God: The Failed Hypothesis (10 page)

The association of spirit with air is embedded in a number of ancient languages: the Hebrew
ruah
(“wind” or “breath”) and
nefesh,
also associated with breathing; the Greek
psychein
(“to breathe”), which is related to the word
psyche
for “soul”; and the Latin words
anima
(“air,” “breath,” or “life”) and
spiritus,
which also refers to breathing
²
. The soul was seen as departing the body in the dying last breath.

In Hawaii, native shamans attempted to breathe life back into a dead body by shouting “ha!” Western doctors were seen not to do this and so were said to be “ha-ole”—without ha. In today’s diverse population in Hawaii, Caucasians are commonly called
haoles.

In the Old Testament, the soul is life itself, breathed into the body by God. While traditional Judaism does not regard death as the end of human existence, it has no dogma of an afterlife, and a range of opinions can be found among Jewish scholars. Christianity, on the other hand, made human immortality its foundational principle, the doctrine probably most responsible for the long success of that faith. The power of Islam can also be attributed to the promise of an afterlife, with dark-eyed maidens providing eternal pleasure (for men, anyway).

Following the teaching of the Greek physician Galen (d. 201), early church fathers located the immortal soul in the empty spaces of the head. However, Christendom lost touch with Greek philosophy after the fall of Rome in 476 until the ancient writings were recovered in the twelfth century, mostly from Islamic sources
³
.

Christians did not take well to the teachings of the Greek atomists, who challenged the whole notion of an immortal soul.

Epicurus (d. 270
BCE
) taught that the soul was made of matter, like everything else. The soul atoms were concentrated in the chest and took life with them when a body died. In
De Rerum Natura
(
On the Nature of Things
) the Roman poet Lucretius (d. 55
BCE
) wrote, “Death is therefore nothing to us and does not concern us at all, since it appears that the substance of the soul is per-ishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if earth mixes with sea and seas with heaven
⁴
.”

Most laypeople today take for granted a separateness or “duality” of soul and body, of spirit and matter. However, this distinction was not made clear-cut until the seventeenth century, when Rene Descartes (d. 1650) found a way to reconcile atoms and soul. This was the age when machines were coming into common use. Descartes was a contemporary of Galileo Galilei (d. 1642), two generations ahead of Isaac Newton (d. 1727). The French thinker developed many of the mathematical methods such as representing curves by equations and the Cartesian coordinate system that would receive wide application in the new science of mechanics that was elaborated by Newton.

Descartes argued that animals, including humans, were intricate, material machines—designed by God, of course (he was terrified of the Inquisition). However, he argued that humans possess an additional ingredient that is not composed of the basic particles of matter: an immaterial soul. The soul did everything that machines were presumably not capable of doing: thinking, consciousness, will, abstraction, doubt, and understanding
⁵
.

Descartes speculated that the pineal gland of the brain marked the place where the soul and the brain interacted.

Descartes was also a contemporary of Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), who agreed with him on the machinelike nature of the human body but viewed the notion of an additional, immaterial soul as a delusion. Hobbes even went further in proposing that society itself could be understood as a clockwork mechanism and, in his most famous work,
Leviathan,
first published in 1652, he attempted to deduce the optimum political structure. He determined it to be dictatorship, by a king or otherwise
⁶
.

At this significant turning point in history, empirical science in Europe was beginning to raise doubts about the blind obedience to authority that had stifled progress for centuries. Copernicus and Galileo had based their new cosmology, which challenged the teachings of Aristotle, on empirical data—setting the stage for the Newtonian revolution. But, even before that happened, a brave new breed of empiricists was taking a closer look at the bodies of humans and animals.

Rise of the Brain

In a fascinating book,
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain and How It Changed the World,
Carl Zimmer tells the story of a remarkable group of seventeenth-century men working in Oxford during the English Civil War and its aftermath, who by dissecting human and animal cadavers established, among numerous other anatomical facts, that the brain was the primary organ of thought
⁷
. These included several who became famous for other individual achievements: Christopher Wren (d. 1723) designed the magnificent Sheldonian Theater in Oxford while drafting detailed illustrations of human organs. Robert Boyle (d. 1691) transformed alchemy to modern chemistry and demonstrated the pressure of air, while conducting hundreds of experiments on anatomy. Boyle’s assistant Robert Hooke (d. 1703) discovered the law of springs while designing instruments such as a microscope that enabled investigators to see the intricate structures inside living organisms.

The leader of the “Oxford Circle” was a physician, Thomas Willis (d. 1675), who produced the first detailed anatomy of the brain and traced the nervous system throughout the body. He identified the heart as a blood pump that operated under the control of signals from the brain. Like his contemporaries, Willis referred to these signals as “spirits.” Not until the eighteenth century would the signals carried by nerves be identified with electricity.

After the restoration of Charles II to the throne, the Oxford Circle came out into the open, moved to London, and evolved into the Royal Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge, which became a catalyst for the scientific revolution that followed.

Willis founded the science of neurology, which eventually confirmed many of his notions, at least in a general way. We now know that electrical impulses compose the “spirits” that carry signals from the brain through the nervous system. Different parts of the brain perform different functions. The human brain is basically similar to that of other animals, differing in those portions that give us our superior cognitive and intellectual abilities. Psychological disorders arise in the brain and are routinely treated today with chemicals. And, as we all are well aware, chemicals can also cause mental disorders or alter mental states and even trigger “spiritual experiences” (as with
LSD
). Brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, affect memory and behavior. All of this strongly implies that our thoughts, memories, and subjective experiences may be entirely based upon physical processes in the brain.

