Some atheists claim that God cannot exist because unembodied minds are impossible; i.e. that persons must be physical beings. I spoke to this in a 2008 post. Prayson Daniel recently blogged on the subject as well. I would encourage you to read his post. I commented on his post, and wanted to share some points I made that supplement the points I made in my previous post.
This argument begs the question in favor of materialism and atheism. It merely assumes that minds/persons are reducible to brains; that we have no immaterial mind that is capable of existing apart from our bodies. No reason is given for thinking that a mind/person needs a body other than the fact that we are not familiar with it. That’s a very poor reason. It confuses common properties of persons with essential properties of persons.
The atheist needs to prove that having a body is an essential property of persons. To do so, he could show that an unembodied person is logically incoherent. They have not done so. Instead, they offer an inductive argument based on familiarity: all the persons we know have bodies, therefore persons require bodies. Such arguments are much weaker than deductive arguments. I could argue that all crows are black because all the crows I have seen are black, but it could always be the case that my sampling is too small and I am simply unaware of non-black crows. To strengthen my case for all crows being black I would need a deductive proof demonstrating that crows cannot not be black. Similarly, an inductive argument against unembodied persons is weak in that it could always be the case that we are simply ignorant of the existence of some unembodied person. If the bodiless persons argument against theism is to rise to the level of a refutation of theism, atheists will need a deductive argument that proves an unembodied person is impossible, and thus the very concept of God is incoherent. They haven’t done so.
While the notion of an unembodied person may be unfamiliar to us, it’s a mistake to confuse familiarity with plausibility. A person raised in the remote parts of the jungle has never seen ice, but his lack of familiarity with ice does not mean the existence of ice is implausible. Neither would it constitute good grounds on which for him to reject evidence being presented to him that ice exists. Likewise, just because we are not personally acquainted with the idea of an unembodied mind/person does not mean an unembodied mind/person does not, or cannot exist.
I would argue that the kalam argument actually provides us with a good reason for believing in the existence of at least one unembodied mind/person. One arrives at that conclusion by logical deduction and logical inference. So unless the atheist can provide a deductive argument to demonstrate that the concept of a disembodies mind/person is logically incoherent, or give us reason to believe that it is more plausible to believe the universe is uncaused, caused by abstract objects, or some other heretofore-unknown-entity, then we are rationally justified in believing not only that an unembodied mind/person is plausible, but actual. Such an argument trumps any “familiarity argument” offered by the atheist.
I think near death experiences involving remote viewing (cases in which people who are clinically dead are able to view things outside of their body that they would be incapable of viewing in their body) also argue strongly for the notion that minds are immaterial, and not dependent on a body. So while the atheist can only rely on inductive arguments that mistake common properties for essential properties, we have two good reasons to believe that unembodied minds/persons are both possible and real.
Thinking to Believe 
January 1, 2013 at 4:26 am
“Some atheists claim that God cannot exist because unembodied minds are impossible.”.
Please cite them. I do not know any atheists who would make such a claim. Most atheists I know even don’t claim that god cannot exist, only that he most likely doesn’t exist. He is not impossible, just unlikely.
“No reason is given for thinking that a mind/person needs a body other than the fact that we are not familiar with it.”
I don’t know about “a mind/person”, but there seems to be no reason to assume that the human mind exists independently of the brain. Adding an incorporeal mind does not have any scientific benefit, it doesn’t actually explain more, so there’s no reason to do so.
“The atheist needs to prove that having a body is an essential property of persons.”
Burden of proof anyone? The atheist takes that what’s there, the body. You can see it, feel it, measure it, etc. If you want to add something that you cannot see/feel/measure, then YOU obviously have to prove that. Otherwise I could claim that your chair has a mind of it’s own and try to force you to show prove that it doesn’t.
“I would argue that the kalam argument actually provides us with a good reason for believing in the existence of at least one unembodied mind/person.”
No, the argument is, if we consider it valid, just a reason to assume a cause. There is no reason to assume it has to be a person. Randomly claiming that god has no beginning and thus must be the cause has nothing to do with logic, just wishful thinking.
“I think near death experiences involving remote viewing ”
Please, there have been as of yet no proven experiences of that kind that were unexplainable. Anecdotal evidence, same as for homeopathy. If you can produce a good scientific study, then we may start to accept the hypothesis that there is more, but until then it’s as valid as an argument as the report of Odin’s engagement in a battle by one of his believers.
And sorry, you only have one reason: You want it to be true.
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January 1, 2013 at 11:08 am
“The atheist needs to prove that having a body is an essential property of persons.”
