Dan Barker on Consciousness and the soul
Barker rejects the soul as a concept left over from prescientific thinking, pointing to neuroscience's progressive explanation of consciousness.
Barker approaches the soul from a naturalist perspective, arguing that everything traditionally attributed to the soul — consciousness, personality, moral sense, the feeling of personal identity — is now understood to be a function of the brain. Brain damage changes personality. Anaesthesia eliminates consciousness. Alzheimer's disease progressively erases the self. If the soul exists independently of the brain, these observations are inexplicable.
He draws on his personal experience of deconversion to make the point vivid. As a preacher, he believed in the soul with absolute certainty — it was the foundation of his theology of salvation. Losing that belief was painful but ultimately liberating, because it forced him to confront the reality that consciousness is precious precisely because it is finite.
Barker also raises the theological difficulties that the soul creates rather than solves. At what point in human evolution did souls first appear? Do Neanderthals have souls? Do severely brain-damaged humans? These questions have no principled answers within soul-based frameworks, which suggests that the framework is wrong.
“If the soul is who we really are, then brain damage shouldn't change who we are. But it does. Every time.”