Diane101 asked me how you can commit a transgression when you do not have to appeal to a higher power. She also asked me how you can be ‘someone’ without a soul, and how you can judge a life to have a value if they do not have a soul.
I’m not going to parse Diane’s words because I know what she is getting at.
I’ll start with a brief discussion of the soul. The soul is an abstract concept. It can be described in various ways. But there are two main components of the idea of a soul. One is identity. What makes me the same person that I was when I was five years old? What is it that has been constant over the intervening thirty years?
None of my cells are the same, but there is an indisputable something that connects the 35 year old BooMan to the five year old BooMan. And that something is a continuity of character, or personality, or memory. Nothing physical is the same except for certain secondary characteristics like my eye color and skin tone.
Someone who has known me my whole life can say things like, “Boo has always been inquisitive, or Boo has always liked blueberry pie, or Boo has always been a slob.” What is it that allows them to say that about me?
For many, that something is my soul. And that leads us to the second characteristic of the idea of soul. That second characteristic is the indestructibility of the soul. Since my soul, or identity, or character is not synonymous with or (seemingly) dependent on my physical characteristics, many feel that my soul must be something non-physical, and therefore not subject to physical laws.
But this view is erroneous. My identity can be altered by any number of factors: disease, brain injury, chemical imbalance, to name a few. I can go from being talkative and trustworthy to pensive and untrustworthy, artsy to scientific, coherent to vegetative, and so on. Any number of physical events can change my character so that my friends and family will no longer recognize me as the person they have known all their lives. My character and my identity is totally dependent on a certain health and continuity of my physical makeup. Death will destroy that physical makeup within a few minutes.
No serious scientist, neurosurgeon, or neurophilosopher will use the concept of ‘soul’. Understanding the way the brain works pretty much rids you of the belief that your soul or identity can survive death, so that you might be recognizable to your loved ones in an afterlife.
But even if your identity or character could survive death, it would be no use to you if your brain had been damaged by alzheimers, or a stroke, or some other accident. Unless, God restores your soul to some ideal point in your life where your brain had not deteriorated, the damage in life would be eternalized in death.
Secularists, following the science, do not believe in a non-physical constant in a person’s consciousness. Any consistency there is, is also a consistency of physical features. Therefore, a meaningful afterlife is impossible.
Now, how does that effect morality? First of all, it means that this life is all you’ve got, and that you will never be reunited with your loved ones after you die.
Therefore, the taking of a life is immeasurably more significant than if the killed were merely to go on existing, possibly in a happier place. When death is final, the snuffing of life is absolute. This makes the secularist take the value of life more seriously than the heaven-believing Christian or Muslim.
No secularist would ever tell someone they can get rewards by committing suicide. They won’t console you by saying that someone is in a better place, unless life had become more unbearable than non-existence.
To a secularist, there can no greater crime than murder.
But why does a secularist value life? Life is fragile but incredibly complex. It is the closest thing we have to a miracle in this world. Human life is the most complex of all, and we feel a kinship with all other human life. It might help to study complexity theory and the works of Stuart Kaufmann, but suffice to say that there is a degree of awe and respect due to nature’s ability to create life, and to create consciousness, and that level of complexity should not be lightly destroyed.
We do not act morally because we expect a reward, or because we fear punishment. We act morally because a just society demands that we treat each with respect, compassion, and even-handedness. We do not kill, because it is a terrible thing to destroy something as beautifully complex as a human being, and a human consciousness.
I hope I have kept this is simple as possible. It is not easy to talk in layman’s terms about the philosophy of mind. It’s not easy to discuss secular moral philosophy in a brief diary. But maybe I can expand in the comments.