No they do not. Atheism has nothing to do or say about persons, an atheist does not believe in God, period. As a Theist you form the premise that God exists and then set about the use the disembodied argument to try and prove that first God IS a person(through belief); and, that being a person God does not require a body like a human.(again through belief). YOU are forming the premise and then set to argue for or against the premise. How smart is that?
You can believe that NOthing exists like SOMEthing exists for a month of Sundays but at the end of the month you will be no further ahead because belief, unlike knowledge, can never set you free. Knowledge and only knowledge can set you free. Belief can only give you the persistence to look for the Lost City of Atlantis or to build a Geiger Counter machine to detect invisible radiation, you postulate exist; when you find the city or build the Geiger Counter machine, you then have proof of the existence of both.
Theists and Religion is pregnant with assumptions:
If there was a God s/he would be self evident,
Religions would not have to proselytize; and,
There would not be a fractured human race, each faction promoting their God Brand and Messenger and making extravagant claims of miracles.
Why would anyone presume to think that a Creator needs to be defended by the Creature? Ego created Religion, Church, Prophet and God. The audacity of arrogant clergy perpetuate hoax, myth & magic as true creations based purely on belief, deceit and sleight of hand. Oh and did I mention the Collection Plate?
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January 1, 2013 at 11:40 am
Now you can come up with many excuses why God is not self evident: testing us, to see who really loves him, prove us through suffering; but, in offering excuses, you deny reality, reason, logic, knowledge.
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January 7, 2013 at 11:06 am
Atomic Mutant
The post to which I linked includes two such atheists who adopt this argument. What do you think of the argument?
I gave two reasons to think a mind can exist independent of the body; one of those reasons specifically related to human minds. But there are many other reasons for thinking that human minds are not identical to or reducible to human brains. Leibniz’s law of the indiscernability of identicals holds that if we can find even one thing true of x that is not true of y, then x and y are not identical. So if we can find one thing true of our mind that is not true of our brain, then they are not identical. And there are properties of the mind that are clearly not properties of the brain (physical properties). I’ll provide two.
The first is qualia. Qualia refers to the experience of “knowing what it is like to X.” Think of someone who is born deaf, who studies all the mechanics of hearing, and then later regains her own hearing through surgery. Would she not come to know something new after the surgery that did not know prior to the surgery? Yes, the experience of hearing; i.e. knowing what it is like to hear. While she knew all there was to know about the physics and biology of hearing, there was something unaccessible to her through physical reality alone. Qualia is a property of the mind that cannot be reduced to the brain, and thus the mind is not physical.
The second is intentionality. Intentionality refers to the aboutness of our mental states—the capacity of our minds to point at, stand for, signify, or represent something beyond itself. To say “Paris” is to be about a certain city. But no physical thing has the property of being “about” some other thing. Aboutness is a non-physical property. Since intentionality is a property of our minds, and is not reducible to physical properties and processes of the brain, then the mind is not reducible to the brain.
As for your burden of proof argument, I don’t deny that dualists and theists have a burden of proof. But the principle is that anyone who makes a claim has a burden to defend that claim. And those who argue that God cannot exist because God would have to be a bodiless mind, and bodiless minds are impossible, are clearly making a claim, and thus have the burden to defend it. I am simply pointing out what they would have to demonstrate to prove their claim, and noting that they have not demonstrated anything.
As for the kalam, you are right that the argument proper does not conclude that an unembodied mind caused the universe. It merely concludes that some cause was necessary to bring the universe into being. But as I noted in the post, logical inferences about the nature of that cause lead us to believe it was personal in nature (not wishful thinking or mere assertions). This comment is already long enough, so I don’t want to detail the arguments for the personal nature of the cause of the universe, but if you are unaware of those arguments and would like me to detail them in a future comment, I’d be happy to do so.
Have you studied near-death experiences? Have you read anyone who has? While most NDEs cannot be verified, there are some that can. And I was specifically referring to those that involve remote viewing. This is when someone who was clinically dead claims to have seen something that would be physically impossible for them to do (1) if they were no longer conscious due to the fact that their brain was dead and (2) if their consciousness was limited to the confines of their physical body. For example, there is one case in which a child who temporarily died in the hospital came back and reported being at his house where his parents and siblings were. He told of what they were doing, eating, and saying. The physician that this was reported to was able to speak with the family prior to them seeing the child, and verified the child’s report in utter detail. In another verified case, a man recounted the conversation his relatives were having in the waiting room at the moment he died. And unfortunately for the brother-in-law, some not-so-nice things were said! There are other such stories as well. This isn’t the time or place to get into a detailed argument about these NDEs. My point is simply that if even some of these NDEs are veridical, this demonstrates the truth of dualism, and undermines the atheist’s argument.
