Prove the existence of the soul

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SentinelofTruth said:
You guys, it doesn’t take four (or was it five? I can’t remember.) pages of debate to prove the existence of the soul. If you’re looking for proof of the soul, you’re looking in all the wrong places. “Nothing is ever wasted or destroyed”, “people lose weight when they die” and such are irrelevant. If you want to prove something about the nature of the human person, work from what we know about the human person. One such thing that we know is free will. If the human mind/soul/spirit is to be explained in material terms, then material things must have the power of independent action. This, as we can observe, is not the case. No physical thing has this power. Physical things only act (not that this really counts as action) when something influences them. They don’t move unless something moves them. Even neurons don’t freely choose to fire. No physical system does. Thus, no physical system has free will. The human mind/soul/spirit must therefore be immaterial.
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I think a naturalistic response would be something along the lines of the fact that free-will is an illusion and that we are really just being guided by an evolutionary program. Not sure what the mechanism of that program might be, but it would probably be argued that the program we have is one that has been continually successful with regards to natural selection.
 
I perceive freedom of choice with my introspection. If the naturalist is going to deny the infallibility of introspection, then I think he is contradicting himself. If introspection is not infallible, then how does he know it isn’t? If introspection can be wrong, then how do we know for certain that we believe it can be wrong? Beliefs are perceived through introspection. Thus, if we deny its infallibility, we don’t even know that we are denying it.
So it seems that to deny the infallibility of introspection forces us to face the absurd and unanswerable question of how we can know that we are denying it. Unless we want to have to deal with question, it seems we must accept that introspection is infallible.
 
Without a soul you wouldn’t be alive or bodily aware. You would instead be a spirit or ghost. Proof of souls or spirits can be found in the fact that there are angels and demons. They are spirits and are similar to us in many respects. The greatest difference aside from us being different species is that we have a body that is fused to our soul. Thus, allowing us to move about in the physical world.

In short, we need more research in finding out what the soul is and how it works.
 
I appreciate that you believe in the soul, but one important correction is in order: the nature of the soul isn’t something that can be ‘researched’, because the soul cannot be empirically observed. It can be perceived through introspection, and we can learn about it via metaphysical inquiry (using the data we get from introspection), but it can’t be ‘researched’.
 
Imagination.

When I imagine a pizza, I cannot literally be seeing a pizza. When I ponder questions in my mind, I cannot literally be hearing any noise. Materialism cannot answer these “problems” because no one is yet so daft as to think that when I imagine a pizza an actual bodily thing with the likeness of pizza materializes in my mind (or worse, in my brain); and again, no materialist is so daft as to insert a microphone into my skull hoping to hear my thoughts. The fact that they do not do this or even try to gives away the game. They know as well as we do that these realities are not and cannot be absolutely material. Everyone knows that such things only bare a likeness to their corporeal counterparts, objects, bases or sources.
 
Cruciferi said:
Without a soul you wouldn’t be alive or bodily aware. You would instead be a spirit or ghost. Proof of souls or spirits can be found in the fact that there are angels and demons. They are spirits and are similar to us in many respects. The greatest difference aside from us being different species is that we have a body that is fused to our soul. Thus, allowing us to move about in the physical world.

In short, we need more research in finding out what the soul is and how it works.
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A soul is the substantial form of a living thing, so all living things have souls. Only a rational, or human, soul is immaterial and eternal. So without any soul, we would be dead. Without a rational, immaterial soul, we would be like any other animals (incapable of reason).

Angels are immaterial substances not dependent in any way on matter (whereas, our souls are dependent on matter, and though eternal will be substantially diminished after we die and before we are reunited with our bodies).
 
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polytropos:
A soul is the substantial form of a living thing,
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Uh, this is like, false.
Have you noticed something about forms (e.g. redness, roundness, etc.)? They can’t change. The soul, however, can. For example, you can grow in virtue. But if the soul can change, and forms can’t, then the soul must not be a form.
 
It’s been days since I posted the argument against hylomorphism. Are you going to reply?
 
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