A spiritual soul, in the immaterial sense, is understood as a non-physical essence or self that underlies a person’s consciousness, identity, and moral awareness. It is conceived as existing independently of the body and brain, capable of thought, will, and possibly survival after physical death.
The idea of a spiritual soul, the real you,
thrives on how, if you are hurt badly, you think the real you is okay
thrives on how you think this spirit is about love, justice, respect, and morality—it is the spring of moral sense
is a mystery and is the reason how free will can work—another mystery
makes you feel like a mini-god, that you control all in your
mini-universe, the cosmos in your head and immediate vicinity
[Religion plays the following trick: “Just because I don't think I
am God and don't think I can command the universe, I am humble.” But
control is control. You can think you are God of your
mini-universe—the room you never leave with all the things you want.
If you were the creator that might be all you would make. So you
don't have to aspire to run all creation or make an unimaginably big
universe to self-deify and be riddled with pride. Everybody controls
something and takes pride in it. Pride is pride. Our hypocrisy does
not like obvious pride, so that is how we get away with it.]
makes you think death is not the end
makes you think you know better than scientific experts who see no need for a supernatural dimension to your personhood
It seems obvious that a soul that is not made of any material parts can be immortal. Not necessarily. Perhaps a soul can put another soul out of existence—or into eternal unconsciousness—in the afterlife. If you truly love your spouse or child, you will prefer for death to be the end of life rather than there be the slightest risk that they will go to eternal damnation. You need to ask if you hold to their immortality out of wishful thinking. It is not about you. Do not do that.
I am taking some inspiration from Psychology Today contributor David Kyle Johnson, Ph.D., on the subject of the soul and also of free will being a spiritual, immaterial power like a soul.
He warns that science is not based on faith but on letting evidence and argument direct you in what to believe and think. He adds, “If you can’t be confident in the findings of science, you can't be confident in anything.” Now, doubting science too much or being agnostic is only going to demotivate science. Why bother if it is just opinion?
Interestingly, he says science looks for natural explanations. Science says that if you lost your wallet, no matter how mysteriously, you would not be suggesting that a ghost might have taken it. What is interesting about that is that if you believe in souls in human bodies, then, in a sense, you are saying that if somebody stole it, it was a ghost! An embodied ghost is still a ghost. I would add that taking something on faith in a secular sense and in a religious sense are not the same thing. Science avoids doing either. Secular faith violates science, but religious faith even more so.
Back to Johnson. To argue that your mental activity is not your brain and indeed is separate from it is against neuroscience, which “shows us that the existence of the mental is dependent upon the existence of the brain; without the brain, the mental cannot exist.” So the soul idea is out.
He cautions, “Some have concluded from the fact that the mental is dependent upon the brain that the mental is identical to the brain. Tallis argues that this is not correct—that this is a fallacious bit of reasoning. And he is correct; dependence does not entail identity. It could be that they are identical, but even if that is true, that fact does not follow from their dependence. Dependence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for identity.”
Some turn the brain into some kind of antenna for the soul. Others recognise that mind can depend on brain but not be identical.
People with grave enough injury to the frontal cortex in the brain change into almost different people. Physical causes, in a sense, remake them. It is not their supposed free will or alleged soul that makes them who they are. That depends on the brain. If there is a soul it is not really them or important. It is like a fandangle made of nothing. It is up to the believers to explain how they could have a soul that was not part of their material components. They cannot do that.
Plus, if we think our experience is that we are some kind of soul, that affects our science in this way: we think we are otherworldly beings in bodies looking at material things. That might not affect science in practice but definitely in theory. It denies that we are part of nature and science looking at nature and science. This is not science but going through the motions.
He writes that science is the best guide to realness that people have ever engaged in. He cautions that this “is not a knock against philosophy, given that science is an offshoot of philosophy, originally called ‘natural philosophy’. It’s also not to say that science can discover all truth; moral truths (if they exist), for instance, are outside the grasp of science.”
Remember the soul is married to moral truth, according to religion. Its alleged components—memory, understanding, and will—are about it being a moral agent.
Philosophers say that if free will is true then “materialism does make it difficult to account for free will.” If it is hard, it is not necessarily impossible. And I always pointed out that if ghosts and non-material entities exist, they can be as clockwork as the material world is, if not more, if it is indeed the case that material things are about being directed, not directing. We are asserting that they might clockwork.
I would add that free will is more of a strong opinion than a belief. Nobody can go back one second in time to see if they could choose to let John live this time instead of killing him. It is a serious issue how one is accused of being freely a murderer on such poor grounds.
Physics informs us, on the basis of general and special relativity, that for “President X will die of old age” to be true, then for this to be true the future, in a way, must already be set and exist. This shows that even with souls and alleged free will you still don't get real freedom.
We conclude that the urge to affirm spiritual souls is based on errors and wishful thinking. The very suggestion is a threat to science. It is safe to say that taking spiritual souls very seriously is regarded by science as a threat. If it could tolerate an opinion, it could not tolerate that overreach.
Material possibilities are constrained by evidence and observable laws. They barely matter except as interesting things to think about. But appealing to purely spiritual or immaterial possibilities is an even worse waste of time. It does not provide a meaningful basis for belief. One could, for example, imagine a soul that functions as a time machine or any number of other fantastical abilities, but without evidence, such claims are no more plausible than any other unsupported speculation. Therefore, the suggestion that a soul exists in a specific, actionable form lacks sufficient justification and can reasonably be set aside.