1. Rebuttal:
Argument from Dualism
Argument from Dualism
Summary:
Materialism cannot explain the mind. Therefore, there must be an immortal, non-material soul that gives human beings our individuality and sense of consciousness. The existence of the soul supports the existence of god.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“Those who think it likely that we survive death will be ready to view this theory as the best explanation of psychical phenomena. Those who, on other grounds, regard this theory as implausible will seek for other explanations. For my part, I consider the evidence so far adduced by psychical research in favor of survival much weaker than the physiological evidence on the other side. But I fully admit that it might at any moment become the stronger, and in that case it would be unscientific to disbelieve in survival.”
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p52
“Man is a part of nature, not something contrasted with nature. His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motions of stars and atoms...
“What we call our ‘thoughts’ seem to depend upon the organization of tracks [now called 'synaptic pathways’ or 'neural networks’] in the brain in the same sort of way in which journeys depend upon roads and railways. The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin; for instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure. If this be so, we cannot suppose that a solitary electron or proton can ‘think’; we might as well expect a solitary individual to play a football match. We also cannot suppose that an individual’s thinking survives bodily death, since that destroys the organization of the brain and dissipates the energy which utilized the brain tracks.
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p48, 50
“A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilized at death and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as more mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.”
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p51
“The mental continuity of a person is a continuity of a habit and memory: there was yesterday one person whose feelings I can remember, and that person I regard as myself of yesterday; but, in fact, myself of yesterday was only certain mental occurrences which are now remembered and are regarded as part of the person who now recollects them. All that constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory and by certain similarities of the sort we call habit.
“If, therefore, we are to believe that a person survives death, we must believe that the memories and habits which constitute the person will continue to be exhibited in a new set of occurrences.
“No one can prove that this will not happen. But it is easy to see that it is very unlikely. Our memories and habits are bound up with the structure of the brain, in much the same way in which a river is connected with the riverbed. The water in the river is always changing, but it keeps to the same course because previous rains have worn a channel. In like manner, previous events have worn a channel in the brain, and our thoughts flow along this channel. This is the cause of memory and mental habits. But the brain, as a structure, is dissolved at death, and memory therefore may be expected to be also dissolved. There is no more reason to think otherwise than to expect a river to persist in its old course after an earthquake has raised a mountain where a valley used to be...
“...We all know that memory may be obliterated by an injury to the brain, that a virtuous person may be rendered vicious by encephalitis lethargica, and that a clever child can be turned into an idiot by a lack of iodine. In view of such familiar facts, it seems scarcely probable that the mind survives the total destruction of brain structure which occurs at death.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Do We Survive Death,” (1936) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p89-90
“Those who think it likely that we survive death will be ready to view this theory as the best explanation of psychical phenomena. Those who, on other grounds, regard this theory as implausible will seek for other explanations. For my part, I consider the evidence so far adduced by psychical research in favor of survival much weaker than the physiological evidence on the other side. But I fully admit that it might at any moment become the stronger, and in that case it would be unscientific to disbelieve in survival.”
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p52
“Man is a part of nature, not something contrasted with nature. His thoughts and his bodily movements follow the same laws that describe the motions of stars and atoms...
“What we call our ‘thoughts’ seem to depend upon the organization of tracks [now called 'synaptic pathways’ or 'neural networks’] in the brain in the same sort of way in which journeys depend upon roads and railways. The energy used in thinking seems to have a chemical origin; for instance, a deficiency of iodine will turn a clever man into an idiot. Mental phenomena seem to be bound up with material structure. If this be so, we cannot suppose that a solitary electron or proton can ‘think’; we might as well expect a solitary individual to play a football match. We also cannot suppose that an individual’s thinking survives bodily death, since that destroys the organization of the brain and dissipates the energy which utilized the brain tracks.
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p48, 50
“A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body becomes, as it were, demobilized at death and therefore not available for collective action. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as more mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases. The argument is only one of probability, but it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based.”
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p51
“The mental continuity of a person is a continuity of a habit and memory: there was yesterday one person whose feelings I can remember, and that person I regard as myself of yesterday; but, in fact, myself of yesterday was only certain mental occurrences which are now remembered and are regarded as part of the person who now recollects them. All that constitutes a person is a series of experiences connected by memory and by certain similarities of the sort we call habit.
“If, therefore, we are to believe that a person survives death, we must believe that the memories and habits which constitute the person will continue to be exhibited in a new set of occurrences.
“No one can prove that this will not happen. But it is easy to see that it is very unlikely. Our memories and habits are bound up with the structure of the brain, in much the same way in which a river is connected with the riverbed. The water in the river is always changing, but it keeps to the same course because previous rains have worn a channel. In like manner, previous events have worn a channel in the brain, and our thoughts flow along this channel. This is the cause of memory and mental habits. But the brain, as a structure, is dissolved at death, and memory therefore may be expected to be also dissolved. There is no more reason to think otherwise than to expect a river to persist in its old course after an earthquake has raised a mountain where a valley used to be...
