The Soul (Influences of Developents in Religious Belief)

Question 1

Medical definition of death

Answer 1

The cessation of all vital functions, demonstrated by an absence of spontaneous respiratory and cardiac functions

Question 2

Reasons people believe in life after death

Answer 2

• we fear death so afterlife makes it easier to bear
• hard to accept how short life is
• it gives meaning to our earthly existence
• moral law is fulfilled when good and evil receive justice
• human potential could be realised in the afterlife
• sanctity of life (wouldn’t be thrown away)

Question 3

A.J. Ayer on the soul

Answer 3

(Language, Truth and Logic 1936): “that there is something imperceptible inside a man, which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead” is meaningless because it is contradictory

Question 4

Dualism

Answer 4

-body and mind are distinct and separate entities, thought they influence each other
-a dualists believes that there are two main parts to the body, humans have composite natures:
• physical, outer, material body which will decay
• the non-material mind/soul
-usually believes in life after death

Question 5

Three different monistic views

Answer 5

• the mind totally depends on the body in order to function
• the mind and body influence each other equally but that the two need each other to be conscious and aware of the world
• the mind and body are distinct entities that are mysteriously locked together in this world, but the soul will escape and live on after death

Question 6

Descartes

Answer 6

body is spatial (physically existing) but not conscious, while the mind is non-spatial and conscious with feelings and thoughts
• separate but interact through the brain
• when the physical body dies, the soul lives on

Question 7

Monism

Answer 7

-body and mind are linked together as one entity
-only physical matter
-psycho-physical unities, a person is made up of a physical body which walks, talks etc and the mind which determines mental behaviour, characteristics, intelligence and humour
-no soul/mind that is distinct from the body which survives death, both die
-Robinson 1960: “Man does not have a body, he is a body…A flesh-animated by soul, the whole conceived as a psycho-physical unity”

Question 8

Alternative to monism and dualism

Answer 8

-materialism/behaviourism: the view that so called mental events are really physical events occurring to physical objects
• when we feel emotion, it is just chemicals in our body
-Ryle: “Ghost in a machine”- ghost is the mind and machine is the body, dismisses dualism
• calling mind and body separate is a “category mistake” akin to separating a university from its buildings
• believes body and mind are one entity
• Supported Philosophical Behaviourism: all mental events are physical events interpreted in a non-physical way, our mind is a part of our body
• Magee: “the human body is a single entity…we are not two entities mysteriously laced together”

Question 9

Criticisms of Ryle

Answer 9

-doesn’t explain all mental behaviour, e.g. wishing is not a physical behaviour
• led to some scholars favouring ‘identity theory’- mental and physical activities are same thing and the mind really means the brain

-Russell: “Our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organised bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases” (Russell on religion 1999)
• others disagree: not only is LAD possible, but desirable, and will require our personal identities to either survive death or be given a new mode of being in order to continue existing

Question 10

The soul

Answer 10

Two definitions
• the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal
• emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, especially as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance

Other ideas

• belief in LAD suggests an understanding of the relation between the person/self and the body- body is the vehicle inhabited by the person
• not all agree with this relationship or on what a person is
• there is no definite agreement on its nature
• cultures have varying ideas

Question 11

St Paul on life after death

Answer 11

writes with certainty about life after death: “when the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory” 1 Corinthians 15:53-55

Question 12

World religions on the afterlife

Answer 12

-Christians: resurrection of Jesus shows life after death to be a certainty
-Muslims: life after death promised in the Qur’an, this life is a preparation for the afterlife, where we are judged
-Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism: people have several earthly lives, when we die we are reborn as another human (or in some traditions an animal) and we have many opportunities to spiritually develop and escape the cycle of life, death and karma

Question 13

Anthony Flew on life after death

Answer 13

“In the ordinary, everyday understanding of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself…when, after some disaster, the ‘dead’ and the ‘survivors’ have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?”
-Flew and others (logical positivists) hold life after death is meaningless, not being empirically testable of falsifiable. it is also a logically incoherent concept

Question 14

Weak solutions to the problems of life after death

Answer 14

• we live in others’ memories
• we live in our legacy
• live through passing on genes
-none of these meet the standard of what most would consider LAD, there would be no experience of these

