The soul idea is a easily testable hypothesis. Science can be used to prove or disprove it. If there is a soul, then no amount of physical damage (i.e. blunt trauma to the head, bacterial/viral infections of the brain, mind altering drugs, act), should affect one's consciousness, memory, and personality.

On the other hand, if there is no soul, that means one's personality, memory, consciousness, basically everything that makes a person a person, is due to material forces. This means material change or damage to the brain should change a person's personality and memory.

Now, like I said, this is easily testable. We can't take some people, randomly assign them to two groups, and give one group a brain damaging drug and the other a placebo. But we can look at accidents that have already happened.

The results: No soul. Material damage to the brain changes one's personality and all things previously thought to be associated with the soul. For example:

1. Persistant vegetative state. With this condition, damage occurs to the brain but the person is still alive, yet their personality is literally "gone". The person has disappeared. Yet they can move, eat, breath, ect.

2. Alzheimer's disease. Plaques build up in the brain and the victim loses memory and forgets who they are.

3. Drugs like alcohol change a person's personality to extroversion and light heartedness.

4. Drug overdose can permanently make someone "******ed".

The list goes on and on. The soul has been disproved.

two reasons people believe in a soul:

1. some things about our brain are still unexplained and the things that are explained are not widely understood

2. people would rather think they are a special creation than just another animal.

personally, i find the idea that i'm just a primate to be quite exciting.

the world is a much more amusing place when you realize no matter where you turn you're likely to run into another overgrown ape walking around going about the things that overgrown apes do.

Yeah, there are still tons of details/mechanisms yet to be explained. But at this point its clear that entirely material processes are 100% responsible for everything that makes a person a person. You don't need to understand all the exact processes to accept that claim.

You commit an error is your assumption that what you are calling the "soul" is necessarily synonymous with things such as consciousness and personality. There are many philosophical workarounds that involve a soul that is not tethered to body/biology as a matter of strict necessity, and it is in those gaps that you would find opposition to your proposition. Now those who follow a scientific worldview simply dismiss the prospect of a non-tethered soul outright as it is not a proposition with falsifiable character. That said, what you wrote would and should give reasonable doubt to anyone that feels the soul and the body are inexorably intertwined, though as has already been pointed out by augie, the gaps in our explanations of the brain's biology and its relationships to things such as consciousness, memory, and personality, prevent the philosophical and/or religious skeptic from discounting the idea of a soul even should they accept the idea of a soul that is tied to the body (this despite a ridiculously strong consensus among scientists that the mechanics are entirely material processes).

FYI, I don't believe in a soul either.

Although the dictionary definition of a soul doesn't necessarily say "personality and consciousness = soul", and although some philosophers or theologians can create an abstract definition that defines soul differently, I think the general idea behind the soul IS that it is one's personality/conciousness.

If not, then why should one care about the soul? If it is not synonymous with personality/memory, what exactly is it and how is it different from nothing?
Christianity is based on the idea of an afterlife where one's soul continues existing and is judged by God upon death. For Christianity, it is obvious that soul means personality and memory of a person.

Virtually every philosopher that has ever posited the existence of the soul--going all the way back to Aristotle and his students--has acknowledged that damage to the head can result in cognitive impairment.

I don't disagree with most of your assertions. I am simply saying that the reason some people can and still DO believe in a soul is precisely because they feel comfortable with the kinds of soul-centric abstractions introduced the likes of Aquinas that often come with a sprinkling of parallelism. In particular, they are comfortable saying things about the soul being immortal and immaterial, but that events in our physical lives can have some parallel effect on the soul, such as where matters of faith and belief are concerned. In this sense they can still rationalize damage or disease NOT having some critical foundation-destroying effect on their souls.

Again, I don't disagree with you, but their faith entails rationalization that has little to do with logic or reason, even if they believe it does.

i don't believe in a soul either.

if there is no soul, there can't be an afterlife, so the religious have no choice but to believe in a soul.

In Catholic philosophy and theology, which is heavily influenced by the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, it is first important to note that "soul" just means, following Aristotelian philosophy, the principle that makes a living thing alive. This is how the ancient Greeks defined psyche, and this is why even materialists like the Atomists acknowledged the soul, because they recognized the distinction between living things and non-living things.

For the Atomists, the soul was just a collection of atoms--made of the same material stuff as the body, in accordance with their strict materialism. For Aristotle, by contrast, a soul is the substantial form of a living thing, i.e., the principle that makes a living thing to be what it is, to be of an essentially different kind from non-living things. The evidence, for Aristotle, that living things are essentially different from non-living things is that living things perform activities that non-living things do not, such as reproduction and sense awareness.

The point is that "soul" doesn't have to mean an immaterial substance distinct from the body--everyone's comments here seem to assume that anyone who believes in the soul is a substance dualist.

In the interest of having this thread be something more than a bunch of atheists cheering for each each other, I will respond from the point of view of a theist who does believe that there is a soul.

The OP has a number of points that I would consider simply incorrect or at least poorly constructed. The soul is of course a difficult concept to define but I will give at least one example that I think captures part of the problem. Imagine that I construct a computer that is programmed to completely reproduce my response to any situation but does not have a "self-awareness". By "self-awareness" I do not mean that it cannot utilize a reflection in a mirror or answer a question relating to self-awareness in the manner that I do. What I mean is that when untested, it does not have the spark within it that is aware that it exists in the way that I do. The difference between that computer and me, is the soul. The problem for the scientist is "How would you distinguish between those two entities?" As it has already been stipulated that the computer will produce the same response as me to any stimulus, I would submit that you cannot. Thus, science is ultimately unable to answer the question of the existence of the soul.

