Chapter 9: The Soul Constant

The human soul is one of the most difficult topics for me to discuss, and yet I believe it to be one of the most important. It would be foolish to write a book about the powers of religion and the perspectives of atheists without touching on a topic that is so deeply embedded into every religion. Because really, the soul is one of the only constants throughout all religions. It may not always be called a soul, but it's still there, whether it be fueled by the Holy Spirit, Chi, Zen, or Spiritual Enlightenment, the soul is present. In fact, if you look at the big picture, organized religions as a whole should not be discussed as the belief in God, but instead the belief in the soul, because that's the one factor that almost every single religion shares.

Excluding, of course, your friend the Atheist. I say that with a blanketing tone, because as I have stated before, Atheists are just too different to assume that we all believe there is not soul. However, I think that those Atheists that do believe in the soul are tinkering on the edge of that cliff, staring staring down from the Atheist world into the world of the Agnostics. All they have to do is jump, and they'll have left our belief system and joined another.

As a Religious Atheist, my problems with the soul lie in the simple value of human life. Clearly, I do not believe in the soul. The question is, however, where do I begin in explaining why? I think I should start with this currently impossible scenario, and yet despite its impossibility today, it might not be impossible tomorrow:

We are now in the world of tomorrow. Cloning is a normal part of human life, and yet thanks to the law passed in the early 21st century, it's illegal to clone entire humans. Instead, we work the cloning process from a different angle, cloning organs from the cells of those in need of them to be implanted to cure what were once life-ending conditions. And so, thanks to the development of cloning, many of the worlds life-ending conditions have shifted to problems that can be solved with a little surgery and a round of pills. And yet, thanks to the ban on human cloning, there still remains this tiny bracket of people who are suffering from the same problems that they encountered yesterday. The people with life-ending or life-ruining brain issues remain untreatable.

Because we cannot clone a brain and implant it, the only way to help these people is to clone the entire person. But we are humans, and where there's a need for something, there's someone who will provide it regardless of the law. So here you are, a man in your 40's who has suffered massive kidney failure. Thanks to cloning, you have two new, healthy kidney's grown from your own cells keeping you alive. You have been healthy now for two years, living at home with your wife and children, when you realize that your wife doesn't seem to be acting herself. Her speech appears to be slurred and her motor skills seem inhibited. So you both go to the doctor to see what's wrong, and when the results come back, you find that she has a massive brain tumor pressing on multiple portions of her brain. The tumor is so ingrown that surgery is out of the question. Your wife has only three months left to live.

You now have two options. You can follow the law and watch your wife wither away into nothing, or you can break the law and turn to the same process that saved your own life two years prior to this very moment. If you are anything like me or most of the people I know, you would be booking your ticket out of the country to that remote region of the world where your wife could be saved.

This is where the soul question comes into play:

There are two ways that this situation can unfold, and I believe it's in the difference in these two scenario's that the question of "What is the soul?" becomes so apparent, and yet so extremely confusing.

Scenario 1: You arrive at the medical clinic where your wife is put onto pain-killers and is told to relax. The doctors inject her with a medication that slows her breathing, decreases brain function, and shuts down her internal organs. Over the course of the next few seconds, you see the life fade from your wife's eyes as her breathing stops and her brain function ceases to exist. Then, the doctors scan your wife's brain, tracking every single detail of its construction, building a map for her replacement. Once the scan is complete, the body is taken away, never to be seen again. Then the doctors begin the cloning process. You wait in the waiting room as the "surgery" is being completed, your wife completely unaware of anything that's happening because, as far as science is concerned, your wife is dead. And yet she has not been pronounced so. After the extremely exhausting 36 hour surgery, you are told you can finally see your wife. You walk into her room, sit beside her bed, and wait for her to wake. When she does, she looks at you and smiles, runs her hand down your face, and tells you she loves you. She has woken from a surgery now free of the life-ending brain tumor in exactly the same condition as everyone else who wakes after major surgery; she is a little delirious, but she is still the same woman. The body is "new," and yet it is aged to the same 40 years of life that it has experienced. Her brain has all the same memories and thinks in exactly the same way as the previous one did. It remembers being inject with medicine, falling to sleep, and then waking up 36 hours later lying in a hospital bed. Like any other surgical procedure, she has no memory of what happened within those 36 hours, just that now the process is complete and she is alive and healthy. She has an exact duplication of your wife's previous brain. The only difference is this one is cancer free.

