, and that these come in three parts, unlike his teacher Plato, Aristotle rejected the idea that this could ever be separated from the body or survive death.  As Brian Davies OP has noted, just because I consider myself to be sober doesn’t mean that I am. The fact that I feel separated from my body doesn’t mean that I am.  GEM Anscombe agreed, arguing that the feeling of having a separate soul is not a proper argument for the soul’s separability.  Further, as Gilbert Ryle suggested, the soul is the product of the parts and functions of the body operating together.  When we speak of “the soul” it is much like speaking of “the university” in Oxford or “team spirit” in cricket… these things are an undoubtedly part of our experience, but they cannot be separated from the components which make them up.  As Ryle wrote in “The Concept of Mind” (1949) Chapter 1, belief in a separate, separable and possibly immortal soul is the result of “that a family of radical category mistakes”… continuing, this “is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument”. To claim that human beings have separable souls, which – not least given our certain scientific knowledge that bodies decompose – is a precondition of having immortal souls, is to build assumptions on top of gut feelings in spite of the evidence, to make a “category mistake” and to take what is essentially a metaphor literally.  

Secondly, as Richard Dawkins has argued, the theory of evolution can account for the impression of consciousness which contributes to the claim that human beings have immortal souls.  In The Selfish Gene (1976) he wrote “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” In 1993 he speculated that the impression of consciousness and a separate soul has become an essential part of being human because it confers a survival advantage to our genes, suggesting that “brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.” The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)  Dawkins’ reductive materialism is supported by the famous case of Phineas Gage, who suffered a traumatic brain injury and then experienced a complete transformation of personality and identity as a result.  The mind, consciousness or “soul” is nothing more than the impression given off by the normal operation of the brain.  Change the brain, change the “soul”.  Kill the brain, destroy the soul.  Basic biology shows that the soul is far from being immortal and that any claim that human beings have an immortal soul lacks credibility in the 21st Century. 

Further, Peter Geach agreed with the evolution argument, arguing that human beings are sophisticated animals and that our belief that we are somehow different is no more than “savage superstition” [God and the Soul (1969),quoted by John Haldane in Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul (2016)].  It is undoubtedly convenient that human beings claim to have a “soul” where other – genetically similar – animals do not.  For Christians, the existence of the soul explains the unique connection between human beings and God, in whose Image they are made.  Further, the existence of a soul both justifies our preferring members of the species homo sapiens in moral decision-making and supports the religious principle of the Sanctity of Human Life.  If human beings have no separable soul or any claim to immortality then it becomes more difficult to justify decisions which ignore the claim of tribes of orangutans on Indonesian rainforests or which deprive blue whales of their habitats for the benefit of a few human capitalists with financial interests in palm oil or Krill.  As far back as the 18th Century Immanuel Kant highlighted the importance of believing in immortality for moral philosophy.  As he argued, without believing in God, freedom and immortality it would be impossible to explain our duty to follow the moral law as there would be no reason to suppose that the law which appeals to us has authority, that we have the ability to do what we feel called to do or that there could be any ultimate point in doing so.  Without the possibility of immortality, which the separable soul supports, there is little reason to do what is right in a world where goodness is rarely rewarded in this life.  Nevertheless, the undesirability of the alternative conclusion is not a proper argument for the existence of an immortal soul in human beings, so the claim that human beings have an immortal soul lacks credibility.  

Clearly, there are arguments in favour of dualism.

Plato used his famous slave-boy in the Meno to argue that we have memories of the forms, either from past lives or from our soul’s previous home in the world of the forms, which best explain our ability to “learn” mathematics and logic quickly.  For Plato, learning is really remembering.  Today, Noam Chomsky’s work on language acquisition makes this idea more interesting  than it might have seemed a few decades ago, however even nativist accounts of language and research evidence indicating that the human brain is somehow “hardwired for language” does not take away from the possibility that this hard wiring could be explained by evolution, without the need to hypothesize the existence of an immortal soul.  

In addition, Descartes built on Plato’s scepticism about sense-data, pointing out the many ways in which the evidence of eyes and ears turns out to be mistaken.  A stick put in water surely does appear to bend.  Nevertheless, Descartes’ radical conclusion, that the only thing of which I can be certain is “cogito ergo sum” seems to go well beyond the evidence.  In 1968 Norman Malcolm poked holes in Descartes reasoning on a technical level, however even in the most obvious way it is apparent that while the senses do lie, conceptual analysis just as often deceives us.  As Aristotle himself pointed out, “if, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will often fail…” [Metaphysics Book 1:1]  Further, Descartes’ arguments for substance dualism, with the seat of the soul in the Pineal Gland, can only in the light of 21st Century science, be seen as uninformed speculation.  Descartes is far from being justified in his conclusion that “it is certain that I am really distinct from my body and can exist without it.” [Meditations Book VI, 54] and the claim that human beings have an immortal soul continues to lack credibility.  

