Occam's Razor, atheism, theism and polytheism.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Do you think chimps have souls?  How about bacteria?  Your arguments, to me, as an atheist, sound like the classic "god of the gaps".  How about lightning?  Do you believe that we need God to explain lightning?

Unfortunately, I do not have time to give you a full and proper account for how neo-Scholastic philosophy approaches those kinds of questions. What I can do is give you some flavor of what that would look like. The classical Christian concept of God handed down to us from the fathers and doctors of the church, is less of a gap-filler; but rather, more of a "god of the expanse." Because God is the Absolute on which all depends his action and presence are universal not only in external phenomena but also most profoundly linked to our mental being, including mental activities that do not rise to the level of conscious awareness.

The notion that souls are some kind of secret sauce added on top of the physical body is a modern misconception. In classical terms, human beings are hylomorphic, a unity of matter and substantial form. Souls are what what makes things what they are. It means something to be a chimp. It means something to be a bacteria. And it means something to be human, i.e. human nature**

Naturalism/Physicalism/Materialism are all terms of art making essentially the same basic arbitrary assumption that all forms of causation are bottom-up, third person processes, i.e. material and efficient causes. It is not the default position as some suppose; but rather, an interpretation of reality based on willfully ignoring first-person observations of formal and final causes. Both formal and final causes are top-down processes. The potential of matter needs to be informed before it can actualize. Efficient causes (agents and bodies) are disposed towards a limited range of ends. We simply cannot make sense of the world without recognizing, either tacitly or explicitly, that teleology operates at all levels of reality and describing the world in terms of intentionality. Consciousness is directed towards phenomenal content. Reason assigns meaning. Animals have desires. Organs have functions and unthinking bodies have regular tendencies.

In contrast to this modern naturalism says that all these obvious features of reality (qualia, forms, intentions, and moral imperatives)magically 'emerge' if you combine undirected physical processes, chance encounters, and unconscious matter in some unspecified way. The magician waves his magic wand over the empty hat of the physical world and out pops the rabbit of consciousness. To continue the analogy, the naturalist/physicalist/materialist (take your pick) isn't trying to figure out where the rabbit came from; but rather, how wand waving and hats can generate rabbits or saying that the rabbit itself is an illusion. Either option is absurd, but they will repeatedly assert that someday/maybe they'll figure it out.

**hence moral imperatives flowing from our rational nature. Unless there is a way you ought to be then there is no basis for what you should do.