Soul 4 Real For Life Rarely Provides
—Lawrence Krauss, 'A Universe from Nothing,' 2012 One July night in a small English village, sometime near the end of the twentieth century, Harry stood by his friend Rodrick as the radio engineer calmly explained his plan to strike at the creator of the universe. Rodrick had decided that he wanted to kill God, and he thought he knew how. This desire was motivated in part by his conviction that the universe should exist on its own, but mostly it was fueled by Rodrick’s deep contempt for the unfairness of existence for which he held God responsible.
“Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Late to dive into your depths where life calmly gives out it's own secret” ~Rilke. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads” ~Erica Jong.
He explained to Harry that even though God was not material, He must possess at least some material characteristics, for otherwise He would not have been able to create the physical universe. When prompted to explain how he might be able to reach God, Rodrick remarked that the information had been available to us for a long time: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,” (Genesis 1:3). The machine that Rodrick built to carry out his plan was an elaborate framework of lasers, mirrors, and prisms, all precisely arranged and calibrated, sitting on the workbench in his home laboratory. He reasoned that it should be possible to generate a self-sustaining pattern of light that would reinforce itself indefinitely, transcending space and time to reach the Creator, striking God with a deadly bolt of energy. The two men adjusted their goggles and Rodrick flipped on the switch. Through the dark lenses, they could make out the pattern of light in front of them as the beams followed their geometric paths.
Gradually, the light intensified, and the brightness started to expand, swallowing the mirrors, the workbench, and the entire room. An instant later, the light was gone. “That’s it,” announced Rodrick dryly. “God is dead.” Harry looked around, and everything seemed perfectly normal. “Nonsense!” he snarled. Rodrick then removed his goggles to inspect the room, and it was at that moment that the truth was revealed to Harry. He saw his friend’s empty eyes.
Rodrick had indeed killed God, and in the process, he had destroyed every living creature’s soul. Life went on, and the vast clockwork of the universe continued to tick according to mechanical laws, but all you had to do now was look into people’s eyes to realize that they were all dead inside. There was no beauty, no meaning, no inner life. This is what God supplied when he was alive, after all, reflected Harry. And now it was all gone.
This is a summary of the short story called 'The God Gun,' by science fiction author Barrington Bayley, which was written in the early 1970s. Today, in spite of considerable advances in technology, most people would find Rodrick’s quest futile and hopelessly simpleminded, to say nothing of its evil nature. But Bayley’s story remains powerful because most of us share his intuition that human beings are more than mere collections of physical parts. There must be something else in addition to the atoms and cells that make up our bodies—an essence, a spirit, something precious and beautiful. In short, a soul. This intuition is deeply rooted in the human psyche and has been shared by people across cultures from antiquity to the present day. As Mark Baker and Stewart Goetz observe in their book 'The Soul Hypothesis,' “Most people, at most times, in most places, at most ages have believed that human beings have some kind of soul.” This intuition also plays a central role in most religious doctrines.
Pope John Paul II famously articulated the idea in a message delivered to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1996, in which the Holy Father declared that the human body might originate from preexisting living matter, but the spiritual soul is a direct creation of God. Explaining the mind as a product of evolution, claimed the pope, was incompatible with the truth about man. Belief in the soul is also very much alive in North American culture today, as the results of numerous polls demonstrate. In my own interviews of college students enrolled in upper-level undergraduate psychology classes like the ones I regularly teach at Rutgers University, I have found that a majority of students also believe that they have a soul.
What’s more, these intuitions are constantly reinforced by a wealth of books, TV shows, movies, and pronouncements made by writers and gurus of all stripes who purport to have found convincing evidence for the existence of the soul. Belief in the immortality of the soul was even featured as the cover story of the October 15, 2012, issue of the magazine Newsweek, with the title 'Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience of the Afterlife.'
In sharp contrast to popular opinion, the current scientific consensus rejects any notion of soul or spirit as separate from the activity of the brain. This is what Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, called “The Astonishing Hypothesis.” In Crick’s words, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Reflecting on what he calls the scientific image of persons, the philosopher Owen Flanagan stressed that we “need to demythologize persons by rooting out certain unfounded ideas from the perennial philosophy. Letting go of the belief in souls is a minimal requirement. In fact, desouling is the primary operation of the scientific image.” The weight of the scientific consensus is distributed over many disciplines and includes, as we would expect, the sciences of the mind (psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science). Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene summarizes the situation as follows. Most people are dualists. Intuitively, we think of ourselves not as physical devices, but as immaterial minds or souls housed in physical bodies.