Finally, paranormal experiences and particularly Near Death Experiences have been used to support claims that human beings have immortal souls.  For example, in 1991 American singer-songwriter Pam Reynolds had a powerful experience of being separated from and looking down on her body and of spending time in “heaven” during a stand-still operation for a brain aneurism.  Nevertheless, most of these experiences fail to stand up to careful scrutiny.  Susan Blackmore described her own journey to this realisation, writing

“It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena—only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic” The New Scientist (2000)

Further, those experiences which resist explanation in simple physiological or psychological terms, such as those highlighted by Dr Sam Parnia in his Aware and Aware II studies, are few in number and may still be explained by scientific progress.  Just because we cannot explain a few experiences with current scientific models doesn’t give us a reason to ditch scientific materialism and regress to a primitive dualistic world view predicated on supernatural entities for which there is no evidence.  

In conclusion, the claim that human beings have immortal souls lacks credibility in the 21st Century.  While the claim speaks to the experience of being human and supports the convenient belief that human beings are ontologically different from animals, there is no proper evidence or sensible argument to support substance dualism.  Those with religious faith will, of course, continue to make the claim that human beings have immortal souls.  The claim is central to their world-view and it is difficult to imagine how Christianity in particular could function without it.  Yet in making the claim believers emphasize how far in faith they are willing to stray from what can be supported through evidence and argument.

Bibliography

  • Class Notes on Soul, Mind & Body
  • Gilbert Ryle “The Concept of Mind” Chapter 1
  • Susan Blackmore “Consciousness: An Introduction”

Critically assess Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument. [40]

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Immanuel Kant criticised what he first termed the Ontological Argument at the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Focussing on the argument as presented by Rene Descartes, which suggested that existence is a perfection and thus a necessary attribute of God, who is a supremely perfect being, in the way that having three sides is a necessary property of a triangle or having valleys is a necessary property of being a hill – Kant concluded that the argument was “so much labour and effort lost”. For Kant, existence is not a perfection and is wrongly used as a predicate. He used the example of a sum of money – the difference between a real and imaginary sum is not that the real sum is worth more, just that the real sum might be in my pocket. Existence is not a predicate and does not describe the properties of an object, it just informs me whether there is such an object in the real world. Bertrand Russell developed this point, using the example of the claim “the present King of France is bald”. Russell pointed out that although the claim seems sensible, as if it is referring to the properties of the King of France’s head and might be either true or false, in actual fact, the claim is meaningless because there is no present King of France for the claim to refer to and thus no way that the claim is either true or false. Existence is not a predicate, it is not just another property that the present King of France does or does not have, it is the ground of meaning on which all sensible claims must be made. Michael Palmer used another example to explain this; that of two candidates applying for a job. If a panel is faced with two CVs listing the “perfections” of the candidate A and candidate B, it would be ridiculous to list “exists” as one of them – existence is neither a perfection nor properly used as a predicate, rather it is what makes the analysis of the CV and the contest between the candidates meaningful. Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument were highly influential and following the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, scholarly interest in the Ontological Argument declined steeply. Nevertheless, developments in the second half of the 20th Century showed that Kant’s criticisms are far from conclusive and reawakened scholarly interest in the Ontological Argument for God’s existence.

While Kant’s criticisms were directed at Descartes’ Ontological Argument, they are often applied to the arguments of St Anselm of Canterbury, presented in his Proslogion (1078). Anselm argued that if God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” then God must, a priori, exist because it is greater to exist in reality than just in the mind, so if God existed only as an idea in the mind (as he must, if Anselm’s definition was accepted) then something greater could conceivably exist… something that existed in reality as well as in the mind. If God is, therefore, the greatest conceivable being then God must exist in reality, because existence is a perfection which makes something greater. Clearly, Kant’s arguments that existence is not a perfection and that existence is wrongly used as a predicate seem to undermine Anselm’s argument fatally. As Gaunilo of Marmoutiers had observed in his “On behalf of the fool”, the idea that the perfect island has to exist just by virtue of being the perfect island is absurd; nobody is going to book a ticket to go there on the basis of an argument like that. Nevertheless, that ignores how Anselm developed his argument in the next chapter of the Proslogion, a point that he made in response to Gaunilo’s attack by restating this part of the argument in his Responsio. In Proslogion Chapter 3 Anselm reasons that it is better to exist necessarily than to exist only contingently, therefore necessary existence – not being able to not exist – must be an attribute of that than which nothing greater can be conceived of. This development of the Argument could defeat Kant’s standard criticisms, in that while existence is not a perfection or rightly used as a predicate, that does not necessarily apply to necessary existence, which is a total state of existence either possible or impossible, not a property which might or might not be added to a object that could only ever contingently exist.

