Does Christianity as described in the Bible support dualism of the mind and body?

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Of course, in philosophy, all of these terms are contested. That is what philosophers do. Philosophically, there is a problem about what exactly is meant by "physical" or "material". If the intention is to exclude the soul, God, etc., then it is certainly incompatible with Christianity, however the definition is made. Still, it's a tricky business to actually write the definition.

Also, "dualism" is a loaded term because it has often been used to refer to a very strict separation between mind and body. This detachment is not an essential feature of the Christian view. For example, life after death could be explained by saying that the body dies but the soul survives, or else by divine reconstruction of the consciousness in a new form. The latter version is not dualistic, but it is a decent match to, say, Paul's account of the raising of the spiritual body.

Materialism or physicalism has been held to be inherently atheistic, because God is understood to be a spiritual being, and therefore beyond the realm of material or physical inquiry. Moreover, Christianity asserts that God reveals truths to humans which were otherwise inaccessible1, whereas the whole point of physicalism is that every truth is deducible (in principle) from physical observation and reason, or else it is unknowable. (Here, I mean something less formal than "doing science" - I'm not saying that materialism is tied to any methodology, but that it's a metaphysical position about how we come to know things. Hence it is basically the same thing as asserting the materiality of the mind: our consciousness being purely physical means that everything about the mind can be explained by the material conditions of the world.) As an axiom of metaphysics, this does not find Biblical support.

As your examples show, the Bible does support the idea that knowledge can be obtained as a result of observation and reason. God is forever saying "look at this!". But that doesn't mean that's all there is to it. Even if we can explain certain things by physics - the way that light enters the eye, and nerve signals reach the brain - the divine hand is not necessarily absent. We learn from Scripture all about the continuous divine command over the natural world. (Let's not worry about determinism, though! We have enough problems already.) So we may be able to form a world-view where the production of material knowledge is still due to God; the physical account ("it's all because of quantum") does not destroy the spiritual version ("God did it"). Natural law theories are a good example.

1. Actually, I suppose this might be a contested point. Certainly there are things we don't know (1 Cor 13:12 is as good a proof-text as any) and things which have been revealed (the Bible, passim). Perhaps John 6:44-46, quoting Isaiah 54:13, is enough to show that certain things taught by God could not have been known to us without the action of God. Longer example passages include Hebrews 11 (faith in things not seen) and 1 Corinthians 2 (God reveals things we have not imagined) quoting Isaiah 64:4 (nobody has heard or seen).

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What is the problem with dualism? Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war A universe which contains things that are obviously bad and apparently meaningless; however containing creatures as ourselves who know what is bad and meaningless verses what is good and righteous. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. In modern Christianity, it usually expressed that all visible reality is corrupted by sin. The world around us (including your human body and its desires) is distorted, insufficient, and evil. Fortunately, there is a spiritual reality that is good. This alternate good reality includes everything that is unseen (God, Heaven, the human spirit).

I believe that when Christianity is dominated by dualistic thought, it does terrible damage to God’s purpose for His people. Subscribing to dualistic Christianity causes us to find little value in this world (except to lead others to Christ and spread the gospel before going to Heaven). The goal within this dualistic view of reality is to escape the corrupted physical world and enter the perfect spiritual world. Dualism causes us to see beauty as meaningless, to find no value in art, to abandon any need to preserve nature, to see science and discovery as futile, to view any attempt to ease the physical suffering of other humans as empty, to see pleasure as a distraction from our ultimate destination, and to see our personality as something to overcome, rather than embraced.

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