Most experimental psychologists and neuroscientists disagree, at least officially. The modern science of mind proceeds on the assumption that the mind is simply what the brain does.
We don’t talk much about this, however. We scientists take the mind’s physical basis for granted. Among the general public, it’s a touchy subject. Thus, according to Greene, science, like Rodrick’s God-gun, has killed the soul, but scientists are reluctant to announce the news.
The soul may indeed be a grand illusion, but it is a useful and comforting one. Open Pandora’s box and we may be the ones, like Harry, looking into other people’s eyes and discovering that everything has lost its beauty and meaning. The award-winning author Jared Diamond once remarked that science is responsible for dramatic changes to our smug self-image.
Astronomy has taught us that our planet is not the navel of the universe. We learned from biology that we were not created by God but evolved alongside millions of other species. This book is about another seismic change in our self-image. Most people today believe that we have the bodies of beasts and the souls of angels.
Science tells us otherwise. In the pages ahead, I will take you on a tour of history, philosophy, and science to show you that the soul, like geocentricism and creationism, is a figment of our imagination, and I will try to explain to you what gives rise to the illusion. Modern astronomy and the theory of evolution did not precipitate the end of the world. They are unmistakable signs of progress. Likewise, I will show you that in spite of repeated claims to the contrary, we lose nothing by letting go of our soul beliefs and—better—that we even have something to gain.
It is this empowering conclusion that I want to leave you with as you reach the end of this book. THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE In a 1999 Edge debate featuring the biologist Richard Dawkins and the psychologist Steven Pinker, titled 'Is Science Killing the Soul?,' Dawkins pointed out that the word soul has different senses. One is the traditional idea that there is something incorporeal about us, that the body is spiritualized by a mysterious substance. In this view, the soul is the nonphysical principle that allows us to tell right from wrong, gives us our ability to reason and have feelings, makes us conscious, and gives us free will. Perhaps most important, the soul is the immortal part of ourselves that can survive the death of our physical body and is capable of happiness or suffering in the afterlife. This is the soul that this book is about.
It is the soul that captures the imagination of a majority of our population. Here’s what some of the students I interviewed wrote about it: Soul to me is the internal self of an individual.
It’s separate from the physical part of the body and makes me what I am. It is what I refer to when I am thinking or talking about myself. I do believe that my soul will survive the death of my body.
I think soul is eternal and will still be there long after my body has perished. I believe my soul is the non-material being of myself. The part that is distinct from both my mind and my external body. I believe the soul to be unchanging and eternal.
Because I think the soul is imperishable I also believe that it will survive the death of my body. I would define my soul as the spirit inside of me that is currently present in a human form.
The properties of the soul are that it contains all of our emotions and feelings. I believe that when I die my soul will live on. These considerations bring up an important issue that has been regularly discussed within scientific and skeptical circles: the issue of tone. In reflecting on this question, the late Carl Sagan, who has done so much for skepticism and the public understanding of science, observed that when skepticism is applied to issues of public concern, as in the present case, there is all too often a tendency to belittle, to condescend, and to disregard the fact that believers are human beings as well, with genuine beliefs and real feelings, people who, like skeptics and scientists, are also trying to understand the world and figure out what their place and purpose in it might be.
Echoing Sagan’s concerns, the astronomer Phil Plait delivered an address at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) of July 2010 titled, “Don’t Be a Dick” (a maxim related to Wheaton’s Law, which provides guidelines on appropriate online game-playing behavior, but that was also intended to apply to life in general). The gist of Plait’s remarks was that even the best ideas are useless unless they are communicated. And in the case of skepticism, the message communicated has the potential to make people uncomfortable and defensive, to say the least. Consequently, our attitude and the way we communicate those ideas takes on critical importance.
I must confess that I have been guilty of the bias described above, and I was unaware of it until a student pointed it out to me when she wrote the following: I came into this discussion excited for this new point-of-view and eager to learn, but I remember leaving the lecture hall on the verge of crying. I know that dualism isn’t the best explanation for the world around us, and it’s good to hear both sides, but the way he explained it felt like daggers were being thrown in my heart and my world was shattering.
