The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain from Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

239 Pages·2015·2.11 MB·English

by  Julien Musolino

Published 2015 by Prometheus Books The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain from Letting Go of
Our Soul Beliefs. Copyright © 2015 by Julien Musolino. All rights reserved. No part of this publication
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Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Musolino, Julien.
The soul fallacy : what science shows we gain from letting go of our soul beliefs / by Julien Musolino.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61614-962-8 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-61614-963-5 (ebook) 1. Soul. 2. Religion and
science. I. Title.
BL290.M87 2015
202'.2—dc23
2014026944
Printed in the United States of America
Foreword
by Victor J. Stenger
Preface
Chapter 1: Lifting the Veil
Chapter 2: The Spirit of the Age
Chapter 3: The First Principle
Chapter 4: Dualism on Trial
Chapter 5: Requiem for the Soul
Chapter 6: La Mettrie's Revenge
Chapter 7: Descartes's Shadow
Chapter 8: The Sum of All Fears
Chapter 9: Imagine
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to?
You will never find that life for which you are looking.
When the gods created man, they allotted him death,
But life they retained in their own keeping.
Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things;
Day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice.
Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water,
Cherish the little child that holds your hand,
And make your wife happy in your embrace;
For this too is the lot of man.
1
—The Epic of Gilgamesh (third millennium BCE)
The common wisdom among scientists and theologians is that science has
nothing to say about God. In an official statement, the US National Academy of
Sciences, the same organization that shamefully denied membership to Carl
Sagan, declared in 1998: “Science is a way of knowing about the natural world.
It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes. Science can
say nothing about the supernatural. Whether God exists or not is a question
about which science is neutral.”2 Christian theologian John F. Haught agrees,
writing, “The scientific method by definition has nothing to say about God,
meaning, values, or purpose.”3
It is also widely claimed that no conflict exists between religion and science.
In their 2009 book Unscientific America, journalist Chris Mooney and former
congressional science fellow Sheril Kirshenbaum tell us, “A great many
religious organizations in America uphold the principle of compatibility” of
religion and science.4
Apparently these organizations have not informed their members of this
policy. A 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 45 percent of
Republicans (who are often conservative and Christian) see a conflict between
science and their beliefs.5 As for Democrats, 33 percent also say that science
conflicts with their faith. Clearly a large number of Americans—liberal and
conservative—believe that science and religion are incompatible.
Carl Sagan is often quoted as having said, “Absence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.” This kept him on good terms with believers. However,
this statement is not always true, as I pointed out in my 2007 book God: The
Failed Hypothesis.6 When the evidence that is absent should be there and is not,
then that can be taken as evidence of absence.
On winter mornings I can look out my office window on an empty field
covered with fresh snow. Occasionally I will see footprints of wild animals—
foxes, coyotes, and other unidentified wildlife. I rarely see the animals
themselves, but I know they exist from the fact that they left footprints. The God
most people worship plays a very active role in the universe and in human lives.
There should be ample evidence for his existence. But there is none. God has left
no footprints on the snows of time.
For millennia humans assumed that gods and spirits were responsible for the
events and phenomena they observed. With dangers all around them, the brains
of primitive people evolved by natural selection to ascribe agency and
intentionality to every event, which enabled humanity to survive. While this
made intuitive sense to our ancestors, some began to doubt that invisible agents
whose goals and purposes are modeled after our own govern the world. In the
sixth century BCE, Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales of Miletus (ca.
624–546 BCE), proposed purely natural explanations for physical phenomena
that involved only inanimate ingredients such as water that could be seen, and
forces such as the wind that could be felt. This was the beginning of science.
Much of the scholarship of ancient philosophers and scientists was lost to
Europe during the thousand-year era termed the Dark Ages. With the autocratic
Catholic Church dominating life in Christendom throughout that period, little
scientific progress was made. Fortunately, many ancient texts were saved,
translated, and expanded upon by Arabic scholars during the golden age of Islam
that began in 622 and ended in 1492—just as that knowledge had begun to creep
back into Europe.
Until then, Europeans continued to rely on supernatural explanations for what
they did not understand. The complex phenomena they saw in the world were
taken as evidence for the existence of an intelligent creator whom they assumed
to be the Christian God.
Today this rationale is known as the “god-of-the-gaps” argument, also
referred to as the “argument from ignorance.” When a person says he or she
cannot understand how something, such as the human body or the cosmos, could
have come about naturally, he or she concludes that it must have had a
supernatural cause. But just because someone—or even everyone at the time—
does not understand some phenomenon, that doesn't mean a natural explanation
for the phenomenon will never be found. History suggests otherwise.
The Dark Ages ended when the Renaissance and Reformation challenged the
authority of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. This led to more open
thinking and the rise of the new science that provided increasingly precise
physical explanations for natural phenomena. As the gaps in our understanding
were steadily plugged by science, God was no longer needed to fill them. Today
we have Darwinian evolution, which eliminates the need for God to explain the
complexity of life. We have several scenarios for a natural origin of the universe
that require no creator or act of creation. The germ theory of disease means we
no longer have to blame illnesses on the devil and engage in painful exorcisms.
We can provide natural explanations for earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes,
tsunamis, and other destructive events that once were attributed to divine
throwers of thunderbolts.
And, as we will see in this beautifully written, impeccably researched, and
compassionate book by Rutgers psychologist Julien Musolino, we are now in a
position to eliminate perhaps the most deeply personal and destructive
superstition held by the bulk of humanity: the immaterial, immortal soul.
Musolino provides a compelling scientific case for the nonexistence of the
