Empirical Evidence

Is there empirical evidence for the existence of a soul? Well, let’s just see. The word empirical derives from the Greek empeiria, meaning “experience.” If we look more closely, the second half of that word is peira, meaning a trial, and the second part of experience, which is rooted in Latin, is peritus; it also means a test or a trial. Now because one must be alive to make a test or trial, empirical translates to “lived experience.” To be sure, since a “test” or “trial” is implied, the lived experience needs to be noted, it needs to be observed. Something on the lawn might be a stone—or it might be some knick-knack made of plastic that just looks like a stone. We experience our souls; it is the most common of any experience; so how can we doubt that it exists?

Here interesting new aspects arise. The phenomenon of having a self is not in doubt; it certainly isn’t doubted by people who haven’t been corrupted by materialist modes of thought. The issue really is whether or not the phenomenon, that self, is autonomously existent, thus apart from the body and its life. It is clearly related to living. As we pass by the open coffin at a funeral reception, the phenomenon is certainly missing—although an exhaustive examination of the body, of the sort that pathologists engage in, will show that the body is still all there—although it isn’t moving at the levels visible to the naked eye. Something is obviously missing. Is it the soul, life, or both? And is there a difference here? The body is dead, life has fled, but is the soul still there—somewhere?

The answer to the question posed above therefore appears to be: there is empirical evidence for the soul because we experience it, but if all experience is tied directly to the soul, evidence for its survival will not be available to us until, well, we die. Paradoxical.

To be sure, there are reports from people who have experienced other people having death-bed visions. And near-death experience reports convince at least those who have them that there is life beyond the body. But these are not intersubjective experiences; others can’t confirm the experience. They may be empirical for those who undergo them, but not for the public at large.

The above suggests that the evidence is narrowly empirical. The individual can know. The current scientific orthodoxy, however, still maintains that there is no such thing as a soul, merely an ego. And the ego is then defined as an evolved subsystem of a living system, and that that bigger thing is itself a process, not anything autonomous that you can detect apart from its physical manifestations. The ego subsystem, of course, can on occasion construct a wonderful sonnet or write a symphony under chance interactions of instinctual drives and outer stimuli that deform them. But when I wake up in the mornings, take a deep breath, and consider what lies ahead, the last thing on my mind is to remind myself that I’m just a useful subsystem constraining my instincts lest they go astray into maladaptive behaviors.