If neuroscience could disprove the
existence of a disembodied soul, then its ramification includes disbelieving the
existence of God because God is a disembodied mind. The assault against the
soul, and thus God, from the vantage point of neuroscience, is increasing.
In his blog entitled A Brief Reflection on Neuroscience and the
Soul, J.P Moreland emphasizes the conflict between science and the soul or
between physicalism1 and dualism, and further adds that science
cannot arbitrate this conflict:2
The great
Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen once observed: “I think we ought to hold
not only that man has a soul, but that it is important that he should know that
he has a soul”…
From a
Christian perspective, Machen offers a trustworthy saying. Christianity is a dualist, interactionist
religion in this sense: God,
angels/demons, and the souls of men and beasts are immaterial substances that
can causally interact with the world.
Specifically, human persons are (or have) souls that are spiritual
substances that ground personal identity in a disembodied intermediate state
between death and final resurrection…Clearly, this was the Pharisees’ view in Intertestamental
Judaism, and Jesus (Matthew 22:23-33; cf. Matthew 10:28) and Paul (Acts 23
6-10; cf. II Corinthians 12:1-4) side with the Pharisees on this issue over
against the Sadducees …
In my view,
Christian physicalism involves a politically correct revision of the biblical
text that fails to be convincing …
Nevertheless,
today, many hold that, while broadly logically possible, dualism is no longer
plausible in light of advances in modern science. This attitude is becoming increasingly
prominent in Christian circles. Thus,
Christian philosopher Nancey Murphy claims that physicalism is not primarily a
philosophical thesis, but the hard core of a scientific research program for
which there is ample evidence. This
evidence consists in the fact that “biology, neuroscience, and cognitive
science have provided accounts of the dependence on physical processes of
specific faculties once attributed to the soul”…
Dualism cannot
be proven false—a dualist can always appeal to correlations or functional
relations between soul and brain/body--but advances in science make it a view
with little justification. According to
Murphy, "science has provided a massive amount of evidence suggesting that
we need not postulate the existence of an entity such as a soul or mind in
order to explain life and consciousness"…
I cannot
undertake here a critique of physicalism and a defense of dualism. Suffice it to say that dualism is a widely
accepted, vibrant intellectual position…I suspect that the majority of
Christian philosophers are dualists.
Still, it is important to mention that, upon reflection, it becomes
evident that neuroscience really has nothing to do with which view is most
plausible. Without getting into details,
this becomes evident when we observe that leading neuroscientists—Nobel Prize
winner John Eccles, U. C. L. A. neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz, and Mario
Beaureguard, are all dualists and they know the neuroscience. Their dualism--and the central intellectual
issues involved in the debate- are quite independent of neuroscientific data.
The
irrelevance of neuroscience also becomes evident when we consider the…best
seller Proof of Heaven by Eben
Alexander. Regardless of one’s view of
the credibility of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) in general, or of Alexander’s
in particular, one thing is clear.
Before whatever it was that happened to him (and I believe his NDE was
real but no not agree with his interpretation of some of what happened to him),
Alexander believed the (allegedly) standard neuroscientific view that specific
regions of the brain generate and possess specific states of conscious. But after his NDE, Alexander came to believe
that it is the soul that possesses consciousness, not the brain, and the
various mental states of the soul are in two-way causal interaction with
specific regions of the brain. Here’s
the point: His change in viewpoint was a
change in metaphysics that did not require him to reject or alter a single neuroscientific
fact. Dualism and physicalism are
empirically equivalent views consistent with all and only the same scientific
data. Thus, the authority of science
cannot be appropriated to provide any grounds whatsoever for favoring one view
over another.
Dr. Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon
and a human brain expert. He contends that the soul exists and that neuroscience
points to the existence of the soul. Here’s an excerpt from an article in Evolution News entitled Egnor: Why Neuroscience Points to a Soul:3
…Is the mind
simply another word for the brain, an organ in the head that fools us into
thinking that the self, the “inescapable I,” is a genuine entity? Dr. Egnor
explains the materialist view in its several successive historical
manifestations, and why, despite its pervasive influence, it hardly qualifies
as a serious perspective. Egnor details the findings of his own field,
neuroscience. These indicate that something extra, something immaterial, is
joined with the material body to form the complete human being. That something
extra is traditionally designated as the soul.
