You are invisible.
No one has ever seen you. You have never seen yourself, nor have you seen anyone else in the world. Strictly speaking, you are not even in this world. When you die, the body you see will eventually disappear, but you will remain forever—invisible and unseen by human eyes, even after you receive your resurrection body.
The “you” I’m speaking of here, of course, is your soul—your invisible self, the locus of your core identity, the real “you.” When the apostle Paul wrote that he would prefer to be “absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord,” his soul was what he was referring to (2 Cor. 5:8). When Jesus told the thief on the cross that “today” the thief would be with him in Paradise, his soul is what he meant (Luke 23:43).
The existence of the soul is controversial nowadays, though. It’s fashionable for “enlightened” people tutored in scientific materialism—the idea that nothing is real except the physical things science can measure—to sniff with contempt at the antiquated idea of the “ghost in the machine.”
This dismissal strikes me as odd since a person’s soul is the thing he knows more about than anything else in the world, even if he doesn’t reflect on it much. The obvious things frequently escape our notice precisely because they’re so obvious.
There’s a more foundational mistake being made here, though. It simply will not do to invoke science in this debate, as some have done, since any “scientific” dismissal of the soul falters for what ought to be an obvious reason.
Time Strikes Out
Time magazine once featured an article delivering a stunning conclusion. In an extensive cover piece on the nature of the mind, researchers acknowledged that consciousness was an enigmatic, elusive thing that resisted materialistic classification.
Nevertheless, though they couldn’t determine what consciousness was, they were certain about what consciousness was not. “Despite our every instinct to the contrary,” the author asserted, “there is one thing that consciousness is not: some entity deep inside the brain that corresponds to the ‘self,’ some kernel of awareness that runs the show.”[1]
Apparently, whatever consciousness turns out to be, it certainly isn’t a soul—an immaterial “kernel” of you running the show from somewhere “inside” your body. The light is on, but nobody’s home.
Scientists know this, the article said, for what they take to be a compelling reason. “After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn’t exist.”[2]
In other words, scientists have been searching for the soul for 100 years and haven’t been able to find it since there is no possible place in the brain for any such soul to fit.
According to Time, then, everything about human consciousness—thoughts, desires, pains, pleasures, motives, emotions—must be explained in purely physical terms. A mother’s love for her children is reduced to certain c-fibers firing in her brain. The virtue of kindness is nothing more than a genetic predisposition. One’s hopes for the future are simply so much chemistry. Brain and body work together as a sophisticated, biological machine with no help from an ethereal, immaterial thing called a soul.
Here’s what ought to be obvious to genuinely enlightened people. If there are such things as immaterial souls, researchers aren’t going to find them by “looking.” One can’t dismiss the existence of a nonphysical thing by appealing to a methodology that is only capable of measuring physical things. It’s like saying invisible people don’t exist because no one has ever seen one.
The empirical approach to the question of the soul is a fool’s errand. This understandable limitation of science doesn’t prove that souls exist, of course, but it does show that scientific analysis is the wrong way to inveigh against the notion. Immaterial souls cannot be detected with instruments.
No, science cannot help us on this issue. That science has no say in the matter doesn’t count against the existence of the soul, however, since there’s so much more going on in the world than meets the scientific eye.
The question of the soul must be settled in a different way, a way we frequently employ on other issues without being completely aware of it. Some things we discover by empirical analysis of the physical world. Other things we discover by introspection, rational reflection, and immediate awareness. Those tools are the ones that will help us here.
First, though, a more foundational concern.
Why Souls Matter
If materialist scientists are right about the non-existence of the soul, then one thing is immediately obvious: Christianity is eviscerated. If people are just wet machines, then when people die, they’re gone. They don’t “pass away” or “pass on,” as if they still exist but have relocated. They don’t “pass” anywhere. They’re not “at home with the Lord” or “in Paradise,” and they’re certainly not in Abraham’s bosom or Hades (Luke 16:19–31).
If humans have no souls, then there’s no point to the biblical Story since what happens to us after our physical bodies die and return to the earth is critical to the Story’s plotline.[3] It’s one reason, I think, that denying the soul has such appeal for many. It’s an indirect way of falsifying the Story. There are other casualties, though.
A virtue of genuinely enlightened thinkers is the ability to look beyond an idea to see precisely where that idea leads. In this case, if there is no “ghost” in the “machine,” then there is nothing left but the “machine,” and this conclusion has pernicious consequences.
For one, the denial of souls not only undermines the Christian Story; it also undermines any secular account of reality thought to dignify human beings in a world bereft of God. Transcendent value, purpose, and meaning find no footing in such a story because in a purely physical world they cannot exist. Man is machine and only machine—physical parts stuck together without rhyme or reason, biological accidents, meat in motion, cosmic junk.