soul. The author makes it clear that he is not presenting his own idiosyncratic
view but that of the wide consensus of psychologists, cognitive scientists, and
neuroscientists—not to mention biologists and physicists. As a physicist who has
never seen the hand of God in any observable phenomenon, I view the scientific
rejection of the soul as the ultimate validation of reductionist material monism.
The elimination of the soul will be the final, fatal blow to religious belief. The
idea of the duality of mind and body has been taken for granted by most
religious believers for centuries. Today we also find mind-body duality to be a
common presumption among those who have disassociated themselves from
organized religion but have not adopted total materialism, describing themselves
as “spiritual but not religious.”
No one can deny the obvious connection between mind and the physical brain,
and not all of those who call themselves “spiritual” embrace supernaturalism. I
wish they would find some other term. The word spirit usually refers to some
substance other than matter—the stuff of the soul.
No doubt soul belief is widespread in America. A 2013 Harris poll showed
that 64 percent of US adults believe in the survival of the soul after death, which
is down from 69 percent in 2005 but still substantial.7 Musolino found that even
a large majority of his own students in psychology classes, where the mind is
presented as an abstract description of the physical workings of the brain, still
believe they have an immaterial soul that will carry their consciousness into the
afterlife.
Many of today's science-savvy believers, including a minority of scientists,
think they can reconcile their faith with the biological and physical sciences that
often seem in conflict with their beliefs: humans evolved, but God guided the
process; the universe began 13.8 billion years ago rather than 6,000 years ago,
but God still created it; there is no scientific evidence for God, but he has his
reasons to hide from us.
However, squaring soul belief with science is going to be considerably more
challenging. How can supernatural religion and spirituality exist without the
immaterial, immortal soul?
As Musolino explains in clear, nontechnical language, there is no need to
introduce a supernatural soul in order to understand human thinking. If our
memories and consciousness are to survive death, as most religious people
believe, then memory and consciousness must reside in some nonmaterial entity.
But if that's the case, then why do we lose memories when we experience brain
trauma or disease, or ingest drugs? If consciousness dwells in the soul, then why
do we become unconscious under anesthesia or from a blow to the head?
The popular conception of consciousness is one of awareness, intent, and
feeling operating on the information provided by our senses and memories. That
information provides us with a knowledge base for our actions, which are then
performed consciously by an entity called the “self” that is thought to be the
essence of our personhood and is usually identified with the soul. For example,
when I lift a fork to my lips at the dinner table, my conscious self performs a
deliberate act by telling my arm and hand what to do. At least, this is the
common understanding of what is called free will.
However, laboratory experiments pioneered in the 1980s by physiologist
Benjamin Libet have shown that before we become aware of making a decision,
our brains have already laid the groundwork for that decision.8 While the
interpretation of Libet's original results remains controversial,9 continuing
research has strongly confirmed the main feature of the phenomenon, which is
the significant time delay between the brain beginning to shape a decision and
our awareness of making that decision.10 The fact that we have conscious access
to only a fraction of all brain processing should give us pause as we consider
decisions, intuitions, or feelings of certainty. The major role of the unconscious
in our behavior and decision-making challenges assumptions about free will and
the associated religious teachings about sin and redemption, as well as our
judicial concepts of responsibility and punishment. If our brains are making our
decisions for us outside conscious awareness, how can we be responsible for our
actions? How can our legal system punish criminals or God punish sinners who
aren't in full control of their decision-making faculties?11 This book addresses
these important questions.
Of course, most people will not immediately welcome the message that the
soul does not exist and that there is no life after death. But what should Musolino
and his colleagues in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience do? Hide
the results of their research just to make people feel better? Keep their
conclusions confined to the technical literature and not explain them to the
general public? Allow the great propaganda machines of organized religion and
New Age spirituality to continue to delude people with promises of life after
death that are based on ancient superstitions and unsupported by evidence?
Musolino does not leave it at that but suggests, as many atheists in the past
have also advocated, that we are far better off knowing that we don't have souls
than being trapped in the prison of soul belief. Even if you are a moderate
believer who is open to almost everything science provides, the very fact that
you still indulge in magical thinking leaves you prone to making decisions in
your life based on ideas that have no rational support. For example, you might
deny your child medical care or vaccination because to do so would conflict with
the teachings of your church.
It will take a long time, but humans are going to have to come to grips with
the fact that they have no souls. Believers can't go on living in a fantasy world
that does them more harm than good. Even in America, with its exceptionally
high religiosity compared to the rest of the developed world, reality must
eventually intrude. Some say this will never happen. However, it is happening
very dramatically elsewhere. Here we do not have to theorize but simply look at
the data, which show that not only is it possible for people to abandon belief, but
the result is a far happier and healthier society than that found in God-
intoxicated America.
In 2005, freelance researcher Gregory S. Paul published the results of surveys
that correlate religiosity in various first-world nations with social health. He
concluded that “in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently
enjoy low rates of social dysfunction, while pro-religious and antievolution
America performs poorly.”12 Similar results are reported by sociologists Pippa
Norris and Ronald Ingelhart in their 2011 book Sacred and Secular13 and by
sociologist Phil Zuckerman in his 2009 book Society without God.14
The facts are clear and simple: many people are happier and behave well—
even better—without belief in God, and there is no reason to think the rest of
humanity will never come around and finally discard the supernatural fantasies
that endanger the very survival of our species. After all, humans have become
accustomed to the fact that they are not at the center of the universe, as well as
the fact that they are not unique creations but just another animal that happens to