A sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear
All
The
recent issue of Harper’s magazine carries a brief story worth noting. It seems that the Air Force commissioned a private
scientific laboratory called “Warp Drive Metrics” of
“The mechanism for teleportation is hypothetically envisioned to be the following:
Animate (and) inanimate objects placed in the teleporter are scanned by a computer-generated beam. The scan beam encodes all the quantum information within the object into organized bits of information, thus forming a digital pattern of the object. The scan beam then dematerializes the object and stores its pattern in a pattern buffer . . . . The teleporter then transmits the matter (or pure energy stream) to its destination in the form of an annular confinement beam. At the receiving teleporter, the matter (or pure energy stream) is sent into a pattern buffer where the object is rematerialized.
“Problem. There are a lot of important little details that were left out of the teleportation process because we simply do not know what they are. . . . (For example,) there are 1028 atoms in a human being. How does one transmit this much information, and how do we disassemble that many atoms? Are human beings simply the sum of all the atoms that compose them? Would this also include the re-construction of a person’s consciousness (personality, memories, hopes, dreams, etc.) and soul or spirit? This question is beyond the scope of this study to address, but it is nevertheless one of the most important concepts awaiting complete scientific understanding.”
The report went on to recommend to the Air Force further research, estimating the cost at $7.5 million.
Today I want to talk about the human soul and what this means and how we might understand it. It is, as the report indicated, “one of the most important concepts awaiting complete scientific understanding.” The question of the human soul may have been “beyond the scope of” their study, but it is within the scope of my own. I plan to submit this sermon to the Air Force, hoping to earn at least a small portion of the $7.5 million dollar pie that the laboratory recommends for “further research.” Proceeds will be generously shared with our capital campaign.
I begin by confessing that in talking about the human soul, I am not talking about something that is “real.” I mean “real” in the sense of being located in space and time. So for those to whom this is the first fundamental question, “Do I believe there is such a thing as a soul,” I answer, “the ‘soul’ is not a thing, an object that can be observed.”
The reading earlier by Douglas Hofstadter (which is reprinted at the end of this sermon) pointed out that there are many meaningful concepts that don’t exist in space and time, and yet we can carry on reasonable conversations about them, and they have meaning for us. He listed quite a few – language, the Star Spangled Banner, the game of bridge, and holes. I could spend the rest of the morning adding to that list of things that don’t exist but we still have meaning for us: the number pi, the human ego, a participle, Hamlet, the future, and so forth. None of these is real in the sense of being located in space and time, yet each has substantial meaning, and lend themselves to fruitful discussions. This is not to say that everything that isn’t real is meaningful, of course. What we want to know about the concept of “soul” is whether it has a useful meaning. I think it does.
The first question is, I suppose, whether the word actually identifies something that has meaning for us. Let me begin with a statement from William Ellery Channing, one of the leading founders of Unitarianism in the United States. I confess when I first read this sentence, I was quite a bit startled, for it seems quite outrageous. In a sermon delivered in 1834, Channing said,
“We have more evidence that we have souls or spirits than that we have bodies.”
The sentence seems utterly incredulous. How can we be more certain of our soul’s existence than we are of our bodies? The next sentence, though, explains what he meant.
“We are surer that we think, and feel, and will, than that we have solid and extended limbs and organs.”
Channing was well-versed in the most important insight of Western philosophy since the time of Plato. That insight came from René Descartes who pointed out that all our knowledge of the physical world is filtered through our senses. What we know about the physical world, including our own physical bodies, depends on our fallible senses of sight and touch and hearing, and so forth. We know our senses can, and do, fool us. It is obvious through examples like desert mirages or train whistles that seem to change tone as they pass by, but the fallibility of our senses is evident in less obvious ways. The sky is not “blue,” for example. Astronauts know that. It is the earth’s atmosphere that combines particular gas molecules that our eyes interpret to be the color “blue.”
Enough of that. Our knowledge of the physical world, including our bodies, is not direct. Our evidence for the physical world is indirect, filtered, coming to us through our fallible senses. There is only one thing that we can know directly, with absolute certainty. We know we are conscious. We know we can think. We are directly aware of our selves. This insight led to Descartes’ famous “cogito”: “I think, therefore, I am.”
