Are Emotions Evidence for the Existence of a Soul?

The Believer said, “I hope you’ve been thinking about the soul over the past week. In fact, I hope you’ve even found the answers to the questions you wanted to ask me about it, because the existence of the soul is something very clear and easy to see.”

The Skeptic replied, “The Argument from Design seemed clear and obvious to you too, but you saw how many problems it had. So don’t judge too quickly. Sometimes what seems completely obvious to us is nothing more than an error in the way our minds understand things. But now that you’ve brought it up... tell me, what exactly was I supposed to think about?”

“For example, if we don’t have a soul, how can we experience emotions such as love, hatred, fear, happiness, and sadness? Can all these emotions really be explained by a completely physical brain?”

“It seems that our emotions can be created or suppressed by chemical messengers and hormones produced inside the body, which act on receptors in brain cells. When a chemical messenger in the brain, such as dopamine, acetylcholine, or serotonin—or a hormone released by an endocrine gland, such as adrenaline from the adrenal glands—acts on receptors in brain cells, it can affect our mood and emotions. If the release of these substances is blocked, or if a drug prevents these chemical messengers from acting on receptors in the brain, our emotions can be affected and controlled. Drugs that imitate the action of these chemical messengers on nerve-cell receptors can also produce similar feelings.

“This is basically how many drugs that affect the nervous system work. They may imitate the action of chemical messengers, block their effects, increase their release, or sometimes make them remain in the brain longer by preventing their breakdown. Chemical messengers in the brain, hormones, medications, and chemical drugs can affect the whole range of human emotions—from happiness, anger, depression, and excitement to even a mother’s love for her child. If our emotions depend so heavily on chemical substances, why should we assume that a non-material element such as a soul is needed to produce them?”

Are Sleep and Dreams Evidence for the Existence of a Soul?

The Believer asked, “What about sleep and dreams? How can you explain the fact that while we sleep, our soul travels to other places and meets different people?”

The Skeptic replied, “Actually, some chemical drugs can cause nightmares1. That itself is evidence that our dreams are images created by the brain. If our soul really left the body and traveled elsewhere, how could a drug tell our soul where to go—to somewhere pleasant or somewhere frightening?”

An Argument for the Existence of the Soul

The Believer said, “Very well... If you think none of these things are evidence for the existence of a soul, then let me prove its existence with an argument. But first, tell me what questions you wanted to ask at the end of our last meeting.”

The Skeptic replied, “I think you gave me a summary of your argument at the end of our discussion last week. The central point was this: first, you believed that the soul exists, and second, you believed that it is non-material. You then argued that the joining of something non-material with matter cannot be explained by chance or natural processes, so an intelligent and powerful creator must be involved.

“Now I want you to prove that the basic parts of your argument are correct. First, tell me how you know that the soul exists. Obviously, before you can prove that the soul exists, you have to tell me what the soul is.”

The Believer said, “When we examine matter, we see that it can be divided into its smaller parts. A rock can be split into two pieces, and those pieces can then be divided into still smaller pieces. In fact, when we speak of ‘one rock,’ we mean something that appears to the observer as a single object. But in reality, it is not truly ‘one object.’ It is made up of countless smaller units.

“Our minds mislead us into treating the rock as a single thing. It seems to us that we are talking about ‘one thing,’ when in fact the rock is not one single entity. It is made up of smaller things, each of which exists in its own right. When we divide the rock into smaller pieces, we realize that half of the rock, a quarter of it, and an eighth of it were all there from the beginning, together in one place. Because these smaller units of matter are joined together, we mistakenly see the object they form as a single thing and give it a name. Giving it a name then strengthens the illusion, making us even more certain that it is one distinct thing with an independent nature.

“We think of Mount Damavand as ‘one’ object. But Mount Damavand is really a concept created by our minds. The physical reality of Mount Damavand2 is the independent parts that make it up, all the way down to things smaller than atoms. Whatever the basic units of matter may be—electrons, quarks, and so on—those are the real independent parts of Mount Damavand, and each has a real existence of its own. If these particles were self-aware like us, they might not even know that they were part of a great mountain. An electron in one of the atoms of Mount Damavand exists in its own right. It is our mind that separates one enormous collection of countless particles within a certain geographical area from the other collections of particles around it—the surrounding mountains and land—forms a single image of that particular collection, and attaches the name ‘Damavand’ to it.

