Existence of the Soul
Note: The primary purpose of this website is to guide you to heaven. It was written to provide evidence that there is a God interested in the salvation of your soul. Jesus Christ is that God and he established the Catholic Church to lead you to a moral life and heaven. This section shows that humans have a trans-physical soul destined for eternal communion with God.
Posted: 1/28/2020 4/5/2020
Table of Contents for this Section
The Mind, the Soul and Consciousness
Near-Death Experience (NDE)
Terminal Lucidity (TL)
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
The Attributes of the Human Soul
Suffering, Sin and Salvation
The arguments for the existence of God from philosophy and science presented elsewhere on this website lay the groundwork for evidence that will demonstrate the existence of the immaterial soul.
The Mind, the Soul and Consciousness
To understand this subject, I need to make a distinction between mind and soul. According to Wikipedia:
• “The mind is a set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment, language and memory. It is usually defined as the faculty of an entity’s thoughts and consciousness.”
• “Soul or psyche … are the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, etc.”
These definitions for mind and soul are essentially the same. The distinction, for the purpose of this discussion, is that materialists claim mind is purely the product of the brain, while theists claim that the mind is the immaterial manifestation of the soul. Looking at this distinction another way, materialists assert that the immaterial mind emerges from matter, while theists assert that mind is grounded in a higher immaterial soul.
Here is a quote from materialist Michael Shermer, a writer for the popular science magazine Scientific American: “Because we know for a fact that measurable consciousness dies when the brain dies, until proved otherwise, the default hypothesis must be that brains cause consciousness. I am, therefore I think.”
Actually, there is no scientific evidence that the mind is located in the brain. All science has been able to demonstrate are correlates of consciousness, the correlation between permanent bodily death and loss of consciousness, and associations between neural brain states and subjective mental states, based on medical imaging studies. This mind-from-brain claim, that when two events occurring together establish a cause-and-effect relationship, is a logical fallacy.
Instead, I will show that the alternative mind-from-soul hypothesis better fits the medical data, and that the soul is the body’s animating principle (or “the soul is the form of the body”). This is analogous to the computer programmer (soul) animating the robot (body). This formulation, first expressed by Aristotle ca. 350 BC, was elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas in Disputed Questions on the Soul in 1267, and confirmed by the Council of Vienne in 1312. The soul is created by God at conception, forming a body-soul composite. The soul leaves the body at death and reunites with the resurrected body at the final judgment.
The existence of the immaterial soul can be inferred from many angles. These include, but are not limited to, Near Death Experience (NDE), Terminal Lucidity and The Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Near-Death Experience (NDE)
The term “near-death experience” was coined in 1975 by Dr. Raymond Moody, but has been observed since antiquity. In 360 BC, Plato related the tale of a soldier named Er, who had an NDE. Er described his soul leaving his body, being judged and seeing heaven. In recent times, medical studies indicate that 9-18% of adults and 85% of children have reported NDEs after surviving physical death. Common traits of NDEs include:
• Intense pure bright light
• Out-of-body experience
• Entering into another dimension
• Visualizing & speaking to spiritual beings
• Tunnel of light
• Life review
If consciousness is generated by the brain, those who experience clinical death (flat EEG, absence of gag reflex, fixed & dilated pupils) prior to resuscitation after heart attack, drowning or significant trauma, should have no awareness. Yet the frequency of reported NDEs suggests that consciousness can be experienced without brain function.
Verified medical reports of unexplainable consciousness during clinical death are abundant, and are summarized by Fr. Robert Spitzer at the Credible Catholic website. These are some illustrative case reports:
Case 1 (von Lommel et al., 2001): “One man who had been in a deep coma, later told a nurse that he recognized her and saw where she had placed his dentures during resuscitation efforts, and even described the cart into which she placed them. They were there, precisely as he described it.”
