You, your Soul, and God

A long while ago I did a series of classes on classical and modern arguments for the existence of God.  At the outset of the first class I went around the room and asked the students, “Why do you believe in God?”

One student replied, “Because I know I have a soul.”

It was a profound observation.  The student’s answer is one of the primary intuitions that send mankind in search of its Creator. 

Today I wanted to talk about the soul, some of the reasons we have the sense of having a soul, and why it points us to God.

The Two Form One “I”:

The first thing we know about ourselves… is that we exist.   The human experience is characterized by a rich conscious inner mental life.  We have emotions, memories, and experiences.  We have identities, goals, desires, and free will.  All of these things are expressed by the single word…

  

  This sense of “I” is coupled to the intuition that there is something about ourselves which is not reducible to bare matter.   That the person looking out of those eyes is more than the lights and clockwork of a brain reacting to stimuli.   We have a soul.

Regarding the soul and the body, some imagine it as a ghost stuffed into a bodily container.  Under that view the real substance of the person is the soul and the body is just a vehicle.  That understanding, I think, is highly problematic.

Instead, a comparison I like to use is the relationship between the sides and angles in a triangle.  The triangle is not just one or the other, but the seamless union of the two to make one thing. 

To continue the analogy, the sides are clearly material things.  The angles are not themselves material, yet we still know they are there.  Just as we look at ourselves and know the soul is there.

The Mental and the Mundane:

One basis for this intuition of having a soul is that many of our experiences, thoughts, and actions cannot seem to be reduced to bare material processes.  Let’s look at a few.

First, we experience tons of things which are not physical.  These experiences may correlate with physical manifestations, but the phenomenon as experiences are distinct from the correlated physical events.  So, for instance, the experience of seeing something red is qualitatively different from the firing of certain neurons in your brain. 

The same could be said for all of our emotions and memories.  Again, there may be brain activity which goes along with these experiences… but the brain activity which goes along with joy and sadness is simply not the same as the experience of joy and sadness.  Further, the function of a certain section of the brain may correlate with your memory of your first hamburger, but that cluster of neurons isn’t the same as the memory itself.

We also experience free-will and mental causation.  Take the simple decision about how much to give to a charity.  You weigh options, think about your budget, decide, and put down a number.  How does our carbon­-based body – a collection of atoms which themselves possess no intelligence - get the ability to do this?

On that same note, we interact with non-material things.   Is the logic of mathematics and philosophy a physical thing?  What about our ideas and motivations?  When we think about these very real things, we are not thinking of concrete objects in the material world. 

We also desire things which cannot be expressed physically.  We want to behold things of great beauty.  You may have seen things which are beautiful, but have you ever seen the concept of beauty itself?  

Or justice… how much does justice weigh?  How do take a physical measurement of wonder and awe?  Can you put the concepts of good and evil into a box of sufficient size?  None of these things are physical, yet we know they are real things we experience.

We intuit that that all of these things – while deeply intertwined with the material world – are not limited to it.  They point beyond it.

Lights and Clockwork?

There are some who hold that there is no such thing as a soul – that the human person can be entirely described through natural means.  In this understanding we are, in the final analysis, nothing but peculiar arrangements of matter.  We are squishy robots. 

Still, folks who deny the soul still have to give some kind of explanation for our consciousness, thoughts, and experiences.  The most common explanation is that these are “epiphenomena” of the brain.  An “epiphenomena” is a fancy term for a byproduct – or emergent effect - of process which has no real substance or itself has no ability to cause anything. 

One might compare this to an object and its shadow.  The interaction of light and the object gives rise to the shadow, but no one would ever think the shadow is a substantial thing which directly controls the object.

Thus, the picture of humanity which rises out of this naturalist-epiphenominalist framework is like this: 

• An organism automatically reacts to various stimuli without any consciousness. This includes everything you do, even speech. 

• The activity of the brain gives rise to mental phenomena which the organism experiences.   This is your experience of the world.  It even includes your thoughts.

• However, these experiences have no backwards effect on the organism.  They are not substantial, and are causally effete.    

• The organism believes it is controlling its body by thought and deliberation, but this is an illusion.  

Again, a person who believes in the unity of the body and soul would happily agree that bodily events and mental events are intertwined and correlated to one another.  The difference is that a person who denies the soul would assert that brain activity is all that really exists.  Or at least, all that has an effect on outward behavior.

Whence Cometh the "I"? 

But there is a major issue which those who take the materialist-epiphenomel approach to the human person which its proponents must contend with.  If our conscious lives are non-substantial and causally inert, it becomes very difficult to explain our experiences.  Here's why...

The Genesis Problem:

Typically those who take this view will only allow for one force for forming our species - Darwinian evolution. But evolution only rewards traits which lead to adaptive behaviors, better survival, and more successful mating.  So if our conscious life is a causally effete illusion produced by our brain, then its presence or absence will not matter in the drama of natural selection. 

So let’s rewind the clock and think about single-celled organisms.  We would not propose that single-celled organisms have a conscious existence.  They are just carbon-based reproduction machines.  They do all the proper behaviors but with no inner awareness - and they get along just fine. 

So why would that change over time? 

We can just as easily imagine the evolutionary process creating a biosphere of creatures with favorable physiological traits and behaviors which are nonetheless devoid of an inner conscious life.

They would act and react exactly as we would expect, but inside their heads there would be no more conscious than in a plankton.  We would follow suit, being - in the end - just unconscious squishy robots.

So if there is no evolutionary advantage to having a conscious life - (again, because it does not cause anything in the real world) - why would it come to exist in the first place?  How could the process of natural selection create - and then select for - a trait which is utterly invisible to its mechanisms? 

No Feedback Loop:

The other issue is that even if a conscious life came to exist in a species - why would it be accurate? 

Imagine you had two conscious humans.  One’s mind took data from the sensory organs and created an accurate mental picture of the outside world.  The other human's mind interpreted the sensory data as meaningless jibberish. 

But because both these mental pictures have no effect on behavior, both would behave the same way - and thus be equally fit for passing on their genes.  If the conscious life is really causally effete, then there is no evolutionary benefit of an accurate experience over an inaccurate one. 

To make a comparison, many systems have what's called a "feedback loop" which allows itself to auto-correct if there is bad data being reported.  In natural selection, the “feedback loop” is typically an early death. 

But if our mental experiences cause nothing, then there is no evolutionary feedback-loop to ensure our experiences reflect the real world. So it is just as – if not more - likely that we would experience utter nonsense while still behaving the proper way.

The Real World:

Yet we all have a basic belief that the people we interact with have mental lives through which they accurately experience reality.  We assume that because this is what we experience ourselves.

But if this materialist-epiphenomenalist view of the person is correct, this assumption is totally unwarranted.  It is just as likely - or even more likely - that our experiences would be jibberish or simply non-existent. 

That’s not just true of your neighbor’s experiences, that includes you too.  Lived consistently, the naturalist-epiphenomenalist worldview would cause you to lose confidence in your experience of reality.

You and Me and God:

So we’re back to the age-old intuition of there being something about human nature which is not physical.  Something which has to do with our personal identity, rationality, experiences, memories, free-will, and desires. 

This leads us to two more conclusions. 

1. If there is something about ourselves which is not physical, it stands to reason that it would continue to exist even after physical death.  It might be greatly reduced in its capabilities (because it is meant to be incorporated into a human body), but it retains its substance.

2. The other conclusion is that this spiritual thing must have a source which can bring it into existence.  But nothing in the natural world can do that.  You're left looking outside to something - or someone - which can do the job.

So we return to what the student said at the beginning of this essay.  “I believe in God because I know I have a soul.”