What on Earth are souls?

Today I am asking for a little help from all those moderate, middle of the road, reasonable believers who accept all the science about the age of the Universe, the age of the World and the full implications of the theory of evolution etc, and yet still believe in a god and still believe that we are special to him and that we must obey his rules, if we are to live for ever and ever in eternal bliss, amen.

I need a little help to understand souls - those little mind-pearls of mysterious essence that reside within us and record our personalities for posterity when our frail physical bodies bite the dust.

Now I'm no expert on this subject, which is partly why I'm asking for help here, but it seems that all cultures and all belief systems, from your basic common or garden animistic ancestor-worship, right up to your full-blown global monotheism with aspirations of World domination, all have some kind of belief in an eternal soul. It must surely be one of our most ancient beliefs; any people that took the time and effort to ceremonially bury their dead and include grave-goods such as food, valuables and so forth, would surely have some kind of belief that their recently departed were not gone forever, and the earliest confirmed burial sites are around 130,000 years old.

So this idea of an eternal soul is by no means a recent one, and my bet is that it is as old as a mind complex enough to form the idea.

Before the rise of monotheism, all religions would have been animistic or polytheistic. Animisms ascribe souls, or at least 'intent' to everyday items such as rocks, animals, the sky, volcanoes, rivers etc, because everything around us has some kind of effect on our lives and it may be easier for us to accept or understand these effects, if we believe that these things have 'intent' just like us (see Dennett, 1971, 1983, 1987). Polytheisms on the other hand are generally more advanced in that they have creation myths and ascribe the perceived intent of objects, and even other people, to supernatural beings called gods.

Then along came monotheism - the idea that all of these intents are controlled by a single mind. Curiously enough, the Old Testament makes no claims about the nature of our souls, merely saying that they will return to the God that gave them (Ecclesiastes 12:7) though later Rabbinical literature does talk about our souls being made up of several parts. These later teachings also claim that animals have simple souls.

With Christianity came the idea we are all so familiar with now - that an eternal soul is given to you by God, who will then judge it upon your death on the actions it took while you were alive, and decide whether you should join him in heaven, or burn in the fires of eternal torment. Islam is of course descended from the other two and agrees with Christianity that you either burn or die happily ever after.

Since most of my believing readers will be followers of one of the trinity of monotheisms (sorry, bad pun) I can conveniently skirt around my considerable ignorance of the nature of the soul in the other major religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, and the minor religions. Any passing Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Shintoists (is that the right word?) Jains, Zoroastrians or any other faith are welcome to contact me and let me know their take on the soul, if they so wish.

So lets turn to Christianity and Islam, whose ideas about the soul have such a profound impact on all our lives, unfortunately. It is to practitioners of these faiths that I make my request for help, in understanding how they can believe in eternal souls, whilst still accepting all the science about our origins.

Catholicism is quite clear in that humans have souls, and animals do not. It also claims that the soul is inserted by God into the embryo at the the time of fertilisation, hence all the rubbish about contraception and abortion going against God's design. Why am I suddenly picking on Catholicism, you may ask? Because it is the World's largest Christian sect by a country mile, and so far as I can tell, Islam hasn't really worried too much about how we got souls, you simply have one and if you doubt this, well, you're an apostate and you have to die, so stop asking silly questions and believe what we tell you. To accept the first point, I need this question answering - at what point in our evolutionary history did we develop souls? If animals, which I am assuming include our close brethren, the other great apes, do not have souls, and yet we do, then at some time in the 5- 7 million years or so since our ancestors diverged from the ancestors of chimps and bonobos, we developed, or were given, souls. Now as a card-carrying evolutionist I am tempted to try and solve this puzzle by trying to imagine when and how we evolved souls, but I rather think this is doomed to failure. We can imagine how speciation occurs over time - think if you will of an unbroken chain of your ancestors stretching right back to the dawn of life itself; each successive generation would be able to mate with it's immediate forbears and progeny, but if we took one ancestor out of line and make him or her jump along the chain, say a few thousand or so generations, we'd find that it would no longer be able to produce viable offspring with whichever one of your ancestors is in the line at that point, such would be the accumulated change in the descendant's genome. Yeah OK, so we all know how evolution works, but can it work for souls? Imagine if you will, Ancestor A, a proto-human without a soul, and Ancestor B, a proto-human a couple of thousand generations later with a soul. What happened in between? Did a soul gradually develop from mutations in DNA? Say intermediate Ancestor A1 survives death a few seconds, A1000 for a few hundred years and so on, and then, hey-presto you get Ancestor B with a fully formed soul capable of lasting 'til kingdom come? Doesn't quite work for me, but then maybe I'm suffering from a failure of imagination, or simply the closed mind I am so regularly accused of having. Also of course, if souls were embedded in our DNA then we would be able to isolate them, once we understand fully what each part of our genome actually does (what a coup that would be!) but this is most unlikely since DNA simply codes for protiens, and souls cannot be physical structures as they survive death, so what would soul DNA code for?
Presumably some kind of structure in our brains that holds the magic energy of eternal life. Once again it would be a great coup for the neuroscientist who finds this structure, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

