Are there arguments against the existence of the soul?
Of course - again, if by "soul" you mean a distinct and separable spiritual substance. The main arguments are (1) since pretty much all mental functions seem to be performed by the brain, any "soul" wouldn't have much to do, and if it did survive the body's death, it wouldn't really be you at all; (2) if the soul is spiritual and body is physical, then it is hard to see how they could interact; (3) assuming that other animals, or at least most other animals, don't have souls, it is hard to see how something quite distinct from the body could have evolved. (2) is normally given as the major objection to Cartesian dualism, but I'm inclined to think that (3) is a more powerful one.
Do all Christian Theologians see this linking between the mind and the soul?
I think that the traditional view is that the mind is part of the soul, but not the whole soul. It was a key tenet of Origenism that the mind
is the soul, or rather, that the soul was originally pure mind; and that non-cognitive elements of the psyche, such as passions, are not really part of
you at all. They are like barnacles encrusting a ship, as Plato said. Origenists therefore held that salvation involves, among other things, getting rid of those elements, restoring the soul to its status as pure mind, and returning it to God, who is also pure mind. I am not sure off-hand, and cannot find out right now, whether this was one of the Origenist doctrines condemned in 553.
Because it has always seemed to me that the mind must be distinct from the soul, because the mind can be changed by strictly physical means.
That only follows if you assume that the soul cannot be influenced by the body, but that is not a Christian belief. On the contrary, the soul and the body influence each other all the time, at least on traditional Christianity. The two main alternative views to that are occasionalism, associated with Malebranche and with some medieval Muslim theologians, according to which God moves the body directly in accordance with the soul's wishes and conveys to the soul the perceptions of the body; and the pre-ordained harmony of Leibniz, according to which nothing influences anything, but everything was programmed by God at the start to unfold in a series of events which only look as if they are influencing each other.
Now of course, the fact that it's hard to see how a physical body and a spiritual soul could influence each other at all, if they have no properties in common, is one of the main objections to the whole idea - and indeed that is one of the reasons for the emergence of those alternative theories, on which they don't influence each other after all.
Do Lucifer and Prometheus represent similar archetypes?
- Both wanted to bring wisdom/knowledge to mankind, while the supreme God(s) wished otherwise.
- Both were punished with eternal torment and suffering
- Lucifer means 'light bringer' (or something like that?) and that's what Prometheus did with fire
- Both were among the first beings created by God(s) [angels/titans]
Or am I being too shallow in the comparison, and need to do more reading? Why is one seen as the greatest enemy to mankind, while the other is regarded as a kind of hero? Didn't they both do the same thing?
As ParkCungHee said, the "Lucifer" character you describe is an amalgam. We've already discussed this a bit recently - see
here and following. So the simple answer to your question is that you're looking at it the wrong way around. You're assuming that the myth of Lucifer came first, and then the interpretation of Lucifer as evil. In fact it was the other way around. Satan, or the devil, is presented as evil (at least in the New Testament), and later mythologising built the narrative of Lucifer that you describe around that figure.
413a3-5 said:
It is not unclear that the soul - or certain parts of it, if it naturally has parts - is not separable from the body.
My philosophy professor says that Aristotle thinks the mind continues to exist after the body dies.
Edit: This is what he offers as proof of that (the last 2 paragraphs):
That's a possible interpretation, although it doesn't seem to me that Aristotle is saying that mind could survive the body, only that it is distinct from it (in some way). But I don't know how best to interpret that.
By the way, can I cite your internet posts as a secondary source in my paper? You are an awesome independent expert.
That would be a terrible habit to get into. You should never cite anything that isn't from a properly authoritative source.
What's your general opinion of Richard Swinburne?
He's one of the most intimidatingly clever people I've met. But I am not convinced by his arguments or general approach. In my view the attempt to argue for Christianity on an evidentialist basis is pretty much doomed to failure, and a Plantinga-style approach of arguing for its rationality on a non-evidentialist basis seems a lot more fruitful - at least to me.
You may have already answered this question or one similar to it, and I'm sorry if this question has already been asked, but I have a bit of a problem seeing how the Christian God and free will can co-exist.
Whenever I ask the "why wouldn't God just make everyone believe in him" question, I get the same answer from every person: God created people with free will and they have to choose to believe in God. Okay, but I see a problem there. In theory, God is supposed to know everything, correct? Okay, then it seems reasonable to suggest that he doesn't only know everything that is happening, he knows everything that ever has happend, and everything that ever will happen. If he knows everything that ever will happen, he knows what choice you're going to make, which means it's predestined to happen, which means that you have no free will in the first place! I made this point in anoter OT thread, but no one seemed to get it. Can you tell me how it is possible for an all-knowing and all-powerful God to co-exist with free will?
This is a very, very complex issue - partly because there are different kinds of necessity. It's been discussed for centuries. See Aquinas' rather bewildering discussion
here.
One version of the argument which isn't yours goes something like this:
(1) Necessarily, anything that God foresees will happen, will happen.