You go home and continue your life, and until the day you die, your wife never once shows any sign of being any different, excluding the fact that she's now a cancer survivor.

Scenario 2: You arrive at the clinic. You are taken aside and told that this process requires your wife to be conscious and awake during the procedure. In order to produce an exact human clone, the old body must host much of the process. Your wife is hooked up to machines, tubes, and medicines as she lies on a bed. On the bed next to her is the shell of a woman, completely void of all physical characteristics. Over the next few hours, the body begins to reform into your wife as it adopts all her genetic traits. The brain within the clone begins to duplicate all her memories, becoming more and more like your wife with every passing second. At the end of the procedure, your wife is lying in the hospital bed, still sick and dying of a brain tumor, and beside her lies an exact copy of herself, the only difference being that this copy is completely cancer free. From the moment the double came into existence and your wife lay awake and alive beside it, you realize that this isn't the same woman. Your wife is still alive, and so the clone and your wife will begin to experience different memories making them different people. A week later, your wife dies of exhaustion, unable to recover from the surgery due to the current state of her body. You are left with a woman who has every single memory you and your wife shared up to the point that your wife stepped out of that clinic with a clone. The clone did not experience death, just life. It did not experience surgery, just birth. Though she may look, act, and feel like your wife, this clone is clearly not your wife. You have shared a week with your wife that this clone never experienced. She is a completely different person.

And so, I ask you, because I myself do not have the answer; Where is the human soul in all of this? As far as I can see, the soul is just the way we look at ourselves. It's a way for us to acknowledge and understand the processes of our brain as if from a point of external judgment. The soul, the way I see it, especially through a situation like this, is simply another word for the human experience.

The soul, at least in my opinion, is that one thing that's more elusive than God. With God, you can at least argue that he's unreachable, an entity of his own accord that operates outside the realm of human understanding. But the soul, that's a part of us, a mystical definition of who we are that exists always and forever. It has our life stamped all over it. When we die, our soul carries the weight of our human actions. What we do here echoes for eternity.

And yet, with an example like the cloning situation, I just can't seem to find the soul anywhere in humanity. I am told that it's non-transferable, and yet everything that makes a human human exists within both cloning situations. In the first scenario, the soul either transfers upon the creation of the clone, a new soul is born into a 40 year old body, or the clone is born soulless. Regardless, the clone would still be exactly the same as any other person. We wouldn't see the difference, and based on our understanding of how the brain controls the body, soul or no soul the clone wouldn't know the difference either.

In the second scenario, either the soul is duplicated, a new soul is born, or again the clone is soulless. Regardless, you have two people in two lives, living as normal people do. The clone is just another human that is identical in every single way to someone who already exists. When that person dies, that clone is still there, living, breathing, walking, talking, interacting; being human.

So I ask you again, where does the soul come into play in human existence? When does a person go from having no soul to having a soul? Is it the absolute second that the little sperm starts tunneling into its home, breaking down its DNA strand to push onwards a tiny little zygote? If so, then as far as identical twins are concerned, one of those little guys is soulless. Or does it happen at some stage in pregnancy. Or perhaps at birth?

And so I maintain that the soul is non-existent. Not because of clones or God or faith, but because the soul is something that exists within all humans, and somehow influences our decisions and makes us feel regret and concern and loss. But these are all the same things produced by the different parts of the brain. The only difference between us and a monkey is that we have the power to invent something as incredible as the soul. Why? Because when we die, our body ends up in the ground. Our brain, that unbelievable source of information and knowledge that is so powerful that it even has the ability to comprehend its self, ceases to exist. All brain function completely stops, and what once made us self-aware is no more, and we become nothing. No limbo, no continued existence, no nothing. Just complete and total nothing, snuffed out like the flame of a candle, leaving behind nothing but a trail of smoke by which others remember us.