I wish he would’ve let us down gently, like saying “Santa may not be here physically, but he’ll always be in our hearts” instead of just yanking off the beard on the mall Santa and yelling in front of all the little kids, “SANTA ISN’T REAL!” This is beautifully put and painful to read, and I felt sincerely sorry for eliciting such feelings. Those remarks also provided an important reality check. Since then, I have become much more sensitive to the issue of tone, and I have made a conscious effort to bear this in mind whenever I discuss the issue of the soul publicly or write about it. Tone, therefore, is something I will be sensitive to in this book. In doing so, I am reminded of Spinoza’s motto, a dictum named after the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and expressed in these words: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” In this regard, I also wish to make it clear at the outset of our investigation that this book is not intended as another broad-brush critique of religion, any more than a condemnation of drunk driving should be construed as a general diatribe against the use of motor vehicles. I am interested in the soul not because it is a religious concept and I have a bone to pick with religion but because it represents a fundamental aspect of human psychology. Truth be told, there is a small group of soul advocates whose ideas I will criticize quite overtly in the pages ahead.
These are the authors of popular books claiming to show that science supports the existence of the soul. I call them the New Dualists. When I discuss their ideas, the tone will be more pointed, if only for rhetorical purposes, but the criticism will always be directed at the ideas themselves rather than at the individuals who proposed these ideas. Besides, the New Dualists are all seasoned writers, and so unlike regular folks, they are used to having their ideas critiqued. This is just part of the game and it comes with the territory. Needless to say, the same rules also apply to my own ideas. With only one exception, I do not personally know the New Dualists, but I am sure that they are a great bunch, and I would be happy to share a stage with them if the opportunity presented itself.
Finally, I am also aware of the fact that even if I manage to find the right tone, the ideas that I will discuss in this book, and especially the conclusions that I will reach, might be offensive and sacrilegious to some. Here lies the dilemma that one finds at the heart of the scientific enterprise.
On the one hand, the advancement of knowledge and understanding is a mission of critical importance in any society, and consequently, it is an endeavor that should be undertaken with earnest conviction and zeal. On the other hand, science has the singular property of revealing to us nature’s ways without the kind of sugarcoating that might sometimes be helpful.
Reality, for better or worse, happens to be the way it is and not the way we would like it to be. Inevitably, certain conclusions are bound to rub us the wrong way, which is the price we need to pay for looking behind nature’s curtain to take a peek at its true face. Related to the issue of tone, when writing on a sensitive topic, is the issue of tactics. Philosopher Owen Flanagan describes three such tactics, which I paraphrase here. (1) You may say: “You are really naive to believe X; we’ll have to educate you so you can think straight and let go of all that silly nonsense.” (2) You may say: “There are good reasons to believe that X is not true, but we are confident that Y is true, and Y is close enough to X that you’ll eventually get used to it.
As you can see, everything will be alright, and the world won’t come to an end.” (3) Or you may adopt the following strategy: People usually speak of X meaning X, but when you, the skeptic, speak of X, you really mean Y, hoping that your intended meaning will win the day, so that others will eventually come to mean Y when they talk about X. I feel that (1) would simply be the wrong approach, for all the reasons I mentioned when I discussed the issue of tone. I also find (3) somewhat disingenuous. So (2) then will be my strategy of choice. WHEN THE SPIRIT MOVES YOU What would possess someone to publicly blurt out, like the child in Andersen’s famous tale, that the emperor has no clothes, and worse, that he has no soul either? One of my favorite answers comes from one of my colleagues who once said, when asked a similar question: “I am paid to find out the truth and announce it!” (To be fair, this remark was probably made tongue-in-cheek, and besides, not all truths are born equal.) For those of us who are involved in the business of teaching psychology, neuroscience, or cognitive science, the soul certainly represents a perfect illustration of the proverbial elephant in the room.
Soul 4 Real For Life Album Cover
We cognitive scientists routinely talk about the physical basis of mind and use phrases such as “the mind is what the brain does.” Much less often do we publicly discuss what the physical basis of mind entails for the traditional notion of personhood. This is no doubt in large part because, as Joshua Greene pointed out, the question of the soul is a touchy issue. But just because an issue is touchy doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk about it. In fact, if we really are in the business of education, we should talk about such issues precisely because they are touchy and therefore rarely discussed publicly. After all, clergymen, movie directors, and politicians openly talk about the soul, so why shouldn’t scientists? It should go without saying (but it goes even better if we say it, as one of my high school teachers liked to remind us) that the goal of such discussion isn’t to bully people who happen to believe in the soul into changing their beliefs. Rather, the objective is to create a free marketplace of ideas, where all points of views can be discussed without fear of censorship or discrimination, and to let people decide for themselves which set of ideas they find the most compelling.
