Wednesday Sermon
Scientists: The Human Soul Does Not Exist
Death is the end of the individual and a merging with the Big Kahuna — being itself.
The Soul
It is hard to believe that in 2024 that so many people ascribe basically to the view of William Blake in the picture above, where the soul is ascending to the afterlife at the moment of death.
According to the most recent surveys, a full 90 percent or more Americans ascribe to this basic view.
In religious and third-world nations like Somalia or Libya, the number is even higher — 99 percent.
There is no doubt that the average Libyan would expect to rise from his body much like the soul in this Blake panting. (I am especially troubled by the fact that the soul appears to be waving “jazz hands” at the poor dead person. Nevertheless, this is the “definition” of a soul that I am discussing in this chapter. Not some “energy” that will survive me, or some quantum something or other. No, what I want, and what every human seems to want, is this imaginary being that looks exactly like me and is me only it is eternal and will never die.)
When the dread trumpet sounds, the slumb’ring dust, Not unattentive to the call, shall wake; And every joint possess its proper place, With a new elegance of form, unknown To its first state. Nor shall the conscious soul Mistake its partner; but, amidst the crowd Singling its other half, into its arms Shall rush with all th’ impatience of a man That’s new come home, who having long been absent, With haste runs over every different room, In pain to see the whole. Thrice happy meeting! Nor time, nor death, shall ever part them more! ’Tis but a night, a long and moonless night; We make the grave our bed, and then are gone!
In 1805 Blake was commissioned by a publisher in London to design and engrave illustrations for a deluxe edition of this poem, which was written by the Scottish poet Robert Blair more than half a century previous. This second to last stanza of the poem depicts the moment of the departed person encountering his new form as an eternal soul. It’s a bit different than Blake’s illustration, in which the form of the eternal soul seems to have already been in there — in the departed’s body — and it simply levitated out of the body at the moment of doom. Blake’s vision is actually more appropriate to our contemporary understanding of this supernatural event — the soul leaving the body at the moment of death.
This levitation out of the body has been widely reported in ICU’s and emergency rooms all over the world of course — “I was up on the ceiling looking down on my body on the gurney.”
Blake was doing his watercolor illustration of the moment the soul reluctantly leaves his body a full fifty years before Darwin would come along and supposedly shatter our religious notions of creation and so on. Yet Blake’s vision has survived the Darwinian onslaught on our soulfulness.
How did this happen?
How, despite all the evidence that we were mechanistically evolved through natural selection and don’t have a particular teleological purpose and sort of just happened, how can we square that with this age-old notion of the soul reluctantly leaving his body in another body.
Of course, this new body, the one that will no longer be threatened by death, is a more fun body to be than this crummy disposable body we currently inhabit — hence the jazz hands, I guess.
We’ll never get sick and we’ll never die. Yay! Much improved, this newer model. This me 2.0.
Even if somehow Blake’s jazz hands soul really existed, and we floated out of our bodies, the most frightening truth of all is that this soul would have no self.
Because of the infinitely regressing homunculus problem I have written about before, for the soul to have a self, there would be this little man — a homunculus, sitting inside the soul looking out. But in order for a homunculus to see, there must be a little man inside the homunculus seeing what he sees. And so on…
Inside our soul’s mind there sits another little soul person, looking outside our soul’s eyes. Otherwise, who would be seeing? And inside this homunculus must be another…and another.
After we die, if we survive, we will be faced with exactly the same existential conundrum we now face: who am I? what am I?
It was bad enough being a meat puppet walking around the mortal coil wondering how the fuck I got there and where the fuck is the manager because I’d like to make a complaint!
Now, I actually fly around. That’s cool. But I still don’t know who or what I am. It seems I’m like this self-less flying thing without a center? A pterodactyl on drugs? I mean, fuck! Who could have predicted this!
This conception of the soul has been disproved and relegated to the dustbin of history
It was logically, mathematically and practically disproven by the fact of evolution — so why do we all act like we still have a soul like this?
The answer to this conundrum is in our mental ability to make a complete, whole picture out of separate parts, even if the most important part of the whole picture is actually missing.
We’re very good at mentally “filling in the gaps.”
