The Science of the Soul

Now that cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are learning more and more about the brain, and are able to point to the parts of the brain whose function is typically thought of to be part of the mind or soul, can a scientist (or even a religious person) still believe in the soul? This is the question that is posed by this article from the New York Times. I just want to offer some thoughts I have on the article.

The article begins with Popes Pius XII and John Paul II and later has quotes from two Catholic academics (one a theologian- John F. Haught, one a biologist- Kenneth R. Miller) that make clear that Catholics can believe in evolution and the existence of a created world where each human has a soul. (N.B. It is up to the individual Catholic whether or not she wants to believe in evolution. It is not an article of faith one way or another.) This is important for a number of reasons. First, people whose religion is some form of secularism (e.g. Dawkins) lump all religious people- and all Christians- together, so it is good to have an article to show that there is nuances in belief among Christians. Second, it demonstrates that the Catholic faith is amenable to the progress of science, but at the same time it cannot contradict the most basic tenets of the faith such as the created world by God and the existence of a soul, which leads to the last paragraph of the article.

“What do you say as a scientist about the soul?” His [Dr. Miller's] answer, he said, is always the same: “As a scientist, I have nothing to say about the soul. It’s not a scientific idea.”

I think this is precisely right. And this is why Intelligent Design is such a dangerous idea. Not only it is bad science, it is bad theology. It is bad theology because Intelligent Design (ID) is stating that some aspect of the Creator can be quantified and scientifically explained, whereas the point of faith is to believe in something that cannot be scientifically demonstrated. (In the Creed, we say "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth"- not "I believe in Intelligent Design that demonstrated that God is the creator of earth, but we can't quite use ID to show that God created heaven....".) All religious believers must make that Kierkegaardian leap of faith (preferably after critical thought), and Intelligent Design denies that thereby making religion nothing other than a bad science.

And the reason that Intelligent Design is bad science is since it has absolutely no explanatory power. The reason that evolution is undeniable true is that evolutionary theory and in particular, evolutionary dynamics answers numerous questions in biology, anthropology, economics, physics, linguistics, psychology (cognitive science), neuroscience, etc. There are hundreds of papers each month that are published each month that use evolutionary theory, but the numbers that use ID is 1 in all of 2006 and none so far in 2007. So a basic tenant of any worthwhile philosophy of science is that the model must have explanatory power. And preferably the model can be applied to many situations, has empirical evidence, and can be formalized (which for evolution is through various differential equations like the replicator model and evolutionary Game Theory). ID has none of these things.

To bring the conversation back to the soul. Intelligent Design claims, essentially, that God can be quantified. This is a various dangerous proposition for a religious person to make for it opens her up to allowing the soul to be quantified as well. Stating that science can prove that God exists, God is the creator, or humans have a soul, is stating that faith is refutable. So as Miller said, the scientist has nothing to say about the soul, but he has a lot to say about the brain.

The article states that the recent advances in brain science have refuted Descates Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) with respect to animals. I don't think that is quite right. While Descartes' Cogito can be refuted a number of ways, I don't see how advances in brain science would do so. Descartes' claim is fundamentally an a priori claim to refute skepticism, not a scientific claim about the soul. And what Descartes considered to be thought, cannot be done by animals. (Now Descartes, contra Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas, did not believe that animals had souls.) But it seems that if brain science refutes any fundamental part of Cartesian philosophy, it would be dualism as a scientific philosophy. All religious believers are de facto dualists in the sense that they believe in the material body and the immaterial soul. But a believer like myself is not a dualist in the sense that I believe that only the material body can be scientifically and philosophically investigated.

That seems enough for today, perhaps more on another day.