Lesson 8 Flashcards
Evaluating reincarnation
In philosophical circles, reincarnation is not well received. Objections to it include:
• Weak research procedures - this was frequently alleged against Stevenson, who (it is said) had a predisposition to believe what he was told about reincarnation.
• Reincarnation is an accepted belief in most of the cases studied by Stevenson, so there is perhaps a tendency for people to encourage each other to provide testimony to support their beliefs.
• The well-known phenomenon of cryptomnesia shows that people can believe that they remember events, whereas in reality they are forgotten memories that have resurfaced.
• Philosophically, how could it be established that any individual now living is the ‘same person’ as a previous incarnation? There is no continuity of memory or psychology (except in the claims made by Stevenson and others) or of body and brain, so belief in the reincarnation of a non-physical soul is unverifiable.
-the amount of evidence from spontaneous childhood memories of past lives cannot be dismissed so easily.
-For those who believe in the existence of an indestructible soul, reincarnation is the most likely explanation in many of the cases investigated by Stevenson and others.
- Plato’s arguments for the natural immortality of the soul
Plato - typical of dualists - holds that the soul is naturally immortal. In the Phaedo, he presents a number of arguments for the immortality of the soul. For example:
1 The Argument from Opposites
2 The Argument from Recollection
1 The Argument from Opposites
Everything comes to be from its opposite Life and death are opposites, so in the same way that living bodies die, the dead must become living.
The Argument from Recollection
-Plato believed that knowledge is recollection.
-He attempted to demonstrate that the principles of geometry can be recollected even by the uneducated. True knowledge is knowledge of the unchanging Forms.
-If we take two sticks of equal length but unequal width, we understand that they are of equal length because our knowledge of the Forms gives us an innate (built in) knowledge of the Form of Equality.
-To have such an understanding implies that we must have existed before birth, which implies further that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body.
What do platos arguments suggest?
-These arguments suggest that after the death of the body, the soul goes to the world of Forms to contemplate their perfection and is subsequently reborn in the flesh.
-This follows an early Greek (religious) belief that everything is involved in an eternal cyclic process, so Plato seems to be endorsing a view of reincarnation of the soul as an automatic process.
Problem with platos view of immortality of soul
-A major problem with Plato’s view of the immortality of the soul is that it rests on his theory of Forms together with some very doubtful arguments.
-For example, the Argument from Opposites seems, simply, to be wrong.
-Plato uses the analogy of sleeping and waking: clearly one does have to be asleep before one can wake up, but to say that one has to be dead before one lives is not the same thing at all.
-There is no space here for an extended critique of Plato, but his arguments for the natural immortality of the soul are very speculative to say the least.
Platos arguement - too simple
-The core of Plato’s argument is straightforward: the soul is immaterial, unexpended and simple - i.e it has no parts.
-Something can be destroyed if its parts are separated. Having no parts, the soul cannot be destroyed. But a self that is so simple it cannot be destroyed is so simple that it cannot be understood and encountered.
-We only recognise one another because of our distinctive complexity, and we gain that by contact with the physical environment in which we live and the world of ideas and language that we inherit and to which we contribute.
-We might entertain the idea of a simple, eternal soul, but we cannot imagine what such a soul would be like, and certainly not how it could have character.
What does Swinburne say about soul
T]he human soul at death [has] a structure, a system of beliefs and desires which might be expected to be there to some degree in the soul if that soul were to be revived. If a man does survive death, he will take his most central desires and beliefs with him, which is the kind of survival for which, I suspect, most men hope.’
Swinburne analogy
-The soul is like a light bulb and the brain is like an electric light socket.
-If you plug the bulb into the socket and turn the current on, the light will shine.
-If the socket is damaged or the current turned off, the light will not shine.
-So, too, the soul will function (have a mental life) if it is plugged into a functioning brain.
-Destroy the brain or cut off the nutriment supplied by the blood, and the soul will cease to function, remaining inert.
-But it can be revived and made to function again by repairing or reassembling the brain - just as the light can be made to shine again by repairing the socket or turning on the current
-Humans can repair light sockets. But there is a practical limit to the ability of humans to repair brains; the bits get lost.
-Humans can move light bulbs and put them into entirely different sockets. But no human knows how to move a soul from one body to another and plug it into another; nor does any natural known force do this. Yet the task is one involving no contradiction and an omnipotent God could achieve it…
Swinburne - alt view
-The alternative is that God could connect the soul to its old body or to a new body (if its previous body had been annihilated)
-Note that the first possibility here is supported by functionalist arguments. You will remember that in principle, Functionalism could accept that minds could operate on a metaphysical platform.
-Given Swinburne’s opinion that mental states are soul states, whether embodied or disembodied, a soul could in both instances retain its memories and desires, and would be the ‘same person’ as the one who had died.
-Note that Swinburne is careful to say that these are possibilities, not facts. It is logically possible that souls, as Swinburne defines them, could survive death either in an embodied or a disembodied state.
-Swinburne seems to be in no doubt that religious belief requires the soul to be embodied. In the Appendix to his conclusions concerning immortality, he refers to,
… the Christian emphasis on the embodiedness of men as their normal and divinely intended state.’
For some Christian’s…
-For some Christian theists, then(such as Swinburne himself)the argument that an omnipotent God could cause souls to exist after death in either an embodied or a disembodied state will make sense.
-For a soft materialist Christian such as John Hick, the idea of a disembodied soul makes no sense, since for Hick a human is a psychosomatic (mind-body) unity, so God would have to resurrect the whole person
