The Soul - Then and Now

by John Winsor

The Ancient Soul: Who We Are

The first magical spirit was the soul. It was self-evident to prehistoric people. They neither had nor needed any other explanation for the distinction between living and dead. While you breathed, you were alive. When you stopped, you were dead. One moment you were there and the next you were gone. All that remained behind was your body - an empty vessel.

The concept of a supernatural "soul" is central to ancient dogma. The words "spirit" and "inspire" derive from the Latin spiritus ("breath"), as do expiration and respiration. "Soul" and "spirit" are more or less synonymous. To inspire is to breathe into. To expire is to die (i.e., to stop breathing). We call an intuitive leap an inspiration - a breath from God. Actually, it's a quite natural phenomenon that occurs entirely inside of the human skull. According to one of the two Creation myths in Genesis, God produced Adam by breathing life into a lump of clay. People at the time observed that the living breathe and the dead don't, so it wasn't a major stretch to associate breathing with the presence of a soul - a body's inhabitant. It made perfect sense to them.

The ancients were unaware of the roles the brain plays in thinking and managing our body's functions - which explains why the Egyptians removed brains from bodies during the mummification process. The brain was, from their perspective, just a glob of unnecessary goop that interfered with the attractive preservation of the outer body, which was the vessel into which the soul would eventually be reinstalled.

In ancient times, explaining the nature of the soul wasn't particularly difficult. Bodies were simply vessels. Souls were the personalities that inhabited and animated bodies. Now that we understand the brain as the thinking and remembering organ and the source of personality and emotion, now that we are aware that thoughts are complex interactions of electrochemical processes within physical structures, that memories, ideas, and associations are physically stored for recall, souls have been rendered obsolete. Nonetheless, religion requires that wishful thinking cling to the concept of the soul.

The Modern Soul: Something We Have

Religious people still cling to the notion of the soul, but it has become a much more mysterious entity - nebulous in character and function. For the ancients, the soul was who we are. Now it's become something we have. At best, it's conceived as some ethereal thing that's undetectable and serves no apparent purpose. It no longer tells us anything about what it means to be alive or dead. With the rise of scientific inquiry, the primitive notion of the soul has become utterly superfluous, but it persists because religious leaders obfuscate the issue and provide disincentives for considering the rational alternative and because wishful-thinking believers prefer the mystical "soul" concept to hard facts about the brain.

When neurobiology rendered the "soul" notion obsolete, all other claims about supernatural phenomena were seriously undermined. Our brains enable us to see, hear, taste, smell, feel, think, emote, communicate, and move without intervention by any supernatural agent. The role of the central nervous system in operating the organs is also completely natural. These things have been determined through empirical research into the functions of the human brain. It's an extraordinarily complex organ, but it's completely physical. Brain research is a very young field and there are plenty of gaps in our knowledge, but the basics are well-established and there's really no need to inject mysterious supernatural properties.

Let's apply Ockham's Razor: The simplest explanation for who we are is that consciousness is one of the brain's many functions. There's no need to complicate matters by injecting this vague and superfluous entity called a "soul." If your soul doesn't exist, it can't go to Heaven or Hell. It can't be reincarnated in a turtle or a turnip, either. It can't linger after you die, so there's no rational basis for believing in ghosts. The notions of all things supernatural - gods, angels, demons, and so on - are intertwined with this ancient misconception. If we don't have souls, then gods and angels can't tell us the paths to eternal salvation or damnation because these are also pure fiction - regardless of how attractive that fiction may be to wishful thinkers.

Phony psychics still prey on people who believe in the soul by claiming that they can communicate with the dead. Phony preachers prey on the same people by admonishing them to pay "fire insurance" to protect the eternal futures of their souls. As in criminal detective work, all one need do to identify the bad guys is follow the money.