If you are not a psychiatrist, I’d prefer you not try to psychoanalyze me. The whole “you believe it because you want it to be true” moniker is a cheap and tired one. As I wrote elsewhere on this blog, in many ways I wish Christianity was false and that God did not exist. The evidence, however, compels me to believe otherwise.
Jason
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January 7, 2013 at 11:07 am
Leonardo,
You responded to my claim that “the atheist needs to prove that having a body is an essential property of persons” by saying “No they do not. Atheism has nothing to do or say about persons, an atheist does not believe in God, period.” Did you not read the context? I am clearly referring to atheists who make a particular kind of argument, and pointing out what they would need to prove for their argument to go through. Clearly the atheists I am talking about do have something to say about the nature of persons. And the fact that they do not believe in God is irrelevant. If they are going to claim that God does not exist because bodiless persons are impossible, then they have to prove that having a body is an essential property of persons, rather than an accidental property.
“As a Theist you form the premise that God exists and then set about the use the disembodied argument to try and prove that first God IS a person(through belief); and, that being a person God does not require a body like a human.(again through belief). YOU are forming the premise and then set to argue for or against the premise. How smart is that?” This is a straw man. To see the fallacy of this claim one can point to those atheists who came to believe in a personal God because of theistic arguments.
I don’t even know what you are referring to by a “disembodied argument” that we use. We start with the fact that there must be a First Cause. From there we reason about what kind of cause this would have to be. Since it brought time and matter into existence, it could not itself be material or temporal. Furthermore, the cause must be personal rather than impersonal because that is the only explanation for how the effect (the universe’s coming into being) could be temporal and yet the cause be eternal. Also, there are only two types of causes: agent, event. Since the universe’s coming into being is the first event, the cause of the first event could not itself be a prior event otherwise the universe’s coming into being would not be the FIRST event (and you cannot have a prior event in the absence of time).
Why think that God has to be self-evident in order to exist? Your existence is not self-evident, but I believe you exist because the evidence for your existence is good. The same is true of God. There is no reason to think that if God exists His existence must be self-evident such that it could not be doubted.
Jason
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January 7, 2013 at 2:09 pm
The argument from physical mind and [Matt ] McCormick’s why God can neither think nor act relies on our conservation -background – of knowledge that we only experience minds in brains in bodies such that to argue for any disembodied mind then would be an argument from ignorance, not from evidence!
Do something to the brain, the mind absorbs it, too.
No, that Swinburne-Craig personal cause reflects finding divine intent when science finds none. That argument assumes that some divinity has to make choices instead of Nature acting by Leucippus’ necessity.
Carneades, Leucippus, Strato and Thales are ever right: Nature needs no divine boss!
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January 7, 2013 at 10:14 pm
Griggs,
NDEs, if veridical, are evidence that the human mind is not only distinct from the brain, but capable of existing apart from the brain. You can’t just ignore this and say there is no evidence. Besides, there is plenty of other evidence for dualism.
Correlation does not necessarily mean identification. Surely you know that. If the soul/mind and body are connected, we would expect for what happens to one to affect the other.
How would science find divine intent? Your statement makes as much sense as saying that a chicken must not have weight because scientists have measured it with a ruler and could not detect any weight. Science is an empirical discipline that investigates physical reality. It is not equipped to investigate non-physical reality, and thus science is not the right tool to say anything about divine intent.
Nature cannot make choices because nature is not conscious. Even if I granted that nature could make decisions, nature as such did not come into existence until the universe came into existence, so one cannot appeal to some decision-making nature to explain the origin of physical reality.
Jason
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January 10, 2013 at 10:05 pm
I have never thought of our minds as being precisely separate from our bodies. I know the Bible says that there will be a physical resurrection of the dead. Wherever we spend eternity will seemingly be spent in a physical body.
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January 16, 2014 at 1:31 am
Mind boggling phylisophical discussion. Such topic being debated without rancour is wao. This seen unseen debate would remain a fugazy till eternity as none can prove or disprove. One might seem to have a stronger point.. that’s it. This thing no body knows and no body will know.Ocean full of terminology and defination would add to the mystery..you know. Only thing that can be said without doubt is I exist-at least temporarily. More I stand by other’s view,I become a non-entity.
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January 16, 2014 at 1:51 am
If my hands and legs cease to exist then also my mind exists. If my heart stops beating my mind is still there as I can be alive by resuscitation.resuscitation. Upto this it is proven physically,scientifically,empirically. So mind to a great extent is beyond body.Fair enough.All agree.
Question comes after brain death. I for one believe higher self is different from mind.This some can dis approve. Analogical, allegorical and inductive proofs are there to support me but not hardcore science(as of now) and part of deductive logic.
