In his book "Matter and Mind: A Philosophical Inquiry", world-renowned atheist philosopher of science and physicist Mario Bunge offers several objections to mind-body dualism. One of them is this:
Dualism violates physics, in particular the law of conservation of energy. For instance, energy would be created if a decision to take a walk were an event in the nonmaterial soul. Moreover, dualism is inconsistent with the naturalistic ontology that underpins all of the factual sciences. This makes brainless psychology an anomalous solitary discipline. It also deprives the science of mind of the panoply of surgical and pharmaceutical tools that allows it to treat successfully the mental disorders that do not respond to psychotherapy. (p. 150)
Actually, Bunge is providing several objections in the above quotation, but I'm going to comment in his argument that dualism violates physics.
What Bunge doesn't mention (and this is astonishing, because he is himself a professional physicist, with a PhD in that science) is that the law of conservation of energy applies only in CLOSED SYSTEMS (that is, in systems which are closed from the input of external sources of energy). Properly speaking, the law says that in a closed system, the energy is always conserved.
But if a non-material soul (God, spirits, etc.) exists, then the whole point is that such entities are not part of the closed system of the physical world.
As comments philosopher Uwe Meixner:
It is alleged again and again that the nonphysical causation of physical events is bound to violate received physics because it, allegedly, entails the violation of the law of the preservation of energy, or the violation of the law of the preservation of momentum. Repetition does not make false allegations any less false. First, in physics, the mentioned preservation laws are always asserted under the condition that the physical system with regard to which they are asserted is a so-called closed system: that no energy or momentum is coming into the system from entities that are outside of it, or is going out of the system to entities outside of it. Now, physics is silent on the question whether the entire physical world is a closed system. Moreover, it does not seem to be an analytic truth that the physical world is such a system. It follows that in order to have the nonphysical causation of physical events conflict with the preservation laws, it is necessary to go beyond physics and to assume the metaphysical hypothesis that the physical world is a closed system." (New Perspectives for a Dualistic Conception of Mental Causation. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15, No. 1, 2008, pp. 18–19)
As physicist Ulrich Mohrhoff commented in my interview with him:
Energy is only conserved within a closed physical system. To assume the universal validity of the law of energy conservation is to assume that the physical universe is causally closed. If one assumes that the physical universe is causally closed, then nothing nonphysical can influence the goings-on in the physical universe. This begs the question of whether the physical universe is causally closed. I have discussed this in detail in a paper titled “The physics of interactionism,” which appeared in Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (Nos. 8–9, pp. 165–184) and The Volitional Brain (Imprint Academic, 1999). It can be downloaded at http://thisquantumworld.com/PDF/Mohrhoff_JCS.pdf.
Bunge's argument against dualism based upon physics is a textbook example of the fallacy of begging the question.
A COMMENT ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF MIRACLES
Traditionally, a miracle has been defined as a violation of natural laws. More exactly, we should to define a miracle as something which is physically impossible, that is, impossible given the operations of nature based on natural laws.
But it is important to understand that natural laws include implicitly ceteris paribus conditions or assumptions, that is, conditions that are assumed in order to make operative and relevant the natural law in question in a given case.
As philosopher William Lane Craig comments:
natural laws are assumed to have implicit in them certain ceteris paribus assumptions such that a law states what is the case under the assumption that no other natural factors are interfering. When a scientific anomaly occurs, it is usually assumed that some unknown natural factors are interfering, so that the law is neither violated nor revised. But suppose the law fails to describe or predict accurately because some supernatural factors are interfering? Clearly the implicit assumption of such laws is that no supernatural factors as well as no natural factors are interfering.
In the case of the law of conservation of energy, as Meixner and Mohrhoff pointed out, the implicit assumption behind Bunge's objection is that the universe is a closed system. Given such condition, the law of conservation holds. Delete such condition, and the law of conservation doesn't hold anymore, because interfering factors outside of the physical universe (e.g. the causal action of God or any nonmaterial soul) could be creating energy, so in that case the universe wouldn't be working as a closed system.
Naturalists, including brilliant philosophers like Bunge, are so convinced that atheistic naturalism is true, that they are intellectually blind to see the implicit conditions which make relevant the natural laws in question. Hence, they commit the sophomoric mistakes of using naturalism-assuming arguments against views which precisely challenge naturalism (what is question-begging).
