I HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED to call James Porter (J. P.) Moreland my friend for over thirty years. While he is a first-rate philosopher, he is also someone with great compassion for people. He genuinely exhibits the love of Christ. While he and I are first and foremost friends, we are also kindred spirits intellectually. We share the same philosophical beliefs about many things.
My charge in this chapter is to give an overview of J. P.’s understanding of a human being. He is an ardent proponent and defender of substance dualism (“dualism,” for short), which is the view that a human being is composed of a soul and physical body. After summarizing J. P.’s understanding of dualism, I will briefly interact with a couple of his arguments for the existence of the soul.
According to J. P., a soul is an immaterial substance that is identical with a human person, and a human person is identical with a human being.1 An immaterial substance is a particular thing that bears essential properties and is able to remain the same thing through time. It is not a “stuff” of an immaterial kind. An immaterial substance is a soul in virtue of having mental properties (having mental properties makes the immaterial substance the kind of thing it is, namely, a soul).2 Mental properties are characterized by their intrinsic and subjective qualitative feel or texture, which is made evident in first-person direct awareness or introspection. For example, a pain is felt hurtfulness and in no way can it be described intrinsically in physical terms (e.g., those of physics, chemistry, or biology).3 Thus a cut in the knee is not itself painful. The cut causes an experience of pain.4 Mental properties are self-presenting, which means that one is not aware of them by being aware of anything else. Self-presenting properties present other things to us intermediately by means of themselves (e.g., it is by a sensation of red that one is aware of an apple, but one is not aware of a sensation of red by means of another sensation).5 To say that one is having a red sensation is to say that one is being appeared to redly.6 Sensations are not always veridical. Thus, one might have a red sensation (be appeared to redly) while looking at an orange jar.7
J. P. clarifies his view of mental properties by means of what is known among philosophers as the “knowledge argument” (sometimes called the “Mary argument”).8 Suppose Mary is a scientist who has been confined to a room in which she has learned everything there is to be learned about the physical correlates of pain. Her knowledge of the physical correlates of pain is by hypothesis complete. All that she has learned about the physical correlates of pain has been acquired from the third-person perspective (which includes physics, neuroscience, etc.). Perhaps the best way to think of this is that everything Mary has learned about pain has been learned through the reading of books and the hearing of lectures. Then one day (for whatever reason) Mary emerges from her confines and is asked to go bowling. She picks up a ball at the local alley and accidentally drops it on her foot. She has an experience that she has never had before and asks (while gritting her teeth, etc.) what this experience is called. She is informed that she has just experienced pain.
Did Mary learn something new? J. P. believes that she did. For the first time, she learned about the intrinsic nature of pain. Up to the time when she dropped the bowling ball on her foot, she only knew about extrinsic, relational properties of pain (e.g., what causes pain and what are the results of experiencing pain). What she now knows about pain was learned from the first-person perspective.
In light of the two preceding paragraphs about having a sensation of red and experiencing pain, it follows that each of us has a multiplicity of mental properties. Like Legion in the gospels, our mental properties are many. Each of us has the property (power or capacity) of being able to experience pain, being able to sense color, being able to know, etc. (other important properties we typically possess are having the capacity to desire and the power to choose, which make it possible for us to act freely for purposes).9 J. P. believes that mental properties are necessarily owned by their possessors (my pain could not have occurred in you, though you might have experienced the same kind of pain that I experienced) and do not float around “looking for” an owner. They come owned from the outset.
So a person is a soul and a soul is a substance in which what is mental in nature takes place. Where is a soul located? To answer this question, J. P. believes we should be guided by the experience of our bodies. What we find is that we feel like we are present as a whole in the entirety of our bodies. From the first-person perspective, I feel like I am simultaneously in my hands, in my feet, in my abdomen, in my head, etc. In J. P.’s words, “I occupy my body as God occupies space, namely, by being fully present at each point throughout my body.”10 I do not occupy my body by having one substantial part of me in my head, another part of me in my left hand, and yet another part of me in my right foot. I cannot occupy my body in this way because, as we will see in a moment, I am an unextended simple thing that has no parts. Thus, while I occupy my body, I am not spatially extended throughout my body. Rather, I am a spatially unextended substance that is present in my totality wherever I am located.11 And I move through space along with my body, when it moves through space.
J. P. is desirous that we know how his view of the soul’s embodiment differs from René Descartes’s account of the matter. On Descartes’s view, the soul is not literally in any of the space occupied by its body (even though it seems to the soul that it is present in the space occupied by its body). The soul is completely nonspatial. Strictly speaking, it is nowhere. Moreover, according to Descartes, the body is a mechanistic substance that exists on its own. The soul does not give life to its body but is causally related to it as long as it is functioning properly. On Descartes’s view, death is the irreversible cessation of function of the body. When death occurs, the soul ceases to be causally related to its body.