But an existence of higher self is a connect to animal world, cycle of birth and justice,non-erroneous god, and personal connection with infinite.
Even if this is not proven this can act as higher logic and beyond logic. Science itself is advocating fuzzy logic,King of science(Mathematics) is advocating abstractness.
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January 16, 2014 at 2:09 am
On a lighter note an young good looking girl asked me “if we cannot see sun created by almighty god more than seconds how can god be seeable?”
My answer was you can see my beauty which is also a creation of god. Does that mean god is seeable?
Yes and no is the answer:) ,infact this yes and no also is not our prerogative.How can creation(finite) be compared to/descriptive of creator(infinite). That way one god and any number of god is also logically flawed. Truth is god himself/herself/itself cannot define himself/herself/itself. While by omnipotence clause it is possible but then infinite cannot define infinite. God ceases to be infinite if god is defined.
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January 16, 2014 at 2:30 am
Silver lining is before day of judgement all are uncircumcised again(like natural). Question is if god is uncircumcising one then why can’t one do that herself/himself?
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May 27, 2017 at 6:05 am
Unless “the universe is uncaused, caused by abstract objects, or some other heretofore-unknown-entity… we are rationally justified in believing not only that an unembodied mind/person is plausible, but actual.”
Why hinge the existence of bodiless minds on a bodiless mind causally responsible for the physical world? That’s a tall order. Why not just say there is no physical law preventing bodiless minds, therefore they are possible?
You seem to want to say bodiless minds are actual, but bodiless minds would be unobservable, so it’s implausible to be certain of their existence (though again, not implausible to think they’re possible).
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May 27, 2017 at 6:47 am
The first comment by atomic mutant leaves much to be desired, not least in terms of argumentative style. For example, ending the response with “Sorry, the only reason you have is you want it to be true” is indicative of the futility of arguing with him further.
Ending a criticism by ascribing a motivation to the author discredits much of what was previously said by the critic, as it is drastically unlikely the critic knows the author’s motivation, particularly within an online context.
Ending a criticism by claiming forcefully that all reasons provided by the author have been refuted is also indicative of unsophisticated reasoning, as most thoughtful people recognize that we all make various plausible assumptions in argumentation on which our conclusions hinge. To deny the plausibility of these assumptions is typically to misunderstand nuance.
And to end a criticism by apologizing is of course patronizing and meant to convey feigned empathy, as though the author must admit his worldview is utterly stupid, and the wise critic has delivered a devastating bombshell. This to me indicates a lack of sophistication, since most sophisticated thinkers are generally familiar with many popular lines of reasoning that wouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
In this particular case, it seems atomic mutant has done only that, providing well-trodden augments, but in a way that is particularly caustic and lacking of nuance. He would benefit from continued reflection both on the nature of scientific inquiry and productive conversation.
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June 6, 2017 at 11:06 pm
John,
I would hinge the existence of bodiless minds on arguments that an immaterial (bodiless) mind is the best explanation for the cause of the universe because it’s actually an argument for the conclusion (and a good argument at that). Just saying physics doesn’t make it impossible is not an argument. And possibilities come cheap. One who agreed with you that physics doesn’t make it impossible would still want to know why they should think it is probable that an unembodied mind exists, and I think cosmological arguments provide good reason for thinking that at least one does.
You seem to think that one must be able to empirically verify something to be certain of it. That seems patently false to me. Consider your own mental life. Do you see it? No, and yet you are certain it exists because you have first-person awareness of it. Or consider your certainty that there are no square circles. That’s not based on empirical observation, but rational intuitions rooted in logic.
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June 7, 2017 at 10:15 am
TR:
“Consider your own mental life. Do you see it? No, and yet you are certain it exists because you have first-person awareness of it.”
But that’s just the point …we have first person and not only that, we also have 7 billion other body-persons on the planet aware of it!
So just because we can’t see the mental state while true, does not extrapolate to bodiless minds just because we can’t “see” it.
You are only using pone part the invisible part but neglect the embodied- mind and mental state it exudes from. That’s why we have the emotion aspect of the Body/Mind conveniently called the soul but the soul; aka, the emotion is not an disembodied entity either…
Oh I know you like to argue the contrary but the human person consists of Body / Mind; Soul / Emotion; Spirit / Will…the Triune Human entity is not bodiless and to suggest otherwise is like a bobble head on the dashboard of your car, agreeing with everything you imagine to support your supernatural not in of reality.
You cannot discern radioactivity but it is not bodiless and you can invent a geiger counter to detect and respond to it. When you invent a supernatural ginger counter to detect and respond to the paranormal, well I wait for that day.
lol 🙂
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