This was the background behind Channing’s innocent but shocking statement, “We have more evidence that we have souls or spirits than that we have bodies. We are surer that we think, feel, and will, than that we have solid and extended limbs and organs.” He followed with another sentence: “Philosophers have said much to disprove the existence of matter and motion, but they have not [even] tried to disprove the existence of thought. . . .”
It seems quite clear to me that we are something more than the sum total of our biological components, or even our environmental influences. Does this then mean that our souls are the same thing as our thoughts or our minds? I think we are getting closer to it, but we’re still not quite there. Recall the tongue-in-cheek comments in the reading by Douglas Hofstedter about whether we have a brain, like we have a liver, or whether we are our brain.
Or consider an essay by the great American psychologist and philosopher William James. His topic for this essay was immortality, but he touches on matters that concern us in trying to understand the human soul.
He begins by affirming the obvious proposition that our thoughts are a function of our brain. To say our thoughts come from our brains seems to suggest that our brains produce our thoughts and our consciousness. But, James continued, there is a difference between producing something and transmitting something. A waterfall can produce electrical power. The sun produces heat. But consider the function of a prism of glass. What happens to the light that shines through that prism is a function of the prism – the light changes course, it bends, and changes color – but it is not correct to say that the prism produces the light. The prism is simply transmitting the light. The light already exists.
James then wonders if it is possible that the human brain merely transmits consciousness rather than producing it. Our brain is a finite expression of a more universal consciousness, which is eternal. Is it possible that the individual consciousness I experience to be me, and you experience to be you, is not produced by the brain, but simply takes specific shape as it is transmitted through the brain. Consciousness is eternal, and like a prism, which doesn’t produce light but shapes it. Our brain receives the consciousness and shapes it to our individual personal identities. Consciousness, like light, already exists.
James’ speculation about the soul seems consistent with that idea of the American transcendentalists, particularly the best known, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson wrote frequently about the soul. This man who could express almost any thought with passion said this: “the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.”
Like James, Emerson imagined the individual human soul being connected to a more universal consciousness. Each individual was an expression of something he sometimes called a “universal mind” or more exactly, “The Oversoul.” It could not be expressed more explicitly than in these famous words from his essay on the Oversoul:
"There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all the same.... What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done."
For the transcendentalist, our individual souls reflect the beauty of this universal mind or “oversoul.” Emerson sometimes spoke of the soul arising from specific human faculties of conscience, instinct, and intellect. Whatever its source, the soul provides energy and passion to life. One transcendentalist leader of that time, who literally wrote the book on “Transcendentalism,” was Unitarian minister Octavious Brooks Frothingham. He described the transcendentalist concept this way.
"According to the transcendentalist, the spiritual being of a person, when graciously shone upon by knowledge and love, puts on divine attributes, glows with beauty, palpitates with joy, gives out flashes of power, distills odors of sanctity, and exhibits the marks of celestial grace. The soul, when thus awakened, utters oracles of wisdom, sings, prophesies, thunders decalogues, pronounces beatitudes, discourses grandly of God and divine things, rises to heights of heroism and saintliness.”
From this transcendentalist view, then, the individual soul is our link to some universal spirit that permeates everything. Whereas earlier in this sermon we may have been led to conceive of the soul as an individual’s mind and thought, this tradition universalizes it.
From this speculation – and of course everything anyone says about the soul is speculative – it appears that the soul is still something more than just human thinking. It perhaps comes closer to human consciousness. While identifying a “universal mind” or “oversoul,” though not to be rejected out of hand, for me stretches just a bit the outer boundaries of speculation. While the concept of “soul” might lead us outward to something universal, surely it also expresses something specific about the individual. There is something about the idea of a human “soul” that seems to identify individual uniqueness – that this person is different from anyone else.
It is conventional wisdom to say that who we are, our personal identities are, determined by nature and nurture – that is, by a combination of our biological and genetic inheritance on one hand, and by our environment and life experiences on the other. The fact that no two human beings have the exact combination of genetic and environmental influences suggests that who we are is unique to us. There is something about me that makes me unique, one of a kind, and there is something about you that makes you unique. Do we have a word that identifies the uniqueness of me and the uniqueness of you, the specific bundle of genetic and environmental influences that are ours alone? Unless a more specific word comes along, the word “soul” seems to work in most cases.