So if you'll forgive my rather fuzzy reasoning on this subject (we are talking about magic after all) I've come to the conclusion that we didn't evolve souls, they must have been given to us sometime in the last 5-7 million years. Hmm. I did say I needed help with this.

So lets turn to the second point above, the belief that souls are given to us at the point of fertilisation. This implies that a human egg is as soul-less as all the hundreds of millions of sperm swimming furiously toward it. But, fear not! For God is watching - nay in fact guiding one of these little spermies inexorably toward the egg, and, as fusion takes place, in goes the soul. So, perhaps we can identify the soul by looking at differences in energy between eggs, sperms and newly fertilised embryos? No? Why not? Because it seems that souls are made of some kind of undetectable energy - IE magic. What a shame, our quest is thwarted once more and we are forced back to the unreasonable position of simply believing in souls without any kind of evidence for them.

OK, so lets accept then that our soul is given to us, and develops along with us throughout our lives. Skipping past the hideous doctrine of limbo that awaits the souls unfortunate enough to be contained within the huge majority of foetuses that spontaneously abort, our soul is born, and takes in all the information provided by the baby's senses. Grows and develops within the mind of the child, becomes an adult and lives it's pointless life, waiting to be released and judged.

If the condition of the soul - it's personality and knowledge, for example - is tied to the body that houses it, what happens if that body is defective, or damaged, or dies before the adult mind is formed? Are we to spend an eternity as a child? As a paraplegic (for example)? As a brain damaged soul? I almost had this argument with a colleague a couple of years ago; I don't know how we got talking about it but I said that it was foolish to think that some part of us survives our death. Unfortunately she was in no mood for rational debate or thinking about this, stridently repeating 'it just can't be like that' whenever I tried to get a word in edge ways. I did manage quickly to ask what happens to a man who is brain-damaged in a car accident, will his soul be damaged too? but to little avail - she dodged the question and started trying to prove her point by talking about near-death-experiences, and all the evidence for them (haha) so I decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and valiantly changed the subject. Any way, I digress.

Now if you happen to be one of those non-believers in any organised religion who still believes we have eternal souls, and are reading this thinking I'm being narrow minded, or attacking a straw-man by picking on the Catholic church (oh, if only it were true! What a better place the World could be if the Catholic faith were a straw man!) then these questions still apply equally to you. Perhaps you believe, as many people do, that animals have souls too; it is still the case that at some point in their evolutionary history they must have acquired them. So when? And How?

It is still the case that nobody can show where in the body the soul resides, or what it is made of, or has any idea how the transmission from physical sensation to ethereal knowledge occurs, whether you are a card-carrying Catholic or a new-age crystal-bothering homeopath.

So to sum up, I don't believe that any part of my psyche will survive the death of my body, being as it is an intrinsic part of it. As I said, maybe it's just because my mind is not open enough, as so many people have said to me (usually after I say I cannot believe in [insert faith-based assertion here] because there is no evidence for it).

So if you want to convince me that I will, in fact, live forever, you need to answer the following questions to my satisfaction:

What are souls?

What are they made of?

Where did they come from?

Which creatures have them, and why?

What happens to my soul if my body and/or brain is damaged?

Should be easy enough, so answers on a postcard please.

Irritation > Apathy

Well, hello again everyone. It is almost a year since I have written a post: it seems that for all that time my latent apathy and laziness were able to out-weigh my need to find release, in the form of writing, for any feelings of irritation, anger, amusement and even out-and-out hair-tearing, teeth-grinding, eye-popping, red faced, screaming apoplexy brought about by the idiotically deranged rantings of the terminally faithful.

Now I don't want you to get the impression that I am in need of anger management classes - I'm generally a pretty mild-mannered sort of chap who wouldn't say boo to a goose - or who would at least have the courtesy to apologise to the goose if it seemed scared afterwards. Nay, in fact for most of life's daily travails I appear so laid back as to be practically horizontal, and for this reason and others I doubt I will ever be successful in life, but, well that's another story and need not concern us here.

