Heaven, Hell and the Immortal Soul

So the traditional Christian view - at least, the one I was brought up with - is that every human has an immortal soul which resides somewhere within their body whilst they are alive, then goes to either Heaven or Hell when they die. I found this view problematic for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the idea of “Hell” as a place of eternal torment is, at best, ridiculous. Supposedly this is the punishment that we all deserve for our “sins,” so “God” who supposedly created us and loves us, will quite rightly send us there to suffer the worst pain imaginable for all eternity after we die (unless, of course, we have devoted our lives to worshipping him in gratitude for the blood sacrifice of his son, without which we couldn’t possibly be forgiven.) Now clearly this idea is abhorrent. I don’t believe that anybody deserves eternal punishment, a conviction I’m even surer of having heard Sam Harris talk about the illusion of “free will.” After all, what is the purpose of “punishment”? Surely it is a means of behaviour modification - anything beyond that is simply “revenge.” And so the idea of “everlasting punishment” is illogical and frankly, just cruel. Any God (or person) willing to inflict such punishment would not, in my opinion, be worthy of worship.

By contrast, “Heaven” is supposed to be this wonderful place where we will be perfectly happy in God’s presence forever. There is no pain, no suffering, indeed, no sin in “Heaven.” It is interesting to note that the people who believe this also believe that the reason those things exist on Earth is because we have “free will.” This of course raises the question of whether we would have “free will” in Heaven. The idea of Heaven itself is quite hard for me to believe in – but fortunately perhaps, as the idea of eternal existence is not entirely welcoming, I’m sure I’d be bored after a few billion years...

The problem with belief in a perfect afterlife is that it has the potential to stop people seeking to improve the one world we know exists. If people think the poor dying in Africa have eternal bliss to look forward to, why would they bother worrying about how to improve their lives on Earth? Perhaps these people will give a small amount to a charity to make them feel they have done something good and “pleased God” but many (admittedly, not all) religious people simply distance themselves from the problems on Earth, believing such things to be a part of “God’s plan.”

Finally, the idea that we each possess (or are) an immaterial soul may seem perfectly logical at first glance. People generally feel that their conscious mind is “who they are” and that this is somehow separate from, but in control of, their material body. This viewpoint of separate immaterial soul and material body is known as “dualism.” The most common criticism of this is the question of how an immaterial soul could affect a material body, but for me there were other, more pressing issues. One of the first problems for me was that Christians usually claimed that humans were the only species to have a soul. This seemed to be at odds with the apparent “proof” that was the conscious mind, as other species of animal were clearly conscious. But then even if I assumed that all conscious animals had some sort of “soul” there was the problem of where to draw the line. Were there different kinds of souls with differing levels of complexity? And if the “soul” was what gave life to an organism, would plants also then necessarily have some kind of soul? And what about cells in a Petri dish?

Going back to the assumption that humans alone possess a soul, there are still many unanswerable questions. At what point does the soul enter the body? Many religious people argue that this happens at the moment of conception – when the sperm fuses with the egg cell. But if this is the case, then what are we to make of identical twins, where a single zygote (fertilised egg) splits into two at some early point in development, and each half develops into a complete person? Has the “soul” present at fertilisation split into two? And what of chimeras, where two (genetically dissimilar) zygotes fuse to create a single person? Have two souls fused together in this person? Even if we assume that the soul does not enter the body until later in development, there are numerous problems. For example, research has shown that each half of the human brain can function independently, so theoretically half of a person’s brain could be transplanted into another body – and that person would continue to live as two separate people. In addition, the fact that drugs, brain damage, tumours, surgery and so on can affect a person’s thoughts, i.e. their conscious mind indicates that the mind is indeed a result of material brain physiology – and so on what grounds is an immortal soul assumed?

Even the Bible is not clear on this issue. For example, Ecclesiastes 9:5 says “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten,” which clearly suggests the absence of any kind of afterlife. Indeed this idea seems to appear late in Jewish history, being popular around the time of Jesus – which would explain its importance in Christian tradition today.