Two More Arguments Against Materialism
Philosophy 114
Ned Markosian
The Argument From Psychic Phenomena
Many people who have lived through near-death experiences report having seen their own bodies from the outside, as doctors attempted to revive them. This phenomenon – the temporary departure of the soul or the mind from the body – is known as astral projection. A related phenomenon, commonly known as reincarnation, takes place when a single soul is recycled through two or more lives. There is significant evidence for the occurrence of many cases of reincarnation – cases, for example, in which a child in one part of the world has vivid memories of an adult life at an earlier time and in another part of the world. Similarly, there have been documented cases involving extra-sensory perception, or ESP. That is, there have been documented cases in which a person perceived something, such as the thoughts of another person, without using any of his or her five senses. There have even been documented cases of telekinesis – cases in which a person moved some object without using any physical force. All of this evidence points inexorably to one end: people cannot be purely physical; they must have souls, or minds. The inescapable conclusion is that materialists, who are not willing to accept the obvious consequences of these well-documented phenomena, are like ostriches who refuse to lift their heads from the sands of ignorance.
The Argument from Conceivability
Here’s
a little thought experiment. Try to imagine dying and going to heaven. This
might not be something that you ever expect to happen – maybe you are a
Materialist, or maybe you don’t believe in heaven, or maybe you just
don’t think you’ve been a good enough person to get into heaven.
But still, see if you can imagine this scenario: you feel a great pain in your
chest; you slowly lose consciousness; you then regain consciousness and find
yourself looking down on your body as it lies lifeless on the floor; and,
finally, you find yourself floating up into the sky and arriving at some large
pearly gates, before which stands a distinguished man with a supersized book on
an ornate pedestal. Surprising? Maybe. But no matter
what your philosophical views are, you should, in all honesty, admit that this
is at least a conceivable series of experiences. Yet that is all that is needed
to disprove Materialism. For if it is conceivable that you exist without your
body, as in the above scenario, then such a thing is
possible. And as any student of modal logic will tell you, if it is possible
for x to exist without y, then x cannot be identical to y (since it is not
possible for anything to exist without itself). The clear upshot is that you
are not identical to your body after all, and that Materialism is therefore
wholly and demonstrably false.