Prof. Matt
McCormick
Department
of Philosophy
Copyright 2006. Not to be copied, distributed,
or otherwised used without permission.
Matt McCormick
According to a recent Harris Poll, 84% of
Americans believe that they possess a soul that will survive after the death of
their bodies.[1]
Every week, millions of people attend religious services where they have
discussions about and try to improve the lot of their immortal souls. Politicians and celebrities make frequent
comments about their souls and the afterlife.
People across the social, economic, and educational spectrum regularly
modify their behavior and make decisions based on the view that there is an
afterlife and that they must act to protect the fate of their souls. In short, the belief in an immortal soul is
enormously popular.
In
this paper, I will argue that humans do not have an immortal soul. All of the characteristics that we typically
associate or identify with souls are causally dependent upon the existence of a
brain and nervous system. At death, the
brain ceases to function, so the soul ceases to exist at the same time the body
does. So, humans do not possess immortal
souls. In sections I-IV, I will discuss
the major steps in this argument in more detail. Then in sections V-VIII, I will consider
objections to the argument, and address several closely related questions
concerning the implications of the argument for surviving death, resurrection,
and so on.
There are different accounts of what a soul
is. In this argument, I will address the
view that the soul is a non-physical, conscious, personal entity that carries
or possesses the characteristics that are essential to person’s identity. On this view, thinking, being conscious,
being self-aware, and having a personality are essential features of a person’s
soul. There are substantial reasons for
focusing on this account of the soul.
First, this characterization is by far the most common in western
religious and cultural traditions.
Second, other characterizations do not have as much personal or
metaphysical significance. A personal
soul is integral to any account of personal immortality. And third, this account of the soul is
clearly refuted by the evidence. Let us
consider the first two reasons and then address the third in the next section.
When we characterize the soul, we typically
think of it in personal terms. First, we
depict souls as aware, they are conscious, they are entities similar to the
embodied persons we are familiar with.
Frequently, we describe the afterlife as someplace where a person, in
the form of their soul, is rewarded or punished, where their soul will serve or
worship God. Only a conscious,
self-aware, thinking entity can do these things. Furthermore, it is not merely that some
consciousness or thinking entity survives the death of my body, but that my consciousness
will survive. My soul is my
consciousness, so there will be continuity from my perspective between
my awareness in my body and my awareness after the death of my body.[2] In our art, our
movies, our mythology, and our religious traditions, the transition from this
life to the afterlife is often portrayed like the transition we make when we
fall asleep and then wake up again. When
I wake up, I am the same person, with the same thoughts, memories, personal
traits, and the same body as the person who went to sleep. When the soul leaves the body, however, the
difference is that when it wakes up, it has left the physical body behind and
only the soul has survived with ones thoughts, memories, and personal
traits. It is widely held that something
that makes me up will survive, that I will have eternal life, that I will be reincarnated, or my soul
will go to heaven. The things that are
essential to me as an individual consciousness are my beliefs, my hopes, my
dispositions, my emotional reactions, and my memories. So in these popular depictions of the soul,
we seem to be identifying it with what we usually call a person’s mind.
Your mind is the thing you are aware of from
your first person perspective when you introspect. It thinks, believes, has emotions, makes
plans, has aspirations, and so on. Other people are only aware of your mind
through their awareness of your body’s behavior. Your brain, at least from your perspective,
is not the same as your mind. It is the
two pound organ inside your skull; it is part of your body. From your perspective, you are not aware of
your mental processes as brain processes.
The argument that is developed in this paper is that mental processes
are dependent for their existence on the presence and continuance of physical
processes in the brain. And since we
identify our souls with our minds and their processes, the soul no longer
exists when the body fails.
I am not contesting the claim that some
non-personal and non-conscious aspects of a person survive the death of the
body. The physical substances that make
up a person’s body survive;
the carbon atoms in a person’s body, for example, become part of
other physical entities like the tree that grows in the graveyard. The house I built, the books I wrote, the
children I parented, the impacts I had in the world, may all last longer than I
do. And to the extent that we leave a lasting
trace in the world, it could be argued that we are immortal. But, these things are not me. They are impersonal effects that I had on the
world. The persistence of my carbon is
not the survival past death of me.
