ABSTRACT
My argument can be taken as supporting a conditional: If mental events/ properties exist and are characterized along the lines of property dualism, then they provide evidence for the existence of God. The strength of this evidence was variously characterized in chapter two. And while I have not provided much justification for the antecedent, I did offer some general considerations in favor of it in chapter two. In fact, I take it to be obvious because of direct first-person awareness that property/event dualism is correct. I also take the degree of such justification to be strong enough to be an overriding defeater for the various arguments that have been raised against property/event dualism. In my view, the philosophical arguments-issues regarding causal inter-
action, problems with soul stuff, pairing problems, the problem of other minds, private language difficulties-are really quite weak, and I believe that most physicalists take strong physicalism to be justified largely on the basis of scientific and not philosophical considerations. Thus, Daniel Dennett speaks for most physicalists when he says that ‘‘the fundamentally antiscientific stance of dualism is, to my mind, its most disqualifying feature
and [why] dualism is to be avoided at all costs.’’1 So while I will not develop a detailed case for property/event dualism in this book, it is important for my project that I weigh in on the impact of modern science on philosophy of mind. I hope to show that the hard sciences have almost no bearing at all on the nature of consciousness (or the self); more specifically, that findings in the hard sciences provide virtually no evidence at all for strong physicalism and, thus, for strong naturalism. If I am right about this, then given the weakness of the philosophical arguments against dualism, we are justified in taking the antecedent of my conditional to be true. Most philosophers agree that the vast majority of people throughout
history have been substance and property dualists. Some form of dualism appears to be the natural response to what we seem to know about ourselves through introspection and in other ways. In this regard, Jaegwon Kim’s concession may be taken as representative: ‘‘We commonly think that we, as persons, have a mental and bodily dimension. . . . Something like this dualism of personhood, I believe, is common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions.’’2 People don’t have to be taught to be dualists like they must if they are to be physicalists. However, as I mentioned above, today it is widely held in the academic
community that, while broadly logically possible, dualism is no longer plausible in light of the advances of modern science. Thus, John Searle says that it is an obvious fact of physics that ‘‘the world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force.’’3 He goes on to say that much of the justification for the various forms of physicalism that dominate philosophy of mind is the assumption that
they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives. That is, the choice we are tacitly presented with is between a ‘‘scientific’’ approach, as represented by one or another of the current versions of ‘‘materialism’’ and an ‘‘antiscientific’’ approach, as represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind.4
