Richard Swinburne - Do People Have Souls?

Is the ‘real you’ a special substance that is nonphysical and immortal? Most regular people would agree, but most scientists would not. What are you? A body alone that is dead forever once it dies? A soul temporally inhabiting a body? A body unified with a nonphysical entity of some kind? What some theologians think may surprise you.

Richard Swinburne is a Fellow of the British Academy. He was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford and is currently Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[StellaMontenegro]

*Professor Swinburne is 88-years-old?! Remarkable vitality and cognitive composure, to say the least. 😮*

[Stegosaurus]

I don't always buy Swinburne's arguments, but he is a fascinating and impressive thinker. I do feel that he was really out on a limb in this clip and that he knew it.

[AmorLucisPhotography]

The key premise in the argument was slipped in and went unchallenged: "It can't be about the physical, because we know everything about the physical" (which basically just echoes the Knowledge Argument, Explanatory Gap argument, Zombie argument, etc.) I can't think of a single serious neuroscientist who would say any such thing as "we know everything about the physical" as it relates to brain and consciousness. He's just clearly wrong on that. Of course, there is the further question of whether any amount of additional physical knowledge about the brain **could** determine which of the mutually exclusive hypotheses regarding consciousness or persons he adumbrated was correct. Prof. Swinburne gives a negative answer to that, but the argument for that was not presented here.

[Farsider]

🤔….i’m so confused. I think I am going to have to watch this video at least 3 more times. First, I’ll split the screen view in half so it reaches just the right side of each of my eyes; then I’ll reverse that so the video only hits the left side of each eye; and then again I will listen to the video with my eyes closed.

If I STILL don’t get it, I might try watching the video one more time while standing on my head.

[dewinthemorning]

If the soul is a non-physical thing, why should it be constrained to one physical spot in the physical brain?

[craigswanson]

Severing the corpus callosum creates gaps in our knowledge. Then follows with “the only possible explanation for our ignorance … must be non-physical”. His logic for dualism is utterly absurd.

[eimkei]

Unless I got lost in the interview, and the answer was there, at what stage of human development did this soul appear? There have been so many different humanoid species and we believe many modern humans have elements of Neanderthal DNA within their make-up, so did they also have souls? If so which species and when did they acquire the facility?

[darkknightsds]

I'm a simple person. I see Swinburne and RLK talking, I click. Simply brilliant stuff here. Swinburne is so sound and RLK is the perfect partner.

[FrankDeAlto]

Your soul is your personality. It really is that simple. The character of your personality is the visceral measure of how spiritually mature your soul is along its path of purification. That character is expressed in how you treat yourself and others. This character development is cumulative from one incarnation to the next. You are not starting from scratch. You are building on what you learned in your past lives. Your character is shaped by your relationship to your personal truth, how much truth you are willing to face and hold a mirror to. In that regard, you walk side by side as the symbiotic facilitator in your soul's journey of purification. Your everyday trials and tribulations continually test your willingness to face your personal truth. The more truthful you are with yourself, the more courage, love and wisdom you can hold and express with humility. Thus, the more rewarding your life becomes, and the more purified your soul becomes. Your personal truth is faced by asking yourself three simple questions over and over again: what am I too proud to admit, what am I too self-willed to let go of, and what am I too fearful to confront.

[craigswanson]

We ought not give any credence to those who say “we know all about the physical, so it must be non-physical”. Good god the arrogance.

[gert]

The argument that there's a non-physical experiencing entity (soul/person) which is 'connected' to a part of the brain, but can lose parts of soul-self when those bits are disconnected from the soul-connected brain parts is odd. Do blind people whose optical brain systems are damaged similarly lose part of their soul-self? Or is a forgotten memory a lost part of the soul-self? Even odder is the idea that these lost experiences are other soul-selves living independently in the same body!

[bretnetherton]

Awareness is the only constant of all experience what could be more fundamental to reality than that? Awareness is known by awareness alone.

[johnrichardson]

That was the most ridiculous argument for a soul I have ever heard.

[eensio]

The soul is concept which belongs to religion. Consiousness is essentially different concept, which has many dimensios. It is dependent on the central nervous system. As you can listen here different manipulative methods can change our personality and lobotomy was used before antipsychotic drugs.

[rochford]

My ex wifes mother convinced me that Human beings do not have Souls....

[stoneysdead]

LOL- Mental gymnastics this man pulled off to get around to "My soul..." was extraordinary- he deserved a gold medal for that tumbling/contortionist routine.

[mobiustrip]

It's not so much that the person does not have a soul, it's that there is no "person" There is an organism

[quakers]

There are people that have had some mental problem like a stroke or mental breakdown, sometimes drug induced in which the idea of the self is gone. In what way does the soul manifest itself that can't be a physical phenomenon? Is it memories or personality, the life story? It seems that I could loose my memories, my life story, and personality and would still exist as a person. What, if anything is left of that five year old now that I am 73? Is there any outward expression of that same soul shared by me at five and me today?

[domini]

Consciousness ( which is assigned to soul by religions) is actually based on some societal ideas gained by an individual over time. Had it been connected to the soul, we should have attained it by birth and not over time. Even if soul exists, it is unlikely that the soul can communicate with the brain. The existence of soul is just a belief and humans do not have the capability to know whether it is true or not.

[pesilaratnayake]

While I think Swinburne makes a decent attempt to incorporate information into his views here, and considers some alternatives, I think his view has many flaws. If there is a non-physical object or being (a soul) in communication with both of the detached hemispheres, then for it to be functional it seems to require both the transmission and reception of information from the brain. If it cannot communicate any information between hemispheres (as is suggested by experimental studies), then it is either only in communication with one hemisphere or it is unable to communicate with other parts of itself (I guess we would consider this to be separate souls). I agree with Swinburne on this.
However, we cannot (as of yet) determine whether or not a hemisphere is unconscious, in the same way that we cannot determine whether or not other people or other animals are conscious. We generally assume other humans are conscious because they appear to be similar to us and we believe ourselves to be conscious, but Swinburne suggests here that we cannot tell if a human is in communication with a soul in much the same way. Therefore, we cannot determine whether anyone else has a soul. They may just display all physiological signs of consciousness without being conscious or having a soul. Perhaps we are as well. Or perhaps people have an arbitrary or uncountable number of souls (why should the number of souls be discrete?). Or perhaps several people share souls without the souls having the ability (or desire) to transfer significant amounts of information. Perhaps the concept of a soul is so poorly understood or defined because we have no means to interact with it (known) that isn't hugely dependent on the physiological states of the body (including the brain), so we can't gauge its properties. Instead, we tend to speculate on the properties of a soul with no real progress.