Norman Malcolm argued that Anselm’s argument in Proslogion 3 can be presented in terms of modal logic. Either God’s necessary existence is impossible – as in it contains a formal contradiction – or possible. If God’s necessary existence is possible, then it is necessary.   Remember, necessary existence is not existence in the sense that we could encounter through our senses. The world of sense is a world in which things exist contingently and might or might not exist, as St Thomas Aquinas observed in his Third Way to God (Summa Theologica I.II QIII). To exist necessarily is to exist in a different way, a way that is by definition beyond anything that we could experience through our senses. For Kant, because necessary existence is beyond possible experience, then it can only be speculative to even speak of it. Kant called necessary existence a “cupola of judgement” meaning that it strays so far beyond possible knowledge to be a flight of fancy or a castle in the air. Nevertheless, this assumes Kant’s world view and the primacy of sense-experience. For rationalist philosophers like Descartes, Leibniz and later Malcolm, what is real cannot be limited to what can be experienced through the senses. The world of sense is faulty, partial, subjective and limited; empirical knowledge is contingent and ever-changing. For Descartes and Leibniz, rational knowledge should be primary because it is none of these things. A clear and distinct idea, an idea which contains no contradictions, is certain, complete, objective and constant. Just as we know that 1+1=2 without resorting to a posteriori reasoning based on experiences with apples and oranges, we know that God necessarily exists a priori because he is supremely perfect. Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig have developed this line of reasoning, using the device of possible worlds. A concept is possible if it could be instantiated in any possible world. A unicorn is a possible concept; although unicorns (at least in the sense of being live horses with single horns!) don’t exist in this world, it is not inconceivable that they might exist in a multiverse. The concept of a horse with a horn is not contradictory, it is possible. On the other hand, a square circle is impossible and could not exist in any possible world because the definition of a square is to have four straight sides, something which directly contradicts the definition of a circle. God’s “maximal greatness” – which must include Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnibenevolence – is possible not impossible and, because maximal greatness precludes the possibility that God might or might not exist in any one universe, God must necessarily exist in every possible world, including this one. In essence, Plantinga and Craig show that Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument fail because they rely on an impoverished epistemology.

To explain this, for Kant, all existential claims have to be synthetic, they have to refer to something in the world of sense-experience and therefore contain the possibility of being either true or false. If I say “unicorns exist” I am making the claim that there are such things as unicorns in the world – if I saw a unicorn I would know that the claim was true and if no evidence of unicorns has ever been found it is probably fair to say that the claim is false. Making the claim “God exists” does not refer to anything in the world of sense experience and it is not possible, therefore, for the claim to be either true or false… in the terms of the Logical Positivists, it is a meaningless claim. In 1951 American Philosopher WV Quine attacked the basis of Kant’s objections to the Ontological Argument in his essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. Like Karl Popper and AJ Ayer, as a young man, Quine had spent time with the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, but by 1950 Quine came to reject their approach, not only to establishing meaning in language but also to bigger questions about epistemology – “what can we know?” and “what does it mean to say that something exists?” Logical Positivists were Positivists, that is to say that they approached philosophy on the basis that scientific, empirical observation is the only source of knowledge and that metaphysics is a waste of time. Positivism formally began with the work of French philosopher Auguste Comte, but looked back to Kant and before that to Hume and Locke. Locke rejected continental rationalism and argued that human beings have no innate ideas, being born as tabula rasa and gaining all their knowledge and understanding from experience. Hume agreed to a large extent, although he acknowledged the limitations of sense-experience as well. Kant said that Hume “awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers and gave a new direction to my philosophical enquiries” and adopted Hume’s fork, the categorisation of possible knowledge into either what is known analytically or what is known from sense-experience, dismissing any other claimed knowledge – including most metaphysical and religious claims – as speculative. Scientific method drew on the work of Locke, Hume and Kant in that it came to focus on sense-experience as the source of all new knowledge and limiting the role of reason to one of analysis and clarification. It is fair to say, therefore, that the Logical Positivists were empiricists. Quine rejected empiricism, and the Logical Positivism of his youth, arguing that in embracing Hume’s fork Kant had awoken from one set of dogmatic slumbers only to fall into another set of dogmatic slumbers. On what basis, Quine asked, did the Logical Positivists claim that sense-experience is the only source of new knowledge? The Logical Positivists failed to provide an adequate explanation of why meaningfulness should depend on either sense-experience or logic and on nothing else. This point was later developed by Alvin Plantinga in his “God and Other Minds” when he pointed out that the Verification Principle is itself unverifiable and therefore self-defeating. Quine also questioned the lack of any adequate explanation for the authority of logic, pointing out that you have to accept logic in order to defend why you should accept logic, which is circular. The same applies to the authority of the empirical senses, Quine argued. On what basis do we say that the sense-experience are the only source of new knowledge without just appealing to sense-experience? This is pure reductionism and again, the justification for Positivism is circular. The answer is that the Logical Positivists adopted Kant’s world-view without much thought, ignoring the fact that Hume (not to mention Descartes) had already outlined the serious problems with relying on the senses in that they are faulty, limited in scope and that data always needs to be interpreted through reason anyway. If Quine is correct and Kant’s epistemology is more dogmatic than critical, then his criticisms of the Ontological Argument start to collapse. On what basis did Kant claim that all existential claims have to be synthetic? For Quine, he had no adequate justification for assuming the authority or primacy of sense-experience, other than by appealing to that same sense experience. Without any proper justification for his epistemology, it seems that Kant’s criticism of the Ontological Argument is on shaky ground indeed.

