Dr. Michael L. Peterson is currently Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the department at Asbury College, where he has taught for thirty years. He received the Ph.D. from the State University of New York in 1976 and has taught at the University of Kentucky, Roberts Wesleyan College, Princeton University, Greenville College, and Georgetown College. Dr. Peterson does research, writing, and speaking in the areas of philosophy of science, philosophy of education, and philosophy of religion. Dr. Peterson has written: Evil and the Christian God (Baker Books); Philosophy of Education: Issues and Options (InterVarsity Press); God and Evil: An Introduction to the Issues (HarperCollins/Westview); and With All Your Mind: A Christian Philosophy of Education (University of Notre Dame Press). He is senior author of Reason and Religious Belief (Oxford University Press, going into its 4^th edition), His newest book commitment is Christian Theism and the Problem of Evil (forthcoming, Blackwell of Oxford). His next writing project is on philosophical theories of human nature.

Having convinced only a small fraction of Americans that chance and tautology — i.e. Darwinism — adequately explains life (despite a court-ordered monopoly on public education for the last half-century), materialists are moving on to your mind. Materialism posits that your mind is meat. No soul, no spirit, just chemicals, congealed by natural selection to dupe you into believing that you’re more than an evanescent meat-robot. It’s a hard sell, but that’s not to say that materialists haven’t tried. In the first half of the 20th century, behaviorists proposed that internal mental states were irrelevant or didn’t exist at all. All that mattered in the study of the mind was stimulus and response. Behaviorism turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a sterile avenue of research, as one might guess about a theory of the mind that denied or ignored mental states. As a theory of the mind, it is now largely regarded as insane, even by materialists. Behaviorism may be the only scientific theory to be finally extinguished by a joke: After a night of passion, one behaviorist rolls over in bed and says to the other: "that was good for you; how was it for me?"

It is possible that a materialistic explanation of consciousness might be found, but that does not make the claim that consciousness is non-physical an argument from ignorance... At any given time, scientists should infer the best current explanation of the available evidence, and right now, the best evidence from both neuroscience and rigorous philosophical analysis is that consciousness is not reducible to the physical. Churchland’s refusal to draw this inference is based not on evidence, but on what Karl Popper called "promissory materialism," a reliance on the mere speculative possibility of a materialistic explanation. Since this attitude can be maintained indefinitely, it means that even if a non-materialist account is correct (and supported by overwhelming evidence), that inconvenient truth can always be ignored. Surely the project of science should be one of following the evidence wherever it leads, not of protecting a preconceived materialist philosophy. Isn’t it that philosophy — the one that constantly changes its shape to avoid engagement with troublesome evidence, either ignoring the data or simply declaring it materialistic — that most resembles a virus?

The simple truth is that in both science and philosophy, strict physicalist analysis of consciousness and the self have been breaking down since the mid-1980s. The problems with physicalism have nothing directly to do with theism; they follow from rigorous treatments of consciousness and the self as we know them to be. The real problem comes in trying to explain its origin and for this problem, naturalism in general and Darwinism in particular, are useless. In my view, the only two serious contenders are theism and panpsychism which, contrary to the musings of some, has throughout the history of philosophy been correctly taken as a rival to and not a specification of naturalism.

Paul Copan is Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. He has authored and edited a variety of books including Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion (2007), The Rationality of Theism (with Paul Moser, 2003), and Creation out of Nothing (with William Lane Craig, 2004).

Philip L. Quinn is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and was previously William Herbert Perry Faunce Professor of Philosophy at Brown University, Rhode Island. He is author of Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (1978), and of numerous articles in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, theoretical physics, religious ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, political philosophy, and philosophy and literature. He has served as editor of the journal Faith and Philosophy (1990-5); as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association (1994-5); and as Chair of the National Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association (1995-9).

Charles Taliaferro is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf College, Minnesota. He was Visiting Scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of Consciousness and the Mind of God (1994) and Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell Publishers, 1997), and numerous papers in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and ethics.

His publications include Faith and Philosophy (1964), The Ontological Argument (1965), God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), God, Freedom and Evil (1974), Does God Have a Nature? (1980), Faith and Rationality (1983), The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship (1990), Warrant: The Current Debate (1993), Warrant and the Proper Function (1993), The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader (1998), Warranted Christian Belief (2000) and Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality (2003).

