Let’s have some fun with a deep topic. Let’s take a trip to where science might someday meet the soul.
First, a disclaimer: this is not me marshaling evidence to argue for or against a particular scientific or spiritual point of view. Rather, let’s call this an exercise in disciplined imagining. Speculation, really, but tethered, where possible, to what science already knows.
To ease into the subject, I’m going to meander a bit. I invite you to come along for the ride.
In a parallel life, I write fiction. One of the characters in my Secret Guardians books tackles an academically out-of-bounds question. He is Abraham Gold, a revered University of Michigan professor of psychology who lost his entire family in the Holocaust. Gold is addressing a packed hall of students at the start of fall semester.
One of the main characters in the story, Sean Byrne, is in the audience.
Here are portions of the passage:
An unknowable world?
Abe Gold settled behind the lectern, extracted his reading glasses, and began scanning his notes. He reminded Sean of a Navajo medicine man: broad nose on a craggy face, silver hair in a ponytail, eyes that had seen it all. He wore a thin, navy blue cashmere pullover over a pale yellow button-down shirt with a bow tie to match.
After a moment, he looked up and, in a voice that betrayed his Eastern European roots, launched into his subject.
“Thank you for coming to listen to a man two generations older than you,” he began. “I am gratified to see so many in attendance, as this is not a class. You will not be tested on the words I speak tonight. Nevertheless, I request your careful consideration of what I am about to advocate.”
Sean knew well what Gold was about to discuss, having pursued Gold since the day he’d first heard the man speak during his undergrad years. Gold tapped on the lapel mic he’d just clipped on his pullover and cleared his throat.
“Psychology must embrace a deeper study of the invisible forces, spiritual in nature, that distinguish us,” he began. “It does not matter whether these forces are called the soul, the mind, the higher mind, the self-actualized self, or whatever other labels are used. What matters is that, to date, this ground has been avoided by most academics.
“True, the spiritual world may be unknown territory, but I assert that it is not unknowable. Consider the renowned American psychologist Abraham Maslow. His research reached upward. He believed in studying the most adept among humanity, the Einsteins of his day. I dare say he would have studied people like Mother Teresa or Florence Nightingale if he could have.”
Even though Sean had heard versions of this lecture before, he found himself drawn in again, as if hearing it for the first time. He leaned forward, propping his arms on the desk.
“Conversely, Maslow wrote, ‘The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a crippled psychology.’ Now, those are strong words. As you might imagine, his ideas were dismissed by more than a few. But his now-famous hierarchy of needs theory—and the identification of what he termed the highest human need of all, self-actualization—struck a chord that resonates still.
“We are not just impeccably evolved animals, as some would posit. We are different.”
The audience sat rapt as Gold paused for effect.
“Speaking of evolution,” he continued, “I would argue there is an evolutionary permanence to our consciousness that transcends our physical forms. I also hold that transcendent consciousness is a subject worthy of scientific inquiry. Heaven—or life after death if the term ‘heaven’ makes you squirm—is more than a belief, more than an unproven religious myth. The evidence is trickling in that life beyond the physical, to put it simply, is very real.
“Research into near-death experiences is ongoing. And the testimonies of those experiences across widely diverse cultures show startling similarities.
“More research is needed,” Gold declared. “And it is research that is well within the purview of psychology. This is just one example of nontraditional areas of psychological research we need to pursue. The research opportunities are truly limitless.
The professor paused, letting the silence hang in the room to allow time and space for minds to open. Sean looked around. Even those who had been taking notes had dropped their pens, waiting for Gold to continue.
“I am not talking about researching the belief systems of peoples and cultures. Other disciplines do that. I am talking about studying the very essence that makes us who we are. For as well as being physical, mental, and emotional creatures, we are spiritual beings. And the study of our spiritual nature is an elemental aspect of the discipline we call psychology.”
Now that’s the fictional Professor Gold speaking, not me. Even though my own beliefs may align with Gold’s arguments, I cannot claim to know for a fact that we are, as he asserts, “spiritual beings.”
What if the soul is discoverable?
But let’s not let that uncertainty stop us. Instead, let’s wonder where science might one day take us. What if the soul is real and some aspect of it is scientifically discoverable?
For millennia, humans have used the word soul to describe something within us that seems to transcend the physical body—an inner essence, consciousness, or presence that cannot be seen, weighed, or measured.
Science has no accepted instrument for detecting such a thing. Perhaps it never will.
But what if that changes?
What would science have to discover before the existence of something we might reasonably call the soul moved from belief to evidence, and then from evidence to accepted fact?
A bold question, for sure. Maybe even unanswerable. But let’s explore it anyway.
What lies beyond the reach of today’s science?
It’s not a stretch to assert there is vastly more to reality than we can directly perceive. To believe otherwise, we would have to assume that science has already discovered nearly everything there is to discover about the nature of life and the universe.