Religion, and faith for those of you who make the distinction, have the capacity to get under my skin like nothing else, to really wind me up, to thoroughly get my goat in fact, and sadly it's not even a goat that I can sacrifice to propitiate the god of anger, so I can tell him to let me calm down a bit and lower my blood pressure, being as it is, of course, a merely metaphorical goat.
So what happened, I hear you ask, to kick me up from my stew of apathy and dis-interest long enough to bring me back to this page that has lain unaltered and reader-less for almost a year, and write three paragraphs of bullshit before I even get close to the point? Why now, when every single day, millions of children around the world have their wonderful, inquisitive and innocent little minds inexcusably polluted with ancient myths, and with hatred for those who don't share them? When nearly every day one or more of these products of hate-filled 'education' detonates themselves for the glory of god? When unwanted children are conceived and born because contraception goes against god's design? When another innocent contracts HIV for the same reason? When young girls have their labia and clitoris cut off to prevent any chance of them ever enjoying sex, which would of course make god angry? When women are forced to cover themselves from head to toe because god holds them responsible if a man be aroused enough to rape them? When women are killed by their own families if they are raped, to expunge the shame and restore family 'honour'? When building continues in occupied land because it was given to the Jews by god? When European Governments like my own capitulate in the face of implicit threats of violence and unrest, further eroding our hard-won freedom and national identity? And the list goes on and on and on and on, so, why now?

I don't know, I just felt like it.

Sometimes whole days can go by when the news is free of religious stories, excepting of course the daily casualty list in Afghanistan, and I am prepared to accept that political and economic reasons are as much to blame as religion in that particular case. Occasionally though, several stories are covered at once and I find my blood pressure rising and have to try very hard not to pull out any of my few remaining hairs.

We are of course approaching the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, and TV channels are full of programs showing 'new' and 'previously unseen' amateur video footage which is of course deeply harrowing. Not so many show the pictures of Palestinians jubilantly dancing in the street we all remember from the news at the time. I wonder why?

Here in Britain three men have just been convicted of a plot (dramatically dubbed Britain's 9/11) to blow up several airliners in flight, in a second trial (in the first trial the jury were hung and could not reach a unanimous decision) after new evidence was presented. Last night viewers of BBC's Newsnight were presented with the stomach-churning spectacle of an 'ex-extremist' who now works to 'reach out to angry and disaffected young British muslims' explain how otherwise perfectly pleasant young men turn in to psychopathic kaffir-hating would-be murderers (my words, you may have guessed, not his) by having their anger and hatred channelled by unscrupulous Wahhabi Imams preaching a vilely fundamentalist version of Islam, you know, the one that is the state religion in Saudi Arabia. He was saying that of course this result is a triumph for British policing and military intelligence, but might not be perceived as a triumph for British justice because some people, in the grass roots of muslim communities, especially these angry-but-otherwise-perfectly-pleasant-young-men would feel that a retrial was only held so that we could 'get the right result' (note that in the lovely Islamic dictatorships that these men would like Britain to become, a retrial would most certainly not be necessary - indeed an initial trial would probably be unnecessary, we'd simply get an angry mob to stone the accused to death, and all be home by tea-time).

All this pathetic justification from a man who was presumably in his youth just as angry and psychopathic as the remorseless newly convicted jihadis (what happened to make him an 'ex'-extremist, I wonder? Did he just grow up a bit? Did he get married and channel his previously retarded and pent-up emotions in to the more wholesome pastime of sex? Did he perhaps realise that a potentially lucrative career as a pundit and government advisor was preferable to scattering himself over a wide area in the pursuit of murdering kaffirs?) was of course accompanied by the usual hand-wringing from the government's spokesperson, in this case the ex-security minister Tony McNulty - 'ex' because while in office he had the deeply unnerving habit of occasionally departing from the party line and saying what he actually thought about things. Unfortunately for McNulty and the government alike, what he thought usually turned out to be unadulterated bollocks. If I were a cynic (which of course I am) I might suggest that this 'ex' minister was wheeled out to parlay with the 'ex' extremist so that if he should accidentally put his foot in his mouth again it would be very easy for the government to 'distance itself' from his remarks. In the event his remarks were of course wholly un-remarkable, the basic gist being that a) government policy and extra funding for security were responsible for bringing these men to justice and b) we must of course do more to 'reach out' to these poor angry young men, to prevent them being corrupted by hate-filled preachers, and to explain to them, so that they really understand, why as a nation we have to do these things that make them so angry. Yada-yada: poor defenceless angry souls; simply misguided and misled; of course it's our fault that they hate us so much and has nothing at all to do with a literal interpretation of an iron-age murder-manual (oops, better be careful, I might hurt somebody's feelings or cause offence - these count as hate crimes in my 'free' country - how terrible it would be to be accused of 'inciting racial hatred' against a group of people who are most certainly not 'a race' and who have the practice of hatred down to a fine art).