Alvin Plantinga was born 15 November 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father, Cornelius, was then a philosophy graduate student at the University of Michigan. When Cornelius graduated with a Ph.D. from Duke University, the family lived on a relatively low income until he secured a teaching job in Huron, Michigan, in 1941.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation. Some of my thinking has culminated in the recently released Consciousness and the Existence of God (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Religion) (Routledge, 2008). Consciousness is among the most mystifying features of the cosmos. Geoffrey Madell opines that "the emergence of consciousness, then is a mystery, and one to which materialism signally fails to provide an answer."ⁱ Naturalist Colin McGinn claims that its arrival borders on sheer magic because there seems to be no naturalistic explanation for it: "How can mere matter originate consciousness? How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness? Consciousness seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the after-effects of the Big Bang; so how did it contrive to spring into being from what preceded it?"ⁱⁱ Finally, naturalist William Lyons argues that "[physicalism] seem[s] to be in tune with the scientific materialism of the twentieth century because it [is] a harmonic of the general theme that all there is in the universe is matter and energy and motion and that humans are a product of the evolution of species just as much as buffaloes and beavers are. Evolution is a seamless garment with no holes wherein souls might be inserted from above."ⁱⁱⁱ

According to classical theistic belief — classical Muslim and Jewish as well as Christian belief — first of all there is God, the chief being of the universe, who has neither beginning nor end. Most important, God is personal. That is, God is the kind of being who is conscious and enjoys some kind of awareness of his surroundings (in God's case, that would be everything). Second (though not second in importance), a person has loves and hates, wishes and desires; she approves of some things and disapproves of others; she wants things to be a certain way. We might put this by saying that persons have affections. A person, third, is a being who has beliefs and, if fortunate, knowledge. We human beings, for example, believe a host of things... Persons, therefore, have beliefs and affections. Further, a person is a being who has aims and intentions; a person aims to bring it about that things should be a certain way, intends to act so that things will be the way he wants them to be... Finally, persons can often act to fulfill their intentions; they can bring it about that things are a certain way; they can cause things to happen. To be more technical (though not more insightful or more clear), we might say that a person is a being who can actualize states of affairs. Persons can often act on the basis of what they believe in order to bring about states of affairs whose actuality they desire. ¶ So a person is conscious, has affections, beliefs, and intentions, and can act... First, therefore, God is a person. But second, unlike human persons, God is a person without a body. He acts, and acts in the world, as human beings do, but, unlike human beings, not by way of a body. Rather, God acts just by willing: he wills that things be a certain way, and they are that way. (God said "Let there be light"; and there was light.)

John Greco is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, where he has taught in the Philosophy Department since receiving his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1989. He is the author of Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and co-editor with Ernest Sosa ofThe Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). He has published essays in epistemology, moral theory, and philosophy of religion in journals such as American Philosophical Quarterly, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Metaphilosophy, Philosophical Perspectives and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. He is also the author of "Virtue Epistemology" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and "Virtues in Epistemology" in Oxford Handbook of Epistemology.

Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us. Also the mind, though of little power on its own, is the place of our widest and most basic freedom. This is true in both a direct and an indirect sense. Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will thing of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct order to exercise it. We simply turn our mind to whatever it is we choose to think of. The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind, as well as what we can or cannot even think of.

The claims of evolution and, more recently, the proponents of artificial intelligence have brought into question what it means to be human. Denying the existence of the soul apart from the body, many contemporary scientists are devout materialists — putting the traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic conception of the human being far out of fashion. However, Ric Machuga argues convincingly that our nature "is an essential unity of both the material and the immaterial," that we not only have a soul but that we are a soul. The body is a necessary — but not sufficient — condition for human existence. In Defense of the Soul is an accessible and timely treatment of a timeless topic: what it means to be human. Not only will it attract readers interested in artificial intelligence, evolution, and the intelligent design debate, it¹s ideal for introductory college and seminary courses in philosophy. It includes an appendix that specifically assesses intelligent design, as well as a thick bibliography that provides an excellent guide to other sources on the topic.

The book defends a functional integration of human life (body and soul are separate but dependent) on earth and in heaven but a disembodied intermediate state wherein the body and soul will be both separate and independent. Cooper's research, objective and scrupulous, examines the widest spectrum: (1) Traditional Christian anthropology and its modern critics; (2) Old Testament anthropology's holistic emphasis; (3) Old Testament anthropology's dualistic implications; (4) The anthropology of intertestamental eschatology; (5) The monism-dualism debate about New Testament anthropology; (6) Anthropology and personal eschatology in the New Testament's non-Pauline writings; (7) Anthropology and personal eschatology in the New Testament's Pauline epistles; (8) New Testament eschatology and philosophical anthropology; (9) Practical and theological objections against dualism; (10) Holistic dualism, science, and philosophy; (11) And finally, a vindication of holistic dualism. ~ Blake G Edwards

As for dualism, much has been said of the violence it does to our unity as psycho-physical creatures, but this is questionable. Multiplicity and disunity are as strong a feature of our existence as psychosomatic unity. We are legion, as the demons say. It is a marvel that all our different parts work together. At best, we are a symphony; but the second violins have quarreled with the wind section, and as we age these quarrels increase. Why should it surprise us if at death the soul separates from the body? Separating is the order of our lives as we tend toward death. If a man's jowls can sink down while his brow stays up, why can't his soul rise up when his body sinks down? All of our flesh is being pulled downward by the gravity of the grave; every day our skin is sloughing off cell by cell; at each stage of life we slough off the skin of a previous stage; and at death we lose what was left of those skins. Perhaps that will be the chance to emerge as the person one was meant to be.