Further, to say that sense-experience is the only source of new knowledge is to relegate whole fields of study, discussion and indeed human experience to junk status. The fact that the Verification Principle proposed by the Logical Positivists as the gold standard of meaning had to be liberalised through the 1930s and 1940s shows that the claim that discussions about topics such as Ethics, History and Aesthetics (let alone Religion) are meaningless is unworkable and runs against what most people believe and experience. Quine proposed an alternative holistic approach called Ontological Naturalism, which moved away from the attempt to define the meaning of individual statements in terms of their reference and towards assessing their meaning in terms of cohering with and contributing to the whole field of science as an explanatory framework. Popper also rejected Verificationism, proposing another, more generous and inclusive, approach to meaning in scientific terms in the Falsification Principle. Both were influential and contributed to a decline in Logical Positivism to the extent whereby by 1960 it was declared “dead, or as dead as any philosophical movement can be.” The decline of Logical Positivism demonstrates the inadequacy of Kant’s world-view for the modern world. What place has a system which claims that sense-experience is the only source of new knowledge in a world of Quantum science and particle-Physics, in which the very act of observing particles changes their state? Long gone is the idea that the senses offer human beings a transparent window on the external world, even the world of matter and energy. Today, the whole field of theoretical Physics would have to be declared “meaningless” by Schlick, Ayer and Carnap… and yet the insights it yields offer humanity unthought of technological advances… they work. Further, Physics suggests that what appears “real” to our senses is far from being solid and as it appears. On the Planck scale no matter exists… if I hit the table the contact I experience is really the interaction of charges in the fields which make up the vast majority of each atom in the wood and in my hand. The universe, which appeared like a vast machine to Kant and which still appears eternal to the amateur start-gazer has been revealed to be infinite while still having edges, a shape and a colour and while expanding at an increasing rate… into nothing. All of this suggests that reason – mathematics – can yield new knowledge and confidently move past anything we can hope to observe through our senses, to a much greater degree than either the Logical Positivists, or Kant, allowed.

On the other hand, even theoretical Physicists admit the need to test their theories through experiments. Very recently, different theories on black holes were tested when radio-telescopes were linked together to take a photograph of a black hole. The photograph – an observation – was necessary to check analytical calculations and prevent them from being purely speculative. This supports Kant’s claim that all existential claims must be synthetic. Physicists theorise about black holes, but it is not possible to say that or how they exist unless and until we take a photograph or make some other observation to verify (or falsify) the theories. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Physics – as there are aspects of Theology – which resist any possible observation. By definition, it is not possible to observe God’s necessary existence, because by definition it must be outside of the matrix of time and space in which our senses operate. Similarly, it is not possible to observe what caused the Big Bang which created the space-time continuum, or to experience conditions in a multiverse. The extent to which cosmological theories like cosmic inflation and string theory are pseudo-scientific (to use Popper’s phrase) because they are not falsifiable or subject to normal scientific method has been a matter of controversy on the letters’ page of Scientific American since 2017. Nevertheless, this should not stop Physicists (or Theologians) from using reason, the other source of knowledge available to them, to push forward the boundaries of knowledge. While Kant was right to be cautious and to warn against metaphysical speculation – because after all, the greatest obstacle to finding something is being convinced that you already have it – his world-view with its focus on the senses as the arbiter of possible knowledge is too restrictive for the 21st Century in the way that the world-view of the Logical Positivists became too restrictive for the 20th Century. It also sits ill with both developing insights about the way in which our senses work and rely on our brains and pre-existing ideas and with insights about the different reality beyond how things appear to our senses, on the Planck scale. While Popper’s Falsification Principle is more flexible than the Verification Principle, it still limits what can be said scientifically to that which can be falsified in relation to observations, it still assumes a Kantian world-view, and herein lies the problem for particle Physics and Cosmology with Scientific Method as it is conceived today. It seems that Kantian epistemology and the assumed world-view within which science has operated since the 1790s is on the verge of being rejected; to use Thomas Kuhn’s phrase, the Positivist scientific (and philosophical) paradigm is shifting and giving way to a paradigm which is more open to reason providing new knowledge which cannot be checked by observation. Given this, it seems that Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument will lose a great deal of their power. As William Lane Craig has pointed out, the Ontological Argument (as he presents it) is valid. If it is accepted that an argument can also be sound – its propositions can be said to be true – even when they cannot be verified or falsified empirically, then the Ontological Argument is much more persuasive.

