The Death of the Soul

Christians believe that every human has a soul: an immortal spiritual entity—one with thoughts, emotions, memories and desires—that controls the brain and body, and will go to heaven or hell upon physical death. In a nutshell, most Christians think that you are your soul. Below I will lay out the reasons why it's unlikely that this is so. (Along the way I'll be borrowing heavily from Ebon Musings' absolutely fantastic essay "A Ghost in the Machine.")

In Philosophy

The concept of the soul is already at a disadvantage from a philosophical perspective before the debate even begins, simply because dualism is more complicated than its alternative. It has more components than monism, and thus (all else being equal) is inferior as an explanation. There is no reason to posit the existence of some ghostly supernatural entity unless doing so offers more explanatory power. The burden of proof is ultimately on people who believe in the soul to prove that the soul exists, not on nonbelievers to prove that it doesn't.

So let's start with a basic philosophical and scientific question: how is it, exactly, that the spiritual interacts with the physical? The natural world is made up of matter and energy, while spiritual things are composed of... well, that's actually not at all clear. In any case, physical processes like firing neurons can only occur as a result of physical forces exerted according to physical laws. For non-physical souls to exert force on a physical object would be to constantly violate the fundamental laws of the universe. To say that miracles are constantly occurring in the heads of every human on the planet is to make a claim that is extraordinary in the highest degree, with no evidence whatsoever to back it up.

In Biology
The problems for the soul doctrine start right from the moment of conception. As it turns out, a single human zygote sometimes splits in two to create identical twins. In other cases, two human zygotes can fuse to create a single person, known as a chimera. So, does one of each pair of identical twins then lack a soul? Does a chimera go through life with two souls that battle each other for control of the mind and body? I suppose God could jump in and add a soul if a zygote splits, or only put a soul into one of the zygotes that will fuse into a chimera. But what a needlessly convoluted system this would be, when it's so much simpler to just relent and admit that no souls are needed at all.

Another practical problem becomes apparent when looking at the issue from an evolutionary perspective: when, precisely, did we get souls? Over the past few billion years, we've made a smooth transition from self-replicating molecule to intelligent, sentient human. Did we have souls all along, or did we acquire them along the way? What made God shove a soul into that particular member of Homo sapiens (or whatever creature it was) and not its relatives—and what exactly did this addition grant them that they didn't already have? From a biological standpoint, the addition of a soul seems both superfluous and arbitrary.

In the Brain
The most serious problems with the soul are revealed when one closely studies the brain itself. For instance, one interesting consequence of neuroscience is that we can monitor a person's brain activity and predict with 60% accuracy which of two choices they will make—10 seconds before they are conscious of having made a decision. The implications are enormous: rather than a soul signaling its choice to the brain, it appears that these choices are dictated by preceding brain activity. As our technology continues to improve, our prediction intervals and accuracy will doubtless increase, demonstrating this with even greater clarity.

Mental disorders are yet another powerful indicator that a person's identity does not reside in some ethereal spirit:

• If your hippocampus is damaged, you may get anterograde amnesia. You would be incapable of forming new memories; your identity would be forever remain just as it was at the time of the damage.
• A stroke in your right brain hemisphere could not only paralyze the left half of your body, but also cause you to deny your paralysis and even invent sincerely believed excuses for why you won't move.
• Damaging your ventromedial prefrontal cortex (as in the famous case of Phineas Gage) may impair your ability to plan and make decisions, making you go from kind, polite and responsible to grouchy, crass and lazy.
• If you've inherited a disorder called frontotemporal dementia, your entire worldview—including your politics and even your religion—might be completely altered.
• If your right hemisphere is incapacitated, you may become emotionally dead; one patient who'd been close with his sister simply didn't care when he was told that her leukemia had relapsed.
• A brain tumor pressing against the orbitofrontal cortex could cause you to become sexually promiscuous or even a pedophile.
• Damage to the frontal lobes could give you environmental dependency syndrome, causing you to automatically make use of any object (e.g. write with a pen or comb with a brush) placed in front of you.
• If your anterior cingulate cortex is damaged, you might develop akinetic mutism, leaving you fully conscious but completely removing your will to move or speak.

