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We could also define man like this and say, “Man is a rational substance consisting of soul and body.” In this case there is no doubt that man has a soul which is not body and a body which is not soul.1
—Augustine of Hippo
“Mind” refers to all those mental states, processes, and events that go on both consciously and unconsciously in the brain.2
—John Searle
John Searle is likely among the most famous philosophers you’ve never heard of. Unlike some atheist philosophers well-known for their attacks on the faith — J. L. Mackie, Bertrand Russell, Michael Martin, and Sam Harris are recognizable examples — Searle has written no broadsides against Christianity. His work has focused on two areas of philosophical specialization: the philosophy of language and (especially) the philosophy of mind. Searle’s thoughts about the mind and consciousness are of particular interest. Make no mistake: Searle denies that humans have souls. However, Searle winds up defending his naturalist view of the mind in ways that are unintentionally friendly to Christian thought. Growing interest in AI is breathing new life into Searle’s famous argument that artificial intelligence cannot be conscious,3 which makes this a good time to become acquainted with his thought.
After briefly introducing Searle, I’ll sketch the main contours of his worldview, including his perspective on religious thought, before considering his naturalist view of the human mind and some ways in which his view (unintentionally) supports the Christian view of the human person.
Background
John Searle (1932– ) taught philosophy for some sixty years at the University of California, Berkeley, one-time home of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology.4 During his career Searle has published over a dozen scholarly books and dozens of articles in professional academic journals. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy at the University of Oxford, and he is the recipient of several honorary doctorates from universities around the world. His professional honors also include the National Humanities Medal (2004), awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Worldview
Searle is a thoroughgoing scientific naturalist. Scientific naturalism, in brief, is a worldview according to which the universe — that is, all that exists — consists of nothing but what is accessible via the natural sciences (viz., nature), and the only real knowledge (or at any rate our most decisive kind) is scientific knowledge.5 Questions about everything from cosmogony and the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to the origin of biological life, morality, and human consciousness will be answered or justified by science. Searle sees no need to appeal ultimately to divine purposes, non-natural causes, or non-physical “stuff” (what philosophers call substance) in order to explain reality.
Searle’s work on the nature of the mind and consciousness is deeply informed by his scientific naturalism. As Searle sees things, one question prevails over all others: “How do we account for our conceptions of ourselves as a certain sort of human being in a universe that we know consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force”?6 We typically regard ourselves as free, rational, moral agents — but Searle requires that perception be either reconciled with or rejected by what “we know,” namely, scientific naturalism. As he insists: “Ultimate reality, to speak rather grandly, is the reality described by chemistry and physics.”7 At bottom, that is all there is. According to Searle’s view, “the basic structure of the entire universe consists in entities that we…call ‘particles,’ and these exist in fields of force and are typically organized into systems. We know furthermore that we and all living systems have evolved…by processes of Darwinian natural selection.” In Searle’s view these claims are established facts, beyond debate. To atomic physics and evolutionary biology, Searle adds a third assertion: “All of our consciousness, intentionality, and all the rest of our mental life are caused by neurobiological processes and realized in neurobiological systems.” Taken together, these three claims comprise what Searle calls “the basic reality.”8 In sum, Searle’s universe includes exclusively what is accessible via the natural sciences, and it is these sciences that yield our only real (or at least our best) knowledge of the universe.
On Religion
Given his scientific naturalism, it is unsurprising that Searle would be dismissive of religious belief. “Nowadays nobody bothers [to attack theistic belief],” he writes, “and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God’s existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.”9 The “basic reality” is taken to be so obviously true that no careful thinker could even consider serious the possibility of God’s existence: “For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified….The result…is that we have gone beyond atheism to a point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations.”10
Setting aside his unabashed condescension (not to mention the absence of any supporting arguments), it is difficult to reconcile Searle’s claim with the evaluations of other eminent atheist philosophers. Thomas Nagel, whose writings on the philosophy of mind Searle takes seriously, acknowledges: “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.”11 Quentin Smith, widely respected for his work in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion, observes that a sea change began in the 1960s in professional philosophy: “Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism…began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians….[I]n philosophy, it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.” Indeed, Smith goes on to claim that “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”12 Whether because of his commitment to scientific naturalism or not, Searle’s view on religious belief is at odds with other prominent (non-religious) thinkers.