Case 2 (Morse, 1990): “A woman had knowledge of a shoe on a window ledge outside the hospital (not near the room where the patient was resuscitated, but next to a third-floor office where she was being interviewed). The psychologist who did the interview (Kim Clark) had to crawl along the ledge outside her window to verify the claim. The shoe was indeed there precisely as the patient had described it. Though the shoe could have been seen from a window, the detail with which the NDE patient described it could not have been detected from that window (a worn little toe, a shoelace beneath the heel).”
Case 3 (Moody, 1988): “One patient reported seeing her young daughter wearing mismatched plaids (which was highly unusual and only knowable if she had actually been in the waiting room). Another woman overheard her brother-in-law talking to a business associate in the hospital waiting room in a very derogatory manner, and was able to report this back to him later.”
The most compelling clinical study to date (Ring et al., 1999) reports visual perception by 80% of blind people during clinical death. The authors describe patient reports as, “seeing in detail, sometimes from all angles at once, with everything in focus, and a sense of ‘knowing’ the subject, not just visually, but with multisensory knowledge.” Fourteen of the 31 patients were blind from birth, had no previous experience of seeing and there was no reported instance of their regaining sight after resuscitation. There has been no verified physical explanation of this phenomenon.
Since consciousness is a subjective experience, objective NDE data are difficult to obtain, particularly those within the time frame of cardiac resuscitation. To obtain objective information, researchers will place a sign where only a patient with an out-of-body experience can see it. One attempt at such a study had equivocal results (Parnia & Young, 2014). Yet 9% of the survivors did report subjective evidence of an NDE event.
While definitive objective evidence of consciousness independent of brain activity during clinical death has not yet been provided, the reported experiences related above are highly suggestive of a transphysical explanation.
Terminal Lucidity (TL)
Terminal lucidity is a phenomenon first defined in 2009 by Michael Nahm, PhD. He described it as “the unexpected return of mental clarity and memory shortly before death.” In 2011, Nahm reviewed 49 case reports of TL involving severe long-term mental deterioration due to brain abscess, brain tumor, Alzheimer’s disease & other dementias, meningitis, schizophrenia and possible affective disorders.
The following are two examples of TL:
Case 1 (Ringger, 1958): “One of the most disabled patients of Happich’s asylum was [Kathy]. From birth on, she was seriously retarded and never learned to speak a single word. She could only utter animal-like voices; her bodily abilities did not exceed uncontrolled spasms. It never seemed that she took notice of what was happening around her even for a second. One day, [after contracting tuberculosis and in rapidly declining health, she began singing], ‘Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace, peace, heavenly peace!’ over and over again. For half an hour she sang. Then, she quietly died. Her face, up to then so stultified, was transfigured and spiritualized … [The attending physician] stated repeatedly: ‘I cannot explain this in medical terms.’”
Case 2 (Nahm, 2011): Recently, [there was an Alzheimer’s case describing] “a woman’s grandmother who had neither talked nor reacted to family members for a number of years until the week before she died, when she suddenly started chatting with the granddaughter, asking about the status of various family members and giving her granddaughter advice. Her granddaughter reported that ‘it was like talking to Rip Van Winkle.’”
These cases of TL and others demonstrate fully conscious functionality (perception, memory, language, etc.) despite severe long-standing brain dysfunction. This indicates the existence of an immaterial soul.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness*
Many materialist scientists assume that consciousness evolved in vertebrates during the Cambrian Age, about 520 million years ago. In 2013, Feinberg & Mallatt proposed the following explanation of how consciousness evolved:
1. Multiple levels of isomorphic or somatotopic neural representations serve as an objective marker for sensory consciousness.
2. All extant vertebrates have these, so we deduce that consciousness extends back to the group’s origin.
3. Genes that pattern the proposed elements of consciousness (isomorphism, neural crest, placodes) have been identified in all vertebrates.
4. Thus, consciousness is in the genes.
While this schema may be useful in explaining the genetic origins of sensory consciousness, it doesn’t address the problem of (1) subjective vertebrate experience, much less the intractable human ability to (2) experience ourselves experiencing. For example, the perceptual experience of appreciating the color blue vs. the deeper-level inward experience of appreciating the appreciation of the color blue.