If our identity is contained within the soul, it seems absurd that a brain disorder can utterly erase or even rewrite one's personality, beliefs, memories and free will. It's hard to see how Christians can possibly hope to explain this, and yet I still haven't gotten to the most damning evidence against the soul: the split brain. One effective treatment for epilepsy in the mid-1900s, used only in extreme cases, was to sever the corpus callosum, a small band of tissue connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Using specially designed tests, scientists found that one hemisphere can know things that the other doesn't, and the two hemispheres can respond to stimuli independently of one another.

But that's only the beginning. In one case, a man's left hemisphere expressed a desire to become a draftsman, while the right hemisphere's ideal job was racecar driving. In another instance, a woman's left hemisphere was suicidal and repeatedly tried to use her right hand to strangle herself to death. In still another, one hemisphere believed in God, while the other did not. What does one call this, if not two distinct identities occupying one head? Do these people have one soul or two? And if only one, where would the theist/atheist go upon death?

Yeah, we're pretty sure it doesn't
work this way.

There are a couple of frameworks that theists may use to explain these phenomena. Maybe the brain is the medium through which the soul interacts with the world, and if that medium is broken, the soul can't get its messages through. But this would imply that deep down every mentally impaired person is lucid, trapped, desperately trying to communicate with the outside world. This is not only ridiculous, but demonstrably false: people who recover from mental illnesses report no such struggles.

Maybe the brain is the self, but its contents are later transferred to a spiritual body upon death. But why would God allow the self to be become utterly compromised so easily? Experiments have shown evidence that certain pathways in the brain are what cause religious experiences of all kinds. So why not just leave souls in the spiritual realm, where their experiences can't be impaired by brain damage or counterfeited by false religions? Furthermore, if a brain is damaged to the point where the selves before and after the damage are mutually unrecognizable, which self is allowed to move on to an afterlife, and on what grounds is the other excluded?

Conclusion
I've shown here that the concept of the soul is flawed in numerous ways. It not only adds needless complexity to our understanding of the mind, but also conflicts deeply with biology, neuroscience, and even the fundamental laws of physics. Most brain scientists and philosophers of mind long ago gave up on the sort of dualism espoused by Christians. It's high time for the rest of the world to follow their lead.

Souls and Human Cloning

My sister and I are both anime fans, and recently we watched Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, an excellent science fiction series that deals with the societal effects of huge advances in artificial intelligence and the widespread use of synthetic bodies and brains. In the thirteenth episode, a girl is suspected to be a clone of a kidnapped CEO's daughter. While we were watching, my sister asked me an interesting question: A clone wouldn't have a soul, she said, so what would it act like? She seemed genuinely stumped by the question. I couldn't just tell her that there's no such thing as a soul, so I said, "That's hard for me to answer. You should take some philosophy classes."

Both of those statements were technically true. Nevertheless, the question does deserve an answer. Basically, a human clone would be nothing more than an identical twin of the original person (albeit one born at a later date). They would probably behave at least somewhat similarly to the original, since they would share the original's genetic code. However, they would certainly have differences in personality, since they would grow up in a completely different environment.

Human cloning is one of the many issues that highlights the problems with the Christian conception of the soul. There doesn't seem to be anything in particular that would distinguish humans who do and don't have souls—in other words, the idea of a "soul" is useless; it explains nothing that can't be explained by natural means. According to Occam's razor, souls would qualify as "unnecessary entities," and so we have no reason to incorporate them into our worldview.

The view that a human clone wouldn't have a soul is actually a fairly common one, and the Bible is even cited in support of it. In Genesis 2:7, it says:

"And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."

Since it seems that in the Bible God personally imbues man with a soul, many Christians believe that a man-made clone wouldn't have one. In fact, some predict that creating a live human clone will be impossible, and will instead result in a lifeless body. Once or twice I've also heard the pastor of my church make a very startling claim: if living clones are produced, they will only appear to be "alive" because the bodies are inhabited by demons. I can easily envision a future in which clones are persecuted or even killed by a faction of extreme fundamentalist Christians. After all, if clones are merely lifeless, demon-possessed puppets, to "kill" them would be a perfectly acceptable (perhaps even commendable) act according to a Christian worldview.

And if many years from now people have their minds uploaded into artificial brains as in Ghost in the Shell, I suspect that many Christians wouldn't believe that the soul would be transferred. They might apply the same explanation of demon possession to living bodies containing mind uploads. Thus, the potential harm that Christianity poses is not limited to present issues such as gay marriage and stem cell research. As technology opens up new paradigms, it may actually create opportunities for the most fanatical Christians to kill innocent people.

