“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.”
Ashley Montagu (1905 - 1999)
According to Wikipedia, “The soul, in many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, is the incorporeal and, in many conceptions, immortal essence of a living thing. According to most of the Abrahamic religions, only human beings have immortal souls.” What is a soul? Do all animals have souls? What happens to a soul at death? These are all scientific questions with theological implications. Where is the soul located? Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci were followers of the cardiocentric model believing the soul is located in the heart. Pythagoras was the first person to propose the cephalocentric model (placing the soul in the brain). Both Plato and Socrates were cephalocentric advocates. Some Christians believe the soul resides in the stomach. Regardless of the location of the soul, researchers throughout history have made various attempts to prove its existence, including attempts to weigh dying patient’s just prior to death and again at the “moment” of death. Any loss of weight was then attributed to the soul exiting the body.
For example, Dr. Duncan MacDougall (1866 – 1920), an early 20th-century American physician, sought to measure the weight lost of human patients (and dogs) as the soul departed the body at the moment of death. He measured the weight loss of six patients at the moment of their deaths. His first subject, the results from which MacDougall felt were the most accurate, lost “three-fourths of an ounce,” which has since been popularized as 21 grams. MacDougall later measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances and reported the results as “uniformly negative,” with no perceived change in weight. He took these results as confirmation that souls had weight, and that dogs do not have a soul. To date, modern researchers have not been able to produce any evidence of a soul exiting the body of a patient at the moment of death.
MacDougall’s efforts of weighing the soul (as well as others) was doomed to failure, not because of deficiencies in the instruments used, but because of the inability to determine the actual moment of death. Dr. Sam Parnia, one of the world’s foremost resuscitation physicians, has concluded that death is a process and more an analogue event than a digital one. Death begins with cardiac arrests, pulmonary failure, traumatic brain injury, or any other event that stops the flow of oxygen to the vital organs such as the brain, heart, and cells. The process of death ends when the body has reached a state beyond which recovery or resuscitation is no longer thought possible. Dr. Parnia calls this, actual death. In this sense, a patient is dead when the attending physicians and medical staff give up on resuscitation. In many cases this decision depends on the ability of the patient to pay for continuing efforts.
The history of science is rich with examples of widely accepted imaginary substances, including luminous ether, phlogiston, ectoplasm, and homunculus. All of which were later found to be nonexistent and no longer accepted. Until the nineteenth century virtually all scientists believed that the universe was filled with luminous ether, a colorless, odorless, and undetectable substance that provided a medium for light to travel through space in a manner similar to sound bouncing off the molecules in the air. In 1887 Albert A. Michelson performed a series of experiments proving that there was no such thing as luminous ether. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work and became the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in science. In 1667 Johann Joachim Becher identified phlogiston as the constituent substance of fire. Phlogiston remained the dominant explanation of fire until 1778 when Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier demonstrated the role of oxygen in combustion relegating phlogiston to the dustbin of incorrect widely-held ideas.
Immediately following WWI, there was an increased worldwide interest in Spiritualism, especially by mediums promising (usually for a fee) to receive messages from the graves of recently departed loved ones. Grief, of course, was rampant during the 1920s due to the over thirty-eight million lives lost during WWI. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle became a leading advocate for Spiritualism after his son Kingsley Doyle died from pneumonia on October 28, 1918 while recovering from wounds suffered during the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Doyle used mediums to communicate with his dead son and during these seances ghostly apparitions of Kingsley would appear. Doyle and others claimed that these apparitions consisting of a substance called ectoplasm. It was allegedly produced by mediums and was the means that allowed the spirit or soul of dead people to appear during a seance. Countless research groups, including the Scientific American magazine (in the 1920s) studied the leading mediums and concluded they were all fakes scamming the vulnerable and the gullible out of their money. The antics of mediums, conjurers, and fortune-tellers was so egregious that in 1926 Congressman Sol Bloom introduced a bill that “would effectively outlaw mediumship for profit as well as all forms of divination for hire.” In modern times, ectoplasm is just another discredited imaginary substances.
The homunculus myth is the most unbelievable example of an nonexistent substance. It was universally believed that a man’s sperm contains a fully-formed miniature human being. Women were viewed simply as birthing vessels. They were denied any genetic role with the child growing in their womb. It should be noted that gender bias against women played a big role in the readily acceptance of an obvious bogus idea. Homunculus was still accepted by medical authorities as late as the 17th century. Science, especially biology, was about to cross a Rubicon.