The long history of scientific discovery demands a little more humility than that. Again and again, something that was once invisible, undetectable, or simply unknown has become part of established scientific reality.
Bacteria were there before microscopes allowed us to see them. Radio waves passed through the world before we learned how to detect them. X-rays, atomic particles, and gravitational waves existed before we had instruments capable of tracking them.
None of this is evidence of the existence of souls, of course. But it does establish something important for our disciplined speculation: what we can perceive and measure at any particular moment in history has never defined the limits of what is real.
And there is no reason to believe we’ve suddenly reached the end of that road. Today’s most advanced instruments will probably seem astonishingly primitive a century from now. The instruments that replace them may detect things we cannot detect today and reveal properties of nature we don’t yet know exist.
The mystery within
Moreover, some of the deepest mysteries may be within us.
Consider consciousness. Science can observe the brain in remarkable detail. We have the ability to watch patterns of brain activity change as a person sleeps, dreams, meditates, prays, or interacts with the world around them.
But observing what the brain is doing and explaining the experience of being conscious are far from the same thing. We know that we experience a world within ourselves. Exactly how those experiences arise—and what consciousness ultimately is—remains a much more difficult question.
Among the mysteries that might offer clues as to the nature of the soul are consciousness, meditation, and prayer. We also know, but sometimes forget, that science can measure the physical side of an experience while remaining unable to determine the ultimate nature of the experience itself.
That distinction is crucial.
Consider prayer. Scientists can measure what happens in the brain and body of someone who is praying. What those changes mean, however, is another matter. They cannot tell us whether the person is communicating with anything or anyone beyond the physical world.
Can science measure immaterial existence?
But what if someday they could?
That question isn’t quite as fanciful as it sounds.
Consider near-death experiences. Thousands of people revived after cardiac arrest and other medical crises have reported vivid experiences during periods when their hearts had stopped and blood flow to their brains had been drastically reduced.
Many report not only extraordinary sensations or visions, but apparent perceptions of events occurring around them while they were unconscious or undergoing resuscitation. A number of these accounts include details later confirmed to be accurate.
That is compelling testimony. However, it isn’t scientific proof.
So the problem is not a lack of testimony. It is proving exactly when and how those perceptions occurred—and ruling out every ordinary way the information might have reached the person.
For science, that is an enormous hurdle. Yes, extraordinary experiences can be described, compared and studied. But suppose that some of these people did experience something beyond the physical world. How could science ever know?
Perhaps the problem is not simply that we haven’t found the evidence. What if some aspect of the soul exists beyond the reach of our present instruments? Could science someday develop a way to detect it? Or is that asking science to do something it can never do—to measure something that, by its very nature, exists beyond the physical world?
What would we look for?
Imagine an instrument sensitive enough to detect something leaving—or separating from—the human body at death. Think of an instrument that registers some previously unknown form of energy, information, or physical activity at the moment the heart and brain cease functioning.
At first, scientists might have no idea what they were looking at.
But suppose the same unexplained signal appeared again and again. Suppose it occurred at death but not during sleep or ordinary unconsciousness. Suppose its characteristics varied in predictable ways. And suppose other laboratories, using different equipment, could detect it too.
Now we would have something science could work with.
But even that would not tell us that consciousness survives death. An unknown signal is simply an unknown signal. The far more extraordinary discovery would be information.
Imagine that whatever scientists were detecting contained information unique to the person who had died. Or perhaps information could somehow pass in the other direction, from the newly detected phenomenon back into our measurable world.
What would count as proof?
One result would not be enough. Neither would ten extraordinary stories. Other scientists would have to reproduce the results under tightly controlled conditions. Alternative explanations would have to be tested and eliminated. Equipment would improve. Experiments would become more sophisticated. Skeptics would challenge the findings—and they should.
But suppose the findings survived.
Suppose laboratories around the world eventually demonstrated, repeatedly and independently, that information associated with an individual consciousness could persist after the brain had permanently stopped functioning.
That would be very difficult to explain away.
And then something even stranger might happen. The ancient idea of the soul might begin to take on a scientific dimension.
Science has done something like this before. Again and again, phenomena completely invisible to us became measurable only after we developed the ideas and instruments necessary to find them. None turned out to be evidence of the soul, but that isn’t the point. The point is that there has always been more to reality than we could see or detect.
A shift in human thinking
Even such a discovery would leave the biggest questions unanswered.
Detecting consciousness beyond death would not prove there is a God or explain the meaning of life. Nor would it establish the truth of any particular set of religious beliefs.
But it would change something fundamental.
For the first time, science would have opened an objective window into the unknowable. And perhaps we would begin to collectively acknowledge the possibility that some aspect of who we are extends beyond the physical body.
If so, something extraordinary would have happened: the possibility of a soul would have entered the realm of scientific evidence.
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