Abstract
In this paper, I argue that if we have reason to believe that an immaterial soul exists, then (absent evidence to the contrary) it should be presumed to be immortal. The conclusion is weaker than Socrates’ conclusion that immaterial souls must be immortal, but the argument is stronger, I claim, for having this weaker conclusion. Moreover, a presumption of immortality is significant in its own right.
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Notes
There’s a large philosophical literature about presumptions. See (Godden & Walton, 2007) for a survey. In this paper, I can afford a good deal of neutrality between the various debates recorded in that literature. This much I will endorse, from (Godden, 2017, p. 489): “When true, the sentence ‘Presumably, p’ indicates the presumptive modal status of p, marking it as having a defeasible, but default and actionable acceptability. The correlative of a presumption’s default acceptability is a burden of proof born by any who would refuse to grant the presumption.”
An anonymous reviewer raises a fascinating issue. Line 8 says that for any time tn after t we should presume that x still exists at tn. But this conclusion only follows if the phrase, “we should presume that...,” obeys a principle of agglomeration. Indeed, this assumption underlines line 7. It is this assumption that’s going to stretch our presumption from t0 to t1, and from t1 to t2, and so on and so forth, all the way to infinity. The reviewer’s concern stems for the worry that justified belief doesn’t agglomerate in this way, and so, neither should presumption. Consider a fair 1000-ticket lottery with exactly one winning ticket. For any given ticket, you should only have 0.1% confidence that it will win; surely not enough confidence to constitute belief (in any context). Accordingly, you should believe of each ticket that it won’t win, and yet you should believe with certainly that one ticket will win. This paradox leads many people to deny the agglomeration principle – doing so will allow that your disbelief regarding each ticket won’t stretch to the conjunction of all of the tickets. But I disagree with that response. I think the agglomeration principle is true. The fact that the principle is intuitive is what explains the paradox in the first place. Thankfully, there are elegant solutions available for lottery style paradoxes that don’t require the denial of the agglomeration principle (see for example Leitgeb, 2014, pp. 160–163). For that reason, I trust that lines 7 and 8 are safe.
Here, I’m reading Socrates charitably, and assuming that his distinction between visible and invisible entities really has more to do with the distinction between divisible and indivisible entities.
An anonymous reviewer is right to point out that, by the lights of premise 2, the creation of a soul would be equally as miraculous as its destruction. I am happy to agree and to state explicitly that this argument for a presumption of future immortality generalises backwards in time just as it works forwards in time. That is to say: by the lights of my argument, if I possess an immaterial soul, then, for any time t prior to my birth, I should presume that my soul existed at t.
Admittedly: various religious traditions might cite Divine revelation as a source of knowledge that some souls are annihilated. But those considerations lie beyond the scope of this paper.
I note in passing that this presumption is an important principle in Talmudic law, known as a חזקה דמעיקרא.
In fact, Swinburne (2019) argues that souls can only play the roles given to them if they are mereologically simple, or, at least, “necessarily indivisible”.
References
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Bennett, J. (1974). Kant’s Dialectic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Godden, D. (2017). Presumption as a Modal Qualifier: Presumption, Inference, and Managing Epistemic Risk. Argumentation, 31, 485–511.
Godden, D., & Walton, D. (2007). A theory of presumption for everyday argumentation. Pragmatics & Cognition, 15, 313–346.
Goldberg, S. (2010). Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krauss, L. M. (2012). A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Somthing Rather than Nothing. New York: Free Press.
Leitgeb, H. (2014). The Stability Theory of Belief. Philosophical Review, 123(2), 131–171.
McDowell, J. (1998). Knowledge by Hearsay. In In: Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mendelssohn, M. (2007). Phädon: or, On the Immortality of the Soul. Bern: Peter Lang.
Simon, J., & Marshall, C. (2017). Mendelssohn, Kant, and the Mereotopology of Immortality. Ergo, 4(29), 821–844.
Swinburne, R. (2019). Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Unger, P. (2005). All the Power in the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Scott Davison, Sandy Goldberg, David Kovacs, Ariel Meirav, Boaz Miller, Daniel Schneider, Saul Smilansky, Danny Statman and an anonymous reviewer for comments and discussion that helped to shape this paper. Thanks also to my friend Tyron Goldschmidt for his disapproval of an earlier draft, which encouraged me to persevere!
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