You are more
than a physical creature alone. Egnor cites, among other pieces of evidence, a
2006 study in the journal Science reporting that patients in a persistent
vegetative state, contrary to how their condition appears clinically, are not
all absent as personalities. Even with a severely damaged, shrunken brain, the
non-material person is somehow still there, and aware. For example, as
functional magnetic resonance imaging shows, many such patients, just like
healthy people, can distinguish the sound of meaningful sentences from
syntactical gibberish. That should be impossible under materialist assumptions.
This article also features a YouTube
video entitled No, You're Not a Robot
Made Out of Meat (Science Uprising 02). This video highlights four pieces of evidence from recent research that supports an immaterial mind.
Recent
research supports the existence of an immaterial mind: That thought actually changes our brain.
First, Dr.
Jeffrey Schwartz, a world’s leading expert in neuroplasticity, treats people
from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His treatment provides evidence that
thoughts change the physical brain. The choices we make changes how our brain
works. This research clearly supports mind over matter.
The second
evidence for an immaterial mind comes from an operation called Corpus Callosotomy. In this operation, if
we cut the brain in half, the brain still seemed to be a unitary person. This
implies that the human mind is not purely generated by the matter of the brain.
Otherwise cutting the brain in half could result in two people. But it doesn’t.
The third
evidence for an immaterial mind comes from brain
stimulation experiments that seemed to show our intellect and identity are
not found in our brain tissue. Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield conducted numerous
experiments wherein he found that there were aspects of the patient’s mind,
which were not affected in spite of what he did to the brain. He could not
change their consciousness, he could not change their intellect, and he could
not change their sense of self, no matter what he did to the brain.
The fourth
piece of evidence for an immaterial mind comes from experiments about freewill. Materialists try to convince us that
freewill does not exist. Dr. Benjamin Libet’s experiments show that humans do
have freewill; at least the freewill to say no.
Here’s more information about Dr.
Libet’s experiment. This excerpt is from Psychology
Today, from an article entitled Free
Won't: It May Be All That We Have (or Need):4
"Free won't"
In this case,
Libet had participants in the same basic paradigm, but he instructed the
participants that once you become aware of your urge to flex, then stop it.
Don't flex your fingers or wrist. Libet believed that there was a window of
about 150 ms in which the participant could do this (note that the whole 200 ms
between conscious awareness and muscle movement is not available, because once
the spinal nerves are activated, somewhere around 50 ms before the muscle
movement, this can not be stopped). The results indicated that the cortical
readiness potential did develop (even earlier than in the past experiments),
but this brain activity flattened out just before the muscle action, which
indicated the vetoing effects of conscious choice. Libet concluded that
participants were using conscious choice to veto the muscle flex at the last
moment.
We have free
will to abort an action. So, we may better think of volitional action in this
case not as free will, but as "free won't." We can stop an action
initiated by our brain nonconsciously.
This capacity
of "free won't" is generated by free choice. This is our conscious
will at work.
To conclude, this information should
be adequate to understand that neuroscience cannot disprove the existence of a
soul. On the one hand, Christians can reasonably argue that science does not
possess any authority to make a decision on the existence of the soul. On the other
hand, we can cite evidence from neuroscience that points to the existence of
the soul.
Endnotes:
1Physicalism
is the position that everything that exists does so within the limits of its
physical properties and that there are no other kinds of things other than
physical. (https://carm.org/what-physicalism)
2http://www.jpmoreland.com/2012/12/08/a-brief-reflection-on-neuroscience-and-the-soul/
3https://evolutionnews.org/2019/06/egnor-why-neuroscience-points-to-a-soul/
4https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dont-delay/201106/free-wont-it-may-be-all-we-have-or-need
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