Intuitively, we know better, of course, and I want to give some reasons to trust that intuition. It may be helpful, though, to consider what a soul is before we consider why it’s reasonable to think we have souls—or, more precisely, why we are souls.
What Is a Soul?
A person’s soul is his invisible self. I think this is a good way to put it. At least, it made sense to the seven-year-old boy who asked me about it once on the air. I needed to add some details for him, though, to avoid confusion. Here is what I said.
I told the boy that his soul lives inside his body much like his hand fits inside his glove when he goes out in the snow. His soul makes his body move like his hand makes his glove move. When he takes his hand out of the glove, the glove just lies there. That’s what happens to a body when the soul leaves. It just lies there, lifeless.
I went on to make two clarifications to my young caller. First, souls aren’t actually in our bodies the same way a hand is in a glove. Our hands are physical, but our souls are not. Souls are not made of physical stuff—which is why they’re invisible—so they don’t need any physical place to fit (contra the Time article). They’re still real, though, even if no one can see them, and they’re united with our bodies in a deep and profound way.
Here is the second thing I wanted the young man to think about. If all people wore gloves all the time and never took them off, some people might be tempted to think we didn’t really have hands at all because they never saw them. They’d say that gloves were the only things that were real and that hands didn’t actually exist. It sounds silly, of course, but that’s often how people think about souls.
Their inference would be a mistake, though, because when we think carefully about gloves, it becomes clear that gloves would not be able to do the things they do all by themselves. Hands in gloves do things that gloves alone can’t accomplish. In the same way, bodies with souls do things that mere physical objects can’t accomplish. Plus, there are things that are true of our souls that could never be true of our bodies, as we will see.
Your soul is what you’re aware of when you introspect. It is the center of all your first-person experiences and the source and “container” of all your mental activities—your thoughts, beliefs, sensations, intentions, and acts of will. Your soul stays the same even when your physical body changes. Indeed, even if you had no body, you would still be yourself since the essential “you” is not physical at all.
Note, I have just been describing the soul, not arguing for it. Now I would like to offer reasons why I’m convinced souls are real. The first is one of the most powerful—ironically, I think, because it’s subjective, not objective. The Time article hinted at it when it said, “Despite our every instinct to the contrary….”
Me, Myself, and I
The first evidence for the soul is this: We know our souls exist because we are directly aware of them. We are in immediate contact with our own sentient, invisible selves—and what we are aware of is not our bodies.
When a pro-choice person says, “I have a right to do what I want with my own body,” or when a transgender person says, “I am a woman in a man’s body,” clearly, when they refer to themselves (“I”), they are not talking about their bodies. Each is talking about the one who inhabits and possesses their body. They are talking about their invisible selves—their souls.
This awareness that our conscious selves are distinct from our physical selves is that “instinct” referred to in the Time article that was, unfortunately, summarily dismissed. As it turns out, your soul is more real to you than anything else you experience in life since everything you experience involves an encounter with your soul.
One sort of experience—introspection—actually allows us to behold some of those things that are in our souls, as this thought experiment demonstrates.[4]
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine your mother working at her computer. Once you have the image clearly in your mind, focus on the blouse or shirt or dress she’s wearing. Make note of the color. Now open your eyes.
Here is the question: Where was that image you just saw? You didn’t see the image with your physical eyes, of course, because your eyes were closed. You “saw” the image, nonetheless, since you’re able to accurately describe the color of the clothing your mother was wearing in the image. So, where was it?
One things is clear. The image was not in your brain. No clever surgeon, even in principle, could crack your skull open during your reflection and find an image in your physical brain of your mom typing away on her computer. The image you “saw” was real, but it wasn’t located in any place physical because it wasn’t physical. It was located in the nonphysical realm of your soul, and you were able to behold the image because you had immediate and direct access to it, as you do all the contents of your own mind.[5]
You saw the image with the eyes of your soul.[6] In fact, every physical sense you possess can be experienced in your mind without any physical input whatsoever. You can see a color,[7] smell a rose, feel fur, taste a strawberry, or hear strains of Beethoven’s 5th symphony. They are more vivid when using your physical senses, to be sure, but they are genuine sensations, even so.
The first evidence for souls, then, is our own direct, first-person experience of our invisible selves. You may have noticed something else about our thought experiment, though. You are the only one who has access to those experiences.
Your Private, Personal World
When you picture your mother in your mind—or hear Beethoven, or feel fur, etc.—you are the only human being who is able to experience those personal sensations. If someone else wanted to know what was going on in your mind—what you were feeling or thinking or imagining—you’d have to tell them.[8] Your mental states are completely private.
I mentioned above that when you introspect about anything, the contents of your mind are immediately available to you—there’s no secondary apparatus giving you access to them. Instead, they are self-presenting, so your knowledge of them is direct.