Nevertheless, even if Kant was too cautious about using reason as a source of new knowledge, it could be fair to say that the Ontological Argument pushes things too far. St Thomas Aquinas made just this point in his Summa Theologica I.II question 1 (1264) when he wrote “because we do not know the essence of God, the truth of God’s existence is not self-evident to us.” Aquinas dismissed the Ontological Argument because to suggest that any human being can have a “clear and distinct idea” of God to use Descartes phrase from the Meditations, sufficient to analyse that idea and find necessary existence – a unique property of God – within it, is arrogant. God is, to use Augustine’s words “other, completely other”, outside time and space, so even if we have innate ideas – as Descartes and Plato argued – it stretches credulity to rely on those ideas being so complete in relation to God so as to make the Ontological Argument plausible. Clearly, what it means for God to be perfect or great is not what it means for human beings to have a perfection or be called great. Aquinas even rejected the idea that it could just be a matter of scale, with God at the top of the scale and people (and other created things) at the other. If God is timeless then God’s perfection and greatness must also be timeless and cannot include any potential for God to be other than he is, to change or to choose. Aquinas’ saw claims about God’s nature as necessarily analogical. Yes, our greatness depends on God’s greatness, but in the way that the healthiness of a yoghurt depends on the healthiness of somebody who eats it. Healthy people are slim, muscly and bounce around… healthy yoghurts are none of these things! For Aquinas, God’s nature can be described (and known) positively, but only in a very limited sense, not completely enough to support an ontological demonstration of God’s necessary existence from an a priori definition of His nature. Nevertheless, St Anselm and Descartes on one hand and Karl Barth and Iris Murdoch on the other would all reject this argument, with reasons that also serve as criticisms of Kant’s approach to the Ontological Argument.

For Anselm it is true to say that God’s attributes are not the same as human attributes, because God is timelessly perfect, nevertheless it is possible to understand enough about God’s greatness to deduce that necessary existence is a necessary property of it. This is because, according to the a posteriori argument in Anselm’s Monologion, God is the best explanation for our ability to judge things in this world as more or less perfect. God creates us with an innate conception of perfection, the top of a scale which we use to measure things in this world every day. Indeed, Aquinas – although he still denied that this would give people a clear enough concept of God to analyse and find necessary existence within – included a similar argument as his fourth way to God in Summa Theologica I.II question 3, arguing that claims about God’s nature can be understood as analogies of proportion as well as as analogies of attribution (as above). This suggests that Aquinas’ rejection of Anselm’s approach was more about the degree to which we can conceive of the essence of God and a matter of interpretation, rather than about Anselm’s whole methodology in the Monologion, which he later used to support his reasoning in the Proslogion. Descartes “trademark” argument in the Meditations supports Anselm’s belief that God creates us with an innate idea of God’s existence and there have been other, similar arguments in the work of scholars from St Augustine to CS Lewis, arguing from the experience of believers, their desire for and innate awareness of God, a posteriori to the conclusion of His existence. It seems that many believers could accept the idea that we have an understanding of God’s supreme greatness even if we cannot completely conceive of what that might entail. It seems, therefore, that Aquinas’ dismissal of a priori attempts to argue that God’s existence is self-evident is rather hasty. Just as Aquinas’ rejection of the idea that God’s existence is self-evident and exclusive focus on arguments from observation as the only approach to defending God’s existence rationally does not fit with believers’ experience of God as an innate idea, Kant’s rejection of both a priori and a posteriori arguments for God in the Critique of Pure reason does not fit with the imperative to believe in God which he himself expressed in strong terms, most completely in “Religion within the bounds of Reason alone” (1794). While Kant dismisses all the rational arguments for God’s existence, including the Ontological Argument, he argues that God is a necessary postulate, an assumption that it is our rational duty to make, to explain the existence of the moral law which we know as a synthetic a priori. Kant reasons, therefore, that we know the moral law a priori, before experience, although it is supported in all respects by experience as well. The moral law is, furthermore, necessarily explained by God. On what basis can Kant argue that Descartes is wrong to claim that we know God’s existence a priori, something which is supported in all respects by experience as well, but proceed to make a similar claim about the moral law. It is worth asking, is Descartes concept of God actually different from Kant’s concept of God? All that Descartes attempts to demonstrate through his Ontological Argument is that Supreme Perfection necessarily exists… he makes no claim about the Ontological Argument proving anything about the nature of that Supreme Perfection, stopping short of listing attributes like being male, being the father of Jesus etc. Is it fair to claim that the moral law can be known a priori – as Kant does – and reject the idea that the necessary existence of Supreme Perfection cannot be known a priori, when both seem equally borne out by experience.