But it also seems to me that “soul” encompasses something more than just our unique DNA and environment. Those influences may, in fact, go a long way in explaining why we act and think the way we do, but they don’t specifically tell us who we are. The sense of self and identity, the “soul,” reaches beyond the influence of biology and environment.
This is the point of a book by popular psychologist author James Hillman, which he entitled, The Soul’s Code. Hillman was dissatisfied by the idea that we are nothing but the product of our biology and our experiences – nature or nurture. He insists that there is something more involved that has to do with who we are at our core: our unique identity. Here is how he expresses his concern about traditional concepts of nature and nurture:
“Today’s main paradigm for understanding a human life, the interplay of genetics and environment, omits something essential – the particularity you feel to be you. By accepting the idea that I am the effects of a subtle buffeting between heredity and societal forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconscious, societal accidents.”
The traditional picture of what makes us who we are, as you can see, was unsatisfying to Hillman. He believes there must be something more to it. As is implied by his book’s title, The Soul’s Code, he believes that “something more” is the “soul.” As he elaborates on his thesis, he suggests that each person’s soul, each person’s genuine self, is encoded to provide a meaning and identity, somewhat in the way our DNA is encoded to provide specific physical characteristics. To explain his thesis, he relies on some concepts first explored by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
Plato had some very specific, and to some minds somewhat strange, ideas about the human soul. His ideas were expressed through a story, a metaphor, called the myth of Er. As I report this myth, keep in mind it is a story, not necessarily to be taken literally, but presented to explain the human condition,
Before birth, our souls exist in a place called “Er,” while they await being placed into a human body. They spend their time there considering what they want their destiny to be. They form an image of their imagined future (Plato’s word was “paradeigma,” as in “paradigm”), a pattern, that reveals how they want to live in the world once they are born: who they want to be as a “unique” person. When the time comes to enter human life, we have a guide, called a “daimon,” which selects a family and circumstance to be born into. Once born, we will find ourselves in a place where our desired self-image and destiny can be lived out.
The plot thickens, though. At the time of our actual birth, our souls go through a cleansing process whereby we forget what our image, what our destiny, what our “paradigm” for life is supposed to be. Our soul once had a vivid idea of our true “self,” but in the process of being born, we forget what it was. Now here’s the kicker. Our task during life on earth is simply to remember our chosen purpose, our self-chosen identity, that self-image and destiny we selected before we were born. Our task is to remember who we really are, who we are supposed to be. This is the work of the soul.
Hillman’s entire book is devoted to elaborating on how we can remember, how we can retrieve, how we can discover our own true self. His method is to delve deep into the biography of people who were successful in life, and illustrate how they discovered their own purpose and calling. Success in life, fulfillment in life, comes not really from creating a purpose, but from uncovering it, or as Plato would have it, remembering it. For it is already with us, it is encoded in our soul.
This notion that our soul has knowledge much deeper the we have, that it carries a destiny from a distant past that we don’t fully comprehend, is not an altogether unique idea. It is perhaps the foundation of Wordsworth’s famous “Ode” on immortality. Consider Plato’s “Myth of Er” when you hear these lines:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
And again in this verse:
Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.
*********************
I have tried, in this sermon, to speculate on something that is, admittedly, entirely speculative: the human soul.
I cannot doubt that there is something about us that transcends mere biology and is more than just environmental influence. What that something is, I’m not sure, but we’ve seen a number of different ideas that have been suggested through the ages. It may be simply a consciousness – the thought activities of the mind that are more real than our bodies. It may be our connection to some a more universal consciousness or mind, the way we “plug in” to something greater in the universe. It may be our genuine self, our personal identity, which comes from outside us, and if we discover it accurately, can guide us in life.
The specific answers are beyond me, though I am convinced that when we talk about the soul, we are talking about something that has meaning, that expresses an idea rooted in experience of the real world.
I’m not sure all this will be helpful to the Air Force, as it explores the possibility of building a transporter that “beams” a person from one place to another. I have a feeling they were hoping for an answer that was a bit more tangible than this. But it is, at least, more information than they have already, and that ought to be worth at least a piece of the $7.5 million dollar research pie.
