Do you have an immortal soul?

Is there more to you than meets the eye? The majority of Earth’s population believes that there is, and they don’t just mean your gall bladder. They mean that your body is infused with some kind of immaterial vital essence called a “soul” or “spirit” or “life force” or “consciousness” or “qi” or “energy”. Most people believe that this essence makes up an important part of who you are, and that without it you wouldn’t really be a complete person—if, indeed, you would still be a person at all.

This idea does not just seek to describe you, of course, but all of humanity; and by extension, objective reality itself. Thus believing it to be true can have a profound influence on how you think about almost everything, including controversial topics like animal rights, gay marriage, legalized abortion, alternative medicine, and the reality TV show Ghost Hunters.

Such an idea, I think, is well worth investigating. And with your retroactive consent, I hereby present you with Part 1 of just such an investigation, wherein I take the liberty of calling your immortal soul into question.

The Creation of the Immortal Soul

Life after death is a promise made by many religions, and in most cases this promise hinges on the idea that your vital essence is like a lifeboat upon which you can float blissfully away from the wreckage of your bloated corpse. This is the case with many versions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Scientology, and yes, even Buddhism. Modern biology, however, tells us that you are not handmade by God, but descended from an ancient nonhuman ancestor along with every other living thing. For sophisticated philosophers like me, this raises a question: where the hell did your immortal essence come from?

For a coherent answer, I thought, the Catholic Church should be a good place to look. Highly educated catholics are easily found here in Edmonton, Alberta, where over 41,000 elementary and high school students attend publicly-funded Catholic schools, and a Catholic-run college offers over 50 courses at the city’s largest university. In addition, the Vatican has made increasingly warm and fuzzy noises about the theory of evolution since 1950. In sharp contrast to many other religious leaders, successive popes have said that evolution is completely consistent with Catholicism, and the dreamy John Paul II even acknowledged that evolution (the cornerstone of all modern biology) is “more than just a hypothesis.”

But when I actually read the Vatican’s comments on evolution, it quickly became clear that it does not apply this scientific creation story to the whole of your person. In fact, your most important part did not evolve at all, according to the Church. For while evolution may describe the origin of your body, the Vatican has always insisted that it does not describe the origin of thy soul.

The spiritual soul is created directly by God. As a result, the theories of evolution [that] regard the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter. . . are incompatible with the truth about man.
–St. Pope John Paul II (1996)

The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God—it is not “produced” by the parents—and also that it is immortal. . .
-Catechism of the Catholic Church (C366)

At first, this exception seemed trivial. Evolution is a scientific theory, after all; and many people use the word “soul” to indicate a part of you that is beyond the purview of science. But soon, I began to suspect that this was not the definition of “soul” in use at the Catholic Church. And while suspicions are fine things, I realized, they are no suitable endpoint for a curiosity-driven investigation. I had to be sure.

The game afoot, I met with Dr. Matthew Kostelecky, a philosopher who teaches at the Catholic St. Joseph’s College. Kostelecky greeted me at his office early in the morning and offered me a glass of water. He had just cycled to work through the Edmonton winter, so I gave him two minutes to catch his breath before I asked him to define the Catholic soul for me. In response, he transubstantiated into the very embodiment of academia: “it depends,” he said.

The astral form of Dr Strange (2016), seen here wearing clothes.

“[Most] people use this term without understanding in any way what it really means,” Kostelecky told me. In fact, he estimated that 90% of the clergy is not sufficiently educated to discuss the soul in metaphysical terms. The vast majority will simply “fall back onto the catechism,” he said.

But he also assured me that academic theologians can offer “a more precise account” of the soul based on Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and he broke it down for me as a janitor’s mop-bucket clattered on the tiles outside his open office door.

To theologians, Kostelecky said, “the soul is the principle of life.” All living things have a soul, therefore, but not all creatures have the same kind of soul. Instead, souls come in “three basic categories” of which “plant souls” are the most primitive, followed by animal and human souls, respectively. As the mop-bucket crescendoed, Kostelecky told me that humans are special, in the theologian’s view, because we have “rational souls” that give us “the capacity for reason.” This, in turn, gives us the ability to understand a mathematical principle that Kostelecky causally mentioned while I nodded to conceal my ignorance.

What I was able to grasp, however, is that there is an intimate connection between such a “rational soul” and the human mind. To many Catholics, apparently, your soul is not merely the metaphorical source of your spirituality: it is also the literal source of your consciousness, free will, intellect, and moral code—in other words, the entirety of your mental faculties. Catholics have good theological grounds to believe this, too.

