In this context, substance refers to what which makes up a being, humans in this case, and so refers to our fundamental construct, our ontology.
Terminology can be tricky but, in short, substance dualism, referring to two, proposes that we consist of body and spirit or of body and soul.
The substance trialism I am proposing proposes that we are body, soul, and spirit.
What the difference between soul and spirit may be is also tricky—as is where mind comes into the mix especially since some would claim no distinction between soul and spirit and claim that mind is just an a.k.a. for soul/spirit.
In any case, my proposal is actually very, very simple and can be said to be premised upon one biblical verse.
Variously, Genesis 2:7 reads thusly:
ESV: then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
KJV: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
NASB: Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living person.
NIV: Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
God form the body and infuses into it “the breath of life” which results in “became a living soul,” “a living person,” “a living being.”
Conceptually, this appears to tell us that God caused a body to be infused with one of His (what theologians would term) communicable attributes.
God causes the body to become animated when He transfers to it something that causes it to become animated which is describes as becoming a living being, coming to life.
A basic level metaphor for what how I am reading this is that the body is like a computer’s hardware: the physical components, the aspects of it we can see and touch.
What God breathes into the body is like the spirit, the electricity without which the computer does not function.
Living soul/person/being would be like the software. Hardware plus electricity would still result in a computer that does nothing. The point of combining hardware and electricity is so that the software is given a manner whereby to manifest, to function, to be expressed, to do.
The spirit within us seems to be an impersonal force, energy. I am granting that in any langue words, phrases, terms can have more than one meaning and more than one usage.
For example, we hear of someone having “the spirit of” what have you—jealously, for example.
A spirit, proper, has no flesh and bone (Luke 24:39)—is not physical—and yet, can incarnate. Biblically, there are some spirits who are not incarnated, such as demons, and some spirits who are incarnated, such as humans.
A disincarnate spirit may perhaps be thought of as a mind without a brain and would seem to be more like a spirit and soul since it exhibits characteristics of personhood which, on my theory, are soulish.
The soul/person/being is the personal aspect of who we are, it is who we are—and may be correlateable to mind.
In the simplest of terms, just like a computer is hardware, software, and electricity (an electricity that is not intrinsic to it, by the way, but comes from without—just like God infused the body with the spirit of life), so we humans are a substance trialism of body, soul, and spirit.
This beings some emotive Atheist counters into play since some have asserted that since if the brain gets damaged and the person ceased to function as they once did (due to dying or becoming mentally challenged in some way) then that proves there are no minds but only brains.
Plugging my metaphor into this concludes in that if we smash a computer’s hardware with a baseball bat and so the computer ceases to function, then that proves that software does not exist.
Moreover, we would be dealing with a damaged enough body that the soul would no longer be able to express itself through it.
Yet, it may be possible to retrieve the software from a non-functioning computer/hardware and re-install it into a new computer. And were we have a picture of what resurrection implies (even if it is a bit sloppy since we would be dealing with repairing the damaged hardware) since God would seem to retrieve the soul/software from the damaged body/hardware, would repair the body/hardware, upload the soul/software, and reinfuse it with the spirit/electricity.
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