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Saturday, June 22, 2013

The soul and split-brain experiments

Many Christians (and others) believe that the soul and the body are separate entities, and, for example, that the soul will go to heaven, but the body will not. See here for a Wikipedia article on such belief, which may be called substance dualism.

On the other hand, many Christians believe that the body and the soul are inseparable in this life, and that they will continue to be so after the resurrection. Let's not get into what happens between death and the resurrection -- there are enough controversial subjects in this post already!

An author in The Skeptical Zone blog has posted about the results of split-brain operations in humans. When that has been done (for therapeutic purposes, such as to stop dangerous epilepsy) the individual generally exhibits two distinct personalities.(See here for the Wikipedia article about such surgery.) As the author says: "Surely the immaterial mind doesn’t split in two at the moment the corpus callosum is cut, does it?"

For an example of a Christian writer who doubts substance dualism, and gives good reasons for doing so.

Thanks for reading.


1 comment:

Martin LaBar said...

Since my first post, there has been more discussion of this subject at The Skeptical Zone. See here:

http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=2888