French philosopher Blaise Pascal rightly remarked that the soul’s nature is so important that one must have lost all feeling not to care about the issue.

The soul also contains faculties of smell, touch, taste, and hearing. Taken together, these five are called sensory faculties of the soul.

When the term is used of God, it clearly does not mean physical breath or life.

As mentioned above, the Pharisees were among the groups that accepted 1–3 and they shaped the thinking of the common people in Jesus’ day. The Sadducees appear to be the major exception to the rule, but opinion is divided about the precise nature of their beliefs.

The core of the modal argument for the soul is fairly simple: I am possibly disembodied (I could survive without my brain or body); my brain or body are not possibly disembodied (they could not survive without being physical); so I am not my brain or body. I am either a soul or a brain or a body, so I am a soul.

What are these supreme tasks and situations? Swinburne claims they include developing a friendship with God, learning to care for others who have that same friendship, caring for and beautifying God’s creation, and the like. Heaven is not a reward for good behavior; it is a home for good people.

The second preliminary is this: We should interpret a biblical passage in light of what its original audience would have understood it to mean. Now it is widely acknowledged that people all over the world throughout the ages have been substance dualists who depict life after death as involving the departure of the soul. This belief predates the

Second, a substance is a continuant—it can change by gaining new properties and losing old ones, yet it remains the same thing throughout the change.

Most lay Christians would be surprised to learn that, among contemporary Christian intellectuals, there is a widespread loathing for substance dualism (hereafter, just “dualism”). We are often told that biblical revelation depicts the human person as a holistic unity whereas dualism is a Greek concept falsely read into the Bible by many in the