“Now imagine that every real component of Mount Damavand were conscious and self-aware and could understand our language. Suppose you stood in front of the mountain and said, ‘Hello, Mount Damavand!’

“Since there is actually no single being called Mount Damavand, all those components—electrons, quarks, or whatever other fundamental, independent, indivisible particles there may be—would answer, ‘Were you talking to me?’

“If you told them, ‘No, I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to Mount Damavand,’ they would reply, ‘There is no such thing as Mount Damavand for you to greet and for it to answer you. We are the things that actually exist.’

“Now look at you and me in the same way. Imagine that every particle making up our bodies were conscious and self-aware and could speak. If I said hello to you and every particle in your body asked, ‘Were you talking to me?’ I could answer, ‘No. I was talking to a self called the Skeptic.’ A self that, unlike Mount Damavand or your body and mine, cannot be divided into smaller parts. A self that is one. An ‘I’ that cannot be imagined as being divided into two separate ‘I’s.

“We can imagine every part of our body being divided into smaller and smaller units until we reach units that exist independently and can no longer be divided. But we cannot imagine the same thing happening to a person’s ‘I.’

“Our ‘I’ is a single, indivisible unit. There is no such thing as ‘half of me,’ and there cannot be. If we imagine your ‘I’ being divided into two ‘I’s, only one of them could be you. The other would be another ‘I’—not you, but someone else.

“What I mean is that there is something within our body and our existence that, unlike any of our organs, cannot be divided into smaller parts. It is indivisible. Like a fundamental particle, it cannot be broken down or divided into anything smaller than itself. We can call this unit the ‘I,’ the ‘self,’ or the ‘soul.’

“This unit cannot be any of the physical units that make up our bodies. Our bodies are material, and their basic units are unconscious electrons and quarks. We cannot say that a human being’s ‘I’ is simply one of those units. How could the complex human ‘I’ be the same kind of thing as a simple physical unit such as an electron or a quark?

“A person’s ‘I’ is indivisible, and since it cannot be compared with any of the indivisible physical units, the human ‘I’ must be a non-material unit.

“So you see, we are forced to accept that we are dealing with something non-material. Our ‘I,’ or our ‘soul,’ is an indivisible unit placed within our body. There is no way to explain such a combination through physical chance alone. This is where we need the hand of a powerful and purposeful creator.”

The Skeptic said, “Give me a few minutes to think about what you’ve said. I don’t want to answer just for the sake of answering. I need to make sure I understand you correctly.”

For a few minutes, the Skeptic watched the cars moving along the street outside the window. From his unfocused gaze, it was clear that he wasn’t really looking at anything in particular. He was deep in thought. Finally, he turned back to the Believer and said:

“You seem to be right about one thing. I can imagine losing any part of my body—a hand, a foot, an eye, an ear, my tongue—and still remaining ‘me.’

“I can even imagine my brain being divided into two and two ‘selves’ resulting from it. But even then, I would have to accept that only one of those selves could be me. The other ‘self’ would not be me. It would be someone else. That other self produced by dividing my brain could not be ‘half of me.’ Either I am entirely ‘me,’ or I am not me at all. Being half of ‘me’ makes no sense. There is no such thing as ‘half a me.’

“Very well... Let’s assume you’re right and that the ‘I’ is a single unit that cannot be divided. The question now is whether my ‘I’ must necessarily be non-material, or whether matter itself, under certain conditions, might be able to produce an indivisible unit such as the human self. In fact, this brings us back to the question of being amazed.”

The Believer was taken aback and replied with some irritation, “What does being amazed have to do with this? That was part of the Argument from Design.”

“Look. You and I imagine that the basic units of matter are probably electrons, quarks, and the other apparently fundamental particles discovered so far. We assume that each of these possibly indivisible units exists independently of the others and that even when it comes together with other particles, it remains an independent unit.

“We think that the basic units of matter each occupy their own space and that it is impossible for them, together with other fundamental particles, to form a single, indivisible whole. We assume that they cannot come together in such a way that their separate identities disappear and a new, completely unified and indivisible entity is formed.”

“You shouldn’t say that such an entity merely appears indivisible,” the Believer said. “The word ‘appears’ suggests that it only looks indivisible, while we don’t know whether its individual parts still remain independent underneath. But when we think about our own ‘I,’ we realize that the unity of our self is not merely an appearance. At every moment, our ‘I’ really is one indivisible ‘I.’ That is also why we expect this unit to continue to exist after death, when the body breaks down and the particles that make up the brain separate from one another.”