The insights by Craig, Meixner and Mohrhoff provide us with a philosophical framework to understand the occurrence of events which are physically impossible (but possible for nonphysical modes of causation coming from non-physical entities, if they exist). That is, for "miracles".
If God exists, then in principle it cannot be excluded that God could be causally efficacious in the world in certain moments. In such case, the effects directly caused by God (which bypasses the natural laws) will be events inexplicable from the perspective of natural laws, because such events are not consequence of the functioning of natural laws (Note that, in the standard Big Bang model, the beginning of the universe from a singularity would be plausibly a case like this, since the singularity is not the effect of any natural law, because natural laws themselves, together with matter, energy and space-time, were created in such Big Bang singularity. This is why, in order to avoid theism, even sophisticated and brilliant atheists like Quentin Smith are forced to hold the extremely implausible, wholly unwarranted and purely ad hoc view that the universe's beginning came from "Nothingness").
We have to keep this in mind, because common atheist objections against miracles tend (like Bunge regarding dualism) to beg the question against the theist. For example, some atheists claim that the resurrection of Jesus is impossible because it is physically impossible (given our current scientific knowledge of anatomy, cell biology, celullar apoptosis) that a dead body comes to life again.
But the believer in Jesus' resurrection fully agrees with the atheist that such thing is physically impossible. The Christian is not arguing that Jesus rose naturally from the death, but that Jesus rose supernaturally (i.e. in virtue of nonphysical, nonnatural modes of causation which bypasses the functioning of natural laws) from the death.
The atheist objection conflates the proposition "Jesus was risen naturally from the death" with the (wholly different, from an ontological viewpoint) proposition "Jesus was risen supernaturally from the death". While the former is extremely unlikely (even physically impossible), the latter is impossible only if supernatural modes of causation doesn't exist. But this begs the question against theism, which postulates precisely a supernatural and omnipotent being called God.
As William Lane Craig comments:
With respect to the resurrection of Jesus, for example, the hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is not improbable, either relative to our background information or to the specific evidence. What is improbable relative to our background information is the hypothesis "Jesus rose naturally from the dead." Given what we know of cell necrosis, that hypothesis is fantastically, even unimaginably, improbable. Conspiracy theories, apparent death theories, hallucination theories, twin brother theories--almost any hypothesis, however unlikely, seems more probable than the hypothesis that all the cells in Jesus's corpse spontaneously came back to life again. But such naturalistic hypotheses are not more probable than the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead. The evidence for the laws of nature relevant in this case makes it probable that a resurrection from the dead is naturally impossible, which renders improbable the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the grave. But such evidence is simply irrelevant to the probability of the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead. That hypothesis needs to be weighed in light of the specific evidence concerning such facts as the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, the vacancy of the tomb where Jesus's corpse was laid, the origin of the original disciples' firm belief that God had, in fact, raised Jesus, and so forth, in the religio-historical context in which the events took place and assessed in terms of the customary criteria used in justifying historical hypotheses, such as explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth. When this is done, there is no reason a priori to expect that it will be more probable that the testimony is false than that the hypothesis of miracle is true.
If God exists, then we cannot say that it is "improbable" that a miracle occurs, because such probability cannot be calculated given God's decisions being free. How are you going to calculate the probability of what a fully free agent like God (if He exists) is going to do in a specific moment?
The atheist simply assumes that it is impossible or extremely improbable, since he doesn't believe in miracles (because he doesn't believe in God). So, naively (or ignorantly), he tries to interpret the miracle in terms of the probability of such event given our knowledge of the natural working of the world. But such knowledge is irrelevant to assess the probability of supernatural events coming from a free agent.
This approach can be seen in Bart Ehrman debate with William Lane Craig, in which Ehrman argued that we don't see people walking on water or coming to life after they're dead... but obviously it only shows that naturally, these things don't happen. (It tells us absolutely nothing about if such things could happen supernaturally in specific, exceptional cases of God's action in the world). Craig called Ehrman's bad arguments "Ehrman's egregious error and blunders", and proved with the Bayes' Theorem, that Ehrman's objections against miracles are mathematically false.
The above arguments discussed in this post don't prove that dualism or the resurrection are true. But they prove that the typical and most common atheistic objections against such positions are, when examined in detail, extremely weak and sophomoric and (in some case, like Ehrman's) mathematically false.
There are not reasons to take such objections seriously.
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