The chemicals that make up my body, if they are not configured in the
way that allows my brain and body to function, will
not produce my thoughts again. They will
not have dreams, they will not remember, they will not have beliefs. Once they lose the configuration that makes
them into my body, my molecules do not have a perspective or any
awareness. To use Nagel’s famous dictum,
there is nothing it is like to be a molecule.
The common view of the soul that is being challenged here is the view
that my non-physical consciousness will continue after the end of my physical
body.
All of our evidence indicates that a being
cannot think, have a mind, or have a personality without a brain and a nervous
system of a certain minimal level of complexity. Brainless minds, as far as our ample evidence
indicates, do not occur. One of the most
compelling reasons for believing that there cannot be a brainless mind is the
close causal connection we observe between the states of our bodies and the
states of our minds. Centuries of
medical data about brain damage has made it clear that when people get brain
damage, they get mind damage. Head
trauma, lesions, tumors, excisions, and other physical alterations of the brain
impair the mental functions that we attribute to the soul like decision
making, problem solving, memories, the ability to abstract,
and emotional responses. The frontal
lobe of the brain is most responsible for the functions identified with the
soul. It controls language, our
responses to our environment, judgments, emotions; it assigns word meanings,
and so on. Damage to the frontal lobe
can result in loss of spontaneity, loss of flexibility in thoughts or the
persistence of a single thought. It can
result in mood changes, changes in personality, and reduced capacity for
problem solving. The temporal lobes on
the sides of the brain are responsible for hearing, acquiring memories, and the
categorization of objects. Damage to
the temporal lobes can result in aggression, persistent talking, increased or
decreased sexual interest, short and long term memory problems, difficulty
recognizing faces, and difficulty understanding words and identifying
objects.
The physical dependence of mental states is
also evident when alterations of the chemistry of the brain with drugs, food,
sleep deprivation, fasting, or coffee change the way we think. We have all experienced the direct effect
that physical circumstances have on the way we think, the prevalence of
positive or negative thoughts in our minds, our being irritable or happy, or
our being cognitively impaired from too much alcohol to drink. Too little to eat or drink and our thoughts
grow slow and negative, too much caffeine and our thoughts race. Even the weather can have a pronounced affect
on the character and direction of out thoughts.
Hallucinogenic drugs induce visions in the mind of a different
reality. People on PCP often envision
spiders and have a powerful belief that they can fly. Millions of people take anti-depression drugs
every day—chemical compounds that alter the chemical events in
the brain—that produce a change in their beliefs, feelings, dispositions, and
other mental phenomena. The causal
dependence in these cases is clear; the mind depends upon specific chemical and
electrical reactions in the nervous systems. Modify those reactions even slightly and there
is a corresponding change in the mind.
The examples of a direct, causal link between physical
events in the body and our thoughts are so numerous and so common in our daily
lives that it is quite remarkable that the view that a brainless mind
can exist has any credence at all.
Nor is the evidence for the causal dependence
of the soul on the body limited to humans.
Creatures exhibit advanced cognitive abilities
like abstraction, problem solving, thinking, and self-awareness in direct
correlation with the complexity of their nervous systems. Chimps exhibit cognitive abilities
commensurate to their brain size, composition, and sophistication. So do garden slugs. Chimps are able to fashion and use primitive
tools; slugs cannot. The continuum
ranges from those creatures with nervous systems that are so simple that they
scarcely qualify as having a brain across the spectrum to humans whose brains
are the most complex objects in the universe.
And across that continuum, the cognitive abilities possessed by those
creatures are correlated closely to what sort of brain they have. The simplest nervous systems are able to do
the least—they cannot think, they do not have complicated emotional responses,
they are not self-aware, they only have the most
rudimentary functions. The most complex
brains possess the full list of features we associate with the soul making it
clear that in order to possess those features, one must have a brain. And without a brain, or if a being’s nervous
system is too primitive, one does not have a soul. We have never discovered a single plausible
exception to this continuous scale of brain/mind complexity.
III. What about “Out-of-body” experiences
and psychic spiritual contact as evidence for brainless minds or bodiless
persons?