But let’s get back to the animal kingdom and look at the bat.
What is it Like to be a Bat? That is the title of a 1974 paper by Thomas Nagel, who defines the mind-body problem of consciousness in the following way: “fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism- something it is like for the organism.” Nagel chose the bat for two reasons. First, he assumed most people would agree that bats have some form of self-awareness. Second, he recognized that the bat experience (bat-ness) is beyond our comprehension because “anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.” He concludes that bat consciousness is inaccessible to science.
In 1995, David Chalmers picks up on this by introducing the phrase “hard problem of consciousness.” Below is a brief summary of the easy and hard problems of consciousness:
Easy problems of consciousness – These represent some ability or the performance of some function of behavior. Some examples include (1.) the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli, (2.) the reportability of mental states, and (3.) the control of behavior.
Hard problem of consciousness – “It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.” [emphasis added]
Chalmers later changed his mind that there is a physical explanation for the hard problem of consciousness, advocating instead for panprotopsychism or panpsychism to explain human consciousness. These concepts claim that mind or soul is present in most or all things, like a law of nature. Of course, there is no scientific evidence for this claim.
Chalmers provides a logical argument for his position that consciousness is immaterial – the philosophical zombie. This hypothetical being is indistinguishable from a normal human, but lacks conscious experience. If such a being is conceivable, he argues, then consciousness arising from matter (physicalism) is false. [Note: See precise wording at the referenced website.]
Modern-day experience supports the notion that complex intelligent action does not require self-consciousness. Not only is it possible for humans to drive for long periods of time without being consciously aware of their surroundings, machines can do it too. The self-driving car takes multiple sensor inputs, calculates appropriate navigation paths and outputs commands to accelerate, brake and steer. No one would argue that the car is conscious of what it is doing.
Therefore, it appears that the only way to satisfactorily explain human self-consciousness (experience of experiencing) is via the immaterial soul.
* In philosophy, consciousness is the conscious experience of oneself and the world, while self-consciousness is the awareness of oneself only … the experience of “I.”
The Attributes of the Human Soul
The existence of the human soul and its transcendence (beyond physical laws) is manifest not only through consciousness but also by a number of other interior attributes. If you study the following list for a few minutes (explored in depth at the Credible Catholic website), you may realize that (a) each of these attributes is unique to human beings and (b) all of them are required for moral decision-making.
• Consciousness/Self-consciousness
• Conceptual Ideas
• Transcendent Reality (God)
• Empathy
• Love
• Conscience
• Free Will
• 5 Transcendental Desires (perfect truth, love, justice/goodness, beauty & being/home)
• Suffering
Consciousness, and especially self-consciousness, is the means by which “self” is known to each of us. It assists us to organize our lives – past, present and future – in a narrative form. It provides a basis for reflection on our moral actions and inactions.
The capacity for conceptual ideas allows us to have abstract thoughts and language. The ability to reason abstractly is the basis for the evaluation of competing moral choices. For example, the principle of double effect is an idea that requires a high level of abstract thought in moral decision-making. Do I kill an aggressor who is attacking my child?
The awareness of a transcendent reality (God) imposes on us the obligations of worship and obedience. Ofttimes, God’s will conflicts with ours, requiring moral decisions.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. In religious terms, it is the recognition that the other is a child of God and has infinite dignity because each soul is a unique creation. Empathy is a virtue that supports love.
Love (agape) is “the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of one’s fellow man.” In the end, we are judged by our love. It is a self-sacrificial charity that extends beyond the self-sacrifice of higher animals for their offspring. Human love is free and it can extend to one’s enemies.
