Among the category of Articles That Should Not Have Been Written, this one is prominent. It’s “Did Neanderthals have souls?” by freelance writer Ruth Graham, and her piece is in The Atlantic.
The question of when, and in which species, hominins were “ensouled” is of interest mainly because it’s so dumb, showing not only the conflict between faith and fact, but the silly issues that theologians get paid to grapple with. As shown in the recent book by Julien Musolino, The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain by Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs, there’s not the slightest bit of evidence for a soul. Although a bit repetitive, the book is certainly worth reading, especially for its copious evidence that the mind is a product of the brain and that there’s no bit of “consciousness” that can be detached from the brain and exist separately.
Nevertheless, many theologians not only assert that there is a soul, but that humans are the only species that have one. That, for instance, is the official position of the Roman Catholic Church, which accepts that humans did evolve, but also that we’re distinct from all other species by virtue of our ability to be “ensouled”. Exactly when this happens during embryonic development is not clear, but the ability to be ensouled itself must have arisen during human evolution. And that raises the question of when that ability arrived in our lineage, a question activated by the recent discovery of Homo naledi. (Theologians always need new grist for their mill.)
Such is the subject of Graham’s piece, which would be okay if it mentioned the evidence against souls. But it doesn’t: it simply buttresses the superstition mongers who find the evolutionary arrival of souls is an intriguing and viable question. But that question is completely unanswerable, not only because we almost certainly don’t have souls, but because the concept of a soul is itself so nebulous that we wouldn’t know what kind of evidence to accept. Should we take ritualistic burial of the dead? (H. naledi may have deposited the dead in a burial chamber, but some ants do the same thing) Religion itself and worship of deities? Language?
Here are the questions, discussed by Graham, that the concept of a soul raises for its adherents:
The broader issue is what happens to the soul of anyone born before Jesus Christ. Surely Moses and Abraham, for example, made it to Heaven. But how? The short answer, according to many theologians, is they trusted in God’s promises about the coming of a savior. They wouldn’t have known the specifics about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, but they could have had a general faith that a Messiah was on his way.
A related question is what happens to modern people who never had the chance to hear the message of Jesus Christ. Again, most Christian theologians allow for salvation on the basis of a kind of orientation toward God. Here’s how the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council addressed the problem in 1964, for example:
“Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”
That last sentence is the kind of opaque theobabble that the Vatican regularly emits.
These are prime examples of the silliness of theology, which answers these questions by simply making stuff up. It always amazes me that educated people can even bother themselves with these questions, much less write screeds about them. (See, for example, the book The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters, by J. P. Moreland, or the article in Psychology Today by physician/researcher Robert Lanza, “Does the soul exist? Evidence says ‘yes'”, which takes as evidence the existence of subjective experience.)
To some theologians, the question of whether H. naledi has a soul comes down to this: “Was the species descended from Adam and Eve?” Since the scientific evidence shows that H. sapiens could not have descended from only two individuals, this question is already nonsensical. But creationist Kurt Wise (remember him?) sees it as answerable, and with a “yes”:
Creationists are already arguing over the naledi discovery. Kurt Wise, the director of the Center for Creation Research at Truett-McConnell College, told the evangelical World magazine that the fossils do represent a fully human species.
But the equally fundamentalist group Answers in Genesis, headed by Ken Ham, disagrees, claiming that H. naledi wasn’t descended from Adam and Eve. They were just apes!
These fossils, like so many others before them, may reshuffle the “family tree” that evolutionists are constantly drawing and re-drawing in their efforts to create for us a history apart from God. But they will not re-shuffle the truth about human history or what it means to be human. We know that God created man and land animals the same day without evolution. We seriously doubt the original owners of the Dinaledi bones [H. naledi] were among the descendants of Adam and Eve, as the preponderance of the evidence suggests they were animals, one of the variations that developed among apes. They most certainly were not any sort of evolutionary intermediate.
This is ludicrous, of course, because we’re still apes, and we’re certainly animals! Here we have two fundamentalist Christian groups disagreeing, with no way to settle the issue. Instead of suspending judgment pending a good definition of the soul and a way to demonstrate its existence, they just make stuff up. This is not science but wish-thinking, and it’s no way to settle issues. And remember, this is in principle an empirical question: it’s about religion asserting what’s real, not simply dealing with meanings and values. So much for those who bang on about religion not making any claims about reality.
But of course even more liberal theologians accept souls, and thus still must deal with the evolutionary question. Graham continues:
Even the many Christians who accept that the world is much older than 10,000 years find that the problem can still provoke. But it’s not necessarily cause for despair over the fate of the naledi soul. British pastor Mark Woods, a contributor to the online publication Christian Today, wrote recently that the naledi burial site raises intriguing suggestions for Christians about the existence of the soul. If this primitive group went to such lengths to bury their dead, he argues, it “shows they knew that death was not an absolute ending, and that those who had died were still, in some way, present.”
That’s a theological way of saying what scientists have been arguing all along. As Lee Berger, who led the discovery in South Africa, put it, “We are going to have to contemplate some very deep things about what it is to be human.” For some, it’s a matter of eternal life and death.
Re the first paragraph, we still don’t know whether the cache of H. naledi skeletons represents some kind of ritual, much less any behavior suggesting that those dead were considered “sacred.” Some ants remove their dead and put them in a “death pile.” Does that mean that ants have souls, too? There’s no evidence that the naledi dead were buried: they could have simply been removed to a specific location in the cave—and really, we don’t even know that for sure. And even if they were buried, this could have been just to avoid stench and contamination. Finally, even if they were buried deliberately for spiritual reasons, that doesn’t show H. naledi KNEW that “death was not an absolute ending.” It showed at most that they believed it. Here pastor Woods is mistaking belief for fact.
As for Lee Berger’s statement, I still think it’s silly to ponder “what it is to be human”, at least on the basis of his discovery (he headed the team that found H. naledi). Let Berger first answer the slippery question of what we mean by “fully human”—and that, of course, is completely subjective. If we invoke specific things like behavior or brain size, yes, we can in principle get an answer. But that’s not what many secularists mean: they are surely talking about the subjective beliefs and attitudes of hominins, and that question is almost impossible to answer.
And it becomes completely impossible to answer once we begin invoking theistic concepts of the soul. If the human soul is a requirement for being “fully human,” and the soul is an idea without an iota of supporting evidence, then the question will linger forever in the domain of theology: a discipline that cannot truly answer its questions, but pretends to do so by confecting solutions.
As for Graham, it was her journalistic responsibility to point out the lack of evidence for souls, and certainly to quote someone who thinks the whole question is nonsensical. By quoting Berger in her last paragraph as almost supporting souls, Graham simply keeps the question alive. If we’re going to talk about “what it means to be human”, let’s get tangible about the question, honest about its subjectivity, and dubious about our ability to find answers.
h/t: Matthew Cobb