The [intellect] must inhere in the one essence of the soul.
-St. Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas’s Shorter Summa (p.86)

The term ‘mind’ usually denotes. . . the subject of our conscious states, while ‘soul’ denotes the source of our vegetative activities as well.
-The Catholic Encyclopedia (2012)

Spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.
-Catechism of the Catholic Church (C365)

When the Church says that your “soul” did not evolve, therefore, the implication is clear: your mind—whole or in part—did not evolve, either. Just as clearly, this doctrine is inconsistent with the scientific consensus that “humans evolved, body and mind, from earlier primates,” despite what most journalists or the pope himself may say.

A telling etymological phylogeny.

This inconsistency is not merely academic but also has practical consequences. For example, it helps explain the long-simmering tension between the Church and psychology—a science that seeks to understand the mind within an evolutionary framework. The issue is not the mere existence of “Catholic psychology” as a discipline—as the book Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries (2011) points out, such a discipline actually makes sense given psychology’s focus on human minds, many of which are Catholic. But many Catholic psychologists are openly contemptuous of their secular counterparts: for example, counselors at the CatholicPsych Institute pointedly offer services that are “consistent with the truth and dignity of the human person;” and Catholic schools like the Institute for the Psychological Sciences are founded on the belief that conventional psychology does not account for your spiritual nature.

Secular psychology. . . tries to treat the person without understanding the person.
-The CatholicPsych Institute

Priests don’t know where to send their parishioners who need counseling because they don’t want them to be given the wrong advice. We are forming a whole new generation of Catholic psychologists who understand the dignity of the human person and moral values.
-President of the Institute for Psychological Sciences (2009)

My training prepared me to recognize the types of things I can’t handle on my own as a psychologist (i.e. when demonic influence is present.)
-“Dr. Greg” on the CatholicPsych Institute blog

The mind-soul connection poses a problem that the Catholic church is not alone in facing. Whether made by a Protestant pastor, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, or a celebrity Scientologist, the promise of immortality in any meaningful sense requires your mind to survive your body. This, in turn, strongly implies that your soul is intimately linked to your mind. To propose that such a soul is also made by a creator is to commit what I have decided to call “mind creationism”—a philosophy just as incompatible with modern science as full-blooded creationism is.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is not atheistic theology. It is unassailable fact.
–Nature editorial (2007)

The Evolution of the Immortal Soul

For me, mind creationism effectively guards the most common way to explain the origin of your immortal soul. But another way does exist. And some people do take this route, including Dr. Denis Lamoureux, a professor of Science and Religion at St. Joseph’s College, and author of the book Evolution: Scripture and nature say yes! (2016).

Lamoureux met me at his office with a handshake and a self-conscious explanation for his attire.  “As you can tell, today is an administrative day,” he said, looking down at his light pink dress shirt with an expression I reserve for unicorn onesies. He was also nice enough to give me a copy of his new book, which I humbly and gratefully accepted even though it was paperback.

Lamoureux calls himself an “evolutionary creationist,” which means that he sees “evolution as God’s way of creating the world,” he told me. Yes! human beings evolved; and yes! God knew ahead of time that this was going to happen. Indeed, Lamoureux speculates that God deliberately arranged things so that, billions of years later, people would eventually come into existence—presumably including you, me, and Kevin Bacon.

Evolution is a planned natural process that heads toward a final goal—the creation of the universe and life with men and women.
-Denis Lamoureux, Evolution: Scripture and nature say yes! (p.52)

For the majority of this time, according to Lamoureux, our pre-human ancestors did without souls. But then, “with [the emergence of] behaviorally modern humans about 50,000 [years ago], something happens,” he said cryptically. Whatever this “something” was, it was not a “sharp intervention” by God, who suddenly swooped down and turned “a pre-human into a human,” Lamoureux told me. But he does think it happened “relatively quickly.”

“I don’t think it’s in one generation. [But] in geological time it’s like a flick of the finger,” he said with a snap. After our conversation, I was moved to express this idea through art.

I’m in a postmodern phase, I think.

Could your immortal soul have been produced by pre-planned evolution? The approach has some advantages: it is impossible to explain the purely natural evolution of an immortal soul; but as we have seen, it also seems unlikely to have been made directly by God. Lamoureux’s evolutionary creationism threads this needle, salvaging the soul’s immortality and transforming evolution from an implacable threat to one’s faith into a testament to God’s glory.

But it occurs to me that it is a very strange and somewhat chilling world in which God arranged for immortality to arise through descent with modification. This is a world in which you inherit your immortal essence from your mortal parents. This is a world in which your nonphysical soul survives your body, despite being produced by physical genes that are part of your body. This is a world in which God controls the future with such precision that He has pre-determined how many children you will have, how many of them will have children of their own, and so on ad infinitum. This is a world in which chance and free will are illusions, and all suffering is caused directly by God.

