Here’s a defense, from Minding the Brain (Discovery Institute Press, 2023), of a widely-hated philosophical concept, substance dualism. Put simply, materialist atheists hate dualism of any kind because it implies that the human being is a dual creature (mind and body). Thus the mind is real and probably immortal.

As Kings College philosophy prof David Papineau put it, “Consciousness is not a problem. Dualism is!” Such thinkers hate substance dualism most because it holds, without reserve, that “the mind and the body are composed of different substances and that the mind is a thinking thing that lacks the usual attributes of physical objects: size, shape, location, solidity, motion, adherence to the laws of physics, and so on.” (Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)

So here is a defense of substance dualism from Minding the Brain by Stewart Goetz, professor of philosophy and religion at Ursinus College and Charles Taliaferro, professor of philosophy (em) at St. Olaf’s College. Make up your own mind:

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Belief in the existence of the soul as an entity (a “substance” in older philosophical language) that is distinct from its physical or material (we use the terms interchangeably) body is usually referred to as “substance dualism,” or simply “dualism.” Most people who have thought about this belief maintain that it is commonsensical in nature and not based on any philosophical argument.

Even those who deny the existence of the soul concede that the vast majority of us initially believe in its existence. For example, the experimental cognitive scientist Jesse Bering writes that human beings are believers in dualism, and the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey insists that there is a human inclination to believe in dualism.

Toward the end of his book Soul Dust, Humphrey mentions other scholars who also acknowledge this ordinary belief in dualism:

Development psychologist Paul Bloom aptly describes human beings as “natural-born dualists.” Anthropologist Alfred Gell writes: “It seems that ordinary human beings are ‘natural dualists,’ inclined more or less from day one, to believe in some kind of ‘ghost in the machine.’…

Neuropsychologist Paul Broks writes: “The separateness of body and mind is a primordial intuition…. Human beings are natural born soul makers, adept at extracting unobservable
minds from the behaviour of observable bodies, including their own.”

The idea of the soul is found everywhere at every time

One must always be aware of the distinction between an ordinary belief and a philosophical treatment or development of it. While most of us as ordinary persons initially believe in the existence of the soul, some individuals go further and philosophize about the soul’s nature and its relationship with its physical body.

The failure to keep in mind the distinction between an ordinary belief and a philosophical treatment of it not infrequently leads many theologians and biblical scholars to assert wrongly that the concept of the soul is a Greek idea and to argue that the Christian church mistakenly appropriated this Greek concept in its articulation of a Christian anthropology.

But the concept of the soul is not a Greek idea. While Greeks like Plato philosophized about the nature of the soul, the idea itself is found everywhere at every time. Hence, contemporary theologians and biblical scholars who reject the idea of the soul (because it is supposedly Greek and unbiblical) in favor of a monistic Hebrew view of the self or person confuse the initial, commonsense belief in the soul with philosophical reflection about the soul’s nature and its relationship with its material body.

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We are not claiming that appreciating the evident reality of consciousness leads to substance
dualism. On the contrary, we, like most or all commonsense individuals, start with belief in the soul-body distinction. But we are maintaining that appreciating the power of the natural sciences does not lead to Dennett’s or any other form of materialism which denies the unique role of the conscious soul in accounting for the nature of human and some other animal life. It is noteworthy that none of the examples of causal explanation cited by Dennett involves events such as reasoning, thinking, or conscious reflection.

The fact that reasoning, thinking, conscious reflection, and so on are indispensable in practicing (or even understanding) the natural sciences is justification for insisting that substance dualism is closer to the truth in explaining the occurrence of many events in the physical world than philosophies that deny the robust role of consciousness in life. Any evidence of the “ever-improving, self-enhancing juggernaut” of the natural sciences is at the same time evidence of the mental-to-physical explanatory power of the conscious, purposeful activities of souls.

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There are, doubtless, reasonable philosophical arguments against substance dualism, as opposed to other dualisms. But we might want to distinguish them from the materialist urge to target the clearest arguments for the existence of the soul for attack.

More information can be found here.