Then lo and behold, the very next item was a special report about the Israeli army. Apparently this avowedly secular organisation has more and more Rabbis joining up to provide moral and religious direction to the troops. Now of course many of the World's armies have ministers and chaplains of some sort to cater for the spiritual needs of their men (and women in some countries), but what makes the Israeli case so interesting and blood-curdlingly frightening is the sheer number of Rabbis joining up, and the fact that they will actually be leading troops in combat operations. So we have the wonderful prospect of Orthodox Rabbis blessing their troops, saying a few prayers and then charging in to battle in the name of god with a rifle in one hand and a Torah in the other. Fantastic. The BBC were not allowed to film these soldiers of god in action, because the Israeli government is understandably a little worried about how this looks abroad, but they did manage to interview a few charming young men at an orthodox seminary who plan to join up. One said that 'god will make our army stronger', another that 'we know god is on our side because he has given this land to us' and the other one said 'we can feel the hand of god guiding our nation's history, look at how we have survived so many wars with so few dead' - nothing to do with having massively superior fire-power and a highly trained and well organised military of course. And where was this 'guiding hand of god' for the last 2000 years or so while the Jews were being pretty much universally hated and persecuted?

So lets not forget that in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank, the Israeli army is an occupying army, charged with keeping the peace of a reluctant population that is hardly without it's own fair share of faith-filled crazies. It really bodes well for peace in the region when the only thing currently preventing out-and-out anarchy in the occupied territories is slowly being filled with men who believe they are doing the work of god with just as much conviction as your average suicide bomber.

The Israeli top-brass say they are not worried because the army has strict secular codes that all soldiers must obey, and all these Rabbis are merely junior officers. Well, what happens in the heat of battle, when some messianic lieutenant gives an order that might be consistent with the will of Yahweh (something like 'thou shalt killeth them all, spare not ye their women, neither spare ye their children, nor their cattle, their sheep nor their goats, nay, thou shalt killeth them all that thou shalt taketh this thy land which your god, who is a merciful god, has given to you; oh and by the way, don't kill all the chickens cos I'll use one later' etc) rather than the army code ('go in, kill the ones with guns and stylish bomb belts, tie up the rest and leave the bloody chickens alone' etc)? I do of course exaggerate (slightly) for comic effect but it can't be good. And where do you suppose the next generation of top brass comes from? From the current crop of Colonels and Majors of course. And what happens when Rabbi lieutenants distinguish themselves in battle? They will be promoted... Captain - Major - Colonel... you see where I'm going with this; wouldn't it be great if some of the Generals of the region's most powerful army truly believed with all their hearts that Israel was given to them by god? It would be a bit like making Pat Robertson a General and putting him in charge of NATO forces in Afghanistan - in other words a truly horrifying prospect for anyone not completely high on scripture.

Well that feels a little bit better, to get that irritation and pent-up sarcasm off my chest, but as is so often the case, anger at religion and its self-righteous practitioners, and their feeble-minded total certainty that what they believe and do is absolutely 100% right, gives way to a sadness at the condition of our species, a real sense of worry about our collective future. Here we are in the 21st century (depending on your calender of course) knowing so much, capable of achieving so much, with a real idea of our place in the Universe, striving forward - and yet still we have one foot shackled to our ignorant past, as though caught in a gin-trap. We try to march into the future with our seven-league boot of knowledge, uncertainty and critical inquiry on our front foot, whilst the bloody trap of superstition, myth and an ignorance that is the hallmark of total certainty spills countless gallons of our blood. Part crippled by this trap and the festering tendrils of infection it tries to spread into our whole body, will we ever manage to prise open the jaws of the trap, break the chain and heal our wounds? Will we stumble on carrying the dead-weight of chains and trap, weakened by infection? Or will it bring us down and leave us dying in the dust and blood from which, with total certainty, we know we were made?