The Skeptic stared outside the restaurant again. After a few minutes, still looking outside, he said, “I can see an assumption in what you’re saying. You assume that, under no circumstances, can the particles of matter in our brain produce our ‘self,’ our ‘I,’ or, in modern terms, our ‘consciousness.’ In other words, you assume that you understand matter very well.”

He turned toward the Believer and continued:

“You take it as an absolute truth that particles of matter each exist within their own limited space and that it is impossible for them, under special conditions and for certain periods of time, to interact in such a way that they produce a new single entity—something like the human self. Something we might call ‘consciousness,’ the ‘self,’ the ‘I,’ or even, as you call it, the ‘soul.’”

The Believer asked, “Do you really think our understanding of matter is that wrong? Do you think particles can somehow stop being particles, merge together, and form an ‘I,’ but whenever we look at them, they turn back into particles again? Do you think that whenever we aren’t looking at the components of the brain, they magically merge into an indivisible ‘I,’ but the moment we look at them, they appear again as separate electrons and other smaller fundamental particles?”

“No. I’m not suggesting any kind of magic trick. What I mean is that we have never directly seen electrons, protons, neutrons, or the particles smaller than protons and neutrons. We have never seen magnetic fields, gravity, the weak force, or the strong force. More precisely, we know about them only through our senses and through the effects that matter and fields have on our senses or on our instruments.

“We humans have a major limitation: we can never directly know the true nature of matter or the objects around us. We can only experience the effects they have on our senses or our instruments. Our contact with the matter around us is indirect.

“By analyzing experiments performed by scientists, we form mental pictures of matter, electrons, and quarks. But we don’t know what these things truly are. To make matter easier to understand, we create a picture of it in our minds. We imagine electrons, protons, and other objects around us as having a particular location and a particular mass, moving from one place to another along some path. But the question is: is this really the true nature of matter? Can we truly understand physical fields such as magnetic and gravitational fields? Do we really know what they are and everything they are capable of doing?

“In past centuries, whenever people couldn’t explain a phenomenon, they quickly attributed it to supernatural powers. Today, many of those phenomena can be explained scientifically. So just because we cannot currently explain how consciousness—or what you call the soul—arises, are we justified in immediately turning to a supernatural being like God and bringing him into the explanation?”

The Believer replied, “You seem to be missing the point. It isn’t simply that we cannot explain it. The point is that, for the reasons I gave, matter cannot possibly form an indivisible entity such as the soul or the ‘I.’ The units of matter are electrons, quarks, and things like them, and an entity such as the ‘I’ or consciousness cannot be any one of these. So we have to accept that this ‘I’ is not produced by matter and is not an indivisible material unit.”

The Skeptic said, “But your argument assumes that you already understand matter. You assume that you know exactly what units it consists of and exactly what those units are capable of. Do you really know everything matter is capable of? For that matter, do you even know the exact nature of matter itself?”

“Perhaps I don’t know everything matter is capable of. But I know that some of the information in my brain is stored on the right side and some on the left; some is in the front and some in the back. Yet the units that make up my brain—electrons and quarks—each remain wherever they are. So whatever forms my soul, or what you call consciousness, and has access to information throughout my brain, whether it is in the front or the back, cannot be any one of those material units. It must be another kind of entity with a different nature—one that is present in both the front and the back of my brain, and on both the right and the left. Material units are not like that. Therefore, my soul must be non-material.

“We have an intuitive understanding of matter that cannot simply be denied. We may not know exactly what matter is, but our intuition tells us that matter consists of separate units, each with an independent existence. An electron exists independently. So does a quark, or whatever fundamental and indivisible unit may be discovered in the future. Each exists at some point in space and exists only there, even though it can affect other places.

“We cannot reasonably say that because one of these units can affect nearby particles through an electric or gravitational field, or through the strong nuclear force, it must therefore also have the range and complexity needed to create an entity such as the soul or consciousness.”

The Skeptic replied, “There was a time when almost everyone in the world was intuitively certain that the Sun and the stars revolved around the Earth and that the Earth stood at the center of the universe. Do you think your intuition could never be wrong?

“Intuition means a direct and immediate understanding of something. But remember: you can never directly experience the true nature of matter. You experience only its effects on your senses. So how can you speak of an infallible intuition about matter? Human senses can mislead people for an entire lifetime, just as they did with the feeling that the Earth was at the center of everything.”