In contrast with Descartes, J. P. believes in a much more Thomistic (after Thomas Aquinas) view of the soul. On this view, the soul gives life to its body. Indeed, the soul “is responsible for the development of the brain and nervous system and, more generally, the body.”12 Because of this, the body is a human body because of “the diffusion of the soul as the essence of the body fully present in every body part…. The soul could exist without the body but not vice versa…. There is only one substance, though [it is not] the body-soul composite…. The one substance is the soul, and the body is an ensouled biological and physical structure that depends on the soul for its existence.”13 Thus, the soul nonconsciously, yet teleologically, guides the development of its body “so as to realize the necessary bodily structure for the organism’s functions to be actualized.”14 The different physical and chemical parts and processes (including DNA) are tools made use of by higher-order biological activities for the purpose of sustaining the various functions that are rooted in the soul.15 Death is the cessation of ensoulment.
The foregoing is a much too brief overview of J. P.’s carefully worked out dualism of soul and body. At this point, I believe it is fair to note that most philosophers, whether dualists or not, will find J. P.’s claim that a soul is a human person standard fare. What will strike them as odd is his claim that a soul is a human being. For most who think about human anthropology, the idea of a human being includes the idea of having a physical body. Hence, a human being is not a soul but a soul of a particular kind (a person) that has a physical body.
But setting this issue aside, why embrace dualism? Why not think that our mental properties are features of our brains? Or why not think that our mental properties are owned by our bodies as wholes? J. P. believes there is more than one argument that supports dualism and the view that mental properties are had by souls. One called the “Simple Argument,”16 goes as follows (I have slightly modified the argument for purposes of exposition):
(1) I am essentially a simple, indivisible, unextended spiritual substance with no substantial parts.
(2) Any physical body is essentially a complex, divisible, extended, entity, which has and can be divided into substantial parts.
(3) Principle of Indiscernibility of Identicals (if x = y, then x has all the properties y has [and vice versa]).
(4) Therefore, I am not identical with my (or any) physical body.
For the sake of clarity, J. P. believes that we must distinguish between separable and inseparable parts of wholes. Briefly, a separable part of a whole is one that can exist on its own, if it is not a part of the whole of which it is a part. An inseparable part of a whole is one that cannot exist on its own, if it is not a part of that whole. The Simple Argument is concerned with separable parts. Thus, Premise (1) states that I am a substance that is simple, which entails that I have no separable parts and am indivisible. In J. P.’s terms, I am a spiritual simple.
J. P. believes there are two arguments that support Premise (1). Here is the first (given limitations of space, I will pass over the second argument). In science, it is often the case that apparently unrelated data can be unified and, thereby, made sense of by the postulation of an entity that causally explains them. For example, the postulation of electrons unified a multiplicity of phenomena by representing them as effects of the electrons’ causal powers. Similarly, there is a host of seemingly unrelated data that are nicely unified by the postulation of the existence of a simple, substantially partless, indivisible soul. Some of the data (I do not list all of the data that J. P. cites) are as follows:17
(i) I have the deep intuition that I cannot exist in degrees. If I lose, say, half of my body or brain, I do not become half of a person. I am an all or nothing kind of being: either I am present or I am not.
(ii) I have the deep intuition that my consciousness is unified at a moment of time. At any given time, my mental states (e.g., my thoughts and sensations) are all seamlessly united in a single stream of consciousness that is mine. And I have no difficulty in identifying which mental states are mine. As stated above, I have direct access to them.
(iii) I have the deep intuition that my consciousness is unified across time. As I move from one room of my home to another, I seem to be the same person that lives through and owns each successive experience of my home.
(iv) I have strong intuitions that psychological criteria of personal identity in terms of memories, character and personality traits are neither necessary nor sufficient for my continued identity through change. Thus, I could and would remain the same person were I to undergo a change in personality and lose some or all of my memories. And just because the personality and memories that I have never change does not guarantee that I remain as the same person. Another person might have the same personality and memories and that person not be me.
(v) I have strong intuitions that I and my body have different persistence conditions (conditions that, if fulfilled, entail that the same entity continues to exist). For example, I could continue to exist as the same person with less than a fully intact body (e.g., one without arms or legs), or a different body, or no body at all (J. P. reminds us that descriptions of body swaps in science fiction are not met with protests that such occurrences are not even possible).
