I spent a while, back in my wayward youth, as a sort of pantheist, until I figured out that pantheism was, as the Brits say, pants. It began to seem to me that what rocks, as parts of the divine universal Being, did was exactly the same as what rocks did anyway. And the same was true of pans and pants, and even of Pan, if he were around to do it.
But while a soul for a rock might be futile, it’s fair to say that futility is as much a part of existence as anything. And, as the spiritualists affirmed in song, “rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.” Between Cephas of the NT and Stone Phillips of the NBC, not to mention Hudson, surely at least some lithic bodies have souls, if anything does at all.
Yes, panpsychism (everything has some form of consciousness), animism (everything has a spirit) and pantheism (the totality of reality is identical to God) do have a degree of overlap.
The degree to which they overlap probably depends on what subsidiary assumptions you make (is consciousness necessary for a spirit/soul, is a spirit and a soul the same thing, etc).
I’m not sure how the Brits and pants fit in (and whether this includes Stubbies – further research would appear to be needed).
I wonder if the interaction between science and religion could be more nuanced and interlaced than this. When religion says that that things, like the existence of God, or the soul, or the divinity of Christ, are not assessable via science, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are “beyond scrutiny” or fact-free. Scrutiny is not solely owned by the empirical and a claim of spiritual truth may (and ought) to be made in the context of facts. The claim itself may not be demonstrably objective fact, but that does not automatically make it a fact-free claim does it? Claims of truth are most often embedded in a context that includes factual/empirical knowledge as well as logic, emotion, prior experience, history, sociology, politics, and so on.
So to me personally, the more interesting question, is not whether a soul is fact or not, but how our empirical knowledge about the physical world would inform our conceptions of the soul and help make them more closely aligned with reality. And for those who believe in the existence of souls, how our conceptions of the soul impact our other beliefs – how we treat each other, how we understand our relationship to God. So for instance, I think science and “facts” indicates that the soul would probably not be genetic (no “soul gene”) and therefore not passed on physically at conception and would be less related to uniquely human attributes (language, etc.) than previously thought.
No, but religion does not supply any alternative methodology for evaluating these questions. Not, at any rate, one which anyone who is genuinely interested in the questions and who does not come to them with an axe to grind could trust. How does one resolve a question of fact without resort to evidence from observation? There’s always a lot of muddled thinking about “other ways of knowing,” but scarcely ever a good demonstration that some “other way of knowing” is of any use to the genuinely interested – and, importantly, disinterested – inquirer after the facts.
Laying aside for the moment such things as claims about history, which do present their own particular problems, a claim about facts that are active in the world, in the here and now, like the existence and operation of souls, IS fact-free if no demonstration bearing upon it can be offered.
Before you can measure facts and put them in a context to bring any of these things to bear upon them, you really do need facts. And when it is claimed that something like the “soul” exists and materially influences physical occurrences in our own physical world, one should expect something in the way of demonstration before one thinks one has a “fact” to interpret in the light of these things.
Am I missing something? What reliable, confirmable methods, not dependent upon some set of faith-based propositions, outside of the empirical can be applied to a present-day question of fact like the existence of souls?
I might have used the expression “hand-waving,” but one has to be careful around here. I see that I have now had a post suppressed for having compared the dishonorable Gunter Bechly to a perfectly honorable circus performer.
That’s a good question, I would just note that there is a lot involved in “resolve” and “observation” there. I see a large difference between “resolve a question of fact” and being fact-free or beyond scrutiny. Sure, religious experience and theological coherence may not have the air-tight argumentative power that empirical observations have, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily useless or unpersuasive.
True story:
When I was in 2nd grade I had a brief stint of refusing to believe in negative numbers. After all, if I have 3 apples, you can’t take 4 away from me. No empirical evidence could persuade me. Eventually I did change my mind and chose to believe in negative numbers, but it wasn’t because of empirical evidence. It was because of two things:
I had to trust that my teacher knew better than I did, they knew more about the world than I did and I had to acknowledge that maybe I was just wrong and didn’t see it, and
I was shown the analogy of debt and introduced (probably not for the first time, but I don’t remember) to the concept of math being a mental construct as opposed to simply “counting physical objects”. I learned that there were rules to math and if I stuck with them (including negative numbers) that the system worked.
