I suppose that’s so. I tend to assume that other people mean what I mean by it, which may or may not be so. All I mean by a “soul” is that there is some non-physical reality which operates on the body and accounts for consciousness – a “ghost in the machine.” The claim that souls exist in this sense assumes that physical things and forces somehow could not generate the internal experience of being a living, acting, choosing thing, and that therefore there has got to be something which is a spirit which steps into bodies and causes them to be “selves” as we experience them. Whether such a thing is immortal, whether it survives the death of the body, whether there are other spirits in whatever spirit-plane may exist, how souls get into bodies, et cetera, are additional questions which might be of great interest, and methods for the investigation of which might be opened, if we could establish that such a thing exists at all.
I’ve had a hard time understanding why this, rather than evolution, is not the principal focus of people who feel they want to attack what they like to call “materialism.” Who cares if things evolved? It seems to me that this is the meat and potatoes. This is what people seem to WANT – the prospect of a life beyond, a heavenly rest or reward, that sort of thing – and this is what experience now suggests is entirely missing. As I have said before, I cannot imagine being convinced not to be a Christian by evolution. But I could easily imagine being convinced not to be a Christian by the story of Phineas Gage, or the many examples in the books of Oliver Sacks or V.S. Ramachandran. These seem to speak strongly of what we experience as a “soul” being entirely the product of the body. When someone claims that spirits, of whatever kind, exist, my first thought is that it is hard to understand, then, why no effort is put into demonstrating the existence of those spirits which, unlike distant gods, are supposedly in action on every city street, every day of the year and whose doings can be witnessed and catalogued. If I had to name one principal reason why I am an atheist, that’s probably what I’d name: the complete yawning absence of any evidence that spirits of ANY kind, including the ordinary pedestrian sort, exist at all.
Just a note, because this remark suggests that, despite my verbosity (or perhaps because of it) I have made myself poorly understood. If the world is divided into “question people” and “answer people,” I place myself firmly in the former camp. I’d rather have ten good questions than one bad answer. And I believe that there are very few questions in this life that are resolvable by pure reason; most require the weighing of evidence, on matters of fact, and the weighing of other considerations like moral values, on matters of more than fact alone. The consequence is that I seldom have any expectation of “definitive” answers to anything. All knowledge is tentative, though some of it is easier to budge than other parts.
So I would hate to be thought of as someone who, confronted with compelling evidence of the grand poetic truth of a complex theistic schema, folds his arms and says, “nuh-uh! I need DEFINITIVE PROOF!” I find instead that where I am is in the position of someone who has got his fact-weighing scales at the ready and is waiting for SOMETHING to put in them.
I’m aware that people will say that there is “evidence” of various theological and theistic propositions but I find that when people say this they do not have the same conception of the competence of evidence that I do. No amount of historical evidence would convince me that, say, Napoleon could throw a one-pound stone ten miles with a flick of his wrist. No number of witnesses of known credibility would move me on the point. And when I consider how much more extraordinary are the claims of the various religions, I am gobstopped by the notion that one ought to, or even could choose to, believe such things on the basis of ancient writings and traditions or subjective feeling.
My brother, a Mormon, once said to me in exasperation: “if you look at it that way, you’re never going to find ANYTHING!” But it seems to me that if I am not trying to find “the one true religion” as Joseph Smith says he was, but am instead trying to find out what is so and what is not so in regard to spirits, gods, et cetera, then the object is not to find “something” but is to find what can be found through the application of methods that are sound and reliable. And while all manner of non-empirical methods are good for a person who is more or less committed to a scheme of belief about the paranormal and who wants to fill out the details of that scheme, none of those methods are worth a damn for someone in my position. I don’t need something “definitive.” But I need the kind of reliable dependence upon evidence which characterizes empiricism.
It will then be said, sometimes, “aha, but our god is not scrutable in that way.” All I can say, then, is that such gods can be of no interest to me. How can I gauge the truth of a proposition if the proposition comes to me with the proviso that its truth may not be judged by sound methods, but may be judged only by unsound methods? It cannot be done. And, while the person who says such things may be innocent of the crime himself, being nothing but someone else’s dupe, statements of that character tend to originate from charlatans, not from people genuinely interested in the truth
