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Writer's picturejmgiardi

Notes on the Soul


Note: According to Bertrand Russell, "Beyond its importance for natural science, atomism also gave rise to a new theory of the soul. Like everything else the soul is made up of atoms. These constituents of the soul are more refined than other atoms, and are distributed throughout the body. On such a view death means disintegration and personal immortality does not exist…" (Wisdom of the West, Crescent Books, 1959, 45). It's common for a skeptic to say that "disembodied minds" are as nonsensical as "disembodied digestion". Hobbes apparently agreed. In Leviathan, he wrote, "The world [the universe]… is corporeal, that is to say, body; and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth: also every part of body is likewise body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the universe is body, and that which is not body is no part of the universe: and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere." Thomas Jefferson reportedly wrote, "To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul." I find it amazing that long ago―long before Christ―there were thinkers who rejected the notion of disembodied spirits. Without such a notion, religion is weakened greatly, as I noticed in these seven-year-old notes:


Bertrand Russell in his essay "Why I'm Not a Christian" said that Christians use fear to persuade (coerce?) people into becoming Christians. This tactic works because many people are afraid. God is traditionally defined as a supernatural being. God, as traditionally defined, can't exist. Michael Shermer put it best: "There is no such thing as the supernatural or the paranormal. There is only the natural, the normal, and mysteries we have yet to explain." If God is supernatural then God can't and doesn't exist. Despite this fact, evangelists can still claim that the God of the Bible exists. What they don't tell you (won't tell you) is that if God exists then God is natural and can be killed and/or neutralized. When we understand this, it becomes clear that the search for "Intelligent Design" is really just the search for an alien creature. So, what are the best arguments that an alien creature exists? I won't get into them here but for the purposes of this chapter I will review some of the Intelligent Design movement's most popular arguments.


The Intelligent Design movement makes the claim that because the universe (and time itself) was created by something, that something must be an intelligent being. However, intelligent design theorists are caught between a rock and a hard place. Because they can't explain how an intelligent being created the universe, there is no good reason to believe the premise that an intelligent being created the universe [unless you believe the Kalam Argument. See previous blog posts]. On the other hand, if the Intelligent design theorist can explain how an intelligent being created the universe, then he or she could create a universe too and the creator of our universe would seem to be a lot less scary and very likely dead by now. The Intelligent Design movement wants you of course to believe, at the very least, the impossible, that the creator of the universe is the Creator, who can somehow create a universe 13 billion years ago and two hundred years ago endow (white) people with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".


About the creator of the universe being scary, most Intelligent Design superstars are Christian and of course believe that the universe maker is very scary indeed. Sorry, a universe maker can't be scary for the same reason that no intelligent being can be scary. Let's assume that the universe maker is Yahweh and Yahweh can imprison your soul for a long time. You should not fear this because the same can be done to Yahweh. If Yahweh doesn't have a soul and just has a body, you can imprison (and/or torture and /or kill) that. If Yahweh has neither a soul or a body how can he think ? How can he exist? When we understand that the fear of Yahweh is no different that the fear of all the other unpleasant (but unlikely) scenarios we realize that the fear of God is, in fact, the fear of life itself. Those who fear God are scared of a difficulty but not an insurmountable one.

As for the "fine-tuning" argument, it's the exact same thing as the "creation is evidence for a creator" argument. It's based on the same circular reasoning. People who argue this way first assume that there is a creator and that he created the universe. After making this assumption, they are correct in calling the universe "creation". And of course "creation is evidence of a creator" but it is not certain that the universe is a conscious creation. Similarly, fine-tuning is evidence of a fine-tuner. However, there is no good reason to believe that the universe has been fine-tuned. For one, how exactly could someone fine-tune a universe? Secondly, we can't assume that the universe had been fine-tuned unless we first assume that there was indeed a fine-tuner. In other words, to use the "fine-tuning" argument, we must use circular reasoning. We must put junk in to get junk out.


The biggest excuse people give for believing in something that probably doesn't or can't exist is Pascal's wager. "Pascal's wager" says that it's better to believe in God than not to because if you believe and God doesn't exist then you won't be punished. If you don't believe and God does exist, then you will be. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. If you define God as a supernatural being, then you and everyone else knows that God doesn't exist. So there is no reason to make a wager. If God exists, God is not "God". In other words, if God exists, God is natural.

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