Books by Ian Rogers
Books by Ian Rogers
Souled Out part 1 posed the following questions:
While these are hard questions to answer, the illusion that modern science is destroying ‘superstitions of religion’, like the existence of an individual soul, needs to be challenged. First, the three questions above are not new. Even cave man (and woman) must have known that drinking to excess or eating the wrong ‘mushrooms’ could alter the state of mind, causing ecstasy, unconsciousness or death. Just because we know a lot more about the mechanics and chemistry of the brain doesn’t mean the concept of a soul has suddenly become obsolete.
The problem of one or two souls for identical twins is closely allied to arguments about abortion. At what age or level of development does an embryo become a foetus - a viable human being? If we are soulless robots, should we say at any point because it is only a machine? Or do we say that once the foetus is viable with medical care then there is a soul present and that ‘person’ deserves life-protecting and life-saving help like any other person? (I accept this ignores the mother’s angle but my primary focus is on the existence or otherwise of a soul, so I move on.) If a single foetus is protected from abortion at 22 weeks, then is it not a reasonable assumption that identical twins will have a soul each at 22 weeks, however souls develop or are bestowed?
The animal-soul problem is similar to the foetal development problem. A single celled organism does not seem likely to have a soul comparable to a human soul, if it has one at all. A fish has some mental abilities but is pretty robot-like. It is guided mainly by inherited, hard-wired behaviour and some learned reflexes. Fish courtship behaviour is ‘instinctive’ but fish can be trained to approach a tuning fork for food. Animal complexity parallels foetal complexity. The more cells there are in the body, the more complex the neural networks and the more developed the brain, the more likely we (or some people) think it is that there is a soul. The more developed a foetus becomes, the more ‘baby-like’ it (he or she) is, the more likely it seems that (he/she) will have a human soul.
There are approximate scientific and social answers to when a foetus is viable. For a healthy foetus in the UK at the time of writing, abortion is only allowed up to 24 weeks (unless the mother’s life is at risk). There have been attempts to lower this to 22 weeks because between 20-35% of deliveries at 23 weeks survive (source Wikepedia, a study of data from 2005).
A baby girl born at 21 weeks is reported to have become a healthy toddler (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/...earliest.../861386001/). In the UK the foetus has no legal status until it is born and has a separate existence from the mother (https://www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk/revision_notes/law-medical-law/samples/the-legal-status-of-the-foetus-and-abortion-ethics). There are some foetal legal rights in the USA and other countries. Animals have the right not to suffer wanton cruelty but cannot be sued for wanton behaviour or criminality. Try serving a writ on a monkey in a safari park!
Most of us like to believe there is something like a soul within us. We like to believe that those we love, but who have died, continue to exist in more than just memory. We also like to believe that, despite the random pain and suffering in the physical world, there is some sort of ’eternal justice’. If we are soulless machines, none of these things are true.
Souled Out part 3 will look at views of the soul from a Christian perspective.
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