Soul searching

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For many believers the findings show the error of viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for theologians a growing impetus to reconcile the existence of the soul with the growing evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by themselves.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is 8220;unassailable fact8221;, the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: 8220;With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.8221;

Or as VS Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of 8220;the universal spirit of the cosmos8221;, but the soul as it is usually spoken of, 8220;an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans8212;all that is complete nonsense.8221; Belief in that kind of soul 8220;is basically superstition,8221; he said.

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious . And among evolutionary psychologists, faith is nothing but an evolutionary artifact, a predilection that evolved because shared belief increased group solidarity and other traits contributing to survival and reproduction.

According to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul, challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the centre of the universe. There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. For Murphy, though, people make a mistake when they assume people can be 8220;ensouled8221; only if other creatures are soulless.

8220;Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,8221; wrote Dr. Murphy. 8220;All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes8212;or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.8221;

Does this mean, say, that Australopithecus afarensis, the proto-human famously exemplified by the fossil skeleton known as Lucy, had a soul? John F. Haught of Georgetown University said, 8220;I think so, yes. I think all of our hominid ancestors were ensouled in some way, but that does not rule out the possibility that as evolution continues, the shape of the soul can vary just as it does from individual to individual.8221;

Will this idea catch on? 8220;It8217;s not something you hear in the suburban pulpit,8221; said Dr. Haught, a Roman Catholic whose book God After Darwin is being reissued this year. 8220;This is out of vogue in the modern world because Descartes made such a distinction between mind and matter. He placed the whole animal world on the side of matter, which is essentially mindless.8221;
CORNELIA DEAN New York Times