The premise that the soul does not exist has practical consequences in society. If there is no soul, then there is no final destination where evil is punished and good rewarded forever. Morality itself becomes irrelevant…
Evolutionists rarely proclaim their incompatibility with Christianity so as not to alarm Christians. They will generally try to present evolution as a purely scientific theory that seeks to explain the origins of the universe. If religious people have a problem, it is their narrow vision that is to blame, not the theory itself.
I have always viewed this perspective as dishonest. It is obvious to me that this debate goes beyond science. The liberal media and educational establishment put too much emphasis on a process that can only be truly verified by going back millions of years (obviously, something no one can do).
Liberals lose no opportunity to introduce evolution into any narrative. It seems that no tourist site or museum can be left without some reference to evolution taking place eons ago.
The debate about evolution impassions both the left and the right, liberals and conservatives, atheists and Christians. No one seems content to leave it in the dark and distant past. No one becomes impassioned about something that is not important. Therefore, the evolution debate must be important.
A Common-Sense Rejection of Evolution
At the same time, I have always thought it ironic that, despite all the propaganda in favor of the theory of evolution, so few Americans actually believe in it. We are supposed to be the nation of technology and progress.
Yet a 2012 Gallop poll, for example, found that only fifteen percent of Americans believe that man is the product of Darwin’s ape-to-human natural selection process alone. Some forty-six percent believe in Creation by God alone. The others are somewhere in the middle. It appears that most people do not have sufficient faith in science to believe in the highly improbable hit-and-miss narrative over billions of years.
Indeed, it takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution. To explain a world of evident intelligent design, it is much more commonsensical to believe in God as Creator.
Evolution Means There is No Soul
Thus, the debate rages mainly in the scientific fields. Although Creation supporters debate well in this field, few see evolution as a grave danger to philosophy, theology or Christianity as a whole.
That is why I was surprised to find a recent bestseller that just plain said it. Curiously, historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, recounts his musings about the undue importance given to evolution as opposed to other scientific theories. He sought to find out why modernity needs evolution to progress.
And when he finds out, he bluntly says it: “If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul.”
Dr. Harari is an important writer who enjoys the greatest prestige and support from the liberal establishment. His books have been on the New York Times bestseller lists and enjoy endorsement from figures like former President Barack Obama and Bill Gates. It is safe to say that his views represent the cutting edge of liberal thought.
The Soul is Rejected by Science, Therefore It Does Not Exist
Dr. Harari explains why evolution means there is no soul. This is because the immortal, immutable, and indivisible soul simply cannot fit into a narrative that is changeable, divisible, and selective. Evolution only works when the being that is evolving has parts that can change, mutate, and thus evolve. The soul has no parts. “Something that cannot be divided or changed cannot have come into existence through natural selection,” Dr. Harari concludes.
His logic is very clear: The existence of souls is incompatible with the theory of evolution since the process cannot produce everlasting entities. Everything is mutable. To him, souls are something we, as humans, created to assure our immortal future in an imagined afterlife. Thus, he says that the whole scientific establishment rejects the notion of the soul and have never found proof of its existence. As it cannot be scientifically observed, the soul does not exist.
The Consequences of Evolutionary Theory
This explains why radical liberals like evolution so much. Christianity exists for the salvation of souls. The role of religion is to link souls to God and prepare them for their eternal destiny. If there is no soul, there can be no God. Religion makes no sense. Thus, it is not by chance that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the adherents of religion and those who really understand evolution’s full implications.
The premise that the soul does not exist has practical consequences in society. If there is no soul, then there is no final destination where evil is punished and good rewarded forever. Morality itself becomes irrelevant. As Dr. Harari claims, man becomes reduced to a conscious animal governed by pre-determined impulses without free will.
Such a society corresponds to the dialectic materialism espoused by Karl Marx and is carried forth by liberal thought to our day. Scholars like Dr. Harari at least have the honesty to admit the essential role of evolution in forming the society they see for the future.
These scholars looking into the future also proclaim their opposition to those who cling to a society based on what Russell Kirk called the “permanent things.” An evolutionary order cannot come to terms with permanent norms of courage, duty, courtesy, justice, and charity, which owe their existence and authority to a transcendent God.
Thus, the battle lines are drawn. Most people defending a Divine order implicitly sense incompatibility between the two worldviews, although they do not know how to express it clearly. The evolutionists know better the brutal laws of evolution yet dare not state them bluntly. The result is a situation that leads to many people, as Dr. Harari rightly claims, prefering “to reject the theory of evolution rather than give up their souls.”
