The concept of an immortal soul is logically unsupportable

Introduction

What would replace religious standards? People pick and choose standards and rules to live by from their religions. Whether or not we dispense with religion the standards that some people take from their religions could, and should, be replaced by ethical standards. Ethical standards are much better than standards from old religions in any case; they are rational and consistent.   Home Top Index Is the trashing of the immortal soul concept even worse for religion than was the Theory of Evolution? Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution has been the great bugbear of those who claim that the Earth was created 6000 years ago and who choose to believe that man was somehow fundamentally different from the other animals. Could the scientific proof that an immortal soul is a meaningless, senseless, useless, ridiculous concept be even worse for religion?

It is possible to prove that a human soul is a meaningless concept; that an immortal and immaterial soul could not carry our memories, our personalities, our emotions, our senses, our characters, it could not be aware of its surroundings, it could not think. The arguments on this page, I believe, show that an immortal soul is a meaningless concept and that the soul as used in religions, is an absurdity and an impossibility.

First; is there any reason that we should believe that people have a soul? What evidence is there for a soul that goes on after death? Absolutely none! No-one has ever scientifically demonstrated that there is such a thing. No-one has ever even provided any solid evidence suggesting that there might be such a thing.

Some parts of the Bible suggest that there is an afterlife. Much of the Old Testament regards the relation between God and Man on earth; the concept of an afterlife seems foreign to the early part of the Old Testament. The immortal soul concept seems to have been invented after the writing of the early parts of the Old Testament. But, in any case, the imaginings of the writers of the Bible have absolutely no evidentiary value.

If, as an exercise, one assumes that we have a soul and examines what properties that soul could have one reaches the absurd conclusion that it could have no properties; it would be a non-entity. Therefore one proves the impossibility of an immortal soul by reductio ad absurdum: reduction to absurdity.

Confusion in Christianity on an immortal soul

There seems to have been different ideas among different Christians at different times about whether:

• all humans have an immortal soul;
• just the 'elect' have an immortal soul;
• all higher animals have a soul;
• there is an immortal soul at all.

Reincarnation There are similarities to the belief in reincarnation, where the person 'comes back' in a new body and possibly even in a non-human form. How the person's 'essence' is transferred seems never to be explained.

As I understand it Jesus spoke of the need for people to accept his teachings and believe that he was the Son of God as being the way to eternal life 'in His father's mansion'. The implication here seems to be that those who didn't follow Jesus' teachings would fully die when their bodies died. Then there is the concept of bad people suffering in Hell for eternity; implying that we all, good and bad, have eternal life. And there is the 'theory' of resurrection; that there may be no continuity, we will die but the 'good Christians' will be somehow re-created at the judgement day.

There are probably other variations on the 'soul' or 'life after death' idea (more accurately a delusion than an idea?)

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Suppose we have a soul

	On similar subjects Bible Christian virtues Ethics God's Word Is God real? Islam's threat Militant Islam Religion is a false belief
	Eternal torment? If there's no brain there's no pain

For the sake of examining the consequences of the idea, suppose for the present that we do have an immortal soul. Once it leaves the body, what would it be capable of?

The senses

Science has explained in great detail how our ears work in concert with our brains to allow us to perceive and interpret sounds. But our disembodied soul would have neither ears nor brain; it could not hear.

In the case of our eyes, science has demonstrated how light is focussed by the cornea and lens to form an image on the retina, and how the cone and rod cells of the retina detect the light, convert it into nerve impulses and transmit them to the brain. The brain then interprets the innumerable nerve impulses, uses our experiences to decipher the areas of differing light intensity in the images, examines the differences between the images coming from each eye, and produces 'a picture in our heads' that is meaningful in terms of objects, movement, textures; things with which we are familiar. A soul of course, having neither eyes nor brain, could not see.

Very similar arguments can be made regarding the other senses: smell, taste, feel. In relation to those religions that threaten their adherents with torment in Hell, you won't take your brain with you to Hell, a brain is required for the perception of pain. A disembodied soul could not feel pain!

Obviously the soul would have no mouth, tongue, vocal cords or lungs; so it would be incapable of speech. It would have no hands, so would be incapable of sign language.

Therefore the soul could have no senses and would be incapable of receiving any information about its surroundings; it would also be incapable of communicating.

