I Don’t Have a Soul

For a former believer like myself, by far the hardest thing about accepting atheism was saying goodbye to the idea that we have souls. For many in the market for a new worldview, this can be a deal breaker. No soul means that these physical bodies we have now, are the only bodies we will ever have. We know that they die, and if they are all we have, then death is final. No meeting up with long lost friends and sipping champagne in the clouds for eternity. No 72 virgins waiting for us in paradise [1].

For about a year after I gave up on Christianity I still clung to the idea that there was some part of us that survives this world. A single human life can contain so much drama, accomplishment and creativity. How can the universe let a thing like that disappear forever? It seems so tragically wasteful. We can of course console ourselves when a person lives a long fulfilling life. Death doesn’t seem so cruel when old age has ravaged a person’s body, and living has become a struggle. But what of lives cut short? What of those who had more to contribute to the world? Couldn’t the universe see what it was losing when it let Freddy Mercury die?

Of course the universe has no opinion on the matter. The universe is not a caring creator — it is a vast expanse of emotionally indifferent matter and energy. Like most I found this reality too bleak, and toward the end of my journey from evangelical to atheist, I briefly took shelter in deism, agnosticism, and “spiritual but not religious”. These at least left the door open on what happens when we die. But the more I read about neuroscience and evolutionary biology, the harder it became to maintain even a vague belief in souls.

Brains

Most of us go about our daily business with a sense that we contain something other than atoms that is our “true” self. When we look out on the world — it doesn’t feel like photons hitting our retinas, signals travelling over optic nerves, and a 3-dimensional image being reconstructed in the visual cortex — it feels like something exists inside of us, looking out [2].

There is much about the brain that we don’t currently understand, but in the last century, science has been busy figuring out which parts of it do what. A lot of that knowledge has come from studying brain injuries. A person damages a particular part of their brain and immediately loses a particular cognitive function. Even a person’s personality can change after brain trauma, a stroke or a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimers. So what job is left for the soul if even the aspects of a person such as personality that we make moral judgements about, are controlled by the physical brain?

Suppose we are out walking by ourselves and come across a man drowning in a river. We will make a decision about whether or not to jump in and try to save him. Somewhere in our brain, neurons will be firing to calculate 1) the risk to ourself, 2) the chance of success, and 3) the potential benefit if we succeed. Other neurons will pick up on the results of those calculations, and start firing to figure out if the potential gain to ourselves outweighs the risk. If it does, then they’ll send signals through nerves to our leg muscles to move us into that lake. Obviously this is a gross simplification of how the brain makes decisions but the point is this — nowhere in this process will neurons stop to consult an intangible soul on the morality of acting or not acting.

Even if there were some mechanism by which the intangible soul could influence the neurons in our brain, we know a brain is capable of making such decisions by itself. A dog’s brain is perfectly capable of deciding whether or not to jump in a lake to save someone, and very few people would argue that dogs have souls.

Cave men

Thanks to archeology we now know that human beings didn’t magically pop into existence on a Friday in 4004 BCE. The current scientific consensus seems to be that we evolved into our present physical form about 200,000 years ago. There is still some debate about when we started thinking and behaving like we do today, but almost everyone appears to agree that by 50,000 years ago, there were people on earth just like you and me. As physically and mentally human as you or me.

Which raises the question — when were people sufficiently human to warrant souls? Did God just decide one day that everyone who was born from that time on should have a soul? In what way was a human ancestor with a soul different to one born the generation before without a soul? What about Neanderthals? If they didn’t have souls then what of our ancestors who interbred with Neanderthals? Did they have half-souls?

Babies

Foetuses don’t magically become people when they pass through their mother’s vagina. There is no one identifiable moment when the developing foetus becomes a person. So when do they get souls? In the absence of any magical moment in a foetus’s development, a seemingly logical conclusion for those who believe in souls is that they are endowed from the moment of conception. The Catholic Church has promoted this idea for hundreds of years and some evangelicals have now created a movement around it which equates birth control with murder.

This idea however runs into serious problems when you consider how many fertilised eggs don’t survive until birth. Even if you exclude artificial abortions, most fertilised eggs don’t make it out of the womb alive. If God is up in Heaven creating souls to put in bodies, why does he let most of them die before they are born? Is the afterlife open to such souls who never lived long enough to do anything bad or good? Is Heaven is overrun by “people” who were never born? [3]

So… if you’d like to maintain the belief that you’re made of fundamentally different stuff to every other creature on earth and will never really die — then these are some of the things should you should diligently avoid thinking about. It’ll be hard work but it certainly can be done, and it’ll probably make you happier. Avoid every science book written in the last century and you should be safe.

But then again, does the idea of eternal life even make sense? How bored would one get after a million years? What about after a trillion years? Do we really want to live forever?

Notes

[1] The Qur’an provides a surprising amount of detail about the 72 virgins including the shape of their breasts http://wikiislam.net/wiki/72_Virgins

[2] If you want to understand why your mind causes you to feel this way, try How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Even if you don’t you should still read that book.

[3] In Biblical times (and in some developing countries today) infant mortality rates were so high that newborns weren’t considered persons until after a month. See Numbers 3:15–16 and Leviticus 27:6.