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.

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. 

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