How Do You Solve the Mind-Body Problem?

How do the mind and the body interact with each other?

QUESTION: Dr. Craig, if you are a philosophical dualist, how do you solve the mind-body problem? In particular, how do the substance’s body and mind causally interact?

DR. CRAIG: Wow. I am not an expert in philosophy of mind. My colleague J. P. Moreland is, and he has just written a book on this subject with Brandon Rickabaugh that is about 600 and some pages long and is going to be published by Wiley Blackwell out of Oxford. I would commend to you J. P.'s work. In my systematic philosophical theology, however, I did deal with this so-called causal interaction problem because it poses an objection not merely to anthropological dualism but to divine immateriality or incorporeality. I think there are a number of things that can be said about that. One thing is that we have very good reason to believe that there is an immaterial mind who has created the universe. I'm thinking here of things like the fine-tuning argument, the applicability of mathematics, and the Kalam cosmological argument. Therefore, we have good reason to believe that such a being exists even if we don't understand how he interacts with the physical world. In the same way, J. P. and Brandon would say that we have very good reasons for affirming anthropological dualism even if we do not at the end of the day understand how the mind causally interacts with the body. Many mind-body philosophers will point out that we don't really understand ultimately how physical objects causally interact with one another! At the deepest level, causation remains a mystery just as much for physical-physical causation as for mental-physical causation. And then the final point that I would make that I think is extremely powerful is Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. Plantinga's argument is not really an argument against naturalism. It's really an argument against the causal closure of the physical. And what he shows is that it's impossible rationally to affirm both evolution and the causal closure of the physical, because in that case your beliefs are not selected for truth value, but merely for survivability, and therefore you can have no confidence that your faculties are reliable. So it becomes impossible to affirm naturalism and the causal closure of the physical. This is literally irrational. In that case the objection to dualism just completely collapses because it's based upon the belief in naturalism and the causal closure of the physical which cannot be rationally affirmed.