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I don’t actually know a whole lot of church people. Something about generally being surrounded by scientifically-minded young people that are reasonably smart and curious about the world they live in (new-new-age triangle-culture cool kids notwithstanding). I went to church as a kid, and probably turned atheist at about the same point in intellectual development that most of the people I know that also went to church as a kid turned atheist (or agnostic). In particular, I remember one heated battle with a creepy pastor, Pastor Schmidt — who at one point, waged war against another pastor for being pregnant/a woman — about our pets and how they didn’t go to heaven. Three or so of us at once discovered fallicy and how it can be used as a broadsword. It was awesome.

His answer, if you’re curious, is that no our pets don’t go to heaven. No matter that they’re without sin, they’re just unfortunate enough to not be made in God’s image. I’m not sure if Pastor Schmidt goes for evolution now. Probably. A lot of churches, including the Catholic church very loudly, have come up with neat-o ways of accepting evolution. To wit: God created evolution to create us, designed and micro-managed the whole project (to perhaps hide his hand in it, no matter how hard he wants us to know about him in the rest of Christian theology). This seems like a problem for the pets thing because all our pets are pretty well within the evolutionary web, and less like the side-project Schmidt’s argument needs to tag non-human life as. I’d argue that even in a God-spawned evolutionary web our pets are within that image for being very distant ancestors, if I had to argue within these fully retarded terms. But theists can wiggle out of anything.

Pastor Schmidt might argue/wiggle that I’m missing a very important point. Evolution addresses all the material stuff, but evolution doesn’t create an immaterial soul. God does that, and non-human animals are boned in this respect, sadly. Which is why it’s cool to kill animals and not people, at least according to this handy guide . I honestly haven’t caught up enough with Christian adaptations to evolutionary science to say much about how a soul factors in to evolution, but that seems like a pretty good out for the church.

You know what does go to heaven? Fertilized eggs. That’s when a soul happens, when a sperm gets together with an egg. Actually, that’s wrong: fertilized eggs really go to hell because they haven’t accepted Jesus Christ, but I digress. In any case, they have a soul right there at the beginning, which is why abortion is bad (and killing dogs and lions is cool) and I guess doubly bad because of the fetus-in-hell-and-eternal-torment thing. In any case, the very essence of you, the God part of you is immaterial. It has no bearing on whether you’re a single fertilized egg, a cluster of cells implanted on a uterus wall, or if you’re Pastor Schmidt or Rick Santorum. You have a soul, and it has nothing to do with the physical you.

It’s amazing to think of the psychosis this idea has endowed certain theists with, and how heavily that psychosis can become part of allegedly rational public policy debate. Birth control pills, embryonic stem cell research, shooting a dog in the head in your backyard: murder, murder, not-murder. Soul, soul, not-soul. It doesn’t matter even a little bit that everything knowable about life says that intelligence and the ability to comprehend things like souls and accept Jesus and avoid hell comes from collections of cells in increasing amounts and diversity/complexity; in terms of eternity, this is trivial. There’s a guy (of course it’s a guy) that checks for your soul at eternity’s gate.

A reader might point out that a soul by being immaterial by definition is outside of our scope of knowledge ability. So, maybe, why not a soul? Let me tell you, with a little help from the ace brains behind the Cosmic Variance blog, why not. Let’s start with the conclusion first: to believe in a soul is to disbelieve in very well-known, proven again and again and again laws of physics.

First of all, you can’t hold that a soul exists that doesn’t interact with the material world, that has no physical/material influence on anything. Well, you can think this, of course — you just can’t assert that a soul that doesn’t interact with the material world has any meaning. It would have less meaning than a line of gibberish never written, thought of, or read. The totally immaterial soul is not even worth using a parallel, unknowable universe as an analogy. A soul that doesn’t interact with the material world would not be real in the material world. A soul that doesn’t interact with the material world does not get to participate in what goes on in a human brain, where thoughts and moral decisions are processed. It cannot inform those processes. A soul that doesn’t interact with the material world can have nothing to do with human memory. A soul that doesn’t interact with the material world does not change from birth to death; to influence is to be influenced in physics, and the material world is nothing but physics. That’s not a matter of faith. Physics is causally closed: all physical events ultimately have physical causes. Everything in the universe is physics: galaxies, sperm, morals, pets.

To quote Jack Handy, “The most difficult thing to defeat is the human spirit. But since it’s invisible, who cares?”

OK, so the actual details. Basically, if the soul interacts with the world than it should be responsible for extra terms in the famous Dirac equation that explains how electrons behave. It looks like this:

It’s a very good equation, one of the best. Every experiment ever done on it has proved the Dirac equation. There is zero chance that it is incorrect. The soul posits that it is incorrect. I’ll turn this over briefly to Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance:

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?

Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.

Did you ever see that episode of the Outer Limits (Tales From the Crypt?) where the doctor makes the breakthrough discovery of where in the body the soul hides? It’s around the base of the neck hugging the spine. Foolishly, he removes it from the test subject, and the test subject turns into some kind of monster-zombie (it’s been like 15 years since I saw it, so this could be off). Everything material in the man’s body adds up to naught without his soul. It’s the idea taken to an extreme: that we contain a piece of divine machinery that functions within our organism. If a soul interacts with the material world, it’s material, and might as well be another organ, even if, as on the show, it’s a bit glowy.

Connections:

• Bill O’Reilly On the Divine Intervention of Tidal Action
• David Eagleman: Science + Uncertainties = Possibilianism!

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv, @everydayelk.