The Believer said, “Do you think I concluded that matter is made of independent units simply by looking at objects and touching them? Haven’t dozens—hundreds—of modern scientific discoveries supported this view? If a scientific claim is confirmed by many experiments and observations and is also consistent with many other well-established observations and findings, can’t we be confident that it is true?”

The Skeptic asked, “Do you think your picture of matter is completely consistent with all other scientific discoveries? Are there no conflicts at all that might give you reason to be less certain?”

“You think otherwise? At least when it comes to the basic units of matter, do you have another view? Can we understand matter in some other way that would allow us to explain an indivisible entity such as the soul or consciousness as something produced by matter?”

Quantum Physics and Why God Is Not Needed to Explain the Creation of Consciousness

The Skeptic asked, “Have you heard anything about quantum physics?”

“I know a little about it. What do you mean?”

“I’m going to use an example from discoveries made about the nature of matter roughly a hundred years ago to show you that what you call an intuitive understanding of matter may not only be wrong—it is definitely wrong.”

The Believer replied, “Then your example had better be directly related to the very thing I call my intuitive understanding of matter. If you talk about something else and then try to stretch your example until it includes my intuition too, I won’t accept it.”

The Skeptic laughed. “You become quite strict when you want to defend your position and criticize my argument. Fair enough. I understand what you mean. I’m talking about exactly the same intuitive picture of matter that you used to argue for the existence of the soul.

“Like everyone else, you think of particles of matter as things that have mass and occupy space. In other words, whether we are talking about a football, an atom, or an electron, you have no doubt that the object exists within a limited region of space. Its electric field or gravitational field may extend outward, but the part that has mass is located within a certain spatial boundary. And it is precisely this limited boundary that makes us think of one football or one electron as something separate from other footballs or electrons—as something with an independent existence.

“So far, do you have any problem with that?”

The Believer looked at him uncertainly. “Can you explain a little more?”

“When a football is here on this table, can you accept that the very same football, at the very same time, is also on every other table? ... Or not?

“And when I say ‘the same football,’ I don’t mean its gravitational effects or anything like that. I mean the football itself, with its whole existence.”

The Skeptic watched the Believer’s hesitant expression for a few seconds, then continued:

“Let me ask it another way. Where is your spoon right now?”

“In my plate.”

“And do you feel that with complete certainty, almost intuitively?”

“I know it through my senses, but yes, I’m certain that it is in my plate.”

“Good. Then I would describe your position like this: when you see your spoon in your plate and touch it, you do not know of its presence directly, but through your senses. Still, you have so many different kinds of evidence that you do not doubt that the spoon is there. And you treat that certainty almost as if it were intuition—as if you had direct and immediate access to the truth that the spoon is in your plate.

“You touch the spoon. You look at it. You tap it against the plate and hear the sound. I can see it too, and so can everyone else in the restaurant. You also remember using that same spoon to put food in your mouth, so your memory supports the same conclusion. All these pieces of evidence point in the same direction. That is why you call it an absolute fact. For you and me, there is simply no stronger way of reaching certainty than having all these different kinds of evidence agree.

“Your experiences with the physical objects around you are mostly like this. After years of living with them and millions of small and large experiences, you no longer doubt that every object has mass and occupies a limited region of space. Mass and a definite spatial location now seem to you like obvious properties of physical objects.”

“Yes,” said the Believer. “I think that’s basically right. After all, my whole life is full of experiences with physical objects, including my own body. All my observations fit this picture of matter. A philosopher may tell me that I never perceive physical objects directly and that I do not really know the true nature of matter, but I can hardly treat that as anything more than a philosophical game.

“I cannot simply turn my back on the huge number of consistent observations I have made and refuse to use my understanding of matter in an argument about the soul. I cannot just say that maybe this simple and apparently undeniable picture of matter is wrong and therefore cannot be used as the basis of an argument.

“If even this simple but strongly supported understanding of matter, confirmed by my experience at every moment of my life, cannot be trusted, then what philosophical conclusion or argument can be trusted? What can we ever be certain of? What can we base our reasoning on? In fact... what beliefs can we even build our lives on?”

The Skeptic asked, “Do you have a piece of paper?”

“Yes... Here, take it, you disorganized man. You come here for a philosophical debate and don’t even bring a pen and paper?”

Laughing, the Skeptic began drawing some shapes on the paper as he explained:

“Imagine that you have a device that fires small pellets randomly toward a wall. Between the launcher and the wall, you place a barrier with two narrow openings in it.

