John Cottingham, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, has taken to producing short challenging books for a wider audience, in addition to his more scholarly works. This is an excellent practice, given his flair for lucid and vigorous writing. His new book, In Search of the Soul, is an engaging, rational essay that aims to make a positive case for theism.

The author advances two of the lesser‐known arguments for the existence of God: the existence of the human soul and the existence of objective morality. The first argument holds that we can infer God's existence from the fact that we experience ourselves as conscious beings with a unified sense of self—in other words, as possessing a soul. While we do not apprehend the existence of the soul through direct revelation, we can nonetheless infer that we have one by contemplating the sort of creatures we are—conscious, intelligent, and rational beings—and the universe we inhabit, which appears to reflect a mind vastly superior to our own. The existence of God becomes plausible once we acknowledge that we possess a soul.

For Cottingham, this connection between theism and the notion of the self is clear. The conviction that human beings are created imago Dei is integral to theism, and this is seen as particularly true given our conscious minds, intellects, and wills. Cottingham suggests that theism can make sense of consciousness as being at the very center of reality by positing “a source … of all being that is somehow mind‐like” (p. 83).

It follows, according to Cottingham, that the “separatist” Platonic or Cartesian soul‐body conception is intellectually untenable. He sides with the “many scientifically oriented philosophers of mind” who insist that, rather than seeking metaphysical explanations for the soul, we should always try to find “naturalistic alternatives” (p. 49). He thus rejects mind‐body dualism and embraces a type of physicalism, which argues that the soul is the “form of the body” (following Aristotle's philosophy of nature). Though it is perhaps understandable that Cottingham wishes to gain the approval of modern materialistically‐minded scientists and philosophers, his flat denial of dualism causes a number of problems for both his theism and his idea of the self/soul. The Hebrew Bible is unequivocal that God has no body: God is spirit. So, if a nonphysical God created the physical universe, all theists (including Christians like Cottingham) have to be dualists of some kind. There is also the question of the way in which this dualism applies—if at all—to humans made in God's image. It seems clear, however, that monism (even dual‐aspect monism) cannot, strictly speaking, be true. The general philosophical definition of physicalism as the thesis that “everything is physical” must therefore be repudiated.

Another problem for Cottingham is that, by rejecting the idea that human beings possess any nonphysical “essence” in the form of a soul that is separate from the ever‐changing physical body, it becomes harder for him to sustain his central claim that an essential or core element of the human self persists through time. His key aim here is to rebut David Hume's proposition that the self is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions … in a perpetual flux and movement” (A Treatise of Human Nature, I, IV, §VI). But if dualism is false, as Cottingham claims, and the self is not an essential or autonomous entity but merely a cluster of sensations, then his theistic argument is flawed.

A further difficulty is that Cottingham fails to engage with arguments that lend support to Hume's denial of an essential autonomous self/soul. He makes no mention, for instance, of non‐Western traditions that reject the idea of the soul. The fundamental Buddhist concept of anatman holds that humans do not possess a continuing identity and that selfhood is a fiction. Buddhist and Humean perspectives have much in common: the seemingly “stable” self is a product of the incredibly rapid speed with which one sense impression, thought, or feeling succeeds another. An important aim of Buddhist meditation is to curtail all this mental activity, thus enabling the illusion of selfhood to disappear.

What of Cottingham's second argument for theism—that the existence of objective morality necessitates the existence of God? He is surely correct in maintaining that, without a transcendent source of goodness beyond the physical world, it is hard to see how objective values exist. For the theist, God is the “transcendent primordial and personal subject” (p. 99), the source of being and goodness. Cottingham is skeptical of philosophers such as Derek Parfit who assert that it is possible for moral truths to exist without God or some mind‐independent metaphysical realm. However, his further claim that we can actually see clear signs of “strong normativity”—the objective reality of the “values and beauties and duties” to which we have access as conscious beings (p. 92)—throughout human history and culture is ethnocentric and fails to withstand serious anthropological or historical scrutiny.

Such a claim can be sustained only if one shares Cottingham's tendency to confirmation bias and ignores the huge diversity of moral values across time and place. There is little or no evidence, for example, that slavery or the oppression of women were seen as intrinsically wrong among the ancient Greeks. And our modern disgust at the gladiatorial contests so popular in Roman antiquity does not spring from an innate revulsion at the thought of extreme cruelty and merciless killing. The abhorrence we have for such things is very much a legacy of Judeo‐Christian precepts about the sanctity of human life. What many liberal literati assume to be absolute and immutable values tend on the whole to be artifacts of specific religious and cultural systems. It thus seems difficult to uphold the idea that human values are objective, given their manifest contingency and variability.

Cottingham's anthropocentric claim that moral values are uniquely human is also highly questionable. Charles Darwin suggested that our moral sense has evolutionary antecedents and is shared with other species. Cottingham, by contrast, seems unwilling to admit that human notions of morality may well be rooted in the social instincts found in other animals, where cooperation and altruistic practices are vital for the survival of the group.

While Cottingham's arguments for theism may have philosophical potential, this book lacks intellectual rigor in that it fails to answer the many objections to those arguments. That said, In Search of the Soul is a good read, composed in the author's clear and interesting style, employing a discriminating use of cliché. It also succeeds in Cottingham's aim of embracing a more humane approach to scholarship.