(October 5, 2024 at 12:35 pm)Sheldon Wrote: if you can't demonstrate anything approaching objective evidence a soul or spirit exists, then I have no sound or objective reason to accept claims they do.
Perhaps you're thinking that a soul is some kind of material substance? Like a wispy thing that can fly out of the body. That would be a sort of Cartesian substance dualism, and as far as I know that isn't the traditional Christian view of things. (No doubt there are Christians who think of soul this way, because there are a lot of them and they believe different things. But it's not the explanation I've read.)
Here you have to think of good old Aristotelian hylomorphism. As you recall, this view of things says that every material object has both substance and form. (Hyle is matter and morph is form.) This I think is self-evidently true, but if you need "objective evidence" I guess you could go around and look at lots of material objects and notice whether each of them has both matter and form.
"Form" here is not just shape. It includes the way the parts of an object work together. So we could say that morph includes function.
According to Aristotle, the soul is the form of the body. Because human bodies, like all material things, have both substance and form, this is unavoidable. If your form were different, you would be different.
This is the view taken by Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and many other important Christian thinkers. So if you were to declare that you don't believe in a kind of substance dualism where soul is some undetectable second substance temporarily occupying the matter of the body, then Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Rowan Williams, and the Pope would all agree with you.
The Christians add something which Aristotle would not agree with: they think that at death the form of the body can be transferred into a different body. (You'll recall that Dante describes this in detail in the Purgatorio.) This is not something that can be argued logically, as hylomorphism is. It is revealed theology, and therefore not provable. I don't have that faith, so I don't see how it's possible. But recently some Silicone Valley guys have started to suggest something similar: they think that your self can be uploaded to some other kind of machine so you won't have to die. I think this is silly.
So that's what Christians say a soul is.
As for spirit, there are a number of ways that word is used.
When I was in high school I used to sneak out of the mandatory pep rallies and I never attended a football game. The principal of my school took me aside and told me I lacked "school spirit." This was not a metaphysical assertion. It was about my way of thinking. This is a common way of using the word, and I expect you are probably comfortable with this usage. A lawyer may say that something conforms to the letter of the law but not its spirit. An activist may say that he does his job in the spirit of Martin Luther King. None of these things implies magic.
As you know, the mystical tradition in Christianity holds that a spiritual change is a change in the way a person sees the world. This is a very old tradition, but was perhaps articulated most clearly by Jacob Boehme, who made it clear that in his view, heaven is not a separate realm but a way of perceiving the here and now. A perfected way of perceiving, freed from ego and mistaken customs and habits. Many Christians before and since have agreed with this. You'll recall that William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, describes this well. Likewise, mystics in the Vedic tradition and in Buddhism see spirituality as a way to think about our thoughts and interpretations of the world, and how these may be improved.
So there's no reason to think of spirit as, again, some kind of substance dualist wispy thing. Nor is spirituality necessarily the acceptance of anti-scientific beliefs. (Though of course some misguided people are attracted to these things.)
As for the common religious view that everything is One, you'll find this is well supported in Neoplatonic philosophy, traditional Indian philosophy, and Buddhism. Although I prefer the Buddhist term -- instead of One they say 不二, which just means "not two." This, again, has to do with perception. We understand the world by dividing it up. This is a necessary method -- discriminating this from that is the only way to live practically. But it is a function of the mind. Again, the Chinese/Japanese view is good here, because the character 分 means both "divide" and "understand."
This is entirely compatible with the theory of evolution, and all other scientific findings. In fact if you've read Erasmus Darwin's books you'll know that he arrived at a nearly complete theory of evolution by interpreting recent archeological findings through a Neoplatonic framework. (He left it to his grandson Charles to figure out the mechanism of evolution, being natural selection.) And of course I understand that Neoplatonism is not a part of modern scientist's viewpoint (it is metaphysics, after all, not science) but I mention Erasmus Darwin just to demonstrate the compatibility of the two.
In practice, spiritual people have followed a number of different courses, some silly and some worthwhile. The goal, as I understand it, is always to adjust oneself to a more healthy, more connected view of the world. This involves suppression of the ego, which is extremely difficult, and that's why we see so many failures. And since modern liberalism, and especially modern American cowboy ethics, makes the ego extraordinarily important, we live in a time when spiritual efforts tend to do quite badly.