The above personal story may not be a perfect example, but it’s what came to mind. Another might be that my scientific career (laser spectroscopy, photochemistry, reaction dynamics, molecular machines) was largely based on quantum mechanics, however I’ve never empirically observed a wavefunction. In fact, all I know about quantum chemistry is viewed through a particular interpretation (Copenhagen) of quantum mechanics, that is not empirically observable (at least as distinct from other interpretations). Frankly, I simply believe it to be fact because it’s what I was taught. How is that very different from believing that I also have a soul because I grew up in a community that has a many-century belief in the same thing?
I would suggest that since a great many people (a majority in the US, not sure globally) believe that people have souls … seems like some level of demonstration. I totally understand that that fact, in and of itself, is not a conclusive demonstration of the existence of souls. However, I never said that the existence of souls is a fact, only that it is not fact-free. To me that is an important distinction.
This sounds to me a bit like you’re saying “what empirical/scientific proof do you have of a non-empirical concept?” which seems sort of a non-starter. I just simply don’t think there are nice tidy ways to say science is what is fact-based and religion is what is fact-free. There are plenty of appeals to authority, uncertainty, and faith in science. And that’s ok, it’s a human endeavor after all, and is subject to all kinds of human frailties (as well as creativity and greatness). Religion on the other hand (especially Christianity, IMO, but we can also talk more expansively) is not just wishful thinking devoid of any touch of reality. Religion tries to tackle some really big, really hard questions, questions that are often outside of what science can really address directly. But that OK, it usually can help because knowing more about how the world truly is helps religion become better/clearer.
So, in short, I’m not suggesting that the existence of the soul is scientifically or empirically addressable, but that scientific and empirical data (i.e. facts, models, etc.) can be a part of developing what we mean by a soul, and is therefore not “fact-free”. It can be in connection with the facts, and yet still be itself not an objective fact. I don’t care to prove whether souls exist or not (that comes from elsewhere, IMO), but I do care that those who believe in the existence of souls have the most sound and grounded-in-reality version they can.
Let me begin by saying that you and I probably disagree less than it is liable to seem. I appreciate what you’re saying but there are some points where I just can’t go there with you.
I’ve never really thought of empirical observations as having air-tight argumentative power. What they do have, however, is an interpersonal generalizability which is very useful when people are trying to do such things as compare notes. If I say my car is orange, you know that this is a fact you could check. Even if you don’t check it, you have a very good idea what would and would not constitute confirmation or disconfirmation. And while there is a subjective interpretive zone where judgment as to naming colors is concerned, you’d expect that my car’s color is something which can be described in terms with which no reasonable person could easily disagree.
But when I say that I dreamed of owning a car that was orange, this is not a thing you can confirm. You can understand what I mean, but you cannot do anything to judge the truth of the statement beyond making a judgment as to my credibility. And if, in my dream, I misjudged the color of the car (is that even possible? Dunno.), you certainly have no way of checking and getting back to me to let me know that it was, in fact, green but looked orange under the peculiar lighting of my dream. Likewise, if I attest to having a vivid experience of having an incorporeal essence which is a substantial part of “me” but which is not dependent on my body, you may be able to judge what it is that I seem to mean but you can do nothing to judge the accuracy of the perception itself. “Religious experience” is in that category: fascinating from psychological, neurological, anthropological and sociological points of view, but useless for judging facts beyond the description of the subjective experience itself.
And I think “theological coherence” is a fairly problematic notion if the idea is that it somehow validates the output of all that coherence. It’s not that some theologies might not be more coherent than others. The problem is that a mill needs grist, and theology tends to be all mill and no grist. My car may be very powerful, but if I take off the wheels, put it on jackstands and rev the engine, no transportation gets done. Philosophy “in the air” does no work; it needs some object to operate upon. Who can care what theologians have to say about the “soul” unless they have some pertinent fact to which to point? What value can anything said on such a subject be, when the philosophical engine is burning all that fuel and turning no wheel? The actions of such a car may be “coherent” but they still do nothing. Any number of theologies might be internally consistent, and/or coherent, but who can care, when they operate on no real entity and cannot be judged one against another for their power to describe reality?