Question 15

Plato’s world of forms and the physical world

Answer 15

-world of forms and physical world are separate
• the soul is immortal, existing before and after death in the world of forms, from whence it gains knowledge which becomes intuition in the physical world
• the body can only learn from sense experience
• unlike the body, the soul is unchanging

Question 16

Plato’s parts of the soul

Answer 16

• reason: allows us to gain knowledge and understand forms
• spirit/emotion: allows love, courage but also recklessness
• appetite: allows needs of the body to be met, but can lead to hedonism
—compared to charioteer (reason) and two horses (spirit and appetite)

Question 17

Socrates as Plato’s mouthpiece

Answer 17

(Phaedo)

• soul continues to live with thought and intelligence after death, unhindered by the body to reach highest state
• the soul continues to live because life is at its essence
• Cebes argues that souls could dissolve at death instead

Question 18

The myth of Er in Plato’s republic

Answer 18

• Er dies in battle, but awakens at his funeral 12 days later
• in afterlife, he had witnessed the judgment of souls and cycle of life and death
• shows the importance of Philosophy to understand what a good life is, as we decide and have responsibility for the choices of each life

Question 19

Evaluation of Plato’s dualism

Answer 19

-defences of Plato’s dualism
• we have intuition on earth, Plato uses example of uneducated slave boy who solved a geometrical problem using his own reasoning
• most things are understood relative to their opposites (light and dark), death of the body is understood relative to the life of the soul, we live in a cycle of life and death
-criticisms of Plato’s dualism
• we experience ourselves as unified wholes
• relies on acceptance of world of forms
• argument from the cycle of opposites is not supported by all experience, black does not bring about white

Question 20

Aristotle on the soul

Answer 20

-soul is not additional to the body, but refers to the attributes of the body
• Russell gave an analogy: football could not exist if there were no footballers
• the soul is the formal cause, the body is marble and the soul is the shape of the sculpture
• the soul is a substance that remains despite the continual change of the body

Question 21

Aristotle’s types of soul

Answer 21

• vegetative/nutritive: the ability to be nourished
• appetitive/perceptive: involves movement and desire/pleasure and pain
• human: ability to reason

Question 22

Aristotle and life after death

Answer 22

• Aristotle’s view seems to leave no room for LAD
• the soul wouldn’t survive the death of the body
• however, he wondered if human reason might survive, although this wouldn’t allow LAD in any personal sense

Question 23

Plato and Aristotle Quotes (delete once added to bank)

Answer 23

Plato Quotes:
• “the body is the source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere requirement of food…and endless foolery, and in fact as men say, takes away from us all power of thinking at all”
• “if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge…knowledge is not to be attained at all, or, if at all, after death”
•

Aristotle Quotes:
• “To attain any assured knowledge of the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world” (De Anima)
• “the soul is inseparable from the body” (De Anima)

Question 24

Kant on life after death

Answer 24

-for the purpose of existence was to achieve the ‘summum bonum’ (complete good)
• humans can’t achieve complete goodness in one life so God is morally obliged to give us another opportunity
• John Hick supports this, “if the human potential is to be fulfilled inn the lives of individuals, these lives must be prolonged far beyond the limited of our present bodily existence”
• “The summum bonum is only possible on the presupposition of the immortality of the soul” (Critique of Pure Reason)

Question 25

Critiques of Kant

Answer 25

• there is no reason to assume there is any justice
• our sense that we ought to be good might very well be futile
• why should we believe that life after death would compensate for injustice in this life

Question 26

Critiques of Christian ideas about the afterlife

Answer 26

-Dawkins: Purgatory is “…a Hadean waiting room where dead souls go if their sins aren’t bad enough to send them to Hell’’
-John Hick: Hell is “…horrible and disturbing beyond words; and the thought of such torment being deliberately inflicted by divine decree is totally incompatible with the idea of God as infinite love”
-Heaven is also problematic, Aquinas: “

Question 27

John Locke

Answer 27

posed an example of the prince and cobbler, bringing into question whether our appearance or mind that makes an individual
• these problems raise issues or theories of resurrection and reincarnation, saying someone who has died is identical with another person in a different body is incoherent