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An interesting piece. In an argument online a few years ago, a left wing atheist openly referred to people as “Soulless Meat Machines”, which led another person on the site, a liberal, to opine “Well, I think I have a soul” (note the tentative nature of his opinion in response to such a blunt and brutal statement).
There is not a question that evolution occurs. The fact that it does does not negate the presence of a soul. You appear to be arguing against humanism rather than evolution….
Since there has never been any proof of evolution presented (the missing link is still missing), it seems that the evolutionist side is quite pompous in presenting it as established science, which it isn’t established at all.
Even those involved in science in centuries gone-by did not believe in the “little beasties” that existed in water and other aspects of the environment until the microscope came along. Just because science can’t measure something, or see it, does not mean it doesn’t exist. It means science is still too primitive to understand how to measure or see it.
In my journey of faith, I knew there was a God, I just didn’t know or understand how to communicate to Him or in what way I should worship Him. Fortunately for me, even though at age of 40, I happened to encounter God through one of His appointed visionaries. I received a healing, and then was over the next few years blessed with encountering more visionaries, receiving more healings, experiencing the Holy Spirit several times, and ending up meeting Maria Esperanza in 1997. All of these experiences confirmed for me that God existed, that the soul is who you are, and the body is just a vessel to contain the soul within this physical world.
Science may never be able to prove the existence of the soul, or measure it; though science is not the final word on whether there is a soul or not. Faith is what allows you to see and experience the soul, not science.
I wish everyone could experience what I did, or what the visionaries have experienced, as it goes so far beyond the limited range and understanding of this mere physical existence. It would bring so many to know and have an understanding of God, even though not a complete knowledge or understanding, and there would be no more questions of whether or not there is a God.
Science is what it is, the human race’s means of trying to explain something it doesn’t know or understand, but only in the physical world. When science dares to venture into the spiritual world, which it never will, they would see and know just how little they think they see and know.
Dr. Horvat, you may very well be right in your carefully argued article; and I believe you are. At the same time, I am intrigued by something G. K. Chesterton (who certainly believed in the human soul) wrote back in 1908: “If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.”
Chesterton speaks sweet reason here. The theory of evolution is purely scientific in content; it concludes from the relevant data that species undergo adaptations according to their environment, via natural selection. Nothing about the human soul is implicated, since this is not within the purview of scientific inquiry. The trouble, it seems to me, is that we’re led to think it is, in part by the “creationists” who have unwittingly given up a ton of ground to materialism without realizing it. The fact that they view theological truths as being dependent on science *at all* is the issue.
His argument rests on the premise that the soul is immutable. An argument that goes against the philosophy, history and etymology of the soul. The Jews refer to layers of the soul. The old testament says a man and women threw marriage become one flesh, “two souls but one body”.
Greek history has it thus: “Empedocles and, apparently, Pythagoras (cf. Bremmer 1983, 125) thought that plants have souls, and that human souls, for instance, can come to animate plants.”
Further back the Egyptians, Persians and many other traditions have the creation of the cosmos, as well as souls, decedent from the Gods from which the parts were used of other gods and presumably souls. See as an example the mythology surrounding the descent from ciaos to the one in daoism or ciaos to the gods of all other major pre-monotheistic religions.
Evolution can exist with a soul. Just because there’s a bios that is mutable does not mean that a soul cannot exist (for the same reason Darwinianism doesn’t exclude Kantian reason or freedom). And this view here tends to ignore the possibility of miracles (suspension of natural laws and processes/rationality) or the fact that a creator has unlimited power. And makes the fallacy of thinking that such power has to be done logically (or understood logically). I.e. evolution exists in bios and physis and at some point soul (and free will) is granted to a species. This can be completely ad hoc and unaccounted for. To seek an account would be irrational because you’re seeking to understand it causally – something you can only do for natural entities, and natural processes.
Thank you for a possible explanation of a question I have not been able to resolve. Is your explanation consistent with position of the Catholic Church? I am not saying it has to be but I would like to know if there are resources I could consult that would more fully describe the explanation you provide. My problem is that the Church teaches animals have no soul only humans have souls. At what point in the evolutionary process or by what mechanism did the animal without a soul that we evolved from become an animal with a soul and therefore become a human?
G.K. CHESTERTON: “Evolution (that sinister enemy of revolution) does not especially deny the existence of God; what it does deny ifs the existence of man.”