The critic might argue that paranormal
reports of out-of-body experiences are exceptions to the physical dependency
argument because they show that soul can exist without a body. They might also argue that life-after-death
experiences, communication with the dead, ghosts, and other paranormal claims
give us evidence for the independence of the soul. In these cases, it is alleged that the body
is either impaired, separated from the soul, or it has ceased to function
altogether, but the soul goes on. The
bodiless soul has managed to communicate with us, or escape the dying body, or
otherwise made its presence known. Do
these cases support the argument for an immortal soul?
They do not.
In every case where skeptics like Houdini, James Randi, Penn and Teller,
Michael Shermer, Martin Gardener, and others have taken these alleged
paranormal cases seriously, investigation has revealed that fraud, deception,
enthusiasm, poor scientific testing, financial gain, or just simple mistakes
are the norm. Out-of-body claims have
not withstood closer examination.
So-called psychics have been discovered to be performing mundane
sleight-of-hand tricks. Impartial
investigators have not been able to find tenable evidence to support ghost
sightings. Attempts to corroborate,
document, repeat, test, or even record the various kinds of paranormal
phenomena that might support the brainless mind thesis have come up empty
handed again and again.
There are over 6 billion people on the earth
right now. And in the history of
humanity, there have been many times more.
If humans possess ontologically independent souls, and if there are
paranormal events that give evidence for bodiless minds, why have we not been
able to observe or document a single credible case? The answer, I maintain, is that there are no
credible cases.
Since so many cases of alleged contacts with
bodiless souls contact have been debunked, the reasonable person is in a
similar position to the one that Hume argued we are in concerning
miracles. Evidence showing the
dependence of the mind on the brain is ubiquitous. If someone makes a paranormal claim that
contradicts that evidence, then we must ask ourselves: Is it more likely that the person claiming to
have had an out-of-body experience or contact with a non-physical soul is lying, deceived, mistaken, or that they are correct? Those who claim to be contacting the dead
through seances or psychic means are often using magicians’ cold reading
techniques to draw information from living relatives who want to make
contact. In many cases, the psychic has
even surreptitiously researched information to give back to the bereaved. On the popular television show, Crossing
Over, John Edward typically interviews audience members before the
cameras role to find out who they want to contact and what they want to
know. Then hours of vague questions,
shotgun predictions, and stabs in the dark are filmed and edited down to give
the appearance that Edward was immediately able to give detailed and unprompted
information about the sought after dead person.
The television audience does not get to see the evidence that makes it
clear that Edward is little more than a carnival showman. Fraudulent psychics will notice subtle body
language cues, clothing, facial expressions, and other details about a person
for guidance in directing their allegedly psychic inquiry. Given how often they are lying, mistaken, or
misguided, anyone claiming to have contacted the world of non-physical souls
must meet a substantial burden of proof to show that they are not employing
trickery or making a mistake. To date,
that burden of proof has not been adequately met. And given the billions and billions of people
that have existed on this planet, one would think that conclusive evidence
would not be hard to obtain.
But suppose that the burden of proof is met
and the paranormalist has either demonstrated reliable and accurate access to
information that only the dead possess, or they have produced other evidence
that defies our attempts to debunk. What
would that show? Would it suggest that
souls survive the death of the body? It
is not clear that it would. We know how
often magicians, psychics, and paranomalists have fooled us with entirely natural
means. And we have learned the lesson
from centuries of alleged supernatural events ultimately being explained in
natural terms. So the careful and
reasonable person would remain agnostic about the brainless mind thesis until
substantial evidence has been amassed.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Unsubstantiated, anecdotal, non-repeated,
undocumented allegations from adherents and enthusiasts will not suffice for a
claim as important and philosophically profound as the immortality of the
soul.
In the cases of people who claim that they
have had life-after-death experiences, the burden of proof is different. In the typical case, it is alleged that while
a person’s body was dying or dead on the operating room table, they have an
experience of separating from their bodies.
They hover above, listening and watching the events in the room, and
then float down a tunnel towards a light to be welcomed by loved ones or by
God. For these cases to be taken as
evidence for the autonomy of the mind from the body, then at least two things
must be established. First, they must
demonstrate that they are not mistaken, enthusiastic, or otherwise
deceived. Second, it must be shown that
the nervous could not have been responsible for the sensations. Proof is difficult to establish in these
cases because the death of the body is not a concise event. Often the heart and circulatory system cease
to function first, then the brain is starved of oxygen
and eventually ceases to function thereafter.