Your knowledge of your conscious states is not only private; it’s also completely accurate—philosophers say “incorrigible”—since it’s impossible for you to be mistaken about the contents of your own mental activity.
There can be no difference between the way a mental state appears to you and the way it actually is, since the nature of a mental state simply is the experience you have of it. Therefore, you cannot be misled about its contents.
It’s not possible, for example, that you believe you’re thinking about a hot dog because you’re hungry for lunch, but you’re actually thinking about something else. You may have beliefs about hot dogs that are false, of course—“the hot dog stand is open today”—but you cannot be mistaken about the conscious thoughts you’re having about hot dogs.
The kind of access you have to the contents of your soul are what philosophers call “first-person private” access. Your sensations of pain or pleasure—indeed, your awareness of any of your mental states—are yours and yours alone. Strictly speaking, you can never feel someone else’s pain. You only feel your own.[9] To put it even more dramatically, no one else knows what it feels like to be you except you.
None of your physical states, by contrast, are private, at least in principal. They’re “third-person public.” When your doctor examines you for a broken arm, his instruments provide accurate details of the physical damage. If you’re in pain, though, you have to tell him where it hurts. That’s because your feeling of pain is mental, not physical like your injured limb. Your report will be accurate, too, since you can’t be thinking you’re in pain when you’re actually feeling pleasure instead.
These two characteristics of your mental life—your private, privileged access to your own thoughts and your incorrigible knowledge of your mental states—are formidable reasons to be confident that your immaterial soul is completely distinct from your physical brain since physical objects do not have these qualities.
Let me tell you why this distinction provides powerful evidence for the soul.
A Question of Identity
Neuroscientists have a near universal impulse to reduce mental activity to brain activity, thus eliminating the need for a soul—or so they think.
Researchers note that physical states can cause mental states. Drop acid, and you’ll hallucinate. They’re also able to accurately correlate specific conscious mental states with physical brain states. When we’re solving math problems, a certain region of the brain “lights up” with activity. Therefore, they conclude, mental states are nothing but brain states.
Those neuroscientists are mistaken, though. Causation and correlation, even when the correlation is constant,[10] are not the same as identity—one thing being the exact same thing as another. Here’s why.
We often use the word “identical” when two objects are so similar we can’t tell them apart, like identical twins. This isn’t the way I’m using the word here, though. In this case, when one thing is identical to another, I’m not talking about two things, but one.
For example, when someone says Greg Koukl is identical to the current president of Stand to Reason, he doesn’t mean there are two different people who look a lot alike. He means Greg Koukl actually is the president of STR. There are not two, but one. Everything true of the first is also true of the second since they are one and the same. If there is any difference between the two, then they could not be identical in the sense intended in this discussion about the soul.[11]
In the same way, if the mind were identical to the brain—if mental states were nothing more than physical states—then mental states would have the same characteristics and qualities that physical things have—but they don’t. The contents or activities of your mind are not anything like the contents or activities of your brain.
None of the features of the soul I mentioned—thoughts, beliefs, sensations, intentions, or acts of will—are characteristic of purely physical things. If you say a particular rock is ugly, you won’t hurt its feelings, nor will it take up arms against you. It has no sensations, and it has no will. Mere physical things have no mental qualities.
On the other hand, none of your mental activities have any physical qualities or characteristics, either. Like the image of your mother, your thoughts, beliefs, sensations, intentions, or acts of will are not located in space. They have no weight. They’re not beholden to the laws of physics or chemistry. In fact, your mental activity—the life of your soul—has absolutely no physical qualities of any kind. Therefore, it’s a mistake to think they’re the same. Clearly, they’re not.
Each characteristic of the soul requires a conscious, first-person perspective. Physical things don’t have that perspective (an “inside” looking “outside”). Only consciousness has the irreducibly first-person perspective, an “I” or a “me.” Only conscious creatures—beings with souls—have that quality.
Your Enduring “I”
I want you to consider the question I asked a hostile student who attended a lecture on the soul that I gave at a local college. He completely rejected the idea that any religious claims—including claims about the soul—could ever be justified, since they weren’t scientific. So, I asked him when he was born.
“1975.”
“What day?”
“May 1.”
“So you were born on May 1, 1975?”
“That’s right.”
Then I asked my follow-up question. “Is the body you possess today the same body you had on May 1, 1975?”
He balked at first, but it was clear that his physical body had totally different qualities from the one he was born with. It was also made up of different physical stuff. The molecules in our bodies change constantly as we age. This young man had cycled through multiple physical bodies in his 21 years. His current body simply was not the one he’d been born with.
I then pointed out the conclusion that was beginning to dawn on everyone in the gallery, including him. “If you were born on May 1, 1975, and the physical body in front of me now did not exist as your physical body in 1975, then you are not your physical body, are you?”
