EXTRA - Textbook

Question 1

Evaluation of Platos idea of soul

Answer 1

-the sense of souls true home being elsewhere is found in the NT and is view of many Christians

idea of soul as seeking escape from body isn’t typical of Christian thinking:
-Yet for many this idea of essential separateness of the soul fits in with feeling on looking at corpses that something has left it
-there is however no good evidence for metaphysical world of forms

Question 2

Evaluation of Descartes argument for existence of the soul

Answer 2

• view stated in support of platos dualist ideas apply to Descartes argument

challenges to each of Descartes proof:
-against first proof most philosophers view consciousness or mind as product of brain which itself is a part of physical body
-against second, neuroscience dhows close correlation between mind and brain
-third proof viewed by many as circular argument

Question 3

Hume challenged the argument- Descartes

Answer 3

-claim that consciousness comes from non material subjects is in fact circular argument

-thought may have a material explanation: this is also most common view of mind in modern thinking

-since souls aren’t located in space how do we know theres only 1 soul

Question 4

Evaluation of Aristotle idea of soul

Answer 4

-against it is view held by many Christians that at death the soul leaves body to return to its true home

-however many people including many Christian’s think of themselves as an integrated unity

-mind/soul distinct from but at same time inseparable from body

Question 5

Evaluation of Descartes interactionism

Answer 5

Descartes’ location of the interaction in the pineal gland has been discredited.
• The pineal gland’s function is now known.
• In any case, at best Descartes’ suggestion says where the interaction takes place; it does not explain how.

This is a real problem, given that substance dualism speaks’ of two totally distinct entities.
Gilbert Ryle assessed Descartes’ theory as ‘the Ghost in the Machine’.
• Ryle accused Descartes of making a ‘category mistake.
• Ryle’s point was that we should not expect to find an extra something in the form of a mind over and above the different parts of the body.

To talk of the mind/soul is not to talk of some ‘disembodied ghost’.

Question 6

Evaluation of hard materialism

Answer 6

• It seems certain that mind and body are closely related. Physical conditions, for instance, often have a strong effect on mental states.

• But hard materialism’s reductionism is very determinist. This is a problem for belief in free will and moral responsibility.

• It rules out any idea of survival after death other than as a memory or through passing on DNA. This is unacceptable for most religious believers.

• There is also what is known as the ‘Hard Problem of consciousness. Consciousness seems so different from the physical brain that it is hard to see how the latter can produce it.

• The physical brain cannot account for qualia, which are the subjective experiences everyone has as a conscious being.

• Dawkins makes sweeping statements.

Question 7

Richard Dawkins

Answer 7

Dawkins is a hard materialist/functionalist. He argues that:
• Humans are simply carriers of DNA:
• The role of the body is to be a survival machine for genes.
• The good genes survive and the bad ones die out.
• There is no such thing as an immortal soul guiding us. o This is just wish-fulfilment.
• Our only guidance comes from our genetic inheritance. o The only way in which we survive after death is through the DNA that we have passed on.

The only kind of soul that Dawkins considers consists of high intellectual and mental powers.
• But this cannot be separated from the brain.
Consciousness developed due to its survival advantages, but when the body dies, so does consciousness.

Question 8

Evaluation of DAM

Answer 8

-Dual-aspect monism then can be seen to provide an answer to the issues raised by both dualism and physicalism.

-Dual-aspect monism can combine with Process Theology to provide a different but clear view of life after death, perhaps through objective immortality’ where every person’s experiences would be remembered forever in the mind of God.

• But this seems to rule out any sense of personal existence after death, such as is believed in by most Christians.

• Although some think that God could still grant believers a personal existence after death.

The single substance that underpins mind and body is not yet known.
• But something similar can be seen in quantum theory, where quarks are unobservable, but their existence is essential to particle physics.

Quantum theory also helps in describing the complementary relationship between mind and matter.

Question 9

Ideas about personal identity

Answer 9

-There are three broad can explore the idea of categories under which we personal identity, though
many people will believe a mixture of these to be the case.

1 Personal identity is physical.
-The physicalist view is that a functioning brain is essential to being a person.
-There are many changes to the body throughout life.
-So bodily identity’ is about spatio-temporal continuity.

2 Personal identity is metaphysical.
-What is real about individuals is their unchanged conscious awareness.
-Campbell used the example of hearing Big Ben striking the hour to argue that there is such a thing as a conscious, self-aware mind.

3 Personal identity is psychological.
-A well-known example of this can be seen in the views of Derek Parfit.
-During our lives there is connectedness to the past and the future, but no deeper and enduring level of ‘self’.
-There is genetic and, in recent cases, psychological continuity with ancestors and, after death, with offspring and descendants.