And even then, the whole brain does not stop functioning at once. Random neural firings and electrical-chemical
activity persists long after doctors have declared the official time of death. Some of this electrical-chemical activity can
persist for days—many morgue employees have been startled by the random ticks
of the limbs of cadavers. If some
out-of-body experience is alleged to have occurred while a patent’s heart has
stopped, for instance, what needs to be established is that it did not occur
during a period of brain and nervous system activity that could have accounted
for those experiences. While many
people have been revived after substantial blood loss, or after their hearts
have stopped, humans are not revived after complete brain death. If the brain has deteriorated to the point
that all electrical and chemical activity has ceased, then it is past
the point of resuscitation, thus raising the suspicion that every reported case
of out-of-body experience is actually the product of latent brain activity, not
a genuine instance of a physically independent soul. Clinical death rarely occurs at the same
instant as complete brain death, and resuscitation is not uncommon.
Furthermore, the physical mechanisms behind
many of the aspects of out-of-body reports are well understood. Oxygen deprivation produces tunnel vision, as
anyone who stands up too fast can attest.
Blood loss can produce the sensation of detachment, floating,
well-being, dizziness, and calm. Drugs
with psychoactive effects like tranquilizers, pain killers, stimulants, and
sedatives, which are often used on trauma patients during emergency treatment,
alter the brain and produce wild imaginings.
People who report out-of-body experiences are often suffering from the
well-documented effects of hypoxia or oxygen deprivation to the brain which
induces tunnel vision, a sensation of warmth and floating, and memory dumps in
the brain. We should not resort to a
supernatural explanation of an alleged out-of-body story until these obvious natural
explanations have been conclusively ruled out.
If someone reports an out-of-body experience, and it appears that they
really did have the sensations, then why not conclude that they spring from the
brain itself just as dreams and hallucinations do?
IV. The Implications of the Physical
Dependency Thesis: When the Brain Dies,
the Soul Dies.
At death, all of the biological functions of
the body will cease, including those in the nervous system even though it may
not stop at the moment clinical death is declared. So the brain stops working. Our thoughts, our consciousness, our beliefs,
our self-awareness—the traits identified with the soul above—all depend upon the
functioning of the brain to persist. So
when the brain stops, they stop too.
Therefore, the soul does not survive the death of the body. The physical dependency of the soul implies
its mortality, not its immortality.
Suppose that someone argues that the immortal
aspects of the soul are not personal beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and the
self-awareness produced by the brain.
There is something else—an energy or life force, or an impersonal
spirit—that survives the body. All beings, or all humans possess this life energy, the critic
might argue, and even though our bodies decay, the life in them is transferred
and lives on.
First, it should be pointed out that this
objection appears to concede my central thesis.
The argument thus far has been to show that if the soul is characterized
in the personal, conscious fashion that is common, it is not immortal.
Second, what evidence do we have that such a
life force or energy exists? The
electrical and chemical events that occur in the human body and nervous system
cease when a human dies. We understand
and are able to measure energy in the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves
to gamma rays. No other kind of energy
or force has ever been observed, measured, or documented. No other kind of energy known to science is present
in the human body. The body gives off
some heat energy, and its chemical and electrical processes radiate
energy. When the body dies, those
energies dissipate and cease. Where is
the evidence that there is some other kind of energy that survives the death of
the body? The burden of proof, once
again, is on those who would defend the reasonableness of the immortality
claim.
Third, suppose the objection is correct and
that there is some mysterious non-personal energy that survives. For most people, their interest in the
afterlife is based upon their interests in what happens to them after
they die. The reason heaven is a reward
and hell is a punishment is because I will be there to experience
it. If some immortal aspect of me, but
not my consciousness, or my thoughts, continues after I die, its survival will
mean nothing to me because there is no me to care one
way or another. So the life force
objection doesn’t salvage any of the personal aspects of the soul that
originally gave us an interest in its fate.
