The Soul Debate
Since I was gone last week, I missed a lively discussion between Secular Blasphemer Jan Haugland and Rayne (Today? Yesterday? Last week?) regarding the possible existence of the soul. Maybe it’s the Y chromosome at work, but I have to come down on Jan’s side here.
His position, as I read it, is that the idea of the soul is a vestigial concept from a pre-historic and pre-scientific era – a necessary and sufficient explanation for an aspect of the human experience that posed all kinds of ethical, existential and evolutionary problems if left unexplained. As scientific materialism has provided an increasingly comprehensive explanation of the universe, the literal existence of a soul becomes not only difficult to prove through experimental processes, but also conceptually unnecessary. Jan claims, convincingly, that it is ontologically necessary to regard all concepts that emerged out of non-empirical methods of discovery as inherently unscientific unless proven otherwise. In other words, the burden falls on ideas like creationism, the power of prayer, miracles, and the existence of the soul to demonstrate exactly how and why they accord with well-understood physical and biological science, rather than on science to disprove them.
Rayne argues that many recent discoveries in the more arcane corners of modern science paint a picture of reality that is sufficiently at odds with our conventional understanding that it is unwise to rule out any possibilities. Today’s metaphysics might be tomorrow’s quantum mechanics. Perhaps the ancients intuited some deeper truths about reality that our observational techniques are not yet precise or sophisticated enough to verify.
Perhaps. But it’s a fine line between keeping an open mind about these sorts of things and making a leap of faith. In considering the claims of religion and spirituality as potentially valid ways of explaining physical phenomena (as opposed to treating them as allegories for ethical teachings), it’s critical to remember that providing a spiritual framework to explain nature’s mysteries is only part of religion’s historical function. The other part is to provide social cohesion and legitimacy for various forms of authority. The concepts of heaven and hell, of miracles, of creation, and of the soul satisfy emotional needs and are all impossible to prove using scientific methods, but it’s very easy to see how they enable religion to solve problems of internal consistency and blunt inquiry into unanswerable questions.
Every person needs to make his or her own decision about whether supernatural religious precepts are true despite vast experiential evidence to the contrary, or if the confluence of interest between religious theory and the social goals of religion is more than just coincidental. There isn’t much room for middle ground here. If you believe, you believe. But if you think that the preposterous supernatural claims of religions exist to bolster ideological positions, then you must accept that it is exceedingly unlikely that they are objectively true, even by accident or intuition, because they were arrived at by methods very different from those accepted as leading to discovery of scientific truths. The concept of the soul satisfies our species’ vain need to feel unique and special in an indifferent and unremittingly hostile natural world. It would be nice if reality made some concession to our fervent desire for immortality, but to suggest that it does strikes me as nothing more than wishful thinking.
