Why nearly everyone still believes in a soul

HostI was thinking the other day about how few people I know actually go to church anymore, yet we still use words like soulmate or talk about someone having a kind soul. It feels like the idea of a soul has outlived the buildings where we used to talk about it. Why is it that almost everyone still holds onto this idea of a soul, even when they walk away from organized faith?

GuestIt's a massive gap in how we think about the world. If you look at the numbers, church seats are getting emptier, but the belief that we have some kind of inner spark or spirit stays rock solid. In some places, nearly nine out of ten people say they have a soul. The reason it stays so high is that our brains might just be hard-wired for it. It's not something we only learn from a book or a priest. From the time we're very small kids, we seem to see the world as being made of two different things. There's the physical stuff you can touch, like your skin and bones, and then there's the personhood, the mind, or the spirit that lives inside that shell. We're born as natural dualists, which is just a fancy way of saying we think the body and the mind are two separate things.

HostBut kids also believe in the tooth fairy and they eventually grow out of that. If we're just seeing a split because our brains are young, why does it stick with us through adulthood, even for people who say they only believe in science?

GuestWell, think about how you view your friends. You don't see them as a bag of chemicals and water. If I told you that I could make a perfect copy of your best friend, down to every single atom, most people would still feel like the copy isn't the real person. There's a famous thought puzzle about a teleporter. If a machine breaks you down here and builds a perfect copy of you on Mars, is that still you? Most people have a very strong gut feeling that something would be lost in the middle. That something is what we call the soul. It's our way of saying that a person is more than just the sum of their parts. This gut feeling is so deep that even people who say they don't believe in anything spooky still act like it's true. We treat our bodies like a suit of clothes that we happen to live in.

HostI don’t know, that feels a bit like we're just stuck in an old way of talking. If we can explain how the brain works with wires and signals, maybe the soul is just a placeholder for stuff we haven’t mapped out yet. Like, once we know how every nerve fires, will the soul just evaporate?

GuestThat's the big test, but so far, the more we learn about the brain, the more we seem to lean on the idea of a soul to make sense of our lives. Think about how we judge right and wrong. If a car hits someone because the brakes failed, we don't blame the car. It's just a machine. But if a person does something bad, we blame their soul or their character. We need the soul to be the captain of the ship. If we're just meat computers following a script written by our genes, then nobody is really responsible for anything. That's a very scary way to live. We keep the soul around because it gives us a choice. It makes us more than just a chemical reaction. It gives us a reason to say that a human life has a special kind of value that a rock or a toaster just doesn't have.

HostSo it's less about where we go when we die and more about how we see each other while we're still here?

GuestExactly. It shows up in how we grieve, too. When someone dies, even the most non-religious person often feels like the body left behind is just an empty house. They'll say things like, he's not there anymore. If we were purely physical beings, that sentence wouldn't make any sense. He would be right there on the table. But our brains can't help but look for the spark. There was a study where researchers told kids about a mouse that got eaten by an alligator. They asked if the mouse still needed to eat or if its ears still worked, and the kids said no. But when they asked if the mouse still loved its mother or if it was still sad, the kids said yes. Even before they have a word for it, kids think the feelings and the self keep going even when the body stops. It's a fundamental part of how we perceive life.

HostIt's interesting that even as we get more technical and use more machines, we still have this part of us that refuses to be just a machine.

GuestWe're desperate to be more than just hardware. You see this even in how we talk about AI now. People get very worked up about whether a computer could ever have a soul. We're not really asking if it has a ghost inside it. We're asking if it matters. Can it feel pain? Can it be happy? If we decide it's just a bunch of code, we can turn it off without a second thought. But if we think there's a soul in there, then we have a duty to it. The soul is really just our word for the thing that makes us worth caring about. As long as we want to feel special and as long as we want to feel like our choices matter, that nine out of ten number probably won't budge much.

HostThe body might be the house we live in, but we're still convinced there's someone home.

GuestPeople may stop sitting in pews, but they'll never stop looking for the person behind the eyes.

HostThe church buildings might be getting quieter, but we still carry that sense of a hidden spark with us every time we look at a friend or wonder who we really are.