The best explanation of (i) through (v) is that I am directly aware of myself as a simple, indivisible spiritual substance. Because I am directly aware of myself as such a substance, I have the intuitions described in (i) through (v). In short, the intuitions captured in (i) through (v) “are easily unified if they are grounded in a direct awareness of the self as a simple, spiritual substance, and they are hard to unify and justify otherwise.”18 Moreover, J. P. believes that any attempt to deny one or more of (i) through (v) is strained: most people who do not have a philosophical agenda do or would concede all of (i) through (v). And it is thoroughly implausible to say that people affirm (i) through (v) because they are religious. Quite the contrary: on J. P.’s view people are religious because religious teachings affirm (i) through (v), which are known independently of being religious because they are known directly through introspection.
Someone might claim that (i) through (v) are a product of our language with its grammatical subjects and predicates, which are themselves a product of theories developed in the past about surviving death, the afterlife, punishment and reward, etc. In other words, because our ancestors wanted to survive death and be rewarded for a lived quality of life, they developed the first-person pronoun “I” that occupies the subject position in our linguistic utterances. J. P. believes this objection puts the proverbial cart before the horse. Contrary to what is suggested, our awareness of ourselves as substances explains the character of our language. More generally, people did not come up with the idea of the soul because they were theorizing about the world and needed the soul to play a theoretical role. No. People theorized about the world by employing concepts that they derived from direct awareness of themselves. Thus, “dualist intuitions are not primarily philosophical; they are commonsensical.”19
Though J. P. does not deem it such, perhaps the most important argument against his claim that we are directly aware of ourselves as simple, indivisible immaterial substances is the following:
Where I appeal to positive, direct awareness of the self, critics will appeal to a failure to be aware of substantive complexity (a failure to be aware of separable parts). Moreover, they will likely point out that this failure to be aware better explains why so many secular philosophers … who accept [(i) through (v)] are not dualists …. The critics can go on to say that my claim to be aware of substantive simplicity doesn’t provide any explanation for why these scholars are not dualists. Indeed, if I am correct, these people should be dualists because they too have direct acquaintance with substantive simplicity.20
J. P. has three things to say in response. First, these critics are looking for the wrong kind of experience that constitutes the first-order awareness of themselves as simple, spiritual substances. People who reject a direct awareness of themselves as simple souls are looking for something like experiencing a sensation of pain or the having of a sensation of red. However, a first-order awareness of the soul is not like that and people who claim not to have it miss it because they are looking for the wrong thing.21
Second, while the way things seem to a person is hard to undermine, it is true that an individual can come to have a belief that is weightier than and leads to a rejection (defeat) of the belief that corresponds to the way things seem. So the all-important question in the present context is what might be such a belief? J. P. says that all too often the belief in question arises out of a prior commitment to physicalism, which, without independent support, amounts to begging the question against what we seem to be aware of about the self’s simplicity in the first-person experience. Thus, to avoid begging the question the physicalist must provide independent reasons for physicalism that are sufficient to overturn what we seem to be directly aware of from the first-person perspective. When all is said and done, J. P. believes that the arguments of physicalists in support of their view are “surprisingly weak.”22 The most frequently rehearsed arguments claim that dualism is no longer believable in light of advances in modern science. J. P. thinks these advances are largely irrelevant to debates about dualism, primarily because the most that science can establish are correlations between mental and physical events and these correlations provide no basis for identifying the events in question, given that the epistemic justification for dualism is first-person direct awareness that is prior to science.23
Third, and finally, it is not implausible to think that physicalists desire that the soul not exist and this desire leads them to deny that they have direct acquaintance with its existence. If this seems too far-fetched to believe, J. P. points out that the philosopher Thomas Nagel has gone on record to declare that he desires that God not exist because he desires not to have to answer to a cosmic authority.24
In concluding my presentation of J. P.’s first argument for the view that mental properties are had by simple souls and dualism is true, I think it is fair to say that his account of belief that the soul exists is akin to Alvin Plantinga’s account of belief that God exists.25 According to Plantinga, while it is possible to present arguments for God’s existence, belief that God exists is properly basic in the sense that it is not inferred from anything else that one believes. The claim that belief that God exists is basic in this way does not imply that it is groundless or unwarranted. There is a ground for the belief. According to Plantinga, such a ground might be an occasion on which one is beholding the starry expanses of the heavens. Upon seeing the heavenly realm, one comes to believe something like “God created all of this,” which implies that one believes in the existence of God. One does not, says Plantinga, infer God’s existence from what one beholds. Rather, one finds the belief arising in oneself in the context of beholding the starry heavens. This context grounds the belief, where the belief is basic.