Further, Karl Barth (and later Iris Murdoch) pointed out that the Ontological Argument, although not conclusive as a proof of God’s existence for the non-believer, it is deeply persuasive for the person with faith. In Barth’s “Faith Seeking Understanding” (1930), far from pre-empting Norman Malcolm’s claim that the Proslogion was an exercise in modal logic (a claim that has been accepted by Hartshorne, Plantinga and Craig), Barth argued that Anselm’s work had been wrongly characterised as a philosophical treatise and argued that it was really a prayer, a deeply spiritual meditation on contingency and necessity and the nature of reality. If Barth is correct then Kant’s criticisms of the argument, at least as they are applied to Anselm rather than their intended target, Descartes, are misplaced. To say that Anselm’s work is “so much labour and effort lost” misses the point that he may not have intended to formulate a deductive proof such as to convince a non-believer at all. Further, while the philosophical intent behind Descartes’ arguments in the Meditations is difficult to deny, it is worth mentioning that this work too was written from the perspective of pre-existing faith. Descartes too had “faith seeking understanding” and was not engaged in a work of Christian apologetics. Kant’s criticisms approach Descartes’ ontological argument for God in isolation and attempt to dismantle it from the perspective of a radically different world-view and epistemological framework. Given the doubt that has been cast on the possibility of attaining objective Truth and a grip on ultimate reality – a doubt that was adopted by Kant from Hume but which was often subsequently ignored – the idea that Kant’s world-view and epistemological framework, which as has been explained rests on as many assumptions as does Descartes, should have the authority to dismiss Descartes’ Ontological Argument is unconvincing. Today, most philosophers have to look to coherence rather than to correspondence to find meaning, and thus have to be open to the possibility that an Ontological argument might be both valid and sound within one form of life and simultaneously valid but not sound in another form of life.

In conclusion, Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument are effective only if his epistemology and world-view are accepted.

“Religious faith requires belief in a separate soul” Discuss (40)

/ vardycharlotte / Leave a comment

Assuming that the statement refers to Christian faith, through the history of Christianity there have been Christians who have believed in a separate soul (e.g. Descartes) and others who have not (e.g. St. Matthew) but the crux of the issue is whether such a belief is required.  This begs the question “by who or what standard?”  Obviously, belief in a separate soul is not required by the Creeds; the Apostles’ Creed affirms “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting” which suggests that Christian faith requires not a dualist but an avowedly monist position.  Further, the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church 1059 affirms that “The holy Roman Church firmly believes and confesses that on the Day of Judgment all men will appear in their own bodies before Christ’s tribunal to render an account of their own deeds”.  It is clear that no belief in a separate soul can be required by orthodox Christian faith, although I will argue that belief in a separable soul might make it easier to sustain faith in the face of life’s challenges and apparent inequities.

Christian faith promises salvation; union with God and restitution for the injustices apparent in this life.  Nevertheless, the New Testament is unclear about how this salvation will come about and whether the afterlife will entail bodily existence or be purely spiritual.  The Synoptic Gospels suggest an immanent eschatology; descriptions of heaven and hell are earth-like and seem to suggest that people will have resurrected bodies to experience reward or punishment much as we experience these in the coming Kingdom of God.  Matthew 25 (the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats) suggests that the evangelists expected that Jesus will soon return to judge the living and the dead and supports a physical understanding of hell ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41)  Luke 16:23-24 also supports this view “So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’ Other references to the final judgement are similar “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4) and this vision of the end-times seems consistent with Old Testament references, such as those in Ezekiel and Isaiah.  Christian faith supported by references in the synoptic gospels would require no belief in either a separate or a separable soul, only a belief in physical resurrection. Nevertheless, belief in physical resurrection is difficult to sustain in the modern world.  There is a complete lack of supporting evidence and it is difficult to see how it could deliver the promised reward (or punishment) in a fair and just manner.  Surely, those who died hundreds or thousands of years before the final judgement would be at greater risk of their bodes having disintegrated.  Surely, those who died as infants, after losing limbs, in extreme old-age or whose bodies were destroyed utterly would seem less likely to get their just deserts.  While “all things are possible with God” (Matthew 19:26) and Christian faith requires a belief in God’s omnipotence, it is clear that this cannot extend to God doing the logically impossible, or else most theodicies would collapse and God could not also be all-good. While God resurrecting people out of nothing by reassembling them from dispersed dust into their ideal form may not be logically impossible, it comes close to being so in some cases.