Question 28

Some issues with the soul

Answer 28

• The relationship between mind and soul is also unresolved
• person being a ‘good soul’ is very different to a person having a ‘good mind’ (this could be argued to be a linguistic issue though)
• theists believe that people still have souls even if their mind is completely destroyed but if the soul is the conscious part that makes moral decisions and has a relationship with God then it is then difficult to say how it is possible for someone with little mental awareness
• LAD- generally referring to mental abilities (e.g. memory) as well

Question 29

Immortality of the soul

Answer 29

• the belief that the soul is a distinct and immortal entity within the body (dualism) which can survive the death of the body and ascend to the afterlife
• although it is not the traditional view of Christianity (which maintains the necessity of the body for ultimate redemption), it has been popular in western philosophy
• the first major argument in favour of an immortal soul was given by Plato in Phaedo, where he sets the scene just after the death of socrates who decides to talk with his friends about death and the immortality of the soul

Question 30

Christian beliefs on the soul

Answer 30

-personhood is associated with belief of souls
-is different from the rest of creation and is made in God’s image
-humanity is made by God, “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being”
-Christians believe soul will be judged by god after death and those who repent for their sins are saved
-soul encompasses mind and spirit
-soul goes beyond mental intelligence and reason, believer can put reason and argument aside in search for spiritual enlightenment and experience of God

Question 31

Creationist beliefs on the soul

Answer 31

-creationists believe that God creates each individual soul every time a new baby is born
• if soul is given to body at birth then abortion would not be murder
• if soul is part of a person at conception then abortion would be murder

Question 32

Traducianism

Answer 32

-belief that the soul is inherited from the parents
-not mainstream view
-links to problem of original sin (the sin is literally inherited)

Question 33

Platonic Christian beliefs on the soul

Answer 33

-soul pre-existed the body
-soul lived with God before the baby was born
-solves problem of how soul can be eternal, as it has no beginning
-not part of mainstream Christianity

Question 34

Richard Dawkins on the soul

Answer 34

-a person is entirely physical and consciousness cannot be separated from the brain, meaning that consciousness ends with bodily death
-to have consciousness, an ability to make decisions and think, gives us an advantage in survival, so we evolved to have consciousness by natural selection
-our awareness results from the mixture of chemicals in our brains
-relationship between brain and consciousness is a mystery: some believe we’ll be able to solve it eventually but others do not
-Dawkins agrees with Russell: there is no sound basis for an immortal soul
• belief is for those who lack courage, fear death and cannot cope with our mortality
—The fact that we are aware is no reason to suppose that we are made in God’s image

Question 35

Dawkins quotes (maybe just for QB)

Answer 35

• “survival machines- blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules” (Selfish Gene)
• “there is no spirit driven life force…life is bytes and bytes of digital information” (River out of Eden)
• “consciousness…can be thought of as the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards the emancipation of survival machines as executive decision takers”

Question 36

Ward

Answer 36

-believed soul vital for human flourishing
-‘Defending the Soul’ written as a response to scientists who claim humans are just physical beings
-focuses on problem of if the soul is abandoned
-without belief in the soul, morality becomes a matter of personal choice
-need moral claims that soul recognises as coming from God
-without soul, humanity lacks sense of purpose
-attacks materialist position
-“man is made of dust; but he is filled with the spirit of God”

Question 37

Hick on the Soul

Answer 37

-the soul is essential to theology
-the whole of this earthly life is a ‘vale of soul making’
-earthly life is a testing ground for people as they develop their moral character
-soul and body are distinct
-the soul needs the body in the afterlife
-unlike Plato, believes the soul is not unchanging
-the soul has to grow and develop as the body does is earthly life
-there is an evolutionary process to learn how to make moral decisions until reaching the stage of living in relationship with God
-LAD is physical rebirth, body is resurrected by God
-Death and Eternal Life (1976): accepts that the immortality of the soul can’t be proved in life but a rational person would accept it

Question 38

Swinburne on the Soul

Answer 38

-In “The evolution of the soul”, explains belief that the soul and body are distinct from each other
-soul is capable of surviving even with body destroyed
-there are fundamental truths about us as individuals which cannot be explained in purely physical terms
-the most important aspects of our identities are not parts of our physical bodies
-human soul is unique in that it is capable of logical, ordered and complex thought
-soul is aware of its own freedom to make choices
-aware of moral obligation
we have souls that recognise goodness when we see other people, it lets us know right and wrong