Question 10

Possibility of physical existence after death: hard materialist/ physicalist

Answer 10

Hard materialists would say that there is no continuing personal existence after death.
• It makes no sense to think of someone surviving death.
• A person’s identity is linked inextricably to the physical body.
• When our physical life ends, all mental activity comes to an end.
• Functionalism contains ideas of minds being transferred from the brain to be stored and, once the technology is developed, reactivated
• But this is not about the continuation of personal existence after death.
O It could be argued that it is not about any real form of physical survival.

Question 11

Bertrand Russell

Answer 11

Concepts about surviving death result from the instinctive fear of death.
• The continual change in each of us means that there can be no distinctive identity.
• We are simply a collection of experiences that arises out of memory and habit.

Question 12

Antony Flew

Answer 12

The concept of life after death is linguistically incoherent.
-Talk of life after death is effectively talking about ‘dead survivors’, which is self-contradictory.
• In speaking about someone, we are referring to a particular person, not a disembodied soul.
• Personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘you’ can refer only to living organisms that we can experience or with which we can interact.

Question 13

Evaluation of hard materialist rejection of belief in LAD

Answer 13

The existence of life after death is incapable of empirical proof.
• But it cannot be proved that there is no life after death.
• Near-death and reincarnation experiences might support the possibility.
-Many Christians believe that Jesus’ resurrection was an actual event.

Question 14

Hicks replica theory

Answer 14

-Hick was a soft materialist. For him, humans are a psycho-physical unity: when the body dies, so does the soul.
-hick did believe in LAD
-believed claims about LAD are cognitive statements and as such can be debated.

• There were three scenarios to his thought experiment. Note that in each case, the transmitted person/replica had continuity of identity with the person in the first place.
1 A living person transported in the blink of an eye from one part of the world to another.
2 A dead person in one part of the world and the appearance of a
‘replica’ in another.
3 A dead person on earth and his/her appearance as a resurrected person in another sphere.

• Hick did not believe that life after death would be like the third scenario. He was simply trying to stimulate debate by showing that life after death was a logical possibility.

Question 15

Evaluation of Hicks Replica Theory

Answer 15

If Hick was right in his belief that God is omnipotent, then bodily resurrection must be logically possible.
• His belief, expressed in his theodicy, about future states of existence fits in with beliefs about reincarnation.
• But there are many unanswered questions about the details of the scenarios. For example, the possibility that God could create a number of replicas, each of which would have a different consciousness.

Question 16

Possibility of physical existence after death: Christian beliefs about resurrection

Answer 16

-Belief in the resurrection of Jesus has been a key feature of Christianity from the start.
resurrection was bodily:

One reading of the Gospels and of Paul’s teaching suggests that Jesus’
• The Gospels all record the empty tomb and three record resurrection appearances.
• Paul lists resurrection appearances and speaks of bodily resurrection.
• This is picked up in the Nicene Creed, which states belief in the resurrection of the body.
more spiritual concept of the afterlife.

However, Jesus’ own teaching about resurrection suggests that he had a more spiritual concept of afterlife

In addition, in Paul’s letters, there is no reference to the empty tomb.
• In his teaching on the resurrection of Christians he thinks in terms of continuity yet discontinuity.
• Before death we have an earthly body, but after death we have a spiritual body.

Question 17

Evaluation of Christian beliefs about resurrection

Answer 17

• The literalist Christian understanding of the resurrection is contrary to scientific fact: dead bodies do not come back to life.
• The more liberal Christian understanding of the resurrection as a
inappropriate.
metaphysical claim (spiritual bodies’) renders scientific investigation

Question 18

Platos argument for natural immortality of soul;

Answer 18

-plato believed that the soul was eternal and belonged to the world of Forms.

• He thought that everything comes into existence from its opposite: as living beings die, so life must come from death.

• He claimed that knowledge was not about learning new things but was about remembering.
The soul remembers things it observed in the world of Forms.
But it is an imperfect memory because of the trauma of again becoming imprisoned in a body.

• Plato believed in the transmigration of souls.

Question 19

price on disembodied soul

Answer 19

Price’s views are a modern version of Plato’s.
• Price conceived of the afterlife as mind-based.
• He used the analogy of a dream as a state in which we perform physical actions.
• Similarly, the environment of the souls disembodied after death would be a reflection of their desires and memories.
• His thinking on this topic was profoundly influenced by his studies in parapsychology.
• He suggested that disembodied souls would communicate and recognise each other through telepathy.

Question 20

Richard Swinburne

Answer 20

Swinburne is a dualist, who believes that mental states are soul states.
• He uses the analogy of the lightbulb to show that the soul is different from the brain.
• Whether embodied or disembodied, it can survive death, retaining memories and desires and with the same identity.
• All the soul needs is something to replace the function performed by the brain in its earthly life.
• This is possible because God is omnipotent.
Like Hick, Swinburne is pointing to logical possibility rather than claiming fact.

