J.P. Moreland on Dualism

In this video, J.P.
Moreland discusses with Robert Lawrence Kuhn (producer and host of the Closer to Truth show on PBS) the movement
among intellectuals away from belief in the existence of a soul:

I think a lot of it’s sociological.
I think we live in a day where scientism is the default position by a lot of
people—that’s the idea that science, and science alone, can give us answers to
our questions about reality. And I think it’s a big mistake to advance that
view….

I don’t think the issue is
scientific. The fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness and
whether there is a soul are just not scientific questions. They’re questions
like, “What exactly is a thought?” “What is a semantic meaning?”… There hasn’t
been a single discovery in neuroscience or any other branch of science that a
dualist (that is, one who believes in the soul and consciousness) could not
easily accommodate within his or her theory…. [See here
for more on that.]

Moreland explains some of the issues behind his belief in
dualism—the definition of consciousness, the interaction between the brain and
the self, objections to substance dualism, etc.—and then sums up the
conversation this way:

The bottom line is this: Consciousness
just isn’t the same thing as physical states of the brain because there are things
true of one that aren’t the other. And the self is not identical to the brain
because the self is a simple substance that isn’t composed of parts. And these
questions are not fundamentally scientific questions, they’re philosophical.

 

(HT: Justin
Taylor – See his post for another video by Moreland on the “Case
for the Existence of the Soul,” and see more Closer to Truth interviews with J.P. Moreland here.)