Dreher's critique:
[Stephen Asma's formulation is] not going to satisfy people who speak of the soul as the part of oneself that exists in some immaterial way, and which will survive the death of the body. I see Asma's point about the impossibility of proving empirically that the soul exists -- though I wonder what he would make of the many, many testimonies made by people who have experienced clinical death, but have been revived by doctors and returned with stories of having floated above their bodies and seen what was happening. Many of these people relate accurate physical descriptions of what they saw, things they couldn't have already seen. Anyway, if Asma is trying to get Aspie-ish philosophers to open their minds to meanings in soul-talk that don't require one to sign up for a belief in a noncorporeal human person, that's one thing. But few people who genuinely care about the question of immortality and numinous phenomena are going to find this to be much of an answer.