Similarly, although he presents an argument for the existence of the soul and the truth of dualism, I believe it is plausible to hold that J. P. thinks belief that the soul exists is properly basic. It is a belief that is not inferred from anything else that one believes but instead is had in light of a direct awareness of oneself as a soul when experiencing pain, thinking about one’s plans for the coming afternoon, having a red sensation, etc. These occasions provide the ground for the belief.
If one is not convinced by J. P.’s first argument (the Simple Argument) for the view that the soul exists as a simple, spiritual substance, he has a second. This argument is conceptualist in nature. It can be summarized as follows: If one understands what it is to be an entity E, then one has an adequate concept of E. Moreover, if one has an adequate concept of E, then one has a distinct positive concept of it. Thus, if one understands what it is to be an E, then one has a distinct positive concept of it. Now if we let E be God, and we understand what it is for God to be a divine soul or spirit, then we have a distinct positive concept of God being a divine spirit. In saying that a concept is distinct and positive in nature, J. P. means that its content must be sufficient for distinguishing its referent from other entities of its genus. Thus, “to have a distinct positive concept of being a dog I would need to have a positive concept of the differentia, of that which marks out dogs uniquely and sets them apart from cats and other mammals.”26 The positive nature of a concept entails that the concept cannot consist entirely of denials of the form “is not this,” “is not that,” etc. Stated slightly differently, a distinct positive concept cannot be characterized in strictly negative terms. Thus, a spirit (J. P. uses “spirit” and “soul” interchangeably) is not just the absence of matter (being nonphysical or immaterial), because the number two satisfies this privative condition.
Now what happens if we accept for the sake of argument that thinking matter is possible (i.e., that a material object might be able to think)? If this is possible, how can we have a distinct positive concept of a spirit? We cannot use “is able to think, feel, sense, etc.” as the positive characterization of “spirit” that marks it out from material objects, because we have conceded that material objects might be able to think, feel, sense, etc. Similarly, we cannot positively characterize “spirit” as “is not composed of separable parts,” “is not solid,” “is not extended,” etc., because these are all negative characterizations. The upshot is that if we allow for the possibility that a material object might think, feel, sense, etc., then we fail to have any distinct positive concept of a soul. But we do have a positive concept of a divine soul insofar as we have a concept of God as a divine spirit. Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that by “spirit” we mean “is able to think, feel, sense, etc.,” and the assumption that a material object can think, feel, sense, etc., was mistaken. “So ‘thinking matter’ is metaphysically impossible.”27 And because we do think, sense, and feel, we must be spirits.
What is one to make of this argument on behalf of the claim that mental properties are had by souls and only by souls and, therefore, that, given the reality of material objects, dualism is true? I begin by taking us back to J. P.’s claim that we are directly aware of ourselves as simple, spiritual substances. Does this awareness include an awareness of the soul’s property of being simple (which along with the property of being unextended entails not being divisible into parts), as opposed to an awareness of the mere absence or lack (a kind of privation) of parts? J. P. believes that it does. On his view, the property of being simple is a primitive property that accompanies the soul’s possession of mental properties like being able to think, feel, and sense. And when one is directly aware of oneself as a soul, one is aware of the property of being simple.
Given his stance on simplicity, the next issue for J. P. is whether the property of being simple can be exemplified only by immaterial things like souls. If only immaterial things can exemplify this property, then maybe an awareness of it is what entails our having a distinct, positive conception of ourselves as immaterial in nature.
At this point, it is helpful to consider the dualism of Descartes (see Meditation on First Philosophy VI). Descartes seems to have believed that the property of being simple could not be exemplified by material things because he conceived of a body as that which is extended in virtue of being made up of separable parts and is divisible into those parts. This seemingly implies that a body is composed of, and is in principle divisible into, an infinite number of parts. However, J. P. is not a Cartesian. He believes in the possibility of material atomic simples that, though extended and divisible, are not made up of separable parts. Hence, the property of being simple does not differentiate the immaterial from the material. Thus, the need exists to rule out the possibility of thinking matter, because if matter can take the form of an atomic simple that thinks, feels, senses, etc., we are left with no positive concept of what it is to be a spirit. (It is helpful here to remember that J. P. believes a soul is not like extended matter that has the property of being simple and yet is divisible. A soul is simple and unextended, and thus not divisible.)
Before going any further, it is relevant to remind ourselves that we are swimming in deep waters when talking about what makes things material and immaterial. J. P. is candid enough to admit this (in private conversation). So what are the alternatives, if any, to his view about the material and immaterial? Well, one could go with Descartes and maintain that because the thing that thinks, feels, and senses is simple, it is immaterial. And it is immaterial because being simple excludes being extended, where being extended is the defining property of being material. But is there any reason to stick with this Cartesian position? Here, a Cartesian might try to turn the tables on J. P. and demand of him a distinct, positive concept of what it is to be material. If being extended with separable parts is not what makes something material, then what does?