Depersonalizing the account of the soul as the life force objection does
dramatically reduces its philosophical and
metaphysical significance. If my soul is
not personal, then whatever it means nothing to me when I am gone. If it is not me that goes on, what interest
do I have in it?
VI. Isn’t it at least possible that we
have an immortal, non-physical soul?
Someone might point out that my arguments so
far have shown only that it is unreasonable to believe that the soul is immortal,
not that it is not possible for it to persist. After all, this argument has not proven that
non-physical, immortal souls are impossible, only that the evidence supports
the view that they do not exist.
As far as it goes, this objection is correct. This argument does not address the logical
possibility that they could exist. The
argument in this paper is not that a brainless mind is logically impossible,
only that given the abundance of evidence before us, there is no reason to
think that our conscious selves will survive the death of the body. All of our evidence clearly supports the
conclusion for physical dependency which shows that it is not reasonable to
believe such a claim. We have mountains
of evidence in support of the view that all of the features identified with the
soul require the normal functioning of the human nervous system to
continue. And we have no credible
evidence whatsoever to think that there can be a brainless mind. The mere lack of logical contradiction in a
proposal does not establish is reasonability, nor does it entitle one to
indulge in believing it. It would be a mistake to conclude that since souls are
possible, it is somehow acceptable to adopt the view that they are real.
Notice that in the objection, the position
has been reduced from “Immortal souls exist,” to “It is possible that immortal
souls exist, but we do not have adequate evidence for thinking that they
do.” Similarly, someone might be
(unreasonably) sympathetic with the Medieval view that
fever is caused by demon possession. So
they might insist that it is at least logically possible that demon’s enter the body and overheat it. But the fact that a proposition is not
explicitly logically contradictory is not grounds for its being reasonable to believe. Suppose a modern doctor correctly diagnoses
your fever and claims that a bacterial infection is causing it and that you
need an antibiotic to cure it. There are
an infinite number of other logically possible explanations for your fever,
including demon possession, aliens are radiating you with an undetectable fever
gun, invisible, fever inflicting elves, and so on. All of these theses are logically possible
but preposterous. The reasonable person
listens to the doctor and draws a conclusion on the basis of the preponderance
of evidence. The mere possibility that
we could have immortal souls, considered by itself, is
no evidence for thinking that we do.
Another objection to my argument maintains
that the evidence for physical dependency given above is consistent with a
dualistic position that minds and bodies are ontologically separate
entities. What if the mind is distinct
from the body, and it controls the body and depends
upon it to publicly express itself? If
the body is the physical expression of the mind’s thoughts and the mind
controls the body, damage to the body would produce a reduction in the mind’s
ability to express itself physically, but the mind could be a separate, intact
entity. If we imagine the body as a sort
of puppet that is controlled by the separate and remote mind, then brain damage
would produce what appears to be mind damage, but actually it is only the
mind’s physical means of speaking, writing, walking, and physically acting that
has been affected, not the mind’s abilities themselves. Or if we think of the eyes as a window
through which the mind sees, darkening the window makes it impossible to see,
but the mind remains intact. Brain damage
that inhibits the body’s ability to speak prevents the mind from speaking, but
does not stop the mind from thinking. In
yet another metaphor, the mind is a separate mainframe processor and the body
is nothing but a dumb, remote workstation that gets its instructions from afar. According to this dualist scenario, the
evidence cited above to support the physical dependency thesis is equivocal
because it is at least consistent with the possibility that the mind controls
the body but the mind is ontologically distinct from it, and the mind depends
upon the proper function of the body to publicly express itself. Maybe the mind
was fine all along, but its ability to publicly manifest itself was compromised
which made it look as if the mind was damaged.
So does the evidence from brain and body
damage cases support the dualist and physical dependency theses equally
well? It does not. In some brain damage cases, for example,
stroke victims suffer from apraxia where they have difficultly producing articulate
speech and difficulty coordinating mouth and speech movements. And stroke patients suffering from dysarthia
can think and form language, but they cannot control the muscles required to
pronounce the sounds. Later, when these
patients reacquire the ability to speak through rehabilitation, they report
that they could think perfectly well, but they could not get their mouths to
say what they were thinking. Similarly,
when a person loses their sight or hearing because of damage to their eyes or
ears, their minds remain intact. But
since different parts of the brain control the formation of concepts and the
ability to control the muscles and respiration required to express them with
one’s mouth, and since the eyes and ears are separate from the brain processes
that are responsible for thoughts, these cases do not support the claim that
the mind does not need the brain to function.