Memory

Scientists, partly from studying victims of stroke and brain injuries, and by other studies, have thoroughly demonstrated that memory is a function of our brain. More than that, they have shown that our ability to remember everyday experiences depends on a slender belt of brain tissue called the hippocampus. Memories can be lost due to brain damage, they can be invoked by electrical stimulation of selected areas of the brain.

A disembodied soul, having no brain, could remember nothing. When you die, all your memories die with you.

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Personality, character

Similarly, studies of victims of brain injuries have shown that damage to particular regions can have profound effects on personality and character. A person can become unrecognisable from his or her behaviour, following serious brain damage, even when capable of otherwise living a normal life. A classic case of a completely changed personality following brain injury is that of Phineas Gage who had a large iron rod completely driven through his head. Amazingly he survived the accident, but his personality and behaviour were completely changed.

Personality and character are therefore functions of our brains.

A disembodied soul would not have character or personality. When you die your personality and character die with your body.

Our brains New research has defined 97 new (in addition to 83 already reported) functional areas in the human brain. If an immortal soul existed, it would be without a brain, so it would be incapable of any of these 180 specific mental functions.

Emotions

Fear is a function of the part of our brains called the amygdala, and greed is handled by an area called the nucleus accumbens. Even the irrational share-trading behaviour that was closely tied to the economic collapse of 2008/09 has been traced to a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Both the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus are involved in sex drive. (See In the Mind of the Market for some of the background science.)

A disembodied soul would have no emotions.

Thought

Quoting from md-health.com:

"The frontal lobe [of the brain] is one of four lobes in the cerebral hemisphere. This lobe controls several elements including creative thought, problem solving, intellect, judgment, behavior, attention, abstract thinking, physical reactions, muscle movements, coordinated movements, smell and personality."

Brain damage from stroke, disease, or trauma can leave people incapable of problem solving, of considering the rational implications of arguments, of understanding what their senses are telling them; in short, of thought.

As a single example, it has been shown that brain researchers can detect who we are thinking about by scanning our brains.

I believe that there is a small area of the brain named for Einstein, where higher mathematical thought processes take place.

Without a brain, a disembodied soul would be incapable of thought.

In summary

If there was an immortal soul it could have no sensory input, no memories, and could not think; it could have no personality or character, no emotions; it could not do anything that we would recognise as definitively human and could not carry anything recognisable from the human in which it originally resided. How then, given what science has shown us, could my soul carry the essential me?

In science and philosophy one way of proving that a proposition is false is by following its logical consequences and showing that they lead to an absurd outcome. For example, if an arithmetical hypothesis leads to the conclusion that one equals two, it can be said to be proven on the principle of 'reductio ad absurdum' (reduction to absurdity), that the hypothesis is false.

The above arguments prove, I believe, reductio ad absurdum, that the concept of a soul is meaningless and achieves nothing; it leads to the absurd outcome of a thing that has no properties and that could do nothing.

Also, the long-used scientific principle of Ockham's Razor tells us that when we are faced with several explanations for something the simpler is almost always preferable. Either we have immortal souls or we do not. If I have a soul it would not be capable of carrying any meaningful 'me' into an afterlife or into a new incarnation unless we ascribe some sort of quite unprovable 'magical' properties to it; it is an unnecessary and unproductive theory that goes nowhere. Surely the alternative of there being no immortal soul is the preferable theory? It is simple and fits observed reality.

If the soul concept goes, there too goes most or all of the world's religions.

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Other questions

Extracted from Wrested Scriptures, absurdities relating to the 'immortality of the soul'.

"If all men have immortal souls, then it begs the question, when exactly did these immortal souls come into existence? Does an unborn baby have an immortal soul? Does a foetus have an immortal soul? Does a fertilised egg at conception have an immortal soul? If so, what do these immortal souls look like if the unborn baby dies in the womb? Does the soul of a stillborn baby instantly gain full adulthood in appearance when they reach heaven (or hell)? Do the souls of these dead babies have fully developed brains when they reach heaven (or hell)? Where will they have gained the knowledge to speak and the powers of memory and reason?"

You would also have to ask when the soul evolved, unless you suppose that God decided at some point to add a soul to our ancestors' make-up. Science shows that we have evolved from simpler organisms, do we need to add another layer of complexity to the science of evolution to account for the development of a soul that is quite indemonstrable and serves no possible purpose?