Where does this leave us regarding the question of human persons? Searle’s efforts to articulate a view of humans that can make sense of our familiar conscious experiences entirely in terms of scientific naturalism constitute his most well-known philosophical contributions. Interestingly, these efforts position Searle as an unwitting ally of the case for souls.
On Philosophy of Mind
The belief that human persons have or are souls that are neither identical nor reducible to physical bodies is, in the Christian tradition, a belief of central importance.13 On this view there are fundamentally two different kinds of “stuff” (substances) in existence: immaterial and material. This view of human persons is substance dualism (also known as mind-body dualism). On this view one’s mind is a faculty of one’s immaterial soul. Needless to say Searle is deeply at odds with the Christian commitment to mind-body dualism, but then Searle is also at odds with the majority of non-dualists, as well. This is in part why Christians may find it worthwhile to become familiar with his thought.
As Aristotle cautions, a small mistake in the beginning leads to large mistakes in the end.14 In Searle’s opinion just such a mistake underlies much that has been written about the mind in the twenty-first century. The mistake is the unquestioning acceptance of materialism, that is, the idea that everything that exists (including mental states) is material. “There is a sense,” Searle writes, “in which materialism is the religion of our time, at least among most of the professional experts in the fields of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and other disciplines that study the mind.” In keeping with his above comments, Searle’s use of “religion” here is pejorative. “Like more traditional religions,” he continues, materialism “is accepted without question and it provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered.”15 Too many twenty-first century scholars, in other words, have committed to investigating the nature of the mind within the conceptual limits allowed by materialism. This unquestioning acceptance of materialism has led to some large mistakes indeed. According to Searle:
from the perspective of the last fifty years, the [field of] philosophy of mind, as well as cognitive science and certain branches of psychology, present a very curious spectacle. The most striking feature is how much of mainstream philosophy of mind of the past fifty years seems obviously false. I believe there is no other area of contemporary analytic philosophy where so much is said that is so implausible….[O]bvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states and that these are not eliminable in favor of anything else, are routinely denied by many, perhaps most, of the advanced thinkers in the subject.16
Beginning with the assumption of materialism, Searle observes, has resulted in the absurd claim that we do not experience non-material mental states. Why, then, have so many assumed materialism in the first place? The answer is, to some extent: to avoid mind-body dualism. As Searle puts it, materialist explanations of the mind are “motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives,” namely, “antiscientific” views such as mind-body dualism.17
Here dualists (that is, thinkers who believe mind-body dualism) find common ground with Searle. The majority of dualists agree that materialism is a mistake underlying much contemporary philosophy of mind.18 On the one hand, quite serious challenges to materialism — especially as it relates to explaining consciousness — have undermined its predominance among philosophers.19 On the other hand, materialism is especially problematic when functioning as an assumption in the way described by Searle. Imagine a detective deciding, before ever seeing the crime scene, which clues she will consider relevant. Or a person just deciding, upon experiencing a pain in their body, that “it can’t be” anything serious and on that basis declining to see a doctor. By similarly assuming the truth of materialism, such thinkers have adopted an “it can’t be” stance toward mind-body dualism. Consequently, as J. P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh aptly remark, such dualism “has not been tried and found wanting so much as it has been judged unacceptable and left untried.”20
Moreover, dualists strongly agree with Searle that the denial by many accounts of human personhood of the reality of consciousness and intentionality21 is obviously false. It’s interesting to note that for this reason Searle, while emphatically denying the dualist claim that human persons have or are souls, is out of step with mainstream naturalists (who tend to be materialists). This is significant because, as Searle frequently insists in his writings, we do have genuinely conscious experiences that just are not — and that we know are not — physical states.22