Your list of "proofs" that the soul does not exist are simply without content. You have not tied any of them to the presence or absence of a soul. I am not even sure why you listed them. Perhaps if you pick one out and really dive into what it tells you, we could have a discussion.

Also, I wouldn't say that I "believe" in the soul at all, because following Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition (which held sway on this point until Descartes' dualism), I begin by defining soul as "the principle that makes a living thing to be alive." Even a materialist reductionist can accept such a definition and agree that there is a soul--there's something that makes living things distinct from non-living things.

Well, I am not sure the statement about the religious is correct, but I could easily make the opposite statement. It is difficult for the atheist to believe that there is a spiritual soul. Neither statement does anything to address reality. It is simply a statement of preference.

yea, sure, of course the word soul has many definitions. nobody would argue with that. i refer to souls all the time. the only "soul" that anyone argues against is the soul that's a separate entity from the body. so that's why the comments will inevitably be framed like that.

Oh sure, that's understandable. But Catholic philosophy and theology don't contend that the human soul is "a separate entity from the body;" it is defined teaching of the Church that the human soul is "the form of the body," which is a metaphysical claim taken ultimately from Aristotle. Now, the Church also contends that the human soul is capable of surviving the death of the body, but this is not because the soul is "a separate entity from the body" when it is united to the body.

To be clear, you're saying that any form of life has a soul (including something like prokaryotic bacteria), is this accurate? Building on this, if current theories of abiogenesis are correct, when does the 'soul' enter in, i.e. when are you asserting non-life becomes life? I'm assuming you don't consider self replicating crystals alive, but this may be presumptuous.

i don't think so.

the atheist can easily be convinced there is a spiritual soul, by evidence. if the soul exists, there must be an experiment that will tease it out.

no such experiment has been conceived and the ones that have been tried came in favor of there being no soul. they have weighed people at the moment of death and recorded no loss of weight.

of course that doesn't disprove the soul; maybe the soul is made of a dark-matter substance and we don't have a way to detect it yet. but the day the experiment takes place that proves the soul i'll be glad to change my opinion.

it has to be a separate entity because our bodies decompose and our atoms go off and do other things.

not really sure what your point is!

Yes, I'm saying that anything that is alive has a soul, because a soul is by definition just whatever it is that makes a living thing alive. (Again, this definition is perfectly consistent with reductionist materialism--you can say that what makes a living thing alive is just the complex coordination of atoms and nothing else, so that everything that a living thing does can be reduced to the activity of atoms). With Aristotle, I also recognize that at the boundary between the living and the non-living it could be hard for us to tell the difference. If a bacteria is alive, then yes, it has soul; if a self-replicating crystal is alive, then it has a soul. Scientific consensus today is that a bacteria is alive, while a crystal is not, and I accept that opinion as the most reasonable.

What I think is necessary is to shift the conversation from criticisms of the soul that assume a soul must be a dualistic substance to a discussion of whether (a) living things are really essentially different in kind from non-living things, or if (b) a living thing is really nothing but a material complex reducible to its smallest parts. In either case, I would say that there is a soul. In other words, I don't think "is there a soul?" is an interesting question; I do think that questions about reductionism vs. ontological emergence--and Aristotle's hylomorphic theory--are much more interesting.

Could you define "a separate entity" and explain what makes something "a separate entity?"

Seems perfectly reasonable, I'm just not sure why we need to use the term 'soul' as a demarcation line between life/non-life, when we're obviously not using the soul to determine whether something is alive or not (meaning we use other characteristics to define life).

In other words the soul just seems unnecessary.

I think the vast majority of atheists (myself included) would opt for B.

I think this is right, and indeed if I were to judge that (b) is correct, I would become an atheist.

Okay, so the first question I would pose is this: if you were to give an exhaustive list of the sorts of activities that an isolated atom (or the parts of an atom) can perform, would "sense awareness" appear on that list?

If it were proven that you did have a soul, would you still be an atheist?

Don't answer too quickly, think about it. It is proven somehow that there is a spiritual soul, independent of the physical world and immortal. Outside of science and perhaps inaccessible to scientific experiments, but certain to exist. Atheism still sounds good to you?

If it were proven that we had souls (not the sort the simply delineates between living and non-living things, but the more conventional religious sort), then sure, I would NOT be an atheist. The problem is that proof is synonymous with being necessarily within science and withing the purview of scientific experimentation. Essentially, for the soul to be proven, it would have to be scientifically demonstrable. How can it have been proven if it can't be objectively demonstrated (or even at shown to be scientifically necessary by some other property of exclusion of ALL other alternatives, a near impossibility for a variety of reasons) to everyone?

it wouldn't prove that there is a god

Let me say first I don't think the above is quite right. God could of chosen life to "be nothing but a material complex reducible to its smallest parts."

I don't necessarily think that's a problem (and in any event I'm am unsure exactly of what 'macro' activities an atom can perform). It's because there is not a exact instant in the abiogenic process where we can go "Not life...not life...not life...LIFE!" that the argument doesn't quite hold. It's a fuzzy concept not unlike dividing the line between human and it's ancestors.