It is obvious why many 21st Century Christians prefer to believe in an eternal life, reward or punishment which begins soon after each person’s death.  A belief in immediate reward and punishment would work either with dualism, belief in a separate soul, or with a belief in re-creation into a parallel dimension.

Immediate reward or punishment through dualism, in a purely spiritual sense, is superficially easier to reconcile with science and reason.  There have been many reports of Near Death Experiences which, if credible, would to support belief in disembodied existence immediately after death.  Pam Reynolds’ experience during standstill surgery in 1991 is often seen as one of the best documented cases. More recent research conducted by Dr Sam Parnia at the University of Southampton might suggest that the soul could continue after death without a body.  In addition, a spiritual interpretation of the afterlife would be more rationally defensible than physical resurrection.  It is easier to see how a soul could survive eternally; a risen body would still be physical and so subject to aging, sickness, disability and other associated limitations.  It is easier to see how a soul could come “face to face” with God, who is not normally seen to have a physical existence as human beings do. Further, parts of John’s gospel, the Johannine letters and Paul’s letters seem to support a more spiritual interpretation of eternal life. Verses such as “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:18) and “So then, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; what is old has passed away – look, what is new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17) and “Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” (Galatians 6:8) seem obviously Platonic in their influence and are closest to dualism. However, although faith with a purely spiritual eschatology seems easier to reconcile with science and reason, it comes with significant problems and has been relatively rare through the history of Christianity. Belief in a separate soul – dualism – is difficult to defend in philosophical or scientific terms and suggests other beliefs and practices which are incompatible with Christian theology. Descartes argued for a Christian dualism, but struggled to provide a coherent account of why the soul would be enfleshed, how soul and body interact and how a disembodied soul could experience reward or punishment in the way that would be necessary for Christian promises of eternal life to be meaningful.  The Catholic Church never accepted the idea that eternal life could be purely spiritual and disembodied because this might seem to dilute the punishment of hell – annihilation or distance from God would scarcely seem a disincentive to people who have decided to commit mortal sins after all.  Further, by the Middle Ages the Church realized that dualism supports an utter contempt for the physical body, which can lead people towards extreme and unhealthy asceticism or towards a disregard for the sins of the body and the belief that its sins – sexual sins included – are less significant.

Belief that the body can be re-created in a parallel dimension after death to receive reward or punishment is far preferable.  Seeking a middle-way between the difficulties of basing faith on a future physical resurrection and basing it on dualism and a purely spiritual eternal life, St Thomas Aquinas developed his Theology on the basis of Aristotle’s Philosophy.  Rejecting the dualism proposed by his teacher Plato, in his Metaphysics, Aristotle had set out how all beings have four different types of cause; material causes (physical ingredients), efficient causes (agents), formal cause (what makes something what it is, its definition) and a final cause (the purpose or end to which its existence pertains). Aristotle understood that the soul is the formal cause of the human being, what makes it what it is and defines its existence.  Unlike Plato however, Aristotle did not see the form of a being having any separate metaphysical existence.  The form depends on the materials it specifies, and the end towards which it works.  The soul is, in effect, the function of the body – what Gilbert Ryle later described as “the ghost in the machine” – it gives the impression of being a separate entity but in fact it depends entirely on the physical body for its existence. This is where Aquinas departed from Aristotle; he argued that on death the body is re-created in a parallel heavenly dimension and that the new unity of soul and heavenly body is subject to punishment and reward.  Arguably, this idea of re-creation has a basis in scripture; references such as “They are buried as natural human bodies, but they will be raised as spiritual bodies.” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44) can be interpreted as Biblical support for Aquinas’ “modified dualism”.  Further, John Hick developed a defense of re-creation into a parallel dimension through the “replica theory” which he developed in Death and Eternal Life (1976).  As Hick argued, provided that the replica retains the memories of the original, difficulties with spatio-temporal continuity can be overcome.  When Captain Kirk said “beam me up Scotty!” there was no doubt that Kirk remained Kirk although there was a break in his spatio-temporal existence. Aquinas’ theory of re-creation supports Christian faith far better than either monism and physical resurrection or dualism and purely spiritual reward/punishment.  It avoids both the challenges presented by science and reason to belief in physical resurrection and the theological pitfalls of dualism, while straining credulity to a lesser extent because it requires only that the soul could be briefly separable, not that it must be sustained in a separate state.  For this reason, Aquinas’ theory was adopted into the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in the 16th Century.

In conclusion, it is clear that orthodox Christian faith does not require belief in a separate soul.  Christian faith can be sustained through a belief in physical resurrection, either in the future starting with the final judgement as the Synoptic Gospels, Creeds and Catechism suggest, or through re-creation into a new body in a parallel dimension as St Thomas Aquinas suggested.  Re-creation does not require belief in a separate soul, but does suppose that the soul is separable.