The more rational thought one gives the concept of the soul the more unlikely it seems.

Why did God give us brains?

If we do have souls and our souls carry the essentials of each of us, why did God also put the essentials of each of us in our brains?

Putting it another way: if I have a soul and that soul carries 'the real me', my memories, my personality, my character, my reasoning abilities, etc., then why are those same properties built into the functionality of my brain? Surely this is unnecessary duplication? If I have a copy of my memories in my brain and another copy in my soul, which copy has precedence? Is one 'backed-up' to the other periodically, like we back up our computers?

Why did God give us eyes?

This is a similar question to 'why did God give us brains?' above. Those who believe that 'near death experiences' are examples of the soul temporarily leaving the body claim that when the body comes very close to death, or actually 'dies' temporarily, the soul moves around and can see the body and all that happens to it. If the soul can see, why do we have eyes?

Of course in the real world no one sees without functional eyes and brains, both of which developed over many millions of years of evolution.

Looking at this from another angle, if the soul can see why does God deny blind people sight? Is he cruel?

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Resurrection

Some theologians hold that the idea of an immortal soul comes not from the Bible but from the ancient Egyptians and Plato; and there seems good evidence for this. See Life Hope and Truth.

Of course the New Testament has much about resurrection. But if there is no continuation after the death of the body, in something like a soul, how can a resurrected body be, in any meaninful sense, the same person as the one who died?

The idea is logically supportable – in some sense – if we suppose that at resurrection God makes a new person, identical to the old in everything, including memories. But then there is the question of, an identical copy of the person at what stage of life? At the point of death; old and decrepit? Or in youth and vigour, but then would it be without the memories that came later in life? Or in youth and vigour, but with the memories of later life somehow added on? (Minus the confusion, and perhaps delusions, of decrepitude?)

Of course there is no evidence for any of this; it is no more than a fanciful exercise in theology.

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This section added 2021/02/28

A note on Buddhism

The concept of reincarnation seems to me to be the greatest failing of Buddhism.

I have read in 'A Gift of Peace and Happiness', which is a free booklet on Buddhism, the below:

"Because there is no permanent unchanging self, Buddhism denies the existence of an unvarying immortal soul passing from one life to the next. According to Buddhism, the mind or consciousness moves from one life to the next."

The emphasis above is mine. It seems to me irrelevant whether one claims that a soul survives death or a 'mind or consciousness' survives death. Either way the claim can be shown to be absurd by the argument on this page.

It is simply nonsensical to claim that either a soul, a mind, or consciousness can survive the death of the body and pass on to some other life or some other organism. In addition, in the specific case of Buddhism, how are we to believe that a human mind could pass on to, say, a cockroach; or a cockroach's mind to a human?

There is also, of course, the unanswered question of 'If my mind or my consciousness came to me from a previous life, why do I have no memory of that life?'

Afterword

When my body dies, my memories die, my thought processes die, all of me dies. All that remains, apart from my dead physical body, are my works and the memories that other people have of me.

Death is a very natural thing, the end of life. An atheist has no reason to fear death.

Related pages

On external sites...

Physics and the Immortality of the Soul, Scientific American, written by Sean M. Carroll, 2011/05/23 - A scientific view on the concept of an immortal soul.

"Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing."

"Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die."

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We asked Australians if they believe in God or the supernatural. Here's what they said; By Natasha Moore for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2021/04/04.

When asked "Do you believe you have a soul" 49% of young people (18-26) replied "I believe this exists" and another 28% replied "I am open to the possibility this exists". Only 4% said that "I believe this does not exist". There were very similar percentages that said they accepted life after death; which implies that most people understood 'soul' to mean 'immortal soul'.

Perhaps surprisingly people in the oldest age bracket (76+) were much more skeptical of the supernatural, "a full 40 per cent said they do not believe in ghosts, and 28 per cent dismissed the possibility of life after death".

So about half of all young people are sufficiently deluded to believe, against all the evidence, that they have an immortal soul. This should be of great concern to all thinking people.

On this site...

Delusions: an unaffordable luxury

A rational 'religion'

Religions and other superstitions

Science, religion and delusion

Self-deception

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