“...We all know that memory may be obliterated by an injury to the brain, that a virtuous person may be rendered vicious by encephalitis lethargica, and that a clever child can be turned into an idiot by a lack of iodine. In view of such familiar facts, it seems scarcely probable that the mind survives the total destruction of brain structure which occurs at death.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Do We Survive Death,” (1936) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p89-90
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“I’ll say something that might surprise some of you. There’s a famous Cambridge philosopher, John Ellis McTaggart, who was an atheist and believed in immortality. There’s no logical impossibility of believing that you survive the death of your body, even though you do not believe in God. I mean I don’t happen to believe what McTaggart believed. So I neither believe in God nor the afterlife. But my point is that the two beliefs are not logically linked. I could be an atheist who believes that he will survive the death of his body in a godless world. The two beliefs are only linked traditionally. There’s no logical connection between believing in the afterlife and believing in God.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p87
“Take the business that people go to heaven and hell and they will be damned. Well, I just don’t think that it’s very plausible. I think that about the notion of bodily resurrection very nicely argued for in the Claremont conference I just mentioned by a very good Christian philosopher, Stephen Davis, who referred to immortality as nonsense, but accepted a bodily resurrection. You can make logical sense of the notion of bodily resurrection. It doesn’t involve any dualist assumptions or anything else bout immaterial spirits. Peter Geach argues this way too. There is just a resurrection of the body. That seems to me not incoherent, just unbelievable. There is no reason to believe in such a thing. It is like believing in Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. But it is not something that is incoherent. It is a matter of scientific argument. I might turn out to be wrong.
“It seems to be belief in immortality–a disembodied soul–has many of the same difficulties in it as a belief in an infinite nonmaterial person does. But I have been told that the really strong parts of the Christian tradition don’t believe in immortality in that sense; they believe in bodily resurrection. That belief seems to me coherent but superstitious. So you have the choice between a coherent but superstitious belief, to wit, bodily resurrection and an incoherent belief, namely, immortality through eternal disembodied existence.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p87-88
“I’ll say something that might surprise some of you. There’s a famous Cambridge philosopher, John Ellis McTaggart, who was an atheist and believed in immortality. There’s no logical impossibility of believing that you survive the death of your body, even though you do not believe in God. I mean I don’t happen to believe what McTaggart believed. So I neither believe in God nor the afterlife. But my point is that the two beliefs are not logically linked. I could be an atheist who believes that he will survive the death of his body in a godless world. The two beliefs are only linked traditionally. There’s no logical connection between believing in the afterlife and believing in God.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p87
“Take the business that people go to heaven and hell and they will be damned. Well, I just don’t think that it’s very plausible. I think that about the notion of bodily resurrection very nicely argued for in the Claremont conference I just mentioned by a very good Christian philosopher, Stephen Davis, who referred to immortality as nonsense, but accepted a bodily resurrection. You can make logical sense of the notion of bodily resurrection. It doesn’t involve any dualist assumptions or anything else bout immaterial spirits. Peter Geach argues this way too. There is just a resurrection of the body. That seems to me not incoherent, just unbelievable. There is no reason to believe in such a thing. It is like believing in Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny. But it is not something that is incoherent. It is a matter of scientific argument. I might turn out to be wrong.
“It seems to be belief in immortality–a disembodied soul–has many of the same difficulties in it as a belief in an infinite nonmaterial person does. But I have been told that the really strong parts of the Christian tradition don’t believe in immortality in that sense; they believe in bodily resurrection. That belief seems to me coherent but superstitious. So you have the choice between a coherent but superstitious belief, to wit, bodily resurrection and an incoherent belief, namely, immortality through eternal disembodied existence.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p87-88
2. Rebuttal:
Argument from Change
Argument from Change
Summary:
A. Things change.
B. In order to change, a thing must be acted upon by something outside itself.
C. Even living beings have desire, which is more than the sum of its parts and therefore must come from outside the being. (A dead body has all the parts of a living one, but cannot desire to enact change itself.)
D. The universe contains all changing things.
E. The universe changes.
F. Therefore, something outside the universe must act to change the universe.
G. God exists outside the universe and is unchanging.
H. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
B. In order to change, a thing must be acted upon by something outside itself.
C. Even living beings have desire, which is more than the sum of its parts and therefore must come from outside the being. (A dead body has all the parts of a living one, but cannot desire to enact change itself.)
