#951 God and the Soul

Dr. craig’s response

I agree with you, Peter, that the human soul/mind is an immaterial entity and that it is not infinite. Its not being infinite, as God is infinite, seems to me pretty straightforward. As a maximally great being, God has certain properties like omniscience and omnipotence that entail his infinity, whereas human souls are very limited in knowledge and power and therefore finite. So that difference between God and human souls seems perspicuous.

The spacelessness of God follows from his creation of space. If space is itself a substance, then it must have been created by God, since God is the only uncreated being. On the other hand, if space is dependent upon relations between physical objects, then in the absence of any universe, space would not exist. So either way God as Creator of everything apart from Himself must transcend space and therefore be spaceless.

Things are more difficult with the human soul. Souls certainly seem to be in space. I am, for example, currently in my office. Now if souls are in space, they cannot be extended throughout space like a gas, lest part of me exist in my left hand and another part of me exist in my right hand. Therefore many philosophers and theologians believe that if human souls are in space during this lifetime, they must be wholly present at the region of space that they occupy. That is to say, the soul is wholly present in the body rather than extended throughout it. Alternatively, one could say that the soul occupies a single spatial point from which it directs body. On this view, the difference between the soul’s spatial location relations and God’s is again fairly easy to understand. The soul is not the creator of space and therefore not spaceless, but was created by God in space.

But we should not dismiss too quickly the idea that souls are spaceless. I appear to be in my office because that is where my physical body is located with my sense organs. If my eyeballs were in the adjoining room connected to my body by enormously long optic nerves, then it would appear to me that I am in the next room (at least if I didn’t move around). So it’s conceivable that a soul might have neither spatial location nor extension, but is intimately connected with its body as an instrument through which it senses the world and acts in the world and so seems to be in the world. Which of these views we should hold is difficult to decide and is another one of those matters on which it is prudent not to have strong opinions.

Now I think that we can say fairly confidently that when a person dies, his soul, even if in space during its earthly connection with its body, is no longer in space following the death of his body. To believe that souls linger in space after the death of the body is to believe in ghosts! That is clearly an unbiblical view. The biblical view is that souls exist in an intermediate state between the death and resurrection of the body, a state in which they are in another realm, variously called Sheol or Hades or “with Christ.” Since souls are immaterial entities like God, they need not occupy space in order to exist. In such a disembodied, intermediate state souls no longer have interaction with the physical world. Of course, they remain finite in nature because being separated from their body does not bequeath them infinite knowledge or power.