Well, so stated, it isn’t different at all. But I can’t speak to what the role of the Copenhagen interpretation in your work is. My suspicion is that it has some usefulness, if only as a placeholder or template for thinking. You speak of it as though it has no use at all; if that’s so, it’s not really very important because one doesn’t rely upon it in any meaningful sense. And the same might be said of any number of speculations about such things as souls.
I would say that it is not only not a conclusive demonstration, but not evidence bearing on that question at all. Evidence of people’s subjective beliefs is liable to tell us more about the nature of subjectivity than about anything else. If you found that many of them think they can make their souls visible, and tack them to a bulletin board for examination, that’d give you a hypothesis to evaluate and a list of people to phone in the hunt for the evidence, but if I had those accounts before me I’d say, “show me.”
I’m completely baffled by the notion that the existence of souls is a non-empirical concept. People think that this ghost-in-the-machine animates what they do. It interacts with the physical world. It’s about as non-empirical as COVID-19. And so when I see that tack being taken, you can imagine how frustrating that is (I am not speaking of frustration with you, but the accumulated frustration of having had this conversation with people dozens of times). Make the claim, then make an ad hoc withdrawal of that claim from scrutiny.
I understand, of course, the notion that if something is assumed, from the outset, to be immune from any evidentiary scrutiny at all, then we have a philosophical curiosity: a fact which cannot even be meaningfully apprehended, but only stated. And “stated” only in the thinnest sense: expressed as an abstraction, corresponding to no observable thing or action at all. In practice, religions generally do not do this in a respectable, consistent way: instead, they make assertions about the divine which are said to be supported and supportable by evidence which is just such-and-such (e.g., holy books, subjective experience of certain types), and whenever some other non-pre-approved class of evidence is invoked as bearing on the subject, THEN inscrutability is invoked to withdraw the power of criticism from the critic.
But in principle there is nothing wrong with the possibility that there are gods of which nothing can be reliably known, or souls of which nothing can be reliably known. It’s just that such possibilities are devoid of any practical meaning. One can know nothing, confirm nothing, and derive no guidance from such things.
I can’t imagine what question is more crucial to answer, in that case, than the question whether the “soul” is merely a subjective experience or an actual ghostly entity. I don’t know how to make my belief in a non-existent thing more “grounded-in-reality” other than to stop believing in it. Is an imaginary million-dollar portfolio of stocks in non-existent companies less real than an imaginary million-dollar portfolio of stocks in real companies? I don’t think it is; I don’t think you make it more real by adjusting the details.
My perspective on these things is that I am a genuinely curious inquirer into them. I don’t mind having a soul and I don’t mind not having one. I’d like to know – not to capriciously choose – what to think about such things. Likewise with the gods. They are, if existent, among the most interesting of critters, and I’d like to know more about them, beginning with the question whether any of them are real. I don’t need gods, I don’t have the personality that worships things, and I don’t have a compelling reason why I feel I ought to believe or ought not to believe. I’d just like to know what’s so, and what’s not so. I don’t particularly think that reality is elective, and while one never perceives it wholly right, one can certainly tell that there is some benefit to getting it as right as one can.
But I feel that that – that last paragraph – is the part of this with which I never meet anyone, within religion, who understands. I don’t want saving, or not saving. I want to understand. I want to correctly apprehend what’s real and what’s not. I have plenty of experience, within my own history of political thought, with the ways in which a person gets off-the-rails by engaging in motivated reasoning, and I am trying not to do it. But religious thought has a way of being Lucy with the football: propose an elaborate scheme of all existence, and then withdraw it from meaningful scrutiny. Back when I used to work on medical quackery, that was the pattern there, too.
