Thoughts on the (nonexistence of) the Soul

I’ve written a good bit on this blog about Christian resistance to the idea that all life, including humans, came to be in a naturalistic, gradual way over millions of years through evolution. I’ve written about it because there’s a lot of public and private discussion on the matter, so it’s relevant.

But evolution is a very easy conversation to have when compared to another that I think eventually must also talk place if we are ever to be fully intellectually honest about our theological positions. I’m talking here about the nature of Being in a metaphysical sense. I’m talking about the scientific status of the soul. The question is quite central for me since I’m a cognitive scientist – I study the mind and there isn’t any clear way in which the mind and the soul can be considered to be different things. In fact, I don’t think there can be a difference on any grounds other than the purely imaginative.

It’s easy to see why this is the case. Just ask the age-old question: what is the soul? How do you answer it? You surely cannot say “The soul is who I am” since it is quite easy to change who you are. Say I hit your right frontal lobe with a hammer. Say you survive the incident, but you have changed. You no longer find things funny, say. Or perhaps you can no longer solve simple problems like tying your shoes or turning off a faucet. Who you are has changed at a very essential level. Has your soul changed, too? Or think about people with severe autism. All evidence suggests that such people do not have a “mental life” in the same way that normal people do. It isn’t clear they even think of themselves as people or have a notion of what it means to be a person. Do they have souls? Or what about the living but brain dead, kept alive on life support. Do they have souls? If they do, then what do we say about them? Perhaps they have souls but just can’t “get in touch” with them? If that’s the case, then do we need to posit a mind~soul connection that gets disrupted when our minds are damaged or unconscious? If they don’t, they the question of what the soul is really comes into focus. It seems we have to say that, if we have souls, we cannot detect or experience them. In that case, why say we have them at all?

You see what trouble we get into here very quickly. There doesn’t seem to be any sense in which humans can be said to have a soul (or spirit or whatever the term) apart from their minds.

Less than a hundred years ago we might have been comfortable with that conclusion. But now we know that the mind, like everything else in the world, is a manifestation of matter (namely, brain matter). We can study the mind like we study the universe, and one day we hope to actually understand exactly how it is that the grey matter in our heads gives rise to the mental world we experience (though we are far, far away from that goal and it isn’t clear we’ll ever reach it). There seems to be no room here for a soul, no possible hypothesis that makes any sense at all. And even if we were to conclude that the mind is the soul, we would still have a serious theological issue. For if we accept the view that the soul leaves the body when we die and goes somewhere (heaven or hell or the hallway closet), we have to explain how the set of characteristics that constitute our mental state could exist outside of the grey matter that gave rise to it. Don’t let talk about information theory and artificial intelligence fool you: there is no comfort there. If you are your mind (and you are), then you are also inextricably your body as well. All of cognitive science points to the fact that minds are very particularly human things that result from particularly human brains. It all points to this: outside of your body, you do not exist.

From a traditional religious standpoint, we are left here with a pretty bleak view: the conclusion that (1) the soul or spirit does not exist in any definable way, and (2) if we define the soul as existing in the mind (the only possible choice), the soul cannot exist apart from the body. The theological implications are pretty clear to me: when we die, we are dead. We don’t “go” anywhere. We don’t continue to exist once our brains stop functioning. We just die.

This is a devastating conclusion to reach. It isn’t any wonder we are more than willing to forego applying natural science to the mind, to maintain as much mystery there as possible. We don’t want to face the fact that we are mortal in a final, definitive sense. I suspect this is behind much of the methodological dualism that plagues cognitive sciences from vision to linguistics.

But here is what is amazing: as soon as the scientist in me reaches the point of despair at the conclusions he has reached, the Christian in me grasps onto hope. For the when it comes to life after death, the central teaching of the Bible is not that we go to heaven when we die. In fact, it is difficult to find solid theological ground for this position in the scriptures anywhere. What IS central is the hope of resurrection, something the Bible clearly describes as a physical, bodily raising from the dead. When Christ returns, we learn, our actual, physical bodies will be brought forth from the ground and transformed in a physical way into everlasting bodies and we will live again, forever.

What more affirming position could we arrive at? Just as we learn from science that we cannot exist apart from our bodies, we learn from scripture that we do not have to. God fully intends to restore our bodies after our deaths when his Kingdom comes fully to the earth. And then we will exist again, and forever, with him.

In the end, then, I think the Christian position is an incredibly hopeful one. But you can probably imagine how difficult it would be to get Christians thinking along these lines. That's because we are so incredibly resistant to the idea of our own mortality, a fact that makes a great deal of sense biologically. But I do think we if want a theology that is intellectually honest with regard to scientific inquiry, a position like this one is the only sensible one to have.

Evolution Sunday

The day after tomorrow is Evolution Sunday, a national event organized by Michael Zimmerman (a professor at Butler) and others with an aim to get pastors talking about science from the pulpit. Its an event of the larger Clergy Letter Project which asks clergy around the world to sign off on the idea that science and faith are not incompatible and, explicitly, that evolution is the best theory out there for explaining life's origins. To quote part of the letter:

While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.

The letter has over 10,000 signatures and on Sunday over 550 churches in the nation will hear a message about science (and possibly about evolution explicitly) from their pulpits (the date, btw, was chosen to approximate Darwin's birthday which is on the 12th).

My feelings about Evolution Sunday are mixed. On the one hand, I think the event is a good thing since it at least conveys to the media and population at large that it is actually possible for serious Christians to accept evolution as valid. The percieved division between faith and science is very often propelled by the media, so the fact that the media has picked up on the event is a good thing, I think.

On the other hand, a glance at the signatories of the Letter and those taking part in Evolution Sunday reveals that the vast majority are from mainline denominations. Presbyterian, Lutheran, and especially the United Church of Christ are well-represented (as well as, of course, unitarian churches). Precious few evangelical congregations have even signed the letter much less agreed to preach about science. The project thus exaggerates a division already present in the church and reinforces the stereotypes of the 'enlightened' mainline Protestant vs. the ignorant, backward evangelical. When I brought this up on the Panda's Thumb, Zimmerman reponded to me that "the clergy letter project is not designed to change the minds of fundamentalists..." but to "educate the vast majority of Christians who, if told they have to choose between religion and modern science, are likely to opt for religion."

This betrays, to me, a basic misunderstanding of what makes evangelicals evangelicals (disregarding his inaccurate use of the term 'fundmanetalist'). One of the (if not THE) defining characteristics of an evangelical christian (vs. a mainline protestant) is that for evangelicals the head pastor of the local church is the final authority on all things spiritual and theological. If anyone is "telling" a Christian that they have to choose between religion and science, it is the pastor. Zimmerman doesn't know it, but if the Clergy Letter were to accomplish the goal is sets for it, the result would be a serious undermining of the basic infrastructure of the majority of churches in America. This isn't a condemnation of the project (I said above that I'm in favor of it). But it does create a deep pessimism that the project or any other like it could ever hope to "educate" evangelical Christians. After all, the theory of evolution doesn' t have any serious impact on most people's daily lives, and certainly not more than their church does. Given the choice between their church and evolution, evangelicals will choose their church every time.

So what is the solution here? The only way to actually change the minds of evangelical Christians about science and evolution, I think, is to convince evangelical pastors that science is a proper subject for theological reflection and Sunday morning preaching. Now, I have no idea how to do that. After all, I'm not a pastor; and I wouldn't be jealous of any pastor who agrees with me on these things.