Adieu, the final farewell, an exploration of death!
The Soul: Forward to Extending Life – Forward to Religious Beliefs – Back to Causes of Death
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It is suggested by many religions that the soul survives the death of the body.
Much philosophical and religious thinking has been applied to define the concept and nature of a soul. It is usually concluded to be an intangible, immaterial essence of a human being. Yet it is considered to be that which also defines their humanity, identity, personality and memories. This notion is very much confused by concepts of the self and of the mind.
This longstanding belief in a soul, has led to the different religious and philosophical schools developing a broad variety of theories as to its origins, its nature, its inter-relationship with the body, and its ‘mortality’. Dreams are often cited as being something created by the soul, and implying that it exists on some ‘other’ plain.
While some consider the soul as our supernatural core, others see it as the ‘function’ that contributes to our free will and conscience. There has been no direct progress in this search for the ‘soul’, though indirectly it has expanded our understanding of anatomy and physiology, and has been vital in both cardiovascular and neurology developments. Despite the lack of proof of the existence of the soul, there remains a massive belief in it from much of the global population.
In south-eastern Turkey the Kuttamuwa stele was discovered – from the 8th c BCE. It is currently the earliest reference to the soul being something other than the body. In this case it was for a royal official and he suggested that his soul was in the stele. Mourners were asked to commemorate him with feasts celebrating his life and after-life.
Assyrians, Babylonians and Ancient Egyptians proposed that existence had both a physical and spiritual aspect. Egyptians saw this as having two parts – ka, or breath, that remained near the body, and ba, or spirit, that moved off to the region of the dead.
Egyptian ba
Ancient Chinese souls also had two parts, a sensitive soul that disappeared at death and the hun or po, the rational part of the soul, that was the basis for ancestor worship.
Chinese symbol for hun
The early Greek philosophers, like Aristotle, concluded that the soul must be resident within the heart. His ‘On the Soul’ called it an anima, he suggested that all living organisms had one, but only that soul of the human was immortal. Plato and Pythagoras argued that it was located in the brain. Herophilus was more precise and termed it as the fourth ventricle of the brain, a small area that sat above the brain stem. But then, anatomy was very much in its infancy.
Hindus, and others from the sub-continent, believed that the soul, the Ātman, was the actual self and that the body was its physical representative in the world. The body existed there to experience karma. While the Ātman remained constant as pure consciousness. They believe that there is Ātman in every living being that is separate from the body-mind complex.
Buddhist Anatta
The Buddhist doctrine of anattā or anātman, suggests that there is no self (or soul) to be found within the structure of a living being. But far from suggesting the soul has a separate existence, its basic tenets are based on the non-acceptance of self, anatman, are that it is the attachment to an idea of self that causes much of the suffering, dukkha.
Nefesh
Judaism places great importance on the study of the souls. It uses multiple terms for soul – nefesh or living being, ruach or wind, neshamah or breath, chayah or life and yechidah or singularity. Judaism considers that the quality of one’s soul is based upon one’s performance of the commandments, or mitzvot.
St Augustine and St Gregory on Nyssa developed early Christian thinking to believe in a body-soul combination. Christian thinking evolved into the belief that when people die, their souls are judged by God and then passes to Heaven or to Hell, where they await resurrection.
Hieronymus Bosch’s Visions of Heaven and Hell
The elder branches of Christianity suggest the dead have no conscious existence until this resurrection. Christians believe they will inherit eternal life either in Heaven, or within a new Kingdom of God on earth. Some Christians reject any punishment of the soul.
There was some early Christian argument as to whether existence was a trichotomy or dichotomy. The trichotomy suggests there is a body (soma), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma), the dichotomy belief merges soul and spirit into one. St Paul the Apostle, in the 1st c CE, discussed the division of soul and spirit, so was a trichotomist. Saint Thomas Aquinas argued that the soul is present in every single part of the human body, and therefore cannot be placed within a single organ (heart, brain…), and that it is inseparable from the body until after that body’s death.
The Quran uses two words for the soul: rūḥ (spirit or soul) and nafs (ego, psyche or soul). The two terms are often interchangeable, though rūḥ is more often used to denote the divine spirit, while nafs suggest one’s characteristics. Quran 39:42: ‘Allah takes the souls at the time of their death… …He keeps those for which He has decreed death and releases the others…’ Islam believes that the soul and body are created at the same time, then the soul is linked temporarily with the body, and survives its death.
The Baháʼí Faith affirms that ‘the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel’.
The soul had come to mean different things to various classical and medieval thinkers. They believed that there was a ‘vegetative soul’, responsible for autonomic functions; a ‘sensitive soul’, responsible for reflex responses to stimuli; and a ‘reasoning soul’, responsible for the rational entity of human beings. The reasoning soul was a human attribute that was the basis of thought, judgment, and responsibility for one’s actions – its departure implied death.
From the late 17th c textbooks of anatomy stopped discussing the soul as one of the human parts. It was René Descartes, also 17th c, who eliminated the soul’s general physiological role. He considered the body and the soul to be separate but interacting entities, each with its own particular attributes. His contemporaries viewed Descartes as having debunked an earlier Greek tradition that had claimed that animals, as well as humans, had souls. His writings about death showed that his concept of the soul clearly implied the principle of immortality.
Descartes suggested (wrongly) that the soul resided in the pineal gland, that this was where volition, cognition, and reason originated. But he was close, we now understand that beneath the pineal gland lies the uppermost part of the brain stem that is crucial for generating consciousness and that without it there can be no volition, cognition, or reason.
In 1901, Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Massachusetts, concluded that at death there was a 21-gram weight loss that he concluded was due to the soul having departed. But his experimentation was upon just the one individual, and his notion was dismissed as unscientific when it could not be replicated.
Gilbert Ryle, a British philosopher, in his 1949 Concept of Mind, condemned Descartes approach as the concept of the ‘ghost in the machine’, which suggests the mind is something that exists apart from the body. Ryle asserted that the body and the mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but that the mind could continue to exist and function after the death of the body.
Several parapsychologists have attempted to develop scientific approaches to prove that there is both a brain and a soul, but none has, as yet, succeeded.
Neuroscientists have successfully mapped all processes of the human mind to a location in the brain, there is nowhere that they have found that can be shown to relate to the soul.
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| ASIDE: Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, plans to revolutionize brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). It has implanted a ‘brain-reading’ device into a person with the aim of allowing a person with severe paralysis to control a computer, robotic arm, wheelchair or other device through thought alone. Others are also active in this field. |
In general science, the mind has been closely examined and though it is complex it appears to operate within the same laws as all other physical objects in the universe. They have, as yet, found no evidence of a soul.
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The Soul: Forward to Extending Life – Forward to Religious Beliefs – Back to Causes of Death
Back to Adieu Index - Back to Bob Denton home page
