#920 Compositional Anthropological Dualism
December 30, 2024Dear Dr Craig,
I've heard that you recently have become a Cartesian substance dualist. Is it true?
If so, can you expand on some of your reasons for abandoning your previous "dualistic interactionism" position in favor of Cartesian substance dualism?
Finally, since in a previous QofW you said that the results of Libet's experiments were exactly what one should expect if dualistic interactionism were true, do you think that Libet's results also are fully expected from a Cartesian substance dualistic position?
Thank you.
Agustin
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
I’m so glad you asked, Agustin! So often reports circulate through the grapevine that consist of half-truths, and so it is in this case. You did the right thing in going to the source.
What is true is that I have unexpectedly come to believe that a person is identical to his soul, as Descartes believed, rather than to a compound entity composed of soul and body. That is to say, I am not a compound object that has a soul as a part; rather I am a soul who has contingently a body. My argument for this conclusion may be found in my recent paper presented at the annual convention of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, a video of which is available here. Here are its premises:
1. The person before physical death = the person after physical death.
2. The person after physical death = the soul after physical death.
3. The soul after physical death = the soul before physical death.
4. Therefore, the person before physical death = the soul before physical death.
We are committed to these premises by biblical teaching, I believe. Therefore a person is a soul who presently has a body.
This conclusion is wholly compatible with dualism-interactionism, which holds that the soul and its body casually interact. That’s exactly what Descartes believed. He held that the soul is not in its body as a pilot is in a ship but is intimately connected with the body as its instrument for sensing and acting in the world. I’m reminded of an illustration from the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Sir John Eckles, who held that the soul uses the brain as an instrument for thought just as a pianist uses a piano as an instrument for music. So Descartes would not have been surprised by Libet’s experiments, since Descartes thought that the body with its finite velocity neural signals is the soul’s instrument for acting in the world.
- William Lane Craig