In these cases, the parts of the brain associated with mental functions
are otherwise undamaged and presumed necessary for the mind,
and it is the portions of the brain that were not vital to the abstract mental
functions that were damaged. Indeed, it
is these sorts of cases of localized damage that allowed neuroscientists to
find the regions of the brain that control the motor skills connected to the
mouth and isolate them from the regions that are responsible for
conceptualization, and other functions.
The sort of evidence that is needed to
support the dualist thesis are cases where the brain regions that are directly
correlated with a specific higher mental function are damaged to the point that
they cannot function, but it can be established unequivocally that those mental
functions continued during and despite that damage. The challenge for the dualist is that if the
brain systems correlated with abstract, conceptual, or other mental activities
are damaged, there are no public indicators that the mind remains
unaffected.
One place the dualist might look is to stroke
victims who have various forms of aphasia.
In severe cases they lose the ability to produce words, recognize words,
read or write altogether. In more mild
cases, they can sometimes understand words and read, but they have trouble
finding words themselves. Perhaps the
brains of stroke victims who have had damage to the regions associated with
forming abstract thoughts (not merely their ability to speak or express
themselves) could recover through rehabilitation. Then, if the dualist thesis is correct, we
would expect those victims to report that all the time during their brain
injury they were thinking and abstracting normally, but they found themselves
mysteriously unable to express those thoughts.
Furthermore, this difficulty is different from the difficulty that
apraxia and dysarthia patients suffer.
But research into these cases has not
produced the evidence that would be needed to support the dualist’s
thesis. Quite the contrary, it has been
our ability to identify highly localized regions of damage and the testimony of
recovered patients that has allowed us to isolate the different regions of the
brain and identify different kinds of disorder.
When a patient recovers,[3] we can get details
about exactly what sort of cognitive difficulties they were having and we can
correlate those with the sort of physical damage to their brains. They report that they could form abstract
thoughts but they couldn’t get their mouths to express them, or they report
that their ability to form abstractions seemed hampered, but other cognitive or
physical abilities were intact, and so on.
What they do not report in cases where there is damage to
vital cognitive centers is that all of their mental powers were unharmed. The very fact that we are able to
successfully separate different disorders such as global aphasia, Broca’s
aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, anomic aphasia, apraxia, and dysarthria, and
identify the physical damage that is responsible for them and their different
symptoms disproves the dualist’s hypothesis.
And what we also find is that these specific regions associated with
higher mental functions are the same across all humans, and that damage to them
has predictable results. The mind does
not operate independently from the brain—the body is not merely a puppet that
is directly by a separate entity, the control of the body and mental functions
emanate from the brain itself.
The physical dependence of the soul suggests
a couple of possibilities for long term, or even permanent survival. I
have argued that there is no non-physical immortality. But perhaps immortality or near-immortality
could be achieved physically. First, if
we can perfect medical treatments, as well as improve dietary and health
resources to the point that we can extend human life indefinitely, then the
existence of a person’s soul could be prolonged. If we can repair or maintain a person’s body
and brain indefinitely, then perhaps their consciousness could be
immortal. Secondly, if the electrical
and chemical events in the brain could be duplicated in a machine, or in
another biological device, then perhaps this duplicate could take up the task
of sustaining one’s personality and consciousness. But such technology is far off, and
philosophers have legitimately worried about whether or not a copy or transferral
of my consciousness could actually sustain the actual consciousness and
perspective that I have, or merely be another version of me the way two copies
of a music recording are the same, but not numerically identical.
In some religious traditions, the claim is
made that there will be a physical resurrection where a person’s body will be
reconstituted into a form it had before it died, and that person will live
again forever. So even though the body
and brain of a person long dead have decayed and their molecules have been
incorporated into other things, through a miraculous event, God will either
reclaim those very same molecules, or ones like them, and then remake the body
and breathe life back into it.