Even for immortality, this is a steep price to pay.

The Mortality of the Immortal Soul

Pope Francis ignited controversy when he assured a young boy that his dead puppy was waiting for him in heaven. Animal rights activists leaped at the chance to argue that if dogs have immortal souls, then so too does chicken, beef, and pork. Next to the Church’s zeal for protecting human souls by discouraging contraception, abortions, and euthanasia, its tolerance of unbridled carnivory might look hypocritical if it acknowledged that livestock have souls that are equally sacred.

But more conservative Catholics rose to defend their bacon bits—and, indeed, the bacon bits of people everywhere—saying that the pope’s comment shouldn’t be taken literally. Puppies cannot go to heaven, they said, because animals do not have immortal “rational souls” like people do. The good news, of course, is that the young boy himself will live to mourn his soulless friend for the rest of time.

Animal and vegetable souls are dependent entirely on matter. . . They cease to exist at death. (There’s no “doggie heaven.”)
–Catholic Answers (2011)

This conservative Catholic view seems increasingly unpopular, a trend perhaps driven by increased pet ownership, or the ongoing revelation that human minds may not be quite as special as once thought. Mounting evidence suggests that, like us, other animals may also empathize with each other, commit intentionally altruistic acts, possess a “theory of mind“, utilize syntax,  participate in culture, and conceive of justice—abilities once considered uniquely human. The distinguishing features we still retain as a species are viewed increasingly as differences in degree rather than in kind; and as the edifice of human exceptionalism cracks in the mental domain, so too does it crack in the spiritual.

This mounting evidence against a uniquely human immortal soul has not been matched by increasing evidence that all lifeforms possess an immortal soul, however. On the contrary, while it may seem intuitive to grant an immortal soul to your beloved pet, Mr Fuzzy Snugglepants, it is less clear how to bestow this honor upon sponges, anthrax, or slime molds. No sophisticated philosophers I am aware of are losing sleep over whether the immortal souls of E. coli split in two during binary fission, whether mitochondrial inherited souls from their free-living ancestors, or whether HIV goes to heaven, for example.

I call this one “Gorillas miss the soul train”.

These two extremes denied to me, I could draw a line on the tree of life, and suggest that the creatures on one side of it are divine and eternal, while those on the other side are objects that will crumble into dust. This seems like an inexcusably rash act in the absence of supporting evidence, however, given the potential consequences of this line’s misplacement. Yet what supporting evidence is there?

My final option is to  suppose that neither you nor any other living thing has an immortal soul. This means that there is no afterlife, which is too bad (for some of us). But at least this way I am not obliged to arbitrarily distribute admission to the afterlife to some species and not others. Nor am I obliged to explain how such a soul originated in the first place, which, as we have seen, is no easy task, whether you are on team God or team Evolution.

The prospect of ubiquitous mortality does make me feel obliged to do things like enjoy my one life to its fullest, to empathize with all living creatures, and to encourage others to do whatever they want (within reason) with either their lives or their unborn zygotes. But these obligations are hardly burdensome, and—more importantly—they are obligations I can fulfill while simultaneously sitting at home in my underwear.

All of this looks like a powerful argument against the existence of an afterlife from where I’m sitting. And by now, I hope you have a much better idea of where that is, exactly.

Selected References & Further Reading

Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: On evolution. Pope John Paul II https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP961022.HTM

René Descartes: The Mind-Body Distinction. Justin Skirry. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/descmind/

Evolution and the Brain. Editorial. Nature. 2007. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7146/full/447753a.html

Dogs in Heaven? Pope Francis Leaves Pearly Gates Open. Rick Gladstone. The New York Times. 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/world/europe/dogs-in-heaven-pope-leaves-pearly-gate-open-.html?_r=0

Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats. Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal et al. Science (2011). http://science.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1427

Humpback whales interfering when mammal-eating killer whales attack other species: Mobbing behavior and interspecific altruism? Robert L. Pitman et al. Marine Mammal Science (2016). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mms.12343/full

Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Christopher Krupenye et al. Science (2016). http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6308/110

Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls. Toshitaka N. Suzuki et al. Nature Communications (2016). http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10986

Genome-culture coevolution promotes rapid divergence of killer whale ecotypes. Andrew D. Foote et al. Nature Communications (2016). http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms11693

Justice- and fairness-related behaviors in nonhuman primates. Sarah F. Brosnan. PNAS (2013). http://www.pnas.org/content/110/Supplement_2/10416.short

Endosymbiosis and The Origin of Eukaryotes. John W. Kimball. Kimball’s Biology Pages (2016) http://www.biology-pages.info/E/Endosymbiosis.html