3-11-06 Soul Man

Quite often, I run up against the idea that science has provided us with enough information to rationally dismiss any and all further consideration about the so-called "soul". Having failed to locate it, detect it, or develop any significant body of data that might prompt further investigation into the matter, supposedly, the conclusion can be made by any rational person that the matter has been put to bed.

I don't buy it.

How could lack of scientific evidence support the non-existence of anything?

Well okay, so, nevertheless, the matter has been dropped, essentially, and the idea is that science has moved on. Science, originally pursued to uncover the secrets of the universe and the secrets of our souls, is often believed to have basically come to a conclusion in the matter of the human soul. In this wise, an assumption has been made that human beings probably don't have "souls". It's a somewhat widely held belief, based upon the apparent lack of evidence that might support any contention that humans do have souls.

That only bothers me in that people believe it with some degree of religious intensity. It certainly isn't a scientific fact, by any wild stretch of the imagination. And it isn't an objective stance on the matter, either. It's based entirely upon an absence of any scientific data at all. We can only describe that type of viewpoint as being a belief.

As a belief, the "no such thing as the soul" viewpoint, since it deals directly with answering the questions surrounding "the soul", might possibly be considered a religious belief except that it doesn't fit into the definitions of what a religion would be. Consequently, this dogma is commonly relegated into its own category of being "not religious".

In other words, the dogmatic belief in "no such thing as the soul" escapes the pigeon-hole of being religious because it's not a religion. Instead it's considered to be just the opposite, a "not-religious" stance.

Conversely, however, it is most definitely not a scientific stance.

So what is it? And why is it that holding this viewpoint of "no such thing as the soul" is widely considered to be a rational and scientific stance? It's hardly an objective viewpoint, based as it is upon absolutely nothing but personal preference. And it's not a scientific viewpoint, as science has produced no evidence whatsoever to support it.

The problem here is that in our culture, the idea of "religion" is glued to the definition, and that definition is shaped by all the religions that preceded that definition. So the argument I'm making here is that a dogmatic belief in the "no such thing as the soul" idea needs to be more accurately described, because it most definitely addresses a traditionally religious element.

Further, most adherents to this concept (that I've ever known, anyway) will generally hold a firm and dogmatic belief in the concept that there is also no such thing as "God". This also addresses a traditionally religious element, and it's also based upon nothing "scientific".

I would suggest that any such dogmatic belief regarding any "answer" to not just one, but two of the most basic matters concerning religion, religious beliefs and religious practices around the world, would have to be considered a religion, in some sense of the word, as well.

It would be rational to take the stance that, despite there being, apparently, no scientific evidence to suggest the existence of either God or the human soul, one should nonetheless hardly take any stance on these matters, and endeavor to refrain from prejudicial skewing of scientific pursuits or conclusions that such dogmatic beliefs might taint. One would call themselves "agnostic", I suppose, in this matter of endeavoring to be "scientific" about it.

This, of course, leaves the matter open, rather than closed. A very important distinction.

It's the practice of considering the matter closed AND rationally, scientifically based that bothers me. The more dogmatic that practice is, the more it tends to evidence itself as a religious practice in terms of the behavior involved.

There appears to be a belief system "package" in all of this, a sort of "party line" involved with the various shibboleths and "everybody knows" kinds of things that make the exclusion of "religion" from science and scientific endeavors somewhat inoperative in a cultural sense. The religious nature of the "party line", however, is very difficult to argue, so I can only address it in terms of what the specific dogmatic beliefs are comprised of.

The central issue is the existence or non-existence of the human soul. How can any stance on this issue be defended as "non-religious"?

In the traditions of western religion, there are two core issues involving the human soul, and God. Both of these issues are dogmatically asserted in this "package", namely, there is no such thing as the soul and there is no God. It's the dogmatic assertion of these beliefs that has very little, or no basis in science. Science can only be pursued to look into these matters, but if anyone believes that science has produced enough evidence, or any evidence at all to support any final conclusions regarding these beliefs, they are sadly mistaken.

Instead, the cultural viewpoint regarding science has been skewed. It boils down, essentially, to personal preference. It also boils down to the way in which science has taken its place in our society over the past century.

