The Soul

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Against_Heresy

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I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
 
Interesting, so you believe in the soul but have no evidence for that belief? I suppose you’d just want to motivate substance dualism. You can start by defeating the mind-brain identity thesis: if it’s possible they’re not identical, then they’re not identical. Check out the Marys Room thought experiment as well.
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
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My best proof: If you think on the soul, then you’ve got a soul…
A dog does not think on his soul, neither a tree or a fish. Each one of the living creatures are closed inside their tissues, molecules and atoms. Atoms cannot go outside themselves.
So, if you have something that can look from the outside to your body and ask: “Does my (this) body have a soul?” it means that it is another “thing” outside the body that is asking this question.
To this “thing” that is not a thing, ce cal soul, spirit, “me”, “I”.
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
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Hylemorphic dualism, Edward Feser’s ‘Philosophy of the Mind’ is a great start, also his blog. Another great philosophical work on the subject, ‘Personal Identity’ by David Oderberg. Want some heavy duty stuff, try Gyula Kilma’s article on this dualism fordham.edu/gsas/phil/klima/BODYSOUL.HTM
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
Click to expand...
All men have the same nature and constitute the single species, man. It is of faith that every man is a composite of matter and a rational soul. The 5th Council of Lateran says that every human being has an individual soul. This soul, according to the Council of Vienne, is man’s formal cause, that is, the internal active principle which makes him to be what he is. The human soul is immortal and endowed with free will. It does not pre-exist its union with a particular body. On account of his powers of reason, man is the image of God. “Let us make man to our image and likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
Click to expand...
God is Pure Spirit. The spiritual soul is why we are in the image of God which means that we can share in God’s life through knowledge (intellective power of the spiritual
soul) and love (volition of the spiritual soul) Our own human nature is an unification or composite of both the material and spiritual worlds.

Seems to me that you could apply to the soul your basic evidence for the existence of God through reason and science. One scientific way is to compare the human species with other species. A logical way is that the means for knowing God have to be spiritual.
 
Against_Heresy said:
Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
Click to expand...
Excellent question, my friend! I look forward to learning great perspective in this thread! The following are my best concepts, thus far.

The soul is the center of the spirit, just as the heart is the center of the body and feelings, and the mind is the center of the thoughts and thinking.

Now to simply recognize the spirit, look at a physical photo of a loved one at a particularly emotional moment in your past. Although the photo is only a bunch of ink blots splattered on a page, it can have amazing effects on you. The reason is because your mind interacts with the spirit, or the exact image, knowledge and past-actions, of the person.

Therefore, the spirit is any instance of a person’s exact image, knowledge, or past-actions.

To simply understand the soul, consider the first Catechism of the Catholic Church, in particular, “…in a plan…”:
Given that God generated a plan, one must ask how did God generate a plan? He did so by thinking of it.
So in thinking of the plan, He thought of all the men and women, including all of their free-willed thoughts, feelings, and actions, that would occur in the process of fulfilling His plan. Since thinking of a person’s exact image, knowledge, and actions is the spirit of the person, when God thought of each one us, our soul was created.

Therefore, when God set His plan in motion, aka Creation, the soul somehow exists in union with the body.

Thoughts?
 
The best evidence for a soul that I’ve seen is when I attend a funeral wake and look in the casket. The difference between what you see there and what you see in a sleeping person is the soul.
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
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Look into “hylemorphic dualism.” The soul is the principle of substantive unity. The best evidence for its existence is simply that I cannot be reduced to matter: my matter changes constantly over the course of my life, yet I remain.
 
sw85 said:
Look into “hylemorphic dualism.” The soul is the principle of substantive unity. The best evidence for its existence is simply that I cannot be reduced to matter: my matter changes constantly over the course of my life, yet I remain.
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The U.S.S. Enterprise isn’t able to be reduced to matter because its matter changes constantly over the course of its life, yet it remains.
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
Click to expand...
The soul is the thing that makes life possible. It distinguishes us from innert matter that is not living like a rock even though rocks and our bodies are made of chemicals. If something is alive then it has a soul. We as humans have a soul that is immortal which distinguishes us from animals. God is rational so we have a rational soul as we are made in His image (God breathed on Adam in Genesis). Rationality allows us to know that there is more to life than just our existence in our yearning for truth and what is beyond.

Our natural nature cannot meet and converse with God so God puts in us an immortal soul that can meet Him there. We talk with God and develop our relationship with Him because we have a soul that is on the supernatural level. We then are beings that are in the middle of things. We are not totally natural and not totally supernatural, or spiritual. Dogs and cats are natural and angels are spiritual beings. We are inbetween because of our spiritual souls.

mdcpensive1
 
Perplexity said:
The U.S.S. Enterprise isn’t able to be reduced to matter because its matter changes constantly over the course of its life, yet it remains.
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That’s a pretty accurate metaphor. In hylemorphic dualism, the soul is simply the form – thus everything has a soul above and beyond its material instantiation.

