Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Man, Part 10.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

In our last session, we completed a look at the biblical data supporting a dualistic view of anthropology.

Today, I want to say something by way of a philosophical defense of dualism, interactionism.

Rob Coons and George Beeler, in their book, The Waning of Materialism,

have pointed out that the physicalist view of the mind has been waning in recent years among

professional philosophers. They're beginning to realize

the many problems with a materialistic anthropology and are starting to move away from it.

Now, in order to appreciate the problems that materialism faces, it will be helpful to draw some basic

distinctions in the philosophy of mind.

So, beginning with the mind, there are two fundamentally different accounts of the mind. One would be physicalism or materialism, and the other will be dualism.

Physicalism holds that there is no immaterial constituent of human being, that human beings

are simply material organisms. Now, physicalism comes in two versions. One would be reductive

physicalism and the other is non-reductive physicalism.

The other is non-reductive physicalism. Reductive physicalism and non-reductive

physicalism. Reductive physicalism holds that mental states are identical to physical brain states.

So far as the mind is concerned, there is just the brain and its physical states.

All of our supposed mental states are reducible to brain states.

Now, by contrast, non-reductive physicalism holds that while the soul or our mental states

are not reducible to the brain or to physical brain states,

nevertheless, the soul is not a real thing. Mental states are mental properties

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