Patricia asked:

What are the views of Richard Dawkins on the body/ soul distinction?

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Richard Dawkins is an atheist. He does not believe that the universe was created by God, nor that the
conditions being exactly right for the emergence of intelligent life-forms, such as humans, was
anything other than chance. All the complexity of life on earth, including human consciousness, can
be explained, or will be explained, by reference to evolution by natural selection.

He is also a materialist. That is, he believes there is no evidence for anything immaterial or
non-physical. So, not only is there no God, there are no souls, there is no life after death. You are
your body, nothing more. Therefore, Dawkins has to accept one or other of the various materialist
theories of the mind. Broadly speaking, he has to believe that either mental states simply are events
in the brain, or that they are at least caused by events in the brain.

Dawkins is unpopular with many religious believers because he has written so scathingly of religion,
and especially of creationism, but many philosophers who are not themselves theists or dualists think
his arguments are overstated and simplistic in that he draws extremely firm conclusions from
arguments that underestimate the complexity of the issues (philosophically if not biologically).

Dawkins is not himself a philosopher. The philosopher with whom he seems most in sympathy is
Daniel Dennett, so it might be worth checking out his books, such as Consciousness Explainedand
Freedom Evolves.A writer with whom Dawkins is associated and who has attempted to account for
all mental processes in term of brain activity is Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works.

If we reject the idea of an immaterial soul, we are still left with a question about what makes you you.
Do you have a true self? What is the connection between your self and your body? This connects
with the question of personal identity, and with other question in the philosophy of mind. In order to be
sure that the person typing this now is the same person who was typing another answer yesterday,
do we need to refer to my body only, to my brain specifically, to my memories, or what?

The questions raised by the old philosophers, such as Plato, Descartes and Hume, do not go away.
Their own "solutions" may be rejected or modified, but they often perceived the difficulties and the
importance of the questions so sharply that they still influence the debate today. There are still plenty
of philosophers who are theists, and some who are dualists (Richard Swinburne is one). They are not
stupid people and when Dawkins gives the impression that they are, he is wrong to do so, in my view.

Graham Nutbrown