(2) Therefore, anything that God foresees will happen, will necessarily happen.
(3) Anything that happens necessarily cannot be a free action.
(4) Therefore, anything that God foresees cannot be a free action.
(5) God foresees everything.
(6) Therefore, there are no free actions.
Aquinas rightly pointed out that this argument is invalid. The shift from (1) to (2) is where the error lies. You cannot argue from "Necessarily, if X then Y" to "If X then necessarily Y" - the necessity in the original proposition covers the whole proposition, not the consequent. What this means is this. There are certain things that are necessarily true of God - among which is his infallibility. If God exists, everything he knows
must be true, and this is absolute necessity. It doesn't follow, however, that the things he knows themselves must be true by the same kind of absolute necessity. In other words, if I mow my lawn tomorrow, then it's absolutely necessarily the case that God knows this, but it doesn't follow from this that it's absolutely necessarily the case that I mow my lawn.
However, the problem is that there are other kinds of necessity. Consider the following claims:
(1) 2+2=4
(2) I had crunchy cereal for breakfast today.
The first of these is necessarily true, by absolute necessity. There is no possible world in which it is not the case that 2+2=4; it just has to be true. The second claim is not necessarily true in the same way. I needn't have had crunchy cereal today. There are many possible worlds in which I had porridge instead. So it is a contingent fact, not a necessary one (i.e. it might have been different). However, from my point of view now, it has a sort of necessity to it, in that I can't change it. Because it is a fact about the past, it is now fixed, and it is impossible to make it so that it isn't true. So it has a sort of de facto necessity.
As I see it, your argument purports to show that, if God exists, then all events, including all creaturely actions, have this second kind of de facto necessity. It goes like this:
(1) Whatever God knows, is definitely true (because God can't be mistaken).
(2) So if God knows that I will mow my lawn tomorrow, I will definitely mow my lawn tomorrow.
(3) If I perform an action freely, that means that I must have the power
not to perform it.
(4) Any action that I will definitely do, I do not have the power not to do it.
(5) So if God knows that I will mow my lawn tomorrow, I do not have the power not to do it.
(6) So if God knows that I will mow my lawn tomorrow, I do not do it freely.
(7) God does know that I will mow my lawn tomorrow.
(8) So I do not mow my lawn freely.
And the same for any other act which I, or anyone else, actually performs. It follows that there are no free acts.
The point is that all facts about the past have de facto necessity, even if they don't have absolute necessity, like the fact about what I had for breakfast this morning. We can think of God's knowledge as past, if we think about what God knew yesterday, for example, or indeed from the first moment of creation. But because God's knowledge encompasses the whole of time, that means that his
past knowledge includes facts about
future events. Because his knowledge is (a) past and (b) infallible, that means that the de facto necessity that applies to his knowledge (in virtue of being in the past) transfers to the future events that he knows about (in virtue of his knowledge being infallible). It follows, then, that if God foreknows future events, then while those future events may not have absolute necessity like 2+2=4 does, they do have the same de facto necessity that all past events do. That means that we cannot change them, and that means that we do not do them freely, if freedom involves the power to do otherwise.
This was basically Martin Luther's reasoning. He concluded that human beings do not have free will, at least not in this sense of free will, and he engaged in a rather polemical argument with Erasmus over the subject.
It's important to recognise that none of this has anything to do with predestination. The above reasoning is based solely on the supposition that God
knows what people will do in the future - not that he
decides what they're going to do, let alone that he
forces them to do it. It depends solely upon God's role as a passive observer. As long as you have an observer who is omniscient, who knows what will happen in the future with perfect reliability, then the argument goes through. That observer doesn't have to
do anything.
In my view, the argument is powerful. But it is possibly
too powerful, for reasons I'll explain below. Here are the common responses:
(1) We don't have free will after all. This is to accept the conclusion of the argument, as Luther did.
(2) We do have free will, but it doesn't depend upon our having the ability to do other than what we do. For example, we may have
compatibilist free will. This would mean rejecting premise (3) of the argument and therefore denying its conclusion.
(3) The nature of free acts is such that they are intrinsically unknowable. That is, if tomorrow I freely choose to mow the lawn, then it is intrinsically impossible for anyone to know this for certain today - even me, or even an omniscient being. There is just no truth of the matter until I make that decision. Omniscience means knowing only what actually can be known. So even if God is omniscient, he doesn't know the future free acts of human beings. It may be that, in creating free creatures, God voluntarily restricts his knowledge of the future. (This is Richard Swinburne's view.) So premise (7) of the argument is denied.
(4) God is outside time, so all this talk of "foreknowledge" and "future" events is inappropriate to start with.
This (4) is perhaps the most obvious response, but it needs some careful thought. Does it actually change the argument? It seems not, because we can rewrite it in a way that does not commit us to the view that God is inside time. In fact, the argument as I stated it above doesn't actually contain any statements to the effect that God or his knowledge are inside time. It depends only on the fact that God's knowledge of my actions is complete and infallible, not on the fact that his knowledge is temporally located before those actions or before my point of view right now.