If teachers, educators, scientists, and writers were discouraged from discussing touchy, unfashionable, or controversial topics on the grounds that they are, well, touchy, unfashionable, or controversial, then education, like Harry and Rodrick’s world, would lose much of its value and meaning. Ironically, fairness and the recognition of different points of view is precisely what is often called for by proponents of certain “controversial” ideas in America today. Take for example the perennial “debate” over creationism and evolution that has been raging in the United States for many decades (much to the astonishment of our European friends). One of the arguments often made by proponents of intelligent design (the latest brand of creationism) is that we should be fair and teach students both sides of the “controversy.” “Teach the controversy and let the students decide for themselves!” we often hear (sometimes from people as prominent as the president of the United States, in the case of George W. Teaching the “controversy” in the evolution vs. Intelligent design “debate” would be an excellent idea indeed if there actually was a meaningful controversy in the first place.
Relay For Life
To be sure, there is a huge manufactured, and largely North American, public controversy, but it has no analogue in the scientific world (hence the scare quotes when I used the words controversy and debate). In the case of the soul, if there is a public controversy over its existence at all, it has been a pretty quiet one, at least compared to the battles raging over evolution.
Nevertheless, while a substantial majority of the American public believes in the soul and its survival after death, mainstream science has abandoned this traditional idea. So here we have two worldviews that could not be more different from one another, and if we really care about being fair and ensuring that different ideas get their share of airtime, I say it’s time to give scientists the microphone. As the psychologist Paul Bloom put it: “Such issues are too important to leave entirely in the hands of lawyers, politicians, and theologians.” This book is the rejoinder to the growing number of popular books that have surfaced in recent years, trying to make the case for the soul on scientific grounds. Examples include 'Life after Death: The Evidence,' by conservative writer and Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza; 'Life after Death: The Burden of Proof,' by New Age author Deepak Chopra; 'The Soul Hypothesis: Investigations into the Existence of the Soul,' by linguist Mark Baker and philosopher Stewart Goetz; 'The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul,' by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and journalist Denyse O’Leary; and 'Proof of Heaven,' by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander.
Here’s a revealing passage from D’Souza’s book: To reclaim the hijacked territory, Christians must take a fresh look at reason and science. When they do, they will see that it stunningly confirms the beliefs that they held in the first place. What was presumed on the basis of faith is now corroborated on the basis of evidence, and this is especially true of the issue of life after death. Remarkably, it is reason and science that supply new and persuasive evidence for the afterlife—evidence that wasn’t there before. So, according to D’Souza, science itself provides persuasive evidence for the immortality of the soul.
If so, one might wonder why mainstream scientists themselves are not convinced by the kind of evidence that D’Souza claims exists. In fact, the scientific consensus goes precisely in the opposite direction: away from the soul and the afterlife. And it’s not that D’Souza’s fellow Christians failed to notice these developments. Consider, for example, the following passage from the back cover of a 2004 book titled 'What about the Soul?
Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology,' edited by the theologian Joel Green. Everyone knows about the rocky relationship between science and theology brought about by the revolutionary proposals of Copernicus and Darwin. Fewer people know about an equally revolutionary scientific innovation that is currently under way among neurobiologists. This revolution in brain research has completely rewritten our understanding of who we are.
It poses fundamental challenges to traditional Christian theology. According to the scientific worldview that now dominates, it is no longer necessary to speak of a soul or spirit as distinct from the functions of the brain. Contrary to what D’Souza and others have claimed, I passionately disagree (perhaps I should say that I rationally disagree) with the conclusion that science supports the notion of an immortal soul. The current scientific consensus isn’t simply a fad, nor is it fueled by antireligious sentiment (as Baker and Goetz suggest in their book). Instead, scientists have abandoned the soul because reason and evidence—the tools of their trade-compelled them to do so. Excerpted from by Julien Musolino.
Soul 4 Real For Life
Published by Prometheus Books. Copyright © 2015 by Julian Musolino.
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Soul For Real – Candy Rain lyrics My love, do you ever dream of Candy coated raindrops? You're the same, my candy rain Have you ever loved someone So much you thought you'd die? Giving so much of yourself It seems the only way Tell me what you want, and I And I will give it to you 'Cause you are My love, do you ever dream of Candy coated raindrops? You're the same, my candy rain My love Did you ever dream that it could be so right I never thought that I would find All that I need in life All I want, all I need now I know I know I found it in you I found it in you 'Cause you are My love, do you ever dream of Candy coated raindrops? You're the same, my candy rain My love, do you ever dream of Candy coated raindrops? You're the same, my candy rain Lyrics taken from http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/s/soulforreal/candyrain.html.
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