There are several substantial questions and
problems with this scenario. First, we
have little or no substantial evidence to think that such an event will
happen. By some readings, the Bible and
other religious documents foretell a physical resurrection. But without substantial independent and
impartial grounds that would make believing such a fantastic prediction
plausible, we cannot take it seriously.
The claim by the Bible or any other source that an unprecedented
supernatural event will occur is not enough to meet the burdens of proof
discussed above. And, as we have seen,
the burden of proof increases proportionally to the extraordinariness of the
claim. Meeting that burden for claims
made thousands of years ago from a fragmented and equivocal set of manuscripts
would appear to be impossible.[4]
Second, notice that the physical resurrection
scenario seems to concede of the point of the soul’s physical dependency, which
is the major thesis of this argument.
The soul cannot exist without the operation of the body and brain.
Third, there are a staggering number of atoms
in the body. After death, those atoms
get widely disseminated. It is not
improbable, for example, that some of the atoms that were in Shakespeare’s body
are in yours. And he got many of his
from other people. So we have this
question: If humans are all resurrected
from the grave, who gets the atoms? The first owner? The last owner? What
about everyone else in between?
Furthermore, the atoms in your body are being regularly discarded and
replaced with new ones throughout your life.
Which ones get reconstituted in your resurrection?
Suppose in the resurrection it is not
necessary to use exactly the same atoms.
Instead, all that is needed is to replace carbon with carbon, oxygen
with oxygen, and so on. Here’s another
difficult question: which body of all
the bodies that you have had from birth to old age, and which configuration of
atoms gets resurrected? Do you come back
as the aging, rapidly failing senior citizen you were the moment before your
death? Would eternity in that state be
the ultimate reward (or punishment?) Are
you resurrected as a newborn? Once you
are resurrected, do you start to age again?
Do you age and die, or does your body stay static? If it stays static, do your thoughts change,
does your personality mature and grow as it did in your first life? Or are you made into a complete, perfect,
unchanging, new being? If so, that would
be resurrecting a person who is radically different from the one you are
now. How could that complete, static,
perfect, new being be you at all if your consciousness and your personality
with all the imperfections and limitations that make you unique no longer
exist?
So while it appears that there may be some
physical means to preserve the soul, the central thesis that a brainless soul
cannot exist has withstood the objections.
And a long and complicated list of challenges and questions confront
physical preservation or resurrection scenarios.
So it does not appear that any of the
evidence in favor of the soul’s immortality is plausible. Psychic contact, out-of-body stories, and
paranormal reports are not to be trusted.
The body is not merely a puppet being directed by a distinct, non-physical
mind. Claims about the survival of an
impersonal energy force are scientifically unsubstantiated, or they lose their
appeal to the individual precisely because they promise no survival for that
person. And even though the physical
autonomy of the soul may be logically possible, it is not reasonable to
believe. All hope for the prolonged
existence of my soul seems to depend upon our ability to prolong the existence
of its physical source.
The argument presented here is relatively simple. Consciousness and personality are physically dependent. When the brain dies, consciousness and
personality cease. A person’s soul, as
we commonly characterize it, is made up of their consciousness and
personality. Therefore, a person’s soul
does not survive the demise of the brain, and thus cannot be immortal.
Endnotes:
[1] The Harris Poll #11,
[2] In addition to the
thesis argued for here for the dependency of the soul on the brain, we may
legitimately worry about how it can be that a disembodied soul is able to
sense--see, hear, move, feel, and so on—without eyes, ears, legs, hands, or any
of the physical organs that make having a physical location and conscious
perspective possible.
[3] It should be noted
that full recovery is rare and difficult.
Stroke victims undergo arduous regimens of physical and psychological
therapy that takes years and often only produces partial recovery from the
symptoms. It is the plasticity and the
wide distribution of mind functions across brain regions that
allows any recovery at all.
[4] Notice that in our own age, people making
extraordinary, supernatural claims are abundant. On television, on the radio, in churches, at
psychic fairs, seances, and so on, supernatural claims are commonplace. Yet, for the most of us, the vast majority of
these claims are obviously false, and we do not take them seriously. We should be cautious about applying an
epistemic double standard when we consider these supernatural claims and the
supernatural claims in ancient religious texts.
People have always been gullible, prone to mistakes, deceitful, and
enthusiastic about supernatural claims.