Consider a familiar mental state: pain. When the door closes on my finger, I experience the sensation of being in pain. Dualists can readily agree with naturalists that certain neurophysiological (not to mention vocal cord!) events are occurring. However, neither those events nor any attendant brain states are the equivalent of my being in pain. That is because being in pain is an intrinsically first-person sensation; in other words, pain just is a subjective feeling. By characterizing a sensation or other mental state as being “first-person” (or private), we mean that it is such that the subject who’s having the sensation (in this case, the pain) has privileged access thereto: no third-person (or public) description of it could fully capture my pain.23 So a perfect description of the neurophysiological events would not include my feeling of the pain, which is to say that my feeling of pain cannot be adequately reconstrued as something physical. “A complete third-person description of the world,” according to Searle, “leaves out these [first-person conscious experiences], therefore the description is incomplete.”24 As Searle explains, we could join mainstream naturalists and “simply define…‘pain’ as patterns of neuronal activity that cause subjective sensations of pain.” But by doing so, Searle continues, “we would have achieved the same sort of reduction for pain [i.e., reducing the mental state to a physical state] that we have for heat [i.e., supposing we redefine ‘heat’ as simply mean kinetic energy of molecule movement]. But of course, the reduction of pain to its physical reality still leaves the subjective experience of pain unreduced….[W]here the phenomena that interest us most are the subjective experiences themselves, there is no way to carve anything off.”25 This is a significant point, because the “subjective experiences” Searle is saving from the materialist chopping block are the sine qua non of what dualists regard as immaterial mental states. To reduce (“carve off”) these mental states would be to deny they are real: if we “tried to say the pain is really ‘nothing but’ the patterns of neuron firings,” then “the essential features of the pain would be left out.”26 Again, that we have genuinely conscious experiences that are not physical objects is a central claim of mind-body dualism. Searle’s arguments in defense of genuinely conscious experiences, though not intended by him to bolster the case for mind-body dualism, constitute strong support for a central claim of dualism and ipso facto the Christian view of human persons.
Dualist in Spite of Himself?
As we have seen, Searle denies that two fundamentally different kinds of substances — immaterial and material — exist; the universe, he says, consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force. He insists, however, that humans have genuinely conscious experiences that are not physical objects. Searle’s attempt to reconcile those claims is an explanation he calls “biological naturalism,” a view that has come in for strong criticism from both mind-body dualists and mainstream naturalists.27
It is worth noting that Searle’s view entails property dualism. Property dualism is not mind-body dualism. Mind-body dualism affirms the existence of both immaterial and material substances. Property dualism is consistent with the denial that immaterial substance(s) exist and is therefore amenable to Searle’s scientific naturalism. Property dualism, though, does hold that in addition to “physical properties” (e.g., those of my laptop include weighing 4.5 pounds and being grey in color) there are also “non-physical properties” (e.g., my current thought has the non-physical property of being about the physical features of my laptop) that cannot be reduced to physical properties. All physical properties are fully describable via a third-person description, whereas that is not the case for non-physical properties, as Searle insists regarding conscious experiences. Again: though not the same as mind-body dualism, property dualism is nonetheless…well, a kind of dualism. In fairness, we should acknowledge that Searle adamantly insists he is not committed to property dualism.28 Yet despite his protestations, as Edward Feser carefully explains, Searle’s biological naturalism clearly entails property dualism.29 This matters because, according to numerous philosophers, property dualism constitutes evidence against naturalism and in favor of theism. The idea, in short, is that the existence and features of (non-physical) mental properties are notoriously difficult to fit into the worldview of naturalism. The theistic worldview, however, has no difficulty explaining the existence and features of mental properties — indeed, on theism, one expects to find these. Theism, then, is explanatorily superior to naturalism.30
In sum, Christians can find important common ground with Searle: that the assumption of materialism is problematic in the philosophy of mind; that it is absurd to deny that humans experience the reality of consciousness and intentionality; and that our subjective conscious experiences cannot be reduced to material objects.31
R. Keith Loftin, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Politics, Philosophy, Economics department at Dallas Baptist University.
NOTES
- Augustine, De Trinitate, 2nd ed., trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 2012), XV.2.11.
- “Brain, Mind, and Consciousness: A Conversation with Philosopher John Searle,” posted on “Insights” (blog of the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress), March 3, 2015, accessed November 8, 2024, https://blogs.loc.gov/kluge/2015/03/conversation-with-john-searle/.