In discussing the metaphysical view known as “physicalism,” which maintains that everything that exists is material, J. P. says matter is “most likely … elementary particles (whether taken as points of potentiality, as centers of mass or energy or as units of spatially extended stuff or waves) … organized in various ways according to the laws of nature.”28 If matter is units of spatially extended stuff, then a Cartesian might jump to the conclusion that J. P.’s position is in trouble in the way just pointed out above: contrary to what J. P. maintains, being simple is sufficient to make something non-extended and immaterial. And when the property of being simple is conjoined with properties like being able to think, feel, and sense, they together are sufficient to make something a spirit. The problem for a Cartesian, however, is that J. P. believes something could be extended yet simple, and thereby not be composed of separable parts. At this point, I don’t know of any way to arbitrate the disagreement between J. P. and a Cartesian. It seems to me that the strongest argument on a Cartesian’s behalf would be to say that the idea of something’s being extended but not made up of separable parts is indeed mysterious. After all, what makes something extended, if it is not that it is made of separable parts? I suspect that J. P. would respond that being extended is a primitive property that cannot be analyzed or reduced.
What about J. P.’s other specifications of what it is to be material? How do they fare in relationship to the concept of a soul? Could a soul satisfy one or more of them and end up being material? Here we must remember that J. P. believes that a soul is located in space (it is located in its entirety at every point occupied by its physical body) with the potentiality to move. As a moveable simple, the soul seems to be a point of potentiality (it has the potential to move or be moved) and perhaps also a center of energy, if by “a center of energy” J. P. means “a center of causal activity.” After all, on J. P.’s view the soul causes events to occur in its physical body. What about being “a center of attractive and repellent powers”? Might a soul be this? Well, if the soul is moved through space by something other than itself, perhaps this other thing causally affects a soul’s attractive and/or repellent powers to produce movement in it (the soul). In short, it is not implausible to hold that it is incumbent on J. P. to explain why a soul that is located in space does not exemplify the properties that he says make something material. (What about mass? Might a soul have mass? If “mass” is understood as “being resistant to acceleration by force,” then it seems that a spatially located simple soul that can move and/or be moved might also have mass.) If the soul does exemplify these properties, then the soul seems to be material and we once again lack any distinct, positive conception of what it is to be a soul. Perhaps J. P. would say that the properties of matter he sets forth are necessary, but not sufficient, for being material. Thus a soul could exemplify them, without being material. What would make the soul immaterial would be its exemplification of mental properties.
Where do the arguments of the previous two sections leave us? As someone who has read a good bit of modern philosophy of mind, I think that most physicalists would certainly find J. P.’s argument for a distinct, positive conception of a spirit philosophically interesting, though in the end, I’m sure they would resist its conclusion. I suspect that they might resist even more J. P.’s claim that he has a direct awareness of himself as a simple substance. Why so? Well, if persons are simple substantial bearers of mental properties (souls) as J. P. claims, then they are ontologically basic. They are some of the basic building blocks of reality, not higher order or surface features of that reality. Thus, they are not reducible to arrangements of matter. This simplicity and the ability to act freely for purposes in ways that are not quantifiable or describable in terms of physical laws suggest the existence of something that is non- or supernatural in nature. In short, given the existence of spiritual simples, we seem to be on a road that might, along with other considerations, lead to theism. And as J. P. has reminded us, for those like Thomas Nagel this is a road that is best not taken.29
1. J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 121.
2. Ibid., 157–58.
3. Ibid., 158.
4. Ibid., 160.
5. Ibid., 161.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 161–64.
9. Ibid., 121–55, 158–60.
10. J. P. Moreland, “Substance Dualism and the Argument from Self-Awareness,” Philosophia Christi 13 (2011): 25.
11. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, 202–3.
12. Ibid., 200.
13. Ibid., 201.
14. Ibid., 204.
15. Ibid., 205.
16. Moreland, “Substance Dualism and the Argument from Self-Awareness,” 22.
17. Ibid., 24–6.
18. Ibid., 27.
19. Ibid., 30.
20. Ibid., 31.
21. Ibid., 31–2.
22. Ibid., 33.
23. Ibid., 34.
24. Ibid., 33.
25. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
26. J. P. Moreland, “A Conceptualist Argument for a Spiritual Soul,” Religious Studies 49 (2013): 37.
27. Ibid., 43.
28. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, 93.
29. I want to thank the members of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought for their helpful comments on this paper.