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Do You Have an Immortal Soul?

September 23, 2024

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Woody Allen once said, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.” Since not dying isn’t an option, Allen advised, “Don’t think of death as an end, but think of it more as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses.” What (else) happens to you after you die? Nothing? Forever? Or is there life after death? Such questions can be considered both theologically and philosophically. 

A theological way to answer the question about life after death is to consider another question: Is Jesus trustworthy? Jesus taught that this life is not the only life—that death destroys the body but does not destroy the soul. As they were both dying on Roman crosses, Jesus told the good thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Indeed, Jesus spoke of heaven and hell on many occasions. So, if Jesus is trustworthy, eternal life is a reality. 

C.S. Lewis thought life after death was not just a matter of revelation but also of reason. Lewis wrote, “If we really are the product of a materialistic universe, why don’t you feel at home in a world where we die and disintegrate? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that not strongly suggest that they were once not purely aquatic creatures? Why are we continually shocked and repulsed by death, unless indeed something in us is not temporal.” Lewis held that philosophy, not just theology, points to life after death.

In his fantastic new book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature, Edward Feser offers an important philosophical contribution to the discussion of life after death. Not limiting himself to only addressing the issue of the immortality of the soul, Feser offers a tour de force of some of the most important questions about human beings. What is the human mind? How are body and mind related? Do we have an immaterial soul? Does it continue after the death of the body? Feser builds his case for the immortality of the soul by grounding it in his answers to central questions about the human person. 

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Feser brings to bear what Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, and Locke have said about these questions. He also examines seminal recent philosophers such as Russell, Quine, Ross, Nagel, and Searle. 

The ambitions of Feser’s book are great. He aims to explicate and defend a view of a human person as a unity of a material body and immaterial soul. He does so with clarity of prose, a wide reading of the relevant literature, and a systematic approach which grounds philosophical anthropology in metaphysics. Feser shows how the Thomistic conception of the human person avoids the puzzles and problems views arising in early modern accounts of the human person found in the philosophy of figures like Descartes, Locke, and Hume. 

In Immortal Souls, Feser defends a realist view of the self, the intellect, the will, and the soul against reductionists and anti-realists. He often shows how the anti-realist view ends up in self-contradiction and how reductionist views of various kinds only have plausibility based on an implicit adoption of realism. Feser argues that nothing in contemporary science contradicts the view of the human person as endowed with freedom of the will and an immortal soul. Of central importance is his argument that formal thought processes (exemplified in mathematics and logic) have exact conceptual content that no material thing can have. So, formal thought processes are not material. What originated from an ancient insight in Aristotle finds a contemporary defense in Feser. 

Feser also addresses many other important contemporary questions. Do computers generating artificial intelligence actually think? Are differences between human and animal intelligence merely a matter of degree? Could technology so radically change human beings that they essentially become a new transhuman species?

Finally, in Immortal Souls, Feser addresses questions of theological import. At death, is the human will fixed permanently either in union with God or in separation from him? Or, on the other hand, could someone be saved after death? Is the soul made in a natural way by the reproduction of a mother and father, or in a supernatural way by God?  Do you survive death in a mutilated state, or do merely your corpse and your soul—which is not, properly speaking, “you”—remain after death? 

I enthusiastically recommend Feser’s Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature to anyone interested in fundamental questions about the human person. He has done a great service in providing a readable and wide-ranging guide to human nature. Carl Sagan once said, “I would love to believe that when I die, I will live again—that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.” Unfortunately, Sagan didn’t get to read Feser’s book. Fortunately, we can.