Plato's Substance Dualism

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Recently, the scientific and religious communities are sparring over life’s biggest existential question; how do humans exist? Throughout the 20th and 21st century, many ardent believers in God, specifically believers of the Judeo-Christian God, believe in a literal translation of the Genesis stories. These Evangelicals believe that whatever happened in the Bible is the verbatim truth and accurately describes how humanity was created. This philosophy, namely Creationism, states that the physical and spiritual worlds were created by God in seven days around six thousand years ago. However, a new belief system arose on the creation of humanity: evolution. Created by the natural sciences, evolution states that, just like all living beings, humans …show more content…

It appears that Pope John Paul II’s argument is comparable to Plato’s substance dualism argument. Plato suggests that humans have two distinct properties, physical and mental properties. Physical properties are any distinct attributes that can be explained via the physical sciences, such as size, weight, color, and shape. However, it also appears that humans have many other properties that are unexplainable by the physical sciences. Humans have mental properties, such as consciousness, desire, and belief, that cannot be explained by science, yet inarguably exists. Therefore, Plato claims that humans have two “souls”, the physical and the spiritual soul (Robinson). The physical soul is dictated by the natural sciences while the spiritual soul is a whole separate being that allows for these mental properties to exits. However, Plato’s substance dualism claim is not uncontested; it is subjected to an unsolvable complication. If there is such thing as an “immaterial soul” that dictates all mental states, where could it be located? If the immaterial soul is located outside the body, then it must be located somewhere. Yet, it seems impossible that this could be true. How could a soul exist outside a body, yet dictate its mental states at the same time? Therefore, due to this complication, Plato’s argument for substance dualism is false, ergo, Pope John Paul II’s claim that there are two distinct persons, the body and the soul, also must be false

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