Conscience helps us to evaluate moral choices. According to John Henry Newman, it is:
“… a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, not a mere opinion or impression or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others. I do not say that its particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other; but what I am insisting on here is this, that it commands; that it praises, blames, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses of the unseen. It is more than a man’s own self. The man himself has no power over it, or only with extreme difficulty; he did not make it, he cannot destroy it…. This is Conscience, and, from the nature of the case, its very existence carries our minds to a Being exterior to ourselves; for else, when did it come? …”
Free will is the ability to make your own choices and determine your own fate, an absolutely essential component of morality. Conversely, a lion who kills a human child is no more guilty of murder than a domestic cat who kills a mouse. Each is acting on instinct; neither has made a free choice.
The Five Transcendental Desires are the innate desires for perfect truth, love, justice/goodness, beauty & being/home. They were built upon the ideas of the Greek philosophers in the 4th century BC and developed by Augustine, Aquinas and others. Humans have a natural awareness of these transcendentals and a desire to seek complete fulfillment of each, which is only found in God. Hence, each desire provides a pathway to God, if we submit ourselves to his will, through correct moral choices.
Suffering, Sin and Salvation
So how does the reality of suffering relate to the attainment of heaven, this website’s theme?
Suffering is an aspect of self-consciousness, a property of the soul and the key to understanding sin and salvation.
There is a distinction between pain and suffering, although most of us use these words interchangeably. For the purpose of this discussion, pain is a sensory input to the brain that registers as an unpleasant feeling we call suffering. Pain in its usual sense is due to “intense or damaging stimuli,” but also includes the physical and psychological disturbances of everyday life. Suffering is “an experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual.”
When I experience pain, I subjectively suffer in my self-consciousness. You may infer my pain by my body language, my verbal utterances and by seeing the reason for the pain. With medical sensors, you can objectively measure the neurological impulses that often accompany my pain. You can even empathize with my condition, because you too are human, and suffer with me. But you cannot measure or be certain of my suffering, because I suffer in my self-conscious awareness, and only I have that unique awareness.
Because we are all human, we make the valid and useful assumption that other humans suffer. But do animals suffer? Does the self-driving car suffer? Scientists and philosophers have asked themselves these questions, but can only speculate as to the answers.
Animals probably don’t suffer because they lack the reflective self-consciousness only seen in humans. Indeed, there is less evidence for their suffering than for ours because they cannot tell us about their subjective experiences. Nor is suffering required to avoid harm, since that can be accomplished by instinctual responses. (Nevertheless, we should assume animals do suffer and treat them humanely.)
Most would agree that the self-driving car, and other “smart” technologies, even if given artificial pain receptors and pathways, would not suffer. And you can be sure that scientists don’t have any idea how to make even the smartest automaton suffer, nor how that suffering could possibly be measured.
It is likely, then, that of all the life forms we know and all the possible artificial beings we may one day create, suffering is known only to humans.
Why then do we suffer? This excerpt from a website on the meaning of suffering provides a key insight:
“This present life is for us a period of testing, to determine where we shall be for eternity, either with God or separated from God … All the suffering that God allows us to experience in this life, is ultimately medicinal, i.e. for our good in some respect, even when we do not see that we need any treatment. God, our Father, is like a loving parent who agrees to subject his child to a regimen of chemotherapy to cure a cancer, though the child does not see the need for the chemotherapy, because the child does not see the cancer or its danger … [That cancer] is sin, and it leads to hell, i.e. eternal separation from God. There is no greater evil than that one, nothing worse to suffer than eternal separation from God.”
Now imagine a world with no suffering. What would it be like?
• No death
• No cancer, heart disease, stroke, AIDS, or malaria
• No tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires, or hurricanes
• No colds, headaches, acne; no injury of any kind
• No depression, boredom, disappointment, or loneliness
• Always a sense of well-being and fulfillment
• Sin is rejected; holiness is attained
Of course, the imagined world I just described is heaven, where there is no need for suffering and sin has been overcome.
Suffering is required only here on earth. It is a merciful gift that supplies us with the incentives necessary for passing the salvation test. They are incentives that awaken us to reality; test us; discipline us to grow in humility, trust, and holiness; and provide us the opportunity to participate in God’s work of redemption for ourselves and others.