Critically evaluate the Ontological Argument. (40)

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The Ontological Argument was first so-called by Immanuel Kant, who sought to destroy the attempt to establish God’s existence a priori that had been made by Leibniz, Descartes and first by St Anselm.  In basic terms the Ontological Argument suggests that since

  • P1. God is supremely perfect

and

  • P2. Existence in reality is better than existence only in the mind
  • C.   God therefore must exist.

The argument contends that real existence is a necessary part of the concept of God and thus that attempts to deny God’s existence are foolish.  Anselm quoted Psalm 14:1 and concluded that atheists assert a straightforward contradiction, in effect saying “God (who by definition must exist) does not exist”.   While the argument seems like “a charming joke” (as Schopenhauer put it), as even the Bertrand Russell remarked, it is much more difficult to show how it fails.  Nevertheless, the Ontological Argument does fail for the reasons set out by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant aimed his critique at Descartes’ version of the Ontological Argument, although his points do relate to other versions as well.  Descartes developed his argument in several places, but the most well known version is in his Fifth Meditation, where he reflected that the existence of a supremely-perfect being was as undeniable and necessary as three sides are to a triangle or valleys are to hills.  Like Anselm, Descartes suggests that existence is part of the definition of God as supremely perfect (as Anselm put it “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”).  Kant rejected this absolutely.  For Kant all knowledge claims are either synthetic or analytic.  Synthetic claims refer to experience and so add to our knowledge of the world, but they always contain the possibility of being true or false.  Analytic claims are based on logic, reason. The relationships between concepts – if valid they provide certainty, proof, but they are tautologous and do not add to our stock of knowledge, they just clarify our understanding and so provide insight.  Kant argued that the Ontological Argument analyses the concept of God and claims to find existence within it. Although it is analytic, it makes an existential claim.  Kant argues that this is impossible – all existential claims must be synthetic – and this is highly persuasive.  Analytic statements cannot expand our knowledge of what does or does not exist in the real world. As Gaunilo remarked in response to Anselm in his essay “on behalf of the fool,” it is absurd to try to define something into existence.  If somebody suggested that a perfect island exists just because by definition it has to, nobody would book tickets to go there on holiday!  Kant’s division of knowledge into synthetic and analytic is still widely accepted, as is his argument that all existential claims must be synthetic, despite WV Quine’s criticism of Kant’s understanding of knowledge.  Quine claimed that the division of all knowledge into synthetic and analytic was a “dogma of empiricism” and only true within Kant’s own limited worldview.

Kant went on to show how the Ontological Argument makes the assumption that existence is a perfection.  Both Anselm and Descartes argue that it is better, more perfect, to exist in reality (in re) than just in the mind (in intellectu) but, as Kant points out, there is no difference between the concept of a real $100 and an imaginary $100 – the concept remains the same whether the money is in my pocket or in my head.  Existence does not add a single penny to the concept, it just tells me where (and if) the concept has been actualised. Related to this is Kant’s famous observation that existence is not a predicate and that the Ontological Argument rests on poor grammar.  A predicate is a word that describes an object.  Although superficially it seems that existence adds to our knowledge of an object, in practice it is the basis on which any claims to knowledge about an object make sense.  Take a job interview.  If there are two candidates, equally well qualified, but it later emerges that only one exists it is not a case of saying that the real candidate is better than the fictitious one but it is a case of saying that the contest was a joke.  As Bertrand Russell remarked, if I ask you “has the present King of France got blonde hair and blue eyes” I smuggle the assumption that there IS a present King of France into my question.  Actually, there is no present King of France so my question is meaningless and can’t be answered either correctly or incorrectly.  This is a difficult point to deny and seems to conclusively destroy the Ontological Argument’s claim to proving God’s existence.  Although there is an intuitive human appeal to the idea that a (any?) real chocolate cake, island – or God – is better than one that only exists in the mind, in practice that cannot be sufficient basis for a claim that God exists.

Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument show that it fails in its object of proving God’s existence. Of course that does not mean that God does not exist.  Just because the Ontological – or any – argument for the existence of God is found to be unsound has no effect on the existence or non-existence of God, although it does take away one support for Propositional faith.  Is it fair to say that as a failed argument the Ontological Argument really is a “charming joke” then?  Absolutely not.  Anselm originally titled the Proslogion “Fides quaerens intellectum”; in the process of faith seeking understanding the Ontological Argument succeeds in clarifying our understanding of the nature and limits of human knowledge.  As such, the argument continues to have great significance.  Further, as both Karl Barth and Iris Murdoch suggested, the argument invites believers to reconsider what they mean by existence, particularly when it comes to God.  Do believers really expect God to be real in the way that a perfect island might be real, or do they have a different sort of reality in mind?