February 28, 1953 marks a major milestone in the history of biology. At 12 noon two men walked into the Eagle pub, a favorite luncheon spot and hangout for students, staff, and researchers from the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. James Watson, a twenty-five year-old American bacteriologist and Francis Crick, a thirty-seven year-old British physicist made a bold and unbelievable announcement: “We have discovered the secret of life.” What they actually discovered was the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid better known as DNA which is now familiar to virtually everyone on the planet. DNA is a recipe for building a living entity such as a human being, chimpanzee, or a carrot, and is contained in a number of chromosomes as part of what is called a genome. All manuals including humans and chimpanzees get half of their chromosomes from their mother and half from their father. The human body contains 100 trillion cells (the number 100 followed by 12 zeroes), and each one contains a copy of two complete genomes (one from each parent). There are two exceptions to this: Sex cells only contain a copy of one genome (a mixture of the parent’s genome) and red blood cells do not contain either. Females have two X chromosomes and males have one X and one Y. Many women in history have been thrown aside or even put to death for failing to produce a male offspring when the “fault” lies with the father who is the only source of the male determinate Y chromosome. This one of the very few examples where men get the last word over women!
On October 22, 1996, Pope John-Paul II released a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He argued that somewhere between the ancestral apes and modern human beings there was what he described as an ontological discontinuity. According to Pope John-Paul this was the point at which God inserted the human soul. Thomas Aquinas said the soul is acquired at the moment of conception through a process called ensoulment. How would this work with identical twins? Recall that identical twins develop from one single zygote which then splits into two embryos. If the soul was inserted at conception into the zygote, what happens when it splits into two? There are at least two possibilities: the soul also divides with each twin receiving half a soul, or one of the twins retain the original soul leaving its sibling without a soul. This problem could be solved theologically by proposing a second ontological discontinuity thus allowing for another insertion of a new and separate soul. What about our close relatives, the chimpanzees? Do they have souls?
What is the difference between a human genome and a chimpanzee genome? The most startling difference is the number of chromosomes. Chimpanzees have twenty-four pairs, whereas humans have only twenty-three pairs. We have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes because somewhere between five and ten million years ago two chimpanzee chromosomes fused into one. Thus chromosome 2 (the second largest human chromosome) was formed by the fusion of two medium-sized ape chromosomes! Evidence of this is quite convincing for evolutionary biologists, molecular geneticists, and other specialists. Matt Ridley in his book Nature Via Nurture demonstrates man’s close genetic relationship to chimpanzees with the following example: If you hold your mother’s hand who in turn holds her mother’s hand (your grandmother) and then repeating the process until a chain of mothers stretching back thousands of generation reaches from Washington, D.C. to New York City, then the last link in the chain would be a chimpanzee. A theologian with some understanding of evolution could argue (without any evidence) that the soul resulted from the fusion of two chromosomes millions of years ago.
Genome analysis has transformed the problem of determining the ancestry of any two entities on the Tree of Life. Molecular biology provides a simple, direct, and more powerful way to determine evolutionary relationships. The complete DNA sequence of an organism defines the species with almost perfect precision and in exhaustive detail. Moreover, this specification once determined, is in a digital form (a string of letters) that can be entered directly into a computer and compared with the corresponding DNA profile of any other living thing (plants and animals). Matt Ridley in his 1999 book, Genome noted that humans are approximately 98% chimpanzees and “. . . we are more chimpanzee-like than are gorillas.” In other words, chimps are closer-related to humans that they are to gorillas! It is, however, important to note that humans did not descend from chimps or gorillas, but share a common relative “higher” in the tree of life. “Higher” denotes the fact that the Tree of Life is usually depicted as inverted with earlier evolved species at the top. However, given the similarity of the human and chimpanzee genome and the tremendous role the genome plays in their respective biological development, it is higher unlikely that only humans have a souls leaving the chimpanzee without a soul.
What theologians and religious leaders call a soul, scientists refer to as elan vital, consciousness, or mind, but regardless what metaphor they use, they see it as a function of the brain and dependent on it. Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili summarize this idea in their 2015 book, Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology as follows: “In one way or another, most people probably subscribe to the notion of dualism–the belief that the mind/soul/consciousness is something other than the physical body. But dualism fell out of favor in scientific circles in the twentieth century, and most neurobiologists now prefer the idea of monism–the belief that mind and body are one and the same thing.” In other words, whatever it is called, soul or elan vital it is dependent on a functioning living body to support the brain and cannot survive death. Or, as Dr Parnia wrote in his 2013 book, Erasing Death, “The ULTIMATE QUESTION AS to how long consciousness (or soul) continues after death can only be definitively determined when science has discovered a scanning machine (like a brain scanner) that can detect the entity of thought and consciousness.”
Sources:
1. Life On The Edge, The Coming Age of Quantum Biology (2014) by Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Al-Khalili
2. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968) by James Watson
3. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999) by Matt Ridley
4. Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, & What Makes Us Human (2003) by Matt Ridley
5. Erasing Death (2013) by Dr. Sam Parnia
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