Question 21

Evaluation of dualist theories

Answer 21

These are subject to the criticisms of dualism given earlier in this chapter.
• Plato’s theory of opposites does not work.
• Price’s theory is dependent on the validity of parapsychology, which is challenged by many.

Question 22

Reincarnation of soul

Answer 22

This belief is found in Hinduism.
• The atman (soul, as a part of Brahman, is eternal, indestructible and unchangeable.
• The sharira (body) is created, mortal and subject to change.
• The atman is imprisoned in the sharira.
• At death, karma determines whether the atman can be liberated from samsara (the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation) to attain nirvana, or whether it passes into another body
• Evidence given to support this belief includes:
past life regression, where under hypnosis an individual recalls a supposed past life
direct past-life recall, in which young children claim to remember a past life, e.g. parents, location, etc.

Question 23

Evaluation of reincarnation

Answer 23

The spontaneous childhood memories seem very convincing.
• But there are other explanations, notably cryptomnesia.
• Some of the research procedures have been weak.

Question 24

NDE

Answer 24

Accounts of these experiences have been given from ancient times, e.g. Plato’s story of Er.

• They are found in all cultures and religions, though individual accounts may reveal religion-specific or culture-specific details, e.g. Christians seeing Jesus.

• There is a range of commonly occurring features:
out of the body experience
going through a tunnel towards a brilliant light
meeting deceased loved ones
feelings of immense peace in positive experiences (but sheer terror in negative ones)
coming to a point of no return, at which the individual feels the need to go back
a profound change in lifestyle and in attitudes to death and the afterlife.

Question 25

Evaluation of NDE

Answer 25

The individuals are not actually dead, so they do not provide evidence for life after death.
• The experiences are hallucinations caused by medication or by the brain’s release of endorphins.
• Examples of people with no optic nerve reporting sighted experiences can be quoted in support of their genuineness.
• The transformation of lives is evidence for the genuineness of the experience.

Question 26

Possibility of psychological continuity after death

Answer 26

Parfits Bundle theory sees continuity after death in terms of psychological connectedness

-any influence ppl have in life continues after death as long as the person is remembered
-There is no sush thing be self individuals are “bundle of ever-changing states of being.

Parfit identified live shat ween his ideas and those of Buddhism.
• Buddhists belier ins oche ever-changing combination imental continues after death.
and physical energies occurring throughout this life is a process that
• This suggests that the idea of some form of personal survival after death may be compatible with Bundle theory.

Functionalism thinks in terms of a computer, which works as input, processing and output of information.
• Mental state and sist of the brain processing the inputted sense experiences and outputting the result of the process in the form of behaviour.
• Dennett claims that the human brain’s computer program consists of the experiences, memories and personality that form the narrative self.
• These could survive the death of the individual through having been stored on another platform, such as a computer.
• This stored information of the individual’s life would be psychologically continuous with what went before.

Question 27

Evaluation of parfits and dennetts theories

Answer 27

The problem with Parfit is how thoughts and ideas can exist without a thinker.
• It is the self that holds together all the events in an individual’s life and forms them into a connected narrative.
Both theories dismiss the idea of consciousness as the subjective experience of individuals.
• Neuro-science cannot explain qualia.
• Some philosophers dismiss the reductionism of Dennett, which explained consciousness in terms of computing.
• Qualia are essentially subjective experiences.

Question 28

Objective immortality with reference to process theology

Answer 28

There are links between the thinking of Process Theology and that of Dual-aspect Monism.
• Both are associated with Panpsychism.
• This takes the view that every entity has some level of consciousness.
• It claims that there is no cut-off point for consciousness.
• David Griffin claims that God and the universe exist panentheistically.
• God is in the universe and the universe is in God, with God as the
‘soul’ of the universe.
• Objective immortality means that after death, every entity survives in the mind of God.
• For humans, that means actions, thoughts and ideas exist eternally as objects in the memory of the eternal God.
• Such survival is part of the total experience of God/the universe, so there is no sense of personal continuity with the individual who lived before.
• Some Process theologians think in terms of subjective immortality.
• They think that God has the power to enable the survival of individuals in such a way that there is continuity of identity.

Question 29

Evaluation of process theology and objective immortality

Answer 29

Many Christians would reject the understanding of God that is assumed by this idea.
• Process Theology rejects the traditional attributes of God, which for many makes God a being unworthy of worship.
• Survival after death is seen as meaningless unless it includes being self-aware.
• Some people, however, are attracted by its compatibility with science and its rejection of anthropocentrism.