There is a long standing dichotomy between western science and western religion. Wherever science has tread upon any of the two issues (above) concerning religion, this dichotomy has raised its ugly head. These conflicts have cemented the relationship between the societal embrace of science and existing western religions into a confrontational one. Because of this, only the traditional conceptualizations of what "religion" actually is have defined the belief systems involved on the "non-religious" side as, most often very insistently, "non-religious".

The "religion" side is easy enough to see as religous, but the belief system of the "rational" side, the "scientifically oriented" side, the "humanist" side, the oft asserted "non-religious" side, is rarely understood in terms of the religious nature of its adherence and practice. But how can any belief system that dogmatically asserts anything concerning the soul and/or God, considering the utter lack of scientific evidence one way or the other, be considered anything other than a religious belief system?

One would therefore have to add another defintion to the word "religion", applying a more modern and up to date recognition of the behavior involved with any sort of belief system. However much or little any religion could be seen as "organized" or simply "personal view", the fact of the matter is that the holding of dogmatic views regarding the soul and/or God is behaviorally consistent across all forms of religious adherence or practice, whether it be the behavior of individuals or groups.

It's especially consistent when observing the situation of conflict between individuals with differing beliefs, and the specific behavior patterns of the individuals' unwillingness to find common ground.

In other words, the recognition of behavior patterns involved with dogma, and what the holding of conflicting dogmatic beliefs does within the workings of human interaction, should open our eyes to what one of the most fundamental aspects of "religion" might be all about. It's all about holding things to be true upon faith, alone.

There is a human mechanism that fuels conflict. The firm holding of a dogmatic view, essentially unsupportable in terms of objectively recognized data, can allow a person to become irrational in the defense of that view. This is why it's considered "ungentlemanly" to discuss politics or religion in polite company. We can all understand that debating one's personal beliefs is to tread on dangerous ground.

Consequently, when a person holds a firm and dogmatic viewpoint that there's no such thing as the human soul, along with the misconception that this is somehow a "rational" and "scientific" viewpoint, the religious nature of their belief is completely hidden from them. If called to task on such a viewpoint, the person will become defensive. This mechanism that fuels conflict can kick in if the person is pushed, and in my experience, not pushed very hard at all.

Now, I wouldn't be writing on this subject at all if it weren't for the more recent developments in particle physics, and research being done in Quantum physics, in relation to the "observer effect". There's hardly any doubt at all that the observer effect is a very real phenomenon in our universe. And, more and more, this begs the question, "What, exactly, is this 'observer' ???"

All these years, all these decades, scientific research has been happily rolling along with a fairly confident sense of there really being no such thing as "the soul". Culturally, and much within the scientific community, this viewpoint has been comfortably accepted as being, probably, what we'll end up settling upon in the end. Then, all of a sudden in the past couple of decades, this whole notion has been slammed up against so unexpectedly, and we've been completely blindsided by all of this unexplainable phenomena associated with the "observer effect".

Completely taken by surprise.

We've come full circle. In its infancy, science was a new hope for finally uncovering the secrets of the universe, perhaps the secrets of our very souls, and maybe even God. As recently as one short century ago, the research being done to somehow find evidence for the existence of the soul, to possibly discover what it might actually be, to reveal how it works, and so forth, was considered to be right over the next horizon.

It was pyschology and and psychiatry that forwarded the paradigm of "no such thing as the soul", at first. People who originally worked in these areas of research were derided, shunned, and laughed at for holding such a view of "no such thing as the soul". But while science, generally, appeared to have failed in the quest to uncover the human soul, or any evidence at all that it might even exist, the work being done in psychology and psychiatry began, coincidentally, yielding practical results in the field of "mental health".

Who could argue with apparent results, versus no results at all? The basis of the work being done to produce results was "no such things as the soul", whereas work done based in the premise that the soul exists, and all we have to do is apply scientific method to find it... well, that produced no results at all.

So, that's how we got to this point. Funding is always going to go to the areas that produce results.

Great scientific discoveries, however, often come on the heels of such innocuous statements as, "Huh... I wonder what the heck this is?"

The simple question, "Huh... I wonder what the 'observer' is?" borders upon the threshold of something absolutely profound. Let's just hope that deeply held dogma regarding the non-existence of the "soul" doesn't get in the way of science over the next few years.