The Fate of Innocents

One major question within Christianity is this: What happens to the innocents who die before they are morally responsible for their actions and intellectually capable of becoming Christians? There are several possibilities, and below I will explain why none of them are acceptable.

The Question

It's hard to understate the extent of this issue for Christianity: it includes not only young children, but also the mentally handicapped and the unborn. The latter case is especially significant; I recently came across two statistics that should absolutely devastate anyone who believes that personhood begins at conception. This includes the many Christians who think that even fertilized human eggs (or zygotes) are imbued with an immortal soul. First, about 60 percent (one source says 30–70%; another says 60–80%) of all early embryos fail to implant themselves into the wall of the uterus and are lost. And second, a birthrate study recorded that only 126 out of its sample of 189 implanted embryos resulted in live births—one third were miscarriages.

Taken together, these two statistics mean that about 73.3% of all zygotes do not result in births. Let me put that another way. By the Christian definition of "person," nearly three times as many people have died naturally in the womb as have been born. Why would God let three quarters of all humans die before they even get a chance to live? And what happens to them afterward?

The problem is not limited to God merely allowing children to die; at times he is explicitly responsible for those deaths. He personally drowned millions of children in the Genesis flood (Genesis 7:21-23). In the tenth plague of Egypt he sent "the destroyer" to do his dirty work (Exodus 12:21-30). And on several occasions (e.g. 1 Samuel 15:1-9) he commanded the Israelites to kill children of rival nations along with adults.

As I've shown, countless billions of innocents throughout human history have died without having an opportunity to be "saved" by the usual means. Clearly, the question of their fate is one of the most important issues that Christians must face.

The Possible Answers

One possibility is that innocents go to hell. However, to punish them based on circumstances beyond their control is obviously repugnant and inconsistent with a good God. Second, they could meet some neutral fate—for example, they could simply cease to exist. This is a fairly sensible option, but it seems to contradict the idea of eternal souls, and (as we'll see later) at least one biblical passage opposes it.

Third, perhaps God knows what these children would have chosen if they'd had the chance and places them in heaven or hell accordingly. But this would entail sending them to an eternal reward or punishment based on decisions that they never actually made. And if God was somehow justified in doing this, then what is the point of this world in the first place? He could have simply placed everyone directly into heaven or hell and skipped the formalities.

Fourth, God might let these innocents choose whether to accept him after they die. But how exactly would this take place? Do they gain any direct knowledge of an afterlife or God himself? If so, why didn't God give all of us this evidence? Does God somehow provide them with only the sort of evidence they would have received on earth? If so, then once again, what is the point of our world in the first place? This scenario accomplishes the same goal in a much simpler manner.

Finally, maybe all innocents go directly to heaven, as many Christians believe. They speak of an "age of accountability" at which children become responsible for their sins. While there is nothing about this in the Bible, they often cite 2 Samuel 12:13-23, in which David implies that he will one day join his dead child in heaven. Of course, there's no particular reason to assume David's belief was justified, so this passage is inconclusive.

The Problems

But beyond that, there's a serious problem with this view: Christians think this world exists to give people a chance to freely accept or reject God. They clearly believe that God greatly values this free will, as it's one of their most common defenses for the problem of evil (God allows evil so that people can freely choose good). If innocents who die before they can accept or reject him automatically go to heaven, they have made no such choice at all. The purpose of God's creation has been significantly undermined!

Another major issue is what heaven would be like for these innocents. Would an infant keep its limited mental capacity and do nothing but crawl around and drool? Would God miraculously grant them intellectual maturity? And if so, where would their personality come from, since it wasn't shaped by a lifetime of experiences? Christians might say that this newly matured being would retain the same "soul," but how could they be considered the same person as the drooling infant in any meaningful sense? What God would really be doing is creating a person from scratch.

Conclusion

In his omniscience and omnipotence, God should have been able to design our world such that everyone freely chooses to accept or reject him, without resorting to some other method to catch those who slip through the cracks. Yet he has both directly and indirectly robbed billions of innocents of their freedom to make that decision—in fact, far more have been deprived of that freedom than have actually used it. Based on this, I must conclude that the Christian system of salvation is flawed, makeshift, cobbled-together, and wholly inconsistent with the God who supposedly came up with it.