Is There Room for the Soul?
New challenges to our most cherished beliefs about self and the human spirit
Within religion itself there is also fresh thought about the implications of the new science of the mind for core religious principles and beliefs. Malcolm Jeeves, an honorary professor of psychology at the University of St. Andrews, is one of many believing scientists who think the Christian concept of the soul should be relieved of its Cartesian and Platonic overlays. "The immortality of the soul is so often talked about that it is easy to miss that the Jewish view did not support it," Jeeves says. "Furthermore, the original Christian view was not the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body." But Platonism did creep in, Jeeves acknowledges, winning over such influential Christian theologians as Augustine and John Calvin. In Jeeves's view, the new science of consciousness, by showing the inseparable links between mind and body, restores the original Christian conception of the unity of the person. As many Christian theologians now say, human beings do not have souls; they are souls. But Jeeves is realistic in thinking that it will take decades for many of his fellow Christians to accept this way of viewing the soul. And that acceptance will not be made easier by the hard-line reductivism of people like Dennett and Crick who, Jeeves says, "commit the fundamental error of nothing-buttery."
But grant Dennett and many other cognitive scientists their view that the self is not a spectator in the theater of consciousness but the composite of multiple drafts related to and constituting the biography of that particular individual. If this view is true, where is the self or identity on which even a broad-minded religious believer might base his notion of the soul?
Here Christians and others might turn to the wisdom of Buddhism, in which the self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process. As Galin writes in a collection of essays on Buddhism and science, this process is "a shifting web of relations among evanescent aspects of the person such as perceptions, ideas, and desires. The Self is only misperceived as a fixed entity because of the distortions of the human point of view." The Buddhist concept of anatman does not suggest that the self is nonexistent but rather asserts that it cannot be reduced to an essence.
Galin proposes that rehabilitating the notion of spirit may be the best way to a new understanding of the self in a post-dualist age. The experience of spirit, he argues, is itself part of the human capacity to experience implicit organization, hidden order, deeper and ineffable connectedness in what we see or otherwise encounter, whether a magnificent work of architecture like Notre Dame or a spectacular vista such as the Grand Canyon. Experiencing spirit is finding unity and wholeness in something, and Galin suggests that we view the self as spirit in that sense: the organization-or even the emergent property-of all of a person's subsystems, not just one more subsystem.
In recent years, the scientific study of consciousness has taken bold, if not always steady, steps in the direction of understanding the experience of wholeness and human spirituality in general. One prominent researcher, Andrew Newberg, a professor of nuclear medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, directs his university's recently founded Center for Spirituality and the Mind, a cross-disciplinary program devoted in part to the fledgling field of "neurotheology." In one respect, this venture marks yet another return to the legacy of William James, whose later work included his masterful Varieties of Religious Experience. The findings of Newberg and his late colleague, Eugene D'Aquili, do not yet rise to the Jamesean level, but they do point in a promising direction. They even suggest that if religion can learn something valuable about the unity of body and mind from science, then science might be able to relearn something from religion about the deepest purposes of our minds.
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