Also, consider this. From my point of view, my action of mowing the lawn tomorrow is in the future; from God's point of view, if he is outside time, it is neither past, present, nor future. As ParkCungHee said, it is like he is looking at a reel of film, seeing all moments at the same time. So he doesn't have
foreknowledge at all. However, there are still temporally-bound facts
about his knowledge. For example, it is true today (Wednesday) that God timelessly knows that I mow the lawn on Thursday. It was also true yesterday (Tuesday) that God timelessly knows that I mow the lawn on Thursday. Now remember what I said about past events having de facto necessity, meaning that they can't be changed. If it was true yesterday that God (timelessly) knows something, then that fact has de facto necessity. So even if God's knowledge is outside time, it can still be seen to have the de facto necessity of facts about the past, because there are facts about the past
about God's timeless knowledge. So we end up with the same problem.
However, if we're going to admit facts of this kind into our reasoning, then we can actually get rid of God altogether and
still have a problem. Consider the following, rewritten version of the argument:
(1') Whatever is a true proposition expresses a fact which is definitely true.
(2') So if it is a true proposition that I will mow my lawn tomorrow, I will definitely mow my lawn tomorrow.
(3') If I perform an action freely, that means that I must have the power
not to perform it.
(4') Any action that I will definitely do, I do not have the power not to do it.
(5') So if it is a true proposition that I will mow my lawn tomorrow, I do not have the power not to do it.
(6') So if it is a true proposition that I will mow my lawn tomorrow, I do not do it freely.
(7') It is a true proposition that I will mow my lawn tomorrow.
(8') So I do not mow my lawn freely.
You can see that I've just substituted "God knows..." with "It is a true proposition that...", and the argument still seems to work just as well. This is what I meant when I said that the argument about God's foreknowledge and freedom is almost too strong. It doesn't simply show that freedom is incompatible with God's foreknowledge. It seems even to show that freedom is impossible in its own right, never mind God. I would conclude that although the problem is framed in terms of God's foreknowledge, it's not really about God's foreknowledge, or God's timeless knowledge, or even God at all. It's more about the nature of freedom. If there is a problem here, it's a problem with this definition of freedom, not with its compatibility with the existence of an omniscient God.
QUESTION: Why don't people refer to God as "It" instead of "Him?"
I suppose because God is conceived as personal, and we don't normally call persons "it". Of course God is not supposed to be male - the male pronoun is just convention.
But only a very few Christians believe in predestination.
That depends on what you mean by "predestination"; I would say the majority of Christians believe that God determines what's going to happen. Catholics believe that this is compatible even with libertarian free will, while Reformed Christians believe that it is not, and reject libertarian free will. If "predestination" means that God determines what's going to happen, then that is probably the majority Christian view, but if it means that we do not have libertarian free will, it is the minority one. As I said, though, the problem that was raised about free will was about God's knowledge, not about predestination.
The second argument is from perfect knowledge. Humans, with limited knowledge, can make predictions of the future from the present with remarkable accuracy when you think about it. I can predict when a man is going to try and punch the side of my head, I can predict when a toddler is going to fall and hurt themselves, the outcome of a horse race and I can predict the contents of a lecture I'm going to hear tommorow, and the comments of a few of he students. Now, we agree that this does not bring about predestination, or a violation of free will, but I can still predict your actions imperfectly. Now a being with perfect knowledge of your nature, and the nature of everyone around you, can have perfect predictive accuracy of your actions, which is distinct from foreknowledge.
I don't know if I'm really convinced by that, for two reasons. First, God's knowledge is supposed to differ from ours not only in its extent but in the way he acquires it. God is supposed to know everything intuitively, by a single rational act. He doesn't have to work things out the way we do. So on that understanding of God, I don't see how one can talk about "predictive accuracy" at all. God doesn't predict what's going to happen on the basis of what he sees now; he doesn't even do so perfectly. If he knows what's going to happen, it's because he just
knows.
Some Christian thinkers disagree, of course. I mentioned Richard Swinburne. He thinks that God is within time, not outside time, and that although he knows all facts about the past and the present, he does not have such universal knowledge of the future, because the existence of free will makes the future intrinsically uncertain. However, Swinburne's God is very good at guessing the future because of his perfect understanding of the past and the future. So he has very good predictive accuracy, although it is necessarily not perfect.
My second objection is that I don't see any practical difference between having knowledge of the future and having perfect predictive accuracy of the future. If God, on your conception, can predict what I'm going to do
perfectly, then doesn't that mean that he
knows what I'm going to do? And in that case, kill fire's problem still arises, because it was a problem based solely on the idea that God
knows what we're going to do (it is irrelevant to that problem
how God knows it). If, conversely, having perfect predictive accuracy does
not entail knowledge, then what's perfect about it?