Only for those who have some inkling of how science works. The ivermectin crowd routinely claims that Tony Fauci is a liar because he changed his mind…on the basis of new data.
Full marks to your 2nd Grade self. Negative numbers do not describe objects in the world, in the way that positve numbers do. They do describe situations,such as debt, but like all mathematical objects their properties are ultimately elicited by the axiom systems that contan them. Whether such objects accurately model any aspect of the world is ofc an empirical matter. (But btw even classical mathematics includes reslts that do not model anything in the world. There is no empirical fact corresponding to the mathematical proof, known to the Greeks, that square root 2 is irrational).
In much the same spirit, the equations of quantum mechanics do a pretty good job of describing reality. Whether the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, or even whether such a question is meaningful, is another question altogether, to which I do not have an answer.
To get back to my OP, Puck Menessohn has convinced me that the difficulty for the immortal soul raised by evolution (could a simple organism have a soul? What about a rock?) is similar to the difficulty raised by the known link between awareness and the material body-brain system (could someone with advanced dementia have a soul? What about a corpse?). So while I see the problems with the concept of the soul as insuperable, and some here do not, they exist quite apart from evolution.
The conflict thesis is a historiographical approach in the history of science that originated in the 19th century with John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.
This specific thesis was justified with a particular set of historical arguments and claims. And this analysis is almost unanimously rejected by historians as pseudohistory. They have the same disdain for it that scientists (typically) have for young earth creationism. It really is that bad.
Here is how I endorsed a recent book on it:
“Why won’t this stubborn pseudohistory die? To the rescue comes Peterson,
a historian extraordinaire with many stories to tell. Exuding a palpable glee, he
quests to debunk the grand pseudohistorical myths of conflict. His book about books
leads the reader in an adventure across centuries. Hacking through the webs of false
references and out-right fabrications, the payoff is a glimpse of what really happened.
The truth is far more hopeful than the fiction. Rather than inevitable conflict, the true
arc of science and religion might be dialogue, maybe even friendship. May this book
get the wide readership it deserves.”
–S. Joshua Swamidass, M.D., Ph.D., Author of The Genealogical Adam and Eve
What ever is going on with the Conflict Thesis, though, it’s totally separate from your question/argument. They are entirely separable. You aren’t even making a historical argument, but ab epistemological claim.
To reiterate, this is not a historical claim of inevitable conflict, but almost precisely the opposite. You are saying that (using what rules?) one can’t epistemologically justify an immortal soul. So this means somehow that there is a conflict with religion.
But it is a logical contradiction? Not really. Is it an evidential conflict? No, not that either. Rather, your just saying that it can’t be justified from your epistemological basis. Okay. That’s fine. No one said it could be. Maybe your basis is incomplete.
Moreover, this is a specific topic that has attracted a lot academic contributions. We are publishing a post-print on it at PS in a couple weeks (i’ll ping you then). You’d really have to engage those academic approaches to this question, and show why they were irrecoverably in logical incoherence or evidential conflict with science in order to have actually uncovered a real conflict.
And whether you are right or wrong about this focused question, I think we can all be very sure that the Conflict Thesis is pseudohistory. That’s a different issue altogether.
Just a thought. Some question the claim there is a soul. Its apparently invisible. But there are many things invisible. Like the tent of our body with something inside the universe has a lot of invisible things in it yet the universe exists. Our body is the outside.
There is stands of connection between stars, between planets, between galaxies. A spiral galaxy is one of many showing its a common thing for invisible forces to connect whole worlds. Is it possible that the neurons of our brains or in a Octopus in our brains and limbs provide a RAM and ROM giving us an feeling of conscience.
…
We think in our heads but our feet feel heat out there. phantom pain in amputees may be a interesting rabbit hole to explore. is there something still there or is there something still there in the mind for that developed section.
…
Maybe our awareness is nothing more than that OR maybe its built on a unseen set of strands. Its undiscovered country.
…
If a butterfly can find a tree thousands a miles away or a fish the brook it was born in and a telemarketer can find your cell phone number maybe we should not discount the impossible because over and over again the impossible is proven to be possible.