Brain Science Today

Scientists no longer need to remove the brain from a dead body in order to study it. Imaging technology makes it possible not only to examine brains in detail but also to observe them while they are still alive and functioning. In recent years, this has enabled the sources of perceptual judgments and different types of thought to be located within the brain. Experiments have been conducted in which subjects are asked to make mechanical, intellectual, and moral choices, while researchers watch the brain carry out the necessary operations.

A number of imaging techniques have been developed with modern technology. Perhaps the most powerful is
magnetic resonance imaging
(
MRI
). Based on the physics of
nuclear magnetic resonance
(
NMR
), with the word “nuclear” removed so as not to alarm patients,
MRI
forms an image by detecting the energy that is released by the spinning nuclei of atoms. This energy is actually very low, coming from the radio region of the electromagnetic spectrum and not at all harmful—especially compared to x-rays, which have sufficient energy to break atomic bonds. In
functional
MRI
(fMRI), the magnetic properties of the blood are used to see patterns of blood flow. An fMRI scan of the brain can quickly produce images that distinguish structures less than a millimeter apart and pinpoint areas in the brain that are being activated.

Other brain imaging techniques include
positron emission tomography
(
PET
),
single photon emission computed tomography
(
SPECT
), and
electroencephalography
(EEG
⁸
). All these techniques confirm that thought processes are accompanied by localized physical activity in the brain. Let us look at just a few of the examples relevant to our discussion.

Many more can be found in the literature.

Using fMRI, scientists in the United States and Brazil have discovered that the region of the brain activated when moral judgments are being made is different from the region activated for social judgments that are equally emotionally charged
⁹
.

Princeton researchers have studied the brain activity in people asked to make decisions based on various moral dilemmas. These dilemmas were divided into two categories—one involving impersonal actions and another where a direct personal action was required. The brain scans consistently showed greater activation in the areas of the brain associated with emotions when the actions were personal
¹⁰
. The relevant point here is not just that physical processes in the brain take part in thinking; they seem to be responsible for the deepest thoughts that are supposed to be the province of spirit rather than matter.

Another area of study with live brains involves the localized stimulation by electric or magnetic pulses. Neuroscientist Michael Persinger claims to have induced many of the types of experiences that people have interpreted as “religious” or “spiritual” by magnetic stimulation of the brain
¹¹
. However, Persinger’s results have been called into question
¹²
.

On the other hand, Olaf Blanke and his colleagues report that they are able to bring about so-called
out-of-body experiences
(
OBE
), where a person’s consciousness seems to become detached from the body, by electrical stimulation of a specific region in the brain
¹³
. I have discussed
OBE
experiments in two books and have concluded that they provide no evidence for anything happening outside of the physical processes of the brain
¹⁴
.

These results do not totally deny the possibility that conscious thoughts are being directed by a disembodied soul, which then somehow implements them through the brain and nervous system. This, in one form or another, remains the teaching of most religions. In 1986 Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the 1950 statement by Pope Pius
XII
that the Church does not forbid the study and teaching of biological evolution
¹⁵
. However, the pope made it very clear that evolution applied to the body—not the mind: “Theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person
¹⁶
.”

Despite the Holy Father’s admonition, a wealth of empirical data now strongly suggests that mind is in fact a “mere epiphenomenon of this matter.” Matter alone appears to be able to carry out all the activities that have been traditionally associated with the soul. No “spiritual” element is required by the data. The implication that “we” are bodies and brains made of atoms and nothing more is perhaps simply too new, too disturbing, too incompatible with common preconceptions to be soon accepted into common knowledge. However, if we do indeed possess an immaterial soul, or a material one with special properties that cannot be found in inanimate matter, then we should expect to find some evidence for it.

Hundreds of reports of scientific observations of special powers of the human mind under claimed “controlled conditions” have been made over the past one hundred and fifty years.

Not a single one has met all five of the conditions, listed in chapter 1, that are required for science to take an extraordinary claim seriously. Are these conditions unreasonable? Am I asking too much of the investigators? I can list dozens of extraordinary scientific discoveries made during that same period that have met precisely these same conditions, so this cannot be attributed to some dogmatic bias in science against “new ideas.”

Obviously I cannot do a survey of every claim, although in my 1990 book,
Physics and Psychics,
I singled out for critical analysis those that the proponents themselves considered the most convincing
¹⁷
. These were brought up to date in my 2003 book,
Has Science Found God
¹⁸
?
In what follows I will review some sample claims that should sufficiently illustrate why the case for special powers of the mind has not been made.

The Force of Life

Let us begin by considering the ancient association of the soul with life itself, as a kind of special ingredient, an
elan vital
or vital force, that is possessed by live organisms and was long thought to distinguish them from inanimate objects such as rocks and dead organisms. Many cultures have held such beliefs, and even today we hear terms like
qi
(chi) used to represent some special energy that is supposed to flow through the body. In Western religions this life force is often identified with the soul. If such a life force exists, then we should be able to detect its presence.