Plato and Hume on Life Before Birth, part 2

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Plato on Life Before Birth, Part 2

In a previous post I wrote that the attempt to prove Plato’s claim that there is life before birth is not a matter of relating ideas/concepts but is best understood as a claim about a matter of fact.  That claim can be stated in this way: “The human soul exists before the birth of the human body it now inhabits.”    The effort to prove that each individual human being lives a life before birth is now removed from the hands of the analytic philosopher and is put into the hands of the scientist. 

The scientist will attack this problem in the same way she would attempt to solve any other scientific problem.  She would begin by stating the problem as a hypothesis, as formulated in the prior sentence.  But before she starts down this path, she must show that the hypothesis is testable and falsifiable.  She must show not only that there are ways that the hypothesis can be tested and confirmed, but she must show that there are ways to disconfirm or falsify it.   

Here is an analogy:  Suppose I tell you that my success at growing prize-winning tomatoes in my garden every summer is due to the fact that God helps me tend my garden.  If you ask me how I know this, I say “I just know it. I feel the hand of God as I till the soil.”  You are sceptical, but upon thinking about it, it occurs to you that there is no way to show that my claim is false.  There are no observations you or anyone could make that would show that God does not guide my hand as I tend my garden.  

Is there a way to falsify the hypothesis that the human soul exists before the birth of the body it now inhabits?  There is no experiment that a scientist could perform that would answer this question.  A scientist can trace the gradual development of a newborn child from the moment of conception.  For example, they know when the first nerve cells develop in the fetus.  If other scientists want to show that this timeline is false, they know how to go about proving this.  But there are no experiments scientists could use to prove it false that the newborn’s soul inhabits the fetus prior to the birth of the infant.  Like the analogy of God tending my garden, the scientist does not know what the evidence confirming or disconfirming the soul hypothesis would or could look like.

To sum up:  David Hume’s reaction to Plato’s theory of the immortality of the human soul (see Part 1) is that it is a hypothesis that cannot be supported by either the method of showing a relation of ideas (concepts), or the method of proving it as a matter of fact. If there are people who still believe that the human soul exists before the birth of the body, then they will have to profess it as a matter of faith, not as a matter of reason.

[see more discussion of this topic in my books Understanding David Hume and Understanding Philosophy  The latter book is new and is free to those who subscribe to the website]