“Now close one of the openings and turn on the launcher. Then examine where the pellets that pass through the open slit hit the wall.

“You find that most of them strike one region of the wall behind the barrier, and the farther you move away from that region, the fewer impacts you see.”

“If you were to draw a graph showing how the impacts on the wall are distributed, it would look like this:”

“Now, if you close slit one and open slit two, and start firing the pellets again, the distribution of hits on the wall will have the same shape. This time, however, the largest number of hits will be on the other side of the wall—the side directly opposite slit two. The distribution of hits will now look like this:”

“Now you open both slits and start firing the pellets. Naturally, you would expect the distribution of hits on the wall to be the sum of these two distributions.”

The Believer said, “Yes... How could it be otherwise?”

The Skeptic replied, “It couldn’t. The distribution would look like this—in fact, it would simply be the sum of the two previous distributions:”

The Skeptic showed the Believer the graph he had drawn and continued:

“Now suppose we perform this experiment in a container of water.

“We place a barrier with two slits in a container filled with still water. We open one of the slits and tap the surface of the water with a finger. The resulting wave reaches the slit. The part of the wave that reaches the slit passes through it and, like a new wave, begins to spread out from the other side.

“The farther this new wave travels from the slit, the weaker it becomes and the lower its height. When it reaches the part of the opposite wall closest to the slit, its height is greatest. The farther away the point where it reaches the wall, the weaker and lower the wave becomes.”

“If we draw a graph showing the height of the wave when it reaches the wall, the wave will be highest at the point directly opposite the slit, and its height will decrease the farther from that point it reaches the wall. The graph will look like this:”

“We would expect that if we close slit one and open slit two, we will get a similar graph on the other side.”

The Believer asked, “Could it be otherwise?”

“No. Nothing different happens. Now, if we open both slits, what will our graph look like?”

“I know what happens. If we open both slits, each wave created when we tap the water with our finger spreads across the surface and moves forward until it reaches the two slits. At the slits, the part of the wave that passes through each one begins to spread forward like a new wave. So beyond the slits, we will have two waves.

“These waves interfere with each other at certain points. Where the crest of one wave meets the crest of the other, the two crests add together and form a higher crest. Where the trough of one wave meets the crest of the other, they cancel each other out. At that point, the water moves neither up nor down, but remains still.”

“The pattern that appears on the opposite wall will also be the result of this interference. Where two crests meet, the water reaches a higher point on the wall. Where a crest and a trough meet, they cancel each other out and the water does not move at all. A graph showing this interference pattern in terms of the height at which the water reaches the wall would look like this.”

The Believer took the pen from the Skeptic’s hand and drew the interference pattern:

The Skeptic said, “Exactly. So each wave passes through both slits. In other words, we begin with one wave, but that wave spreads out, passes through both slits, and divides into two waves. Each of these new waves then spreads out again. Depending on where it reaches the wall and how it interferes with the other wave, it will strike the wall at a certain height.

“Now let’s see what happens if we perform this experiment with a tiny fundamental particle of matter, such as an electron.

“This time, instead of a device that fires pellets, we use an electron gun. And beyond the barrier with the two slits, instead of a wall, we place a screen that detects where the electrons hit—a detector.

“Now we open one slit and fire the electrons one at a time. The pattern produced by the electrons hitting the detector is similar to the pattern we obtained with the pellets, and also with the water wave when only one slit was open3. In other words, the electrons are most likely to hit the part of the detector directly opposite the open slit, and the farther we move away from that point, the fewer hits we observe.”

“The important point is that each electron hits only one point. So we conclude that an electron is a particle. What I mean is that the electron does not behave like a wave. Each water wave, once created, spread out and affected the whole wall. But an electron affects only one point, and in this respect its behavior is completely particle-like.”

The Believer said, “That is exactly what we would expect.”

The Skeptic replied, “Right. From what we know about particles of matter such as electrons and protons, each particle is confined to a particular region of space, and its existence and mass are located within that region, even if it also creates a field around itself, such as a gravitational or electric field. In any case, the particle itself exists within its own limited region. That is one of the basic features of a particle, and it matches our ordinary understanding of material particles—the same understanding that you called intuitive, or at least close to intuitive.”

The Believer said, “So far, I don’t see any problem.”

“So far, no one does. Everything still supports our ordinary picture of matter and material particles.

