For the majority of my life I was a substance dualist and I believed in the complete duality between mind and matter. I believed that the mind was a complete separate substance from matter and that they were both equally real. Substance dualism is very popular in religious circles and its one of the many major positions on philosophy of mind. However a few years back I was seriously starting to doubt it. The biggest problem in substance dualism is the interaction problem which states that mental affects cannot have physical effects because of its duality. To put it in simple terms how can a complete separate substance such as the mind have a real physical affect on the body and how can brain damage change the mind in ways that it effects personality. In other words if the mind can effect the brain and vice versa then they have a shared property and thus they are not separate substances after all. This problem along with many others gave me serous doubt about dualism and at the time substance dualism was the only game in town since I was a christian and I was taught my whole life about the duality between mind and matter. When I mentioned the interaction problem to my pastors they were never able to solve it they were just appealing to mystery and that there is some unknown way that mind can interact with matter. When my pastors couldn’t answer this problem I tried to get resources outside my church such as popular christian apologist like Frank Turek and William lane Craig but they are also substance dualist and I really could never find any solution to the interaction problem from any apologist out there. Christian apologist have written extensively on the problem of evil, arguments for Gods existence etc. But no apologist could solve the interaction problem since I could never find an article from them that addressed and this not only brought doubt to substance dualism but also my entire christian worldview since at the time I was only taught substance dualism was in scripture and so at the time if substance dualism was false then Christianity was false. It’s similar to being taught that if evolution is true then the bible is false except that this time even the theistic evolutionist and the most popular christian apologist are teaching that if substance dualism is false then Christianity is false. So it has the same issues in that regard. Not only that but at the time it wasn’t ancient that I reject young earth creationism and dispensationalism since I just came to also accept evolution as true. So basically i went a full 180 degree turn when I accepted evolution since now I was critically thinking about my faith and its implications and this is when I was doubting substance dualism. At this time in my life I was forced to reject substance dualism because of the interaction problem and the only alternative that I knew about at the time was materialism since I was taught that it was either materialism or dualism and nothing more than that. So I became an agnostic for a short time and I didn’t believe in God or the bible. That lasted for a short while until I came across a YouTube video called “Quantum physics debunks materialism” made by inspiroringphilosophy. At first I thought that the video would be defending substance dualism but I was surprised because it was actually defending a completely different position called idealism. Once that occurred I was really confused because I had no idea about other positions other than materialism or dualism so I went through inspiroringphilosophys channel and I realized that its main purpose was christian apologetics and defending the gospel of Jesus christ. I then proceeded to watch the other videos and it presented arguments for God that I have never heard of and not only that but I was unable to come up with rational objections to the arguments. These were the Digital physics argument and the introspective argument. I also watched his series on the case for the soul and I realized that he was arguing for an idealist version of the soul rather than substance dualism and the idealist version didn’t have the interaction problem or any other problem that substance dualism had. At this point I really had no reason to doubt idealism as true and so I accepted idealism because of the evidence he presented in his videos. Now I am an idealist and accept it because that’s were the evidence points too and I have no rational reason to reject it. And thats my short story of why I converted from substance dualism to idealism. Now I have a much better understand of it than I did before and can defend it in a rational way. I could go more in detail on idealism but I will save that for other post in this blog.