In the meantime, I think the soul, each individual’s soul, is worth honoring. There is something inside of us that inspires us to do the best we can, that gives us passion for life, that guides us in our ethical choices, that forms our aspirations for tomorrow. There is something that makes us who we are – unique and in possession of inherent worth and dignity. Whatever that is, it is worth honoring.
I’ll close by visiting Channing again on the soul. In a different sermon, he emphasizes how it is in the nature of the soul to grow and expand.
“We were made to grow. The soul bears the impress of illimitableness in the thirst, the unquenchable thirst, which it brings with it into being, for a power, knowledge, happiness which it never gains, and which always carry it forward into (the future). The body soon reaches its limit. But intellect, affection, moral energy, in proportion to their growth, tend to further enlargement, and every acquisition (of the soul) is an impulse to something higher. When I consider this principle or capacity of the human soul, I cannot restrain the hope which it awakens.
READING from The Mind’s I
By Douglas Hofstadter (Pulitzer Prize winning author of scientific works)
(From the Introduction): You think to yourself:
Here I am reading page 5 of this book. I’m alive; I’m awake; I see the words on the page with my eyes; I see my hands holding this book. I have hands. How do I know they’re my hands? Silly question. They’re fastened to my arms, to my body. How do I know this is my body? I control it. Do I own it? In a sense I do. It is mine to do with as I like, so long as I don’t harm others. It’s even a sort of legal possession, for while I may not legally sell it to anyone so long as I’m alive, I can legally transfer ownership of my body to, say, a medical school once it is dead.
If I have this body, then I guess I am someone other than this body. When I say “I own my body” I don’t mean “This body owns itself” – probably a meaningless claim. Or does everything that no one else owns own itself? Does the moon belong to everyone, to no one, or to itself? What can be an owner of anything? I can, and my body is just one of the things I own. In any case, I and my body seem both intimately connected and yet distinct. I am the controller; it is the controlled. Most of the time.
Then (this book) asks you if in that case you might exchange your body for another, a stronger or more beautiful or more controllable body.
You think that this in impossible.
But, the book insists, it is perfectly imaginable and hence possible in principle.
. . . What if your brain were to be transplanted into a new body, which it could then control? Wouldn’t you think of that as switching bodies? There would be vast technical problems, of course, but, given our purposes, we can ignore them.
It does seem then (doesn’t it?) that if your brain were transplanted into another body, you would go with it. But are you a brain? Try on two sentences and see which one sounds more like the truth to you:
I have a brain.
I am a brain.
Sometimes we talk about smart people being brains, but we don’t mean it literally. We mean they have good brains. You have a good brain, but who or what, then, is the you that has that brain? Once again, if you have a brain, could you trade it for another? How could anyone detach you from your brain in a brain switch, if you always go with your brain in a body switch? Impossible? Maybe not,. . . .
The idea that what you are is not simply a living body (or a living brain) but also a soul or spirit seems to many people to be unscientific, in spite of its ancient tradition. “Souls,” they might want to say, “have no place in science and could never fit into a scientific world view.” Science teaches us that there are no such things as souls. We don’t believe in leprechauns and ghosts any more, thanks to science, and the suspect idea of a soul inhabiting a body will itself soon (disappear).
But not all versions of the idea that you are something distinct from your purely physical body are so vulnerable to ridicule and refutation. Some versions, as we shall see, actually flourish in the garden of science.
Our world is filled with things that are neither mysterious nor simply constructed out of the building blocks of physics. Do you believe in voices? How about haircuts? Are there such things? What are they? What, in the language of a physicist, is a hole – not an exotic black hole, but what is a hole in a piece of cheese, for example? Is it a physical thing? What is a symphony? Where in space and time does The Star Spangled Banner exist? Is it nothing but some ink on paper in the Library of Congress? Destroy the paper and the anthem would still exist. . . . Latin still exists, but it is not a living language. The game of bridge is less than a hundred years old. What sort of thing is it? It is not animal, vegetable, or mineral.
We must not suppose that science teaches us that every thing anyone would ever want to take seriously is identifiable as a collection of particles moving about in space and time. Some people may think it is just common sense to suppose you are nothing but a particular living, physical organism – a moving mound of atoms – but in fact this idea exhibits a lack of scientific imagination, not hard-headed sophistication. One doesn’t have to believe in ghosts to believe in selves that have an identity that transcends any particular body.