“Now we open both slits and fire the electrons one at a time. Notice that we do not fire several electrons together. We send them through separately, one by one. We would expect that if an electron passes through slit one, then, like a pellet, it passes only through that slit. Whether the other slit is open or closed should make no difference to an electron that has taken the path through slit one, just as it made no difference in the pellet experiment.

“But what we observe is completely unexpected.

“When both slits are open, the electrons hit the detector in such a way that they appear in some regions and do not appear at all in others. The regions where no electrons are detected are regions that would receive hits if only one slit were open. But when both slits are open, those regions receive no hits.

“Remember, the electrons are fired one at a time and at separate moments. They do not interfere with one another, and they do not block or disturb one another as they pass through the slits.

“After a very large number of individual electrons have been fired, the distribution of hits on the detector looks like the interference pattern produced by water waves. In that experiment too, there were regions along the wall where the water remained still and did not move up or down.”

The Skeptic said, “This graph, and the pattern formed by the electrons hitting the detector, make it look as though each electron somehow ‘knows’ that both slits are open and passes through both of them like a wave. After passing through the slits, two new waves seem to emerge from that single electron, and these two waves interfere with each other. But when the individual electron reaches the detector and has to reveal itself, it can no longer behave like a water wave and affect the entire detector. At that point, the electron seems to choose just one spot on the detector where it will appear, and the waves become a single electron again.”

The Believer said, “I don’t understand! Are you saying that the electron becomes like a wave and is no longer a particle located at a particular point in space? What is this wave? What exactly is waving?”

“Physicists do not claim to know what this wave actually is. But to explain the phenomenon, they treat what is ‘waving’ as the probability of finding the electron, rather than the electron itself. It is as though these probability waves pass through the two slits and interfere with each other. When they reach the detector, they reinforce each other in some places. At those points, the probability that the electron will appear on the detector is greatest. In other places, these ‘probability waves’ cancel each other out. At those points on the detector, the probability of the electron appearing is zero.”

The Believer said, “I don’t understand! ... Probability is a number. Are you saying that instead of a physical object with mass and real existence, what moves through space and, as you put it, ‘waves,’ is numbers?

“Numbers exist in the mind, not in space. Space is where real things exist.”

The Believer fell silent for a few moments. Resting his head in his hands on the table and staring at his plate, he said, “Numbers moving through space, adding and subtracting from one another in space, and in the end merely determining the probability of finding an electron at each point—without making its presence there certain!!!”

Then he raised his head and looked at the Skeptic.

“How does the electron decide which possibility to choose? There must be many points where the probability of finding the electron is not zero. How does the electron choose one of them? Are you sure what you’re telling me is correct?”

The Skeptic replied, “Look... What I’ve described is an interpretation of experimental observations—an interpretation developed by physicists. The discoveries of the strange events that occur at the quantum level, the level of very small particles, made one thing clear to scientists: what they had previously believed about the nature of matter was wrong. No one yet knows exactly what matter truly is. But our ordinary, everyday picture of matter—the picture that human beings have generally shared—is certainly not an accurate description of reality.

“Over roughly the past century, further study of quantum theory and observations at the quantum level has only made one thing increasingly clear: the human mind seems unable to form an intuitive picture of the true nature of matter.

“Before quantum phenomena were observed, there were already logical and philosophical reasons to question our indirect understanding of matter. We had to allow for the possibility that our picture of matter might be wrong. But now we know that it is not merely a matter of ‘perhaps.’ Our ordinary picture of the basic units of matter is certainly incomplete or wrong. Matter is simply not what we once imagined it to be.

“And since we have not fully understood the nature of matter, we cannot say that matter is incapable of producing something like consciousness. So the argument you gave for proving that consciousness—or the soul or the self—must be non-material no longer has a foundation. Perhaps matter can produce the unified experience of consciousness without the intervention of an all-knowing and all-powerful God. In any case, you no longer have an argument for claiming that it cannot.”

The Believer asked, “Can you prove that matter by itself can produce consciousness in the brain?”

“You were the one trying to use consciousness, or the soul, as a way of proving the existence of God. You tried to prove that matter could not possibly produce something like the soul. You tried to prove that the soul could not be material. You claimed that you understood matter well enough to know that something like consciousness could not arise from it.

“Now we have seen that you do not know the true nature of matter. So you have to abandon that argument. We cannot keep attributing everything we are still unable to explain to God. After thousands of years, it is time to leave that way of reasoning behind.”

The Believer picked up the papers on the table and looked through them one by one. Then he said, “I need to read more about quantum physics and see what it actually says. We’ll talk again next week.”