But more of that in a minute. First, I guess I better break the bad news about how it’s scientifically impossible for evolution to be true and for the human soul to exist at the same time.
It’s one or the other folks. Here’s why. This is what is called a logical line of reasoning.
Fact 1. We descended from sea weed.
Fact 2. No reasonable person would suggest seaweed has a soul. It’s gross and slimy and awful. How could it possibly have a soul? If you want to argue that it’s possible for seaweed to have a soul, then you might as well say a handful of dead dust on a barren planet has a soul, which really is redefining the word “soul” to be utterly meaningless. Yes, seaweed, then, might have an utterly meaningless soul, but for all intents and purposes, we can stipulate that it has no such thing.
Fact 3. Thus the only way we could possibly have gotten a soul is to somewhere along the line to have “evolved” a soul.
Fact 4. Evolving a soul in evolutionary biology posits an absurd event: a set of parents without a soul who give birth to an offspring with a soul. This MUST have happened somewhere along the line. But this is as likely as a kangaroo mating with another kangaroo and giving birth to a duck. We have absolutely no evidence in all the history of biology of such a wholesale wackadoo type of fundamental difference of category in offspring.
Fact 5. However, many people growing up, especially during adolescence, might “feel” like their parents have no soul compared to their own adolescent self-righteous “soulfulness.” But really, kid, those parents are busting their ass for you and doing the very best they can so STFU. You don’t have a soul either! Get over it.
Fact 6. You might think it absurd for a suicide bomber to dream of waking up in a paradise with so many virgins waiting for him after his martyrdom, but your own idea of a soul is really not that far off of that. It just isn’t. No, you don’t have a plastic explosive belt attached to your waist, but you do think you’re going to wake up fresh as a daisy after you croak and everything will be somehow hunky-dory. Newsflash, it won’t.
Fact 7. You think you are the same person yesterday as you were today. That is absolute insanity. Everything about you is different, except one thing — your habitual awareness. If not for this daydream you wander around in habitually, you would be absolutely astounded at how different “you” are today than yesterday. Then two seconds ago, actually. I am not the same person who started writing this article twenty minutes ago. I don’t share a “soul” with this article-starting Clem Samson. Nor do I share a soul with the article-finishing Clem Samson who is to come. We’re chalk and cheese. I love that British expression. It means, we’re nothing alike. But we sort of look alike. Whoops, I thought it was cheese so I took a bite. Now I have chalk in my mouth. Spit, spit.
Fact 8: And this is for you, Doctor Enderson, who has notified me that he peruses the Sunday Sermons as part of his Sunday morning ritual, which includes doing the crossword. I’ve known you for decades, doctor. Let me correct that — I have known many different Endersons over these decades. I knew young Enderson, before your medical school. I know older Enderson — after you became a doctor and a fantastic small boat sailor. I know current Enderson, who is beginning to think about retiring from medicine and going into small boat sailing full time. Doctor Enderson, these were all fabulous people. But they were not the same people. There seems to be some sort of “Enderson Essence” that all these people have in common — but that is a delusion of my own habitual thinking. A result of gestalt, which I will explain in the next paragraph. But Doctor Enderson, I have loved all of these Enderson-like manifestations. They’ve been just terrific. Keep it up. I love your changing and evolving Enderson forms. Your soul, I fear, I know not. But I imagine if you did have a soul, I would adore it.
Gestalt
The process by which a human being imagines him/her/theirself to be a “whole” self is called gestalt, in German. It has no good translation, but what it refers to is the human ability to infer a whole circle out of a couple of curved lines. We are able to infer the missing curved lines to complete the circle.
So too, we cannot see our “whole” selves, but we infer this whole self from the scant evidence we do have of “self-hood.” I was here, now I am there. Connect the dots, I must be the same person I was then — hence I have a human soul.
But that’s what we’re so good at, we humans. Using this ability to make massive conceptual leaps we were actually able to deduce all sorts of things, like the birth of the universe, and of course, the evolution of the species.
The Supernatural Gestalt
Another use that we put this mental ability is to project ourselves into mysterious and hidden realms that we cannot see. Here, however, we are not using our innate and correct gestalt ability to complete the whole from partial hints.
Because we have no partial hints whatsoever about the afterlife.
