Richard Swinburne, Substance Dualism & Motivated Belief.
Philosopher Richard Swinburne was recently interviewed by Julian Baggini on the Microphilosophy podcast regarding his arguments for mind-body substance dualism.
Listen to the podcast episode here.
Roger’s comments to Julian Baggini:
Thanks for interviewing Richard Swinburne regarding his dualist beliefs of the nature of persons. To lay my cards on the table, I too am one of those completely puzzling Christian theists (and yet perfectly rational I believe). I don’t necessarily agree with Swinburne’s dualism, myself currently being in a state of flux regarding this issue, but favouring some type of emergentism at the moment.
I do believe Swinburne did correctly pull you up on a couple of your presuppositions and biases, commonly associated with what I like to call “Modernist chauvanism”, characteristic of many secular scientists and philsophers:
1. Failure to recognise our cognitive limitations and the possibility of boundaries to our knowledge capabilities, that may not improve with the passage of time. This concept is well highlighted by people like Prof Russell Stannard and refutes the concept that just because something cannot be explained or accounted for on current knowledge, then the concept must not exist. Note, however, that this is not the same as a “God of the Gaps” claim. This is a common argument against substance dualism – that we can’t possibly understand how an immaterial mind could act on and influence a material body, so dualism must be wrong. Many philosophers of mind in the dualist camp rightly charge this argument as being overused and over-hyped as a knock-down argument against dualism.
2. I was particularly pleased to hear Swinburne pull you up on your asymmetrical application of “motivated belief” – the implication that dualists desperately want to believe in substance dualism because of a prior committment to a particular interpretation of Christian theism. Swinburne was completely correct in reminding you that motivated belief biases obviously occur just as much in non-theists, and could just as easily be used to argue that secularists would be motivated to reject out of hand data that supported dualism, purely and solely for the reason that it might imply the existence of God. Swinburne is correct in reminding you that no one is free of motivated belief bias, including secular physicalists.
The good news is that Christian theism does not automatically limit one to substance dualism. In fact, recent theological reflection in the context of contemporary cognitive sciences has shown that Christian theism may well be entirely compatible with forms of emergentism a la william Hasker and even non-reductive physicalism, a la Nancy Murphy. I do hope in your upcoming book you are gracious enough to grant a broad view on the compatibility of Christian theism with other models of the person other than Cartesian dualism.
Chris C
on April 25th, 2012
>>>”This is a common argument against substance dualism – that we can’t possibly understand how an immaterial mind could act on and influence a material body, so dualism must be wrong.”
I think you’ve stated this far too strongly. The ‘argument’ would be, very simply, that since there is nothing approaching a coherent account – never mind a plausible one – as to how an ‘immaterial’ mind might interact with a material body, there is simply no reason for supposing that such a thing might, or could, be so. Indeed, as things stand, ‘immaterial’ is nothing more than a non-concept; after all, if it’s neither matter, nor energy, what’s left over to be? So the point is entirely moot, it seems to me, until theists can go at least some way towards meeting their heavy burden of proof.