The fact that your soul sustains your identity through time even though your physical body changes radically helps explain another commonsense feature of our lives.
Years back, I stumbled across an LA Times piece with the headline “Man Sentenced to Life in Two 1957 Police Murders.”[12] As you read the following portion of the article, pay close attention to the personal pronouns:
A businessman was sentenced Monday to a pair of life terms after he admitted murdering two El Segundo police officers in 1957 and offered a teary-eyed apology to the families of his victims. “I do not understand why I did this,” said Gerald F. Mason, 69, who was caught when an old fingerprint from the crime scene matched his in a new FBI national database. “I detest these crimes…. I still do not want to remember what happened…. Please believe I am still looking for ways to express my remorse for the horror I have caused,” he said in court. [Emphasis added.]
Why was Gerald F. Mason lamenting his guilt for killings that happened 46 years earlier? Two reasons. One, Mason knew he was identical to the person who murdered those policemen nearly a half-century earlier even though a different physical body committed those crimes. Two, Mason knew he was not a mere machine doing what it was programmed to do. Rather, he was a free moral agent who could have done otherwise. The first (sustained personal identity through time) and the second (individual moral guilt) both require the existence of a soul.
Here is the point: If there is no soul, then you are not the same one who was born on your birthday. If there is no soul, then there can be no moral freedom and, therefore, no moral guilt.
The Long Game
I have offered four powerful reasons for you to be confident that not only do souls exist, but you are a soul.
First, you have immediate, intimate experience of and incorrigible access to the contents of your soul. Second, your immaterial mental states cannot be reduced to mere physical brain states, because mental things and physical things have completely different properties, so they are not identical. Third, your soul sustains your identity through time even though your physical body changes radically. Fourth, if there is no “ghost” in the machine, then you are reduced to a sophisticated mechanical object without moral responsibility or transcendent meaning, value, or purpose.
However, if you do have a soul, it opens the door to a universe of possibilities, suggesting answers to our deepest questions about meaning, purpose, morality, guilt, and—hopefully—forgiveness.
Further, developing your soul properly in this life has profound consequences in the next life. When you die, your physical body is left behind, but you continue on. Here is the question: What will be the state of your soul when you enter Jesus’ presence and are “absent from the body and…at home with the Lord” in Paradise?
Paul wrote, “Bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come” (1 Tim. 4:8). Paul’s point was that the soulish growth enduring forever is tied to the spiritual progress we achieve in this life.
So, what have you been building on your own Christian foundation? Gold, silver, and precious stones bringing eternal reward? Or wood, hay, and stubble destined to be burned (1 Cor. 3:12–15)? Will you enter eternity clothed in godliness, or will you enter Jesus’ presence naked and smelling of smoke?
Take care of your soul. Guard your soul. Protect your soul. If it’s wounded or broken, ask God to restore your soul.[13] How you nurture your soul will make an everlasting difference, for what could be more important than the fate of your soul?
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?”—Jesus[14]
[1] Michael D. Lemonick, “Glimpses of the Mind,” Time, July 17, 1995, 52, https://time.com/archive/6727636/glimpses-of-the-mind/.
[2] Ibid.
[3] I go into detail on that Story in The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).
[4] This experiment was originally suggested to me by philosopher J.P. Moreland.
[5] I’m using the word “mind” here as a synonym for the word “soul.”
[6] Some have objected, saying a computer has an image on its screen, but that doesn’t mean the computer has a soul. There is no meaningful parallel, however, between a person seeing a first-person private, non-physical image through conscious introspection, and someone using his physical eyes to see a third-person public, physical image that appears and disappears on the screen of his computer. The computer is not conscious. We are. It displays an image for a conscious person to see with his physical eyes, but the computer is not seeing the image itself. The objection has no bearing on my point.
[7] Color is not identical to a wavelength of light, then, since you can see colors with your “mind’s eye” when no physical light is present.
[8] Neuroscientists know that certain areas of the brain are centers of certain types of thought—anxiety, for example—only because a conscious patient has told them what’s going on in his mind when the scientists see with their instruments that those regions of the brain are active.
[9] You may identify with someone else’s pain, of course, or sympathize with them, but you can only actually feel your own sensations, not others’.
[10] Constant correlation means that certain brain activity is consistently present when there’s a specific mental activity—e.g., every time I put salt on my tongue, specific neurons in my brain always fire (physical state), and I experience the sensation of salty taste (mental state).
[11] Philosophy students might recognize this notion as Leibniz’s Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals.
[12] Richard Winton and Steve Berry, “Man Sentenced to Life in Two 1957 Police Murders, Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2003, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-25-me-segundo25-story.html.
[13] Psalm 23:3.
[14] Mark 8:36.