D. The universe contains all changing things.
E. The universe changes.
F. Therefore, something outside the universe must act to change the universe.
G. God exists outside the universe and is unchanging.
H. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“The idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moths’ celestial navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I suggested for childhood gullibility. The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the ‘religion is a by-product’ view, points out that children have a natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he suggests, and especially children, are natural born dualists.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p208-209
“A dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between matter and mind. A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a manifestation of matter – material in a brain or perhaps a computer – and cannot exist apart from matter. A dualist believes the mind is some kind of disembodied spirit that inhabits the body and therefore conceivably could leave the body and exist somewhere else. Dualists readily interpret mental illness as ‘possession by devils,’ those devils being spirits whose residence in the body is temporary, such that they might be ‘cast out.’ Dualists personify inanimate physical objects at the slightest opportunity, seeing spirits and demons even in waterfalls and clouds...
“...The idea that there is a me perched somewhere behind my eyes and capable, at least in fiction, of migrating into somebody else’s head, is deeply ingrained in me and in every other human being, whatever our intellectual pretensions to monism. [Psychologist Paul] Bloom supports his contention with experimental evidence that children are even more likely to be dualists than adults are, especially extremely young children. This suggests that a tendency to dualism is built into the brain and, according to Bloom, provides a natural predisposition to embrace religious ideas.
“Bloom also suggests that we are innately predisposed to be creationists. Natural selection ‘makes no intuitive sense.’ Children are especially likely to assign purpose to everything, as the psychologist Deborah Keleman tells us in her article ‘Are children “intuitive theists”?’ Clouds are ‘for raining.’ Pointy rocks are ‘so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy.’ The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
“Native dualism and native teleology predisposes us, given the right conditions, to religion, just as my moths’ light-compass reaction predisposed them to inadvertent ‘suicide.’ Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a ‘soul’ which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body. We can also easily imagine the existence of a deity as pure spirit, not an emergent property of complex matter but existing independently of matter. Even more obviously, childish teleology sets us up for religion. If everything has a purpose, whose purpose is it? God’s of course.
“...But what would the Darwinian advantage be? Predicting the behaviour of entities in our world is important for our survival, and we would expect natural selection to have shaped our brains to do it efficiently and fast...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p209-211
“The idea of psychological by-products grows naturally out of the important and developing field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that, just as the eye is an evolved organ for seeing, and the wing an evolved organ for flying, so the brain is a collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs. There is a module for dealing with kinship, a module for dealing with reciprocal exchanges, a module for dealing with empathy, and so on. Religion can be seen as a by-product of the misfiring of several of these modules, for example the modules for forming theories of other minds, for forming coalitions, and for discriminating in favour of in-group members and against strangers. Any of these could serve as the human equivalent of the moths’ celestial navigation, vulnerable to misfiring in the same kind of way as I suggested for childhood gullibility. The psychologist Paul Bloom, another advocate of the ‘religion is a by-product’ view, points out that children have a natural tendency towards a dualistic theory of mind. Religion, for him, is a by-product of such instinctive dualism. We humans, he suggests, and especially children, are natural born dualists.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p208-209
“A dualist acknowledges a fundamental distinction between matter and mind. A monist, by contrast, believes that mind is a manifestation of matter – material in a brain or perhaps a computer – and cannot exist apart from matter. A dualist believes the mind is some kind of disembodied spirit that inhabits the body and therefore conceivably could leave the body and exist somewhere else. Dualists readily interpret mental illness as ‘possession by devils,’ those devils being spirits whose residence in the body is temporary, such that they might be ‘cast out.’ Dualists personify inanimate physical objects at the slightest opportunity, seeing spirits and demons even in waterfalls and clouds...
“...The idea that there is a me perched somewhere behind my eyes and capable, at least in fiction, of migrating into somebody else’s head, is deeply ingrained in me and in every other human being, whatever our intellectual pretensions to monism. [Psychologist Paul] Bloom supports his contention with experimental evidence that children are even more likely to be dualists than adults are, especially extremely young children. This suggests that a tendency to dualism is built into the brain and, according to Bloom, provides a natural predisposition to embrace religious ideas.
“Bloom also suggests that we are innately predisposed to be creationists. Natural selection ‘makes no intuitive sense.’ Children are especially likely to assign purpose to everything, as the psychologist Deborah Keleman tells us in her article ‘Are children “intuitive theists”?’ Clouds are ‘for raining.’ Pointy rocks are ‘so that animals could scratch on them when they get itchy.’ The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.
“Native dualism and native teleology predisposes us, given the right conditions, to religion, just as my moths’ light-compass reaction predisposed them to inadvertent ‘suicide.’ Our innate dualism prepares us to believe in a ‘soul’ which inhabits the body rather than being integrally part of the body. Such a disembodied spirit can easily be imagined to move on somewhere else after the death of the body. We can also easily imagine the existence of a deity as pure spirit, not an emergent property of complex matter but existing independently of matter. Even more obviously, childish teleology sets us up for religion. If everything has a purpose, whose purpose is it? God’s of course.
“...But what would the Darwinian advantage be? Predicting the behaviour of entities in our world is important for our survival, and we would expect natural selection to have shaped our brains to do it efficiently and fast...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p209-211