When we talk about the human soul we generally mean the immaterial faculties (i.e., intellect and will), though these are distinct from the form. It’s these that are preserved after death and reunited to resurrected bodies.
 
sw85 said:
That’s a pretty accurate metaphor. In hylemorphic dualism, the soul is simply the form – thus everything has a soul above and beyond its material instantiation.

When we talk about the human soul we generally mean the immaterial faculties (i.e., intellect and will), though these are distinct from the form. It’s these that are preserved after death and reunited to resurrected bodies.
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Ah, oddly (you might find I suppose) I’d take this as reason not to be a hylemorphist.
 
Perplexity said:
The U.S.S. Enterprise isn’t able to be reduced to matter because its matter changes constantly over the course of its life, yet it remains.
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Yet in one episode, Scotty was trapped in the trasporter for about 30? years and came back(Startrek NG).
mdcpensive1
 
Perplexity said:
The U.S.S. Enterprise isn’t able to be reduced to matter because its matter changes constantly over the course of its life, yet it remains.
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I don’t think that analogy works. The U.S.S. Enterprise (even in its futuristic imaginative state) wasn’t alive and the materials of which it was constructed were not in a constant state of regenerative flux.

Maybe The Borg would work.

Chuck
 
sw85 said:
Why?
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I suppose for a few reasons:

First, it strikes me as absurd to call the Enterprise immaterial. If someone understood the Enterprise to be immaterial, they’d have to clarify that in conversation because we’d naturally assume they meant something material.

Second, as Van Cleve states, “[t]he Aristotelian position [hylemorphism] leads to a problem that Ernest Sosa has dubbed “the explosion of reality”. To be drawn into the problem, ask yourself the following question: which aggregates of matter and which forms are such that when those aggregates come to exemplify those forms, a new entity is thereby created? It seems to me that an impartial Aristotelian ought to answer as follows: wherever any matter instantiates any form, a new entity is thereby exists. Consider, for example, the entity Sosa calls a snowdiscall, which has as its matter a chunk of snow and as its form any shape between being round and being disc-shaped. If you take a snowball and flatten it, you destroy the snowball (having deprived it of its essential form), but you leave a snowdiscall in its place. Moreover, the the snowdiscall you leave was there all along, sharing matter with the original snowball…From here it is but a short step to the recognition that an impartial Aristotelian (or “absolutist” as Sosa calls him) should admit that there are millions of of entities inhering in any parcel of matter. Consider the following series of shapes: being round, being round or flattened up to degree 1, being round or flattened up to degree 2, and so on, until we reach the property of being round or flattened up to some degree including being squashed into a disc. We may distinguish infinitely many such shapes. From an impartial or absolutist point of view, each of these shapes has as much claim as roundness to be regarded as the essential form of an entity of some type. An ordinary snowball, it would therefore seem, coincides with infinitely many other entities - snowdiscalls of all possible degrees.” Sider, Theodore, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman. Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008. p. - p. 324

Seems like many would reject such a position because of its bloated ontology (the reason most reject Lewisian Realism), but as Van Cleve later notes, this position seems to violate the impenetrability of matter principle, which I take to be more plausible than hylemorphism: Two or more things cannot be in the same place at the same time.

Instead of snowballs and snowdiscalls we could use the Enterprise and get the same result.

Edit

I’ve seen this argument before, Zimmerman advanced it as a modified version of Chisolm’s Entia Successiva argument in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion.

But, really, this species of argument is just a rehash of the ol’ Theseus’ Ship Paradox.
 
Against_Heresy said:
I am good at bringing evidence for the existence of God through reason and science but I don’t have any good reasons for the existence of the soul.

Can someone offer me evidence for the soul based on reason and logic, it would be appreciative.
Click to expand...
if the people you are arguing with believe in metaphysics then you could give them evidence. But if they are positivist or empiricists, it will be very difficult if not impossible to convince them because you would have to change their philosophical viewpoint to convince them that soul’s exist.

why you can’t observe a soul so it must not exist. (this is the believe of all empiricist and positivist)
 
grannymh said:
God is Pure Spirit. The spiritual soul is why we are in the image of God which means that we can share in God’s life through knowledge (intellective power of the spiritual
soul) and love (volition of the spiritual soul) Our own human nature is an unification or composite of both the material and spiritual worlds.

Seems to me that you could apply to the soul your basic evidence for the existence of God through reason and science. One scientific way is to compare the human species with other species. A logical way is that the means for knowing God have to be spiritual.
Click to expand...
Devils advocate

I don’t believe in God, because there is nothing in nature that I observe that is proof of God. So your analogy doesn’t work. No pure spirit exists, so that must mean soul doesn’t exist.

again playing devils advocate.
 
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