Well, there are those people who died on the operating table and came back with the reports of the white light.
That’s about all we have, folks. It’s not enough to make a meaningful gestalt about our cosmic destiny.
In other words, there is no such thing as Supernatural Gestalt.
Gestalt itself is based on evidence, not fantasy.
The soul, then, is a fantasy.
Another fantasy that is a result of supernatural gestalting — I will live forever in heaven after death if I make good choices.
I know, that was a bit of a jump, or a logical leap, wasn’t it? See, we’re leaving “real” thinking behind and getting into dreamy time rainbow world.
Here’s Why I’m Glad I Don’t Have A Soul
I’m afraid of ghosts.
I mean, I really thought it through, this soul that was described to me by mommy and daddy and religious education instruction and then by some dancing wuli master pseudo religious pseudo physics.
It’s a being that has no material characteristics.
It’s purely of the “spiritual realm”.
It can probably walk through walls.
But it probably can’t walk at all — it probably just floats.
It sees everything — even though it has no eyes.
It knows everything, even though it’s apparently brainless.
It is really good. Even though you know without a doubt, without a doubt I repeat, that you ARE NOT and have NEVER BEEN entirely good.
It lives forever.
See, it’s a ghost.
I for one am really glad that I don’t have one of those ghosts living inside me. Gross. Sliming me with ectoplasm every once in a while. Ew, where did that weird sticky substance come from that I can’t get off my fingers? Oh, musta been my soul passing by.
Who am I gonna call? Ghostbusters.
If as I approach the grave I suddenly chicken out and I persuade myself that I have a soul after all and if I put my hands together and pray real hard I will survive this oncoming onslaught of death and decay, I am going to call the ghostbusters to come and get rid of my soul.
Suck it up in one of those tubes and put it in a ghost jar and seal it up. I don’t want it.
Ahhh…another day free from the ghost. Thanks, ghostbusters.
Happy Halloween, My Fellow Ghosts!
Alright, I agree that for one day out of the year, we can pretend to be ghosts. That’s fine. It’s not so scary on Halloween. It’s fun! There’s a festival spirit to the thing.
On Christmas, too, it’s fantastic to fantasize about some magical baby. Wonderful! I have no problem with that.
When the religions start to invade the other days of the year, that’s where the problems start. The religious wars and persecutions and such.
If we had been able to limit it to Christmas, Easter and Halloween the Spanish Inquisition would have been a cakewalk.
If we could get these evangelical Trump believers to limit their worship to the great day of January 6, that would be fine too.
There Must Be A Secular Life
It’s hard to believe that I even feel the need to “argue” for such a thing. It used to be a given. The sacred and the secular are collapsing together in the United States into a scary hodgepodge of religion, conspiracy theory, paranoia, and pseudoscience. I raise my voice with fellow secularists! Resist! Get some guns. Protect yourself. The loony right is now openly and outwardly announcing their intention to foment violent civil war. “A storm is upon us,” they say. This is a reference to an imagined day real soon when Donald Trump will suddenly arise to destroy liberals and “send them back to hell where they belong.”
Ouch.
Although the idea of liberals in hell is kind of amusing. Like, right away we would start complaining to Satan about being offended or triggered and not feeling safe. “Safe? You’re in fucking hell, liberals!” bellows Satan, and hurls the pitchfork at us. “I’m Satan, not fucking Terry Gross! Although I do have a spot for her saved over there. See you soon, Terry!”
The Day of the Dead, I Like
This is truly uncharacteristic for us human beings — to deal with death in a spirit of fun and celebration. Most of the time we’re too afraid to even think about it, much less mention it in polite company.
Death is unseemly.
But in the Hispanic community, there it is — death in its faces, its skeletons and its strange power.
The Day of The Dead might be the first post-ego holiday.
It’s an effective reminder of us to seize the day, for tomorrow may not be coming. And of course to remember our loved ones who have passed before us.
Well, I did foresee that I would not be the same Clem Samson who began this article. I end it feeling a little more connected to my dead ancestors, thinking about those calacas, the sweets in the shape of skulls or skeletons. I never could have predicted that when I began. What a nice surprise. Hi grandma! How’s the afterlife? See you soon!!!!
Here’s the Scientists: series so far: