The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 235 of 254
Christians without dualist souls
Having dismissed the idea that we have immaterial souls, you might assume that there is nothing left to be said for the Christian idea of a life to come. However, I was surprised to discover that many Christians, including Pope Benedict XVI, do not believe in the dualist soul of Descartes or Richard Swinburne. Far from being a core creed of Christianity, it is arguably not authentically Christian at all. Rather, as the Christian psychologist Warren S. Brown puts it, many Christians see the person ‘as a unitary physical entity without a separate nonphysical soul, but not reducible to “nothing but” the physiology of cells of the chemistry of molecules’.1 This is very much like the kind of material person I described in Chapter Seven: we are no more than, but more than just, matter.