Richard Dawkins on Consciousness and the soul
Dawkins regards the soul as a prescientific concept that neuroscience has rendered unnecessary.
Dawkins approaches the soul question as a biologist: consciousness is what brains do, and brains are products of evolution. There is no evidence for an immaterial soul, and the concept does no explanatory work that neuroscience cannot do better. Brain damage alters personality, anaesthesia eliminates consciousness, and death ends it.
He acknowledges that consciousness is subjectively remarkable but denies that this warrants a supernatural explanation. The argument from personal incredulity — 'I can't imagine how consciousness arises from matter, therefore it must be immaterial' — is, in Dawkins's view, simply an argument from ignorance.
Dawkins points out that the soul hypothesis raises more problems than it solves: when does the soul enter the body? Do animals have souls? Do embryos? The concept is not merely unsupported by evidence — it generates a thicket of unanswerable questions that dissolve the moment we accept a naturalistic account of mind.
“What is it about the human brain, the human mind, that could possibly be immune to the scrutiny of science?”