…
here is one. Octopus can see with their skin and can react almost instantaneously to its surroundings while also coordinating with their other brain centrally located. And they have synapses in each of their arms. So the right hand could literally not know what the left hand is doing. With this level of complication in the world is it even a stretch to think God if he spans the heavens couldn’t literally be connected to everyone of us so our prayers are not even a second away from his ear.
If the bible is true and in him we live move and have our being. Soul and conscience is a small point in a whole universe of invisible we haven’t even tapped.
…
With or without God, the whole universe is interconnected. Attraction couldn’t happen.
Can I take that thought farther??
So if My DNA and all that is living as humans could have one copy fit in a table spoon. (maybe someone could calculate if that is possible.) What if ,… wait. the question is, Will I be remembered, will there be some sort of hard drive of my personality, my memories? God could have a carbon copy or spiritual copy of your DNA and could recreate you on a whole other planet. You wouldn’t even know you are over there.
…
But what if he could have a copy of your Soul. If everything is connected by strong and weak forces and gravity etc. And other things we do not see… Maybe our soul is not even in our body. Maybe its in the cloud. So when we die, we might fear that if we are burned or rotted that our DNA our Brain, our Soul stops being and if there is a resurrection, the Science wont work if we are burned. If there is not a skin cell of our DNA if there is nothing of us, how could we take advantage of “Eternal Life” If there is No Resurrection Paul the Apostle says?
…
12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
15 Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.
16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
17 And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
18 Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
1 Corinthians 15
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This is really what this is about. When I am physically destroyed, will I be returning. If not Shall I serve God?
Is the soul real. Is there a copy of me that will stay in the cloud. Does it need my DNA?
Science and all humanity lives dealing with this question.
The problem we seem to have here is that in a soul we appear to have a ‘something’ (for want of a better word) that has both (i) disputed existence, and (ii) (seemingly) poorly-defined properties.
If its properties were better defined we would have a better chance of settling its existence.
If its existence was more firmly established, we would have a better chance of more clearly discerning its properties.
But as it stands, we have no fixed starting point, and so the discussion will tend to go round and around, without any conclusive end.
I think that the best that we can do is make explicit assumptions about the soul, and see where that leads us.
I tried to make some of the assumptions, that seemed to be implicit in the OP, explicit in my earlier post. I’d like to examine one more potential assumption:
Should we be assuming that, in order for a creature to have a soul, at least one, or perhaps both, of its parents must have had souls?
This assumption, or one fairly similar to it, would seem to be required for Christian beliefs about souls to potentially conflict with science’s consensus on human evolution.
If this is an assumption we should be making, what is its basis in Christian theology?
I’d say “dispute” is a little strong I respect @Puck_Mendelssohn a ton and was hoping to throw out some conversation starters, and feel pretty good about the resulting conversation. He and I will not agree on everything, but I think he’s right that we probably agree a lot more than we disagree, even if those disagreements are on pretty important things.
I’m certainly not a theologian or an expert in this area, but my lay understanding is that it’s probably more common to believe that souls are created de novo for each person, at conception. I hear something like that from Catholics fairly often. Which is why I was a bit confused by the OP.
Sorry. I used the word “discussion” in my mind when I was planning out this idea, “dispute” just seemed to slip out.
This is a large part of the problem I, and I would suspect many other skeptics, have in taking much of theology seriously.
Or quite a bit of philosophy for that matter. Can you really have a serious discussion about the nature of “consciousness”, if that that term is so poorly-defined that panpsychism stays on the table?
Well, for some people it will be interesting nevertheless and aren’t as bothered by the nebulousness, or maybe lack some of @Puck_Mendelssohn’s desire to get a definitive truth. On the other hand, just because we don’t know the precise nature of consciousness doesn’t seem to prevent us from using it and recognizing it in some incomplete way. We often use things we don’t fully understand and sort of learn by using. I tend to think Christians gain a better understanding of things like the soul as they experience life and interact with other souls. Doesn’t mean we understand it all that well, or can articulate a definition, or provide the empirical evidence I’d love to have.
I respect