Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul?

“College socialized me to dismiss religion. It was part of the academic zeitgeist: Smart people don't believe that stuff anymore. I became a child of the Enlightenment, a materialist, confident the alternatives amounted to superstition.

 

I've been back-pedaling. Writing "Human Accomplishment" (2003) forced me to recognize the crucial role transcendent belief had played in Western art, literature and music -- and, to my surprise, science. Watching my wife's spiritual evolution from agnosticism to Christianity, I saw that she was acquiring insights I lacked. I read C.S. Lewis, who raised questions I couldn't answer. I scrutinized New Testament scholarship and was more impressed by the evidence supporting it than that discrediting it.

 

I also discovered that the scientific story about the nature of the universe and human consciousness is more complicated than I had assumed.

 

Example: A central tenet of materialism is that consciousness exists exclusively in the brain. I first encountered claims to the contrary in the extensive literature on near-death experiences that grew out of Raymond Moody's "Life After Life" (1975). The evidence now consists of dozens of books, hundreds of technical articles and thousands of cases. I read about Ian Stevenson's cross-national studies of childhood memories of previous lives. He assembled a database of more than 3,000 cases, and more has been accumulating in the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies.

 

The evidence for both near-death experiences and childhood memories of previous lives is persuasive in terms of the credibility of the sources and verified facts, but much of it is strongly suggestive instead of dispositive. It doesn't reach the standard of proof Carl Sagan popularized: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." This led me to seek a subset of cases that exclude all conceivable explanations except that consciousness can exist independent of the brain.

 

Certain near-death experiences approach that level, but the most robust, hardest-to-ignore evidence comes from a phenomenon called terminal lucidity: a sudden, temporary return to self-awareness, memory and lucid communication by a person whose brain is no longer functional usually because of advanced dementia but occasionally because of meningitis, brain tumors, strokes or chronic psychiatric disorders.

 

Terminal lucidity can last from a few minutes to a few hours. In the most dramatic cases, people who have been unable to communicate or even recognize their spouses or children for years suddenly become alert and exhibit their former personalities, complete with reminiscences and incisive questions. It is almost always followed by complete mental relapse and death within a day or two.

 

The phenomenon didn't have a name until 2009, but case studies reach back to detailed clinical descriptions from the 19th century. Hospices, palliative-care centers, and long-term care wards for dementia patients continued to observe the condition during the 20th century but usually treated it as a curious episode that didn't warrant a write-up. With the advent of social media, reports began to accumulate. We now have a growing technical literature and a large, systematic sample compiled by Austrian psychologist Alexander Batthyany.

 

Two features of the best-documented cases combine to meet Sagan's standard: The subjects suffered from medically verified disorders that made their brains incapable of organized mental activity; and multiple observers, including medical personnel, recorded the lucidity.

 

A strict materialist explanation must posit a so-far-unknown capability of the brain. But the brain has been mapped for years, and a great deal is known about the functions of its regions. Discovering this new feature would be akin to finding a way that blood can circulate when the heart stops pumping.

 

I see the strict materialistic view of consciousness as being in roughly the same fix as Newtonian physics was in 1887, when the Michelson-Morley experiment [1] proved that the speed of light doesn't behave as Newton's laws said it should. It took 18 years before Einstein's theory of special relativity accommodated the anomaly.

 

We are identifying anomalies in the materialist position that must eventually lead to a paradigm shift. Science will have to acknowledge that even though conventional neuroscience explains much about consciousness under ordinary circumstances, something else can come into play under the extreme conditions of imminent death.

 

The implications are momentous. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow observed that for a scientist trying to explain creation, the verification of the big-bang theory "ends like a bad dream": "As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." Neuroscientists who have been trying to explain consciousness may have to face their own bad dream: coming to terms with evidence for the human soul.

 

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Mr. Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of "Taking Religion Seriously."” [2]

 

1. The Michelson-Morley experiment, performed in 1887, was designed to detect the hypothetical "luminiferous aether" through which light was thought to travel. Using an interferometer, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley expected to measure a difference in the speed of light as the Earth moved through this aether. The experiment's null result showed no detectable "aether wind," leading to the conclusion that the aether does not exist and the speed of light is constant in all directions, a key finding that supported Einstein's theory of special relativity. 

 

How the experiment worked

 

    Objective:

    To detect the Earth's motion through a hypothetical medium called the luminiferous aether.

 

Setup:

A Michelson interferometer split a beam of light into two perpendicular beams. One beam traveled parallel to the Earth's orbital motion, and the other traveled crosswise.

Measurement:

The two beams were reflected back to their starting point, where they recombined. The experiment expected to find a time difference between the two beams due to the "aether wind," which would cause a shift in the interference pattern of the recombined light.

Rotation:

The entire apparatus was mounted on a floating platform and slowly rotated to check for changes in the interference pattern from different angles and at different times of the year.

 

The conclusion and significance

 

    Null Result:

    The experiment failed to find any significant shift in the interference fringes, which meant there was no detectable "aether wind".

 

Conclusion:

The experiment's most important conclusion was that the luminiferous aether does not exist. It demonstrated that the speed of light is constant for all observers, regardless of their motion.

Impact:

This "failed" experiment was crucial for the development of modern physics. It undermined the prevailing aether theories and provided strong evidence for Einstein's theory of special relativity, which is built on the principle that the speed of light is constant.

 

2. Can Science Reckon With the Human Soul? Murray, Charles.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Oct 2025: A13.