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.