- See R. Keith Loftin, “Consciousness, AI, and the Imago Dei,” Christian Research Journal, August 22, 2024, https://www.equip.org/articles/consciousness-ai-and-the-imago-dei/.
- According to “The Daily Californian” and other news outlets, in 2019 the University of California, Berkeley reportedly cut ties with Searle due to violations of the university’s sexual harassment policy. Sasha Langholz, “Former Professor John Searle Loses Emeritus Status over Violation of Sexual Harassment, Retaliation Policies,” The Daily Californian, July 13, 2019, https://www.dailycal.org/archives/former-professor-john-searle-loses-emeritus-status-over-violation-of-sexual-harassment-retaliation-policies/article_4c07ffc7-1dd5-5024-a417-526372e4ebdc.html.
- The nuances and varieties of naturalism(s), as well as penetrating critiques thereof, may be found in Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro’s Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008) and William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland’s edited volume Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2000).
- John R. Searle, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 108.
- John R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 33.
- Searle, Philosophy in a New Century, 109. For more on this, see Searle’s Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 4ff.
- Searle, Mind, Language and Society, 34.
- Searle, Mind, Language and Society, 34–35. Searle elsewhere writes: “Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof of the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in serious doubt, it is rather that in our deepest reflections we cannot take such opinions seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things…we remain convinced that either they have not heard the [scientific] news or they are in the grip of faith” (The Rediscovery of the Mind [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994], 90–91).
- Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130.
- Quentin Smith, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo 4, no. 2 (2001): 196–97.
- See, for example, John W. Cooper’s, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989) and the chapters on various Christian doctrines in R. Keith Loftin and Joshua R. Farris, eds., Christian Physicalism? Philosophical Theological Criticisms (New York: Lexington Books, 2017).
- Aristotle, On the Heavens, 271b8–9.
- John R. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 48.
- Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind, 3.
- Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind, 3–4.
- Some Christian scholars believe that humans are wholly physical beings, but this view (Christian physicalism) is not compatible with essential Christian beliefs. See, for example, Loftin and Farris, Christian Physicalism?, as well as R. Keith Loftin, “Souls and Christian Eschatology: A Critique of Christian Physicalism,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 60, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 195–209, https://equipthecalled.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/60.2_Loftin.pdf.
- See, for example, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 202–10 and the essays in Robert C. Koons and George Bealer, eds., The Waning of Materialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), 7.
- The term intentionality, Searle explains, “is a technical term…to refer to that capacity of the mind by which mental states refer to, or are about, or are of objects and states of affairs in the world other than themselves” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, 28).
- For example, Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction, 46 and Rediscovery of the Mind, 70.
- As E. J. Lowe explains, “There seems, then, to be a fundamental asymmetry between ‘first-person’ and ‘third-person’ knowledge of mental states — the knowledge of such states which one has in virtue of being a subject of such states oneself and the knowledge of such states which one has in virtue of being an observer of other subjects of such states” (An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 68).
- Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction, 98.
- Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind, 121, emphasis added (cf. Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction, 117f.). Angus Menuge helpfully explains this in Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 38f.
- Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind, 117.
- For example: J. P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument (New York: Routledge, 2008), 53–69; E. J. Lowe, “The Causal Autonomy of the Mental,” Mind 102, no. 408 (1993): 633–37; Jaegwon Kim, “Mental Causation in Searle’s ‘Biological Naturalism,’” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55, no. 1 (1995): 189–94; David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapters 4 and 5.
- He makes this claim in several places, perhaps most forcefully in “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist,” in Philosophy in a New Century, 152–60.
- Edward Feser, “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist,” accessed November 8, 2024, http://www.edwardfeser.com/unpublishedpapers/searle.html.
- See, for example, Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God, especially 38ff.; Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 192–215; Robert Adams, The Virtue of Faith and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 243–62. A slightly different version of such an argument is offered by Ben Page in “Arguing for Theism from Consciousness,” Faith and Philosophy 37, no. 3 (2020): 336–62.
- Thanks to Travis Dickinson and John M. DePoe for helpful input on this article.