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| A “Hell Courtesan” surrounded by souls (Japan), the Soul of Pe (Ancient Egypt), and an angel carrying a soul (France). Public domain images and Janusz Recław via Wikimedia Commons. |
Who Believes in a Soul?
Belief in an immortal “soul” that contains part/all of a person’s consciousness and that separates from the body at death is nearly universal among human beings and cultures. A recent survey found that about 74% of people believe in a soul.
Whether a soul travels to heaven, is reincarnated into a new body, or remains nearby as an ancestral spirit, these beliefs feature in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shinto, Bahá’í, and Zoroastrianism.
In some other religions, people have multiple souls, only some of which are immortal. This belief appears in several indigenous, shamanistic, and ancient religions (e.g., Ancient Egypt), including people who are Native American, African Kongo, Chinese, and Austronesian.
A minority of groups do not believe in immortal souls. For example, Buddhists do not believe in an eternal “self,” while the Maasai (from Kenya) believe that death is when consciousness ends (sometimes called “extinctivism”). Atheists and other skeptics are also likely to hold extinctivist beliefs, while some early forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Greek religion regarded the soul as inseparable from the body.
What Causes People to Believe in Souls?
Widespread belief in souls is unsurprising when you think about what happens when someone dies. At death, a body is left behind, and an invisible “thing” that animated them is gone (consciousness, personality, memories, beliefs, desires, etc.). The inevitable question is: where did this invisible thing (or “soul”) go to?
We live in a world where matter changes state rather than vanishing. Trees are converted into dwellings, animal fur into clothing, and rocks into tools. Because of this, we might intuitively wonder where the souls of our loved ones have gone, and sadness about our loss might motivate a belief that they “continue somewhere else” (e.g., an afterlife) or are “still here but invisible” (e.g., ancestral spirits).
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| The soul leaving the body. An artwork by Luigi Schiavonetti (1810). Public domain image. |
The extent to which soul beliefs are motivated by sadness is debatable. Significantly, however, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that people have intuitions that make the idea of a soul seem especially plausible.
Intuitions are things that we expect or understand without being taught. For example, we intuitively expect objects to be solid, to move in a continuous path when pushed, and to fall when dropped. We also expect mindful beings to move in accordance with their goals and to cooperate with friends rather than foes. These intuitions may be innate, which is why babies and young children are surprised when their expectations are violated (e.g., in videos).
Intuitions also govern the attitudes of adults when there is less time to think reflectively. We may call them instincts or “trusting your gut,” and they can represent a conflict between your unconscious mind and your reflective, explicitly-stated beliefs.
The sections below describe five intuitions that make it exceedingly difficult for people to not believe in souls. (This does not mean that souls are real. It just means that our unconscious minds trick us into believing in them.)
How Did We Evolve to Believe in Souls?
The five intuitions below are likely to be products of evolution. However, they did not necessarily evolve to give us a belief in souls. They may have evolved for other reasons, and soul belief was just a byproduct. These intuitions have been described in more detail by Paul Bloom and by Jesse Bering in his scientific paper “The Folk Psychology of Souls.”
The “Dualism” Intuition
Dualism is the belief that the mind is immaterial and distinct from the material body. Dualism therefore implies that minds are independent of, and separable from, bodies, which would certainly make it easier to believe in eternal souls that leave the body at death (if souls are like minds).
There are several reasons to think that dualism is intuitive. First, we habitually refer to our bodies like possessions (e.g., “my body,” “my brain”) that we inhabit rather than identify with. Second, it is surprisingly easy to make sense of narratives in which minds leave or switch bodies (e.g., the film Big), and several indigenous societies have independently developed beliefs about spirit possession. Third, the intuitions that we apply to objects (e.g., they move in continuous lines) differ from those we apply to mindful people (e.g., they move to achieve goals).
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| Are we our brains? Or do we just inhabit our brains? Image via Pixabay. |
Although dualism could be learned through religious training and colloquial language or deciphered from experiences such as dreaming and involuntary bodily functions, the fact that so many religions and societies from around the world have independently developed dualistic beliefs suggests that part of our evolved psychology is “giving it a push.”
Consistent with this view, a psychological study found that five-month-old babies became surprised when a physical object moved behind one barrier and re-emerged from behind another, but they were not surprised when a person did the same. The results suggested that we are born with the intuition that people are more than just physical objects.
Another study involved telling children a story about a mouse that was eaten by an alligator. When questioned, most of the children said that the mouse's biological states had ceased (hunger, growth, brain function, etc.), but far fewer said the same about its psychological states (emotions, desires, knowledge, etc.). Older and more educated children were less likely to attribute psychological states to the mouse, suggesting that we start out as dualists.
More recent studies have found evidence for intuitive dualism in adults and non-Western populations, and for an association between dualism and afterlife beliefs. However, some studies have supported the opposite view: that materialism is intuitive.
Offline Social Reasoning
A different intuition governs how we think about people when they are not around (i.e., “offline” social reasoning). Humans are social creatures that have evolved to skillfully navigate the social world. So, when a friend is not around, we intuitively imagine what they are doing, thinking, and feeling (e.g., “Sarah is at the library. She is enjoying her books”).
Given that we expect friends and family to sometimes be physically absent, we may apply this intuitive reasoning when they are absent for other reasons (e.g., death). For example, as those who have lost loved ones know, you can forget that they are not in their bedroom, or coming home from work, or a phone call away, and this state of mind may only change with their prolonged absence.
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| People can imagine lost loved ones in familiar places. Credit: Claudia Wolff via Unsplash. |
Creationist Thinking
The idea that clouds are “for” raining and rocks are pointy “to stop elephants from stepping on them” might seem unusual to adults, but not to children. Often, young children treat natural objects and phenomena as if they were “made for something” and “that is why they are here.” Scholars call this way of thinking “teleofunctional” (i.e., designed for a purpose), but most people refer to it as creationism.
Creationist thinking extends to unknown phenomena as well, such as a picture falling off the wall or a light flickering. Young children are disposed to think it is a “sign” from some entity (God, lady luck, gremlins, etc.) that performed the action for a purpose, such as to send them a message.
As people age, a scientific education appears to reduce creationist thinking, while a religious education may reinforce it. Even so, adults and even scientists struggle to avoid creationist answers when pushed to answer quickly.
It may be that evolution endowed people with this creationist intuition because it works in many situations. Human and even prehuman evolution was dominated by the use of tools and man-made objects. Knowing how these objects functioned was crucial for survival, and asking “what is this for” may be the shortest path to gaining the most useful information (i.e., evolution does not create perfection. It does not have foresight. It is an inefficient, slapdash, natural process that solves immediate problems via the shortest path).
According to most religions, souls have a purpose too (e.g., “to find God and uphold his law”). However, nonreligious people still ask questions such as “why am I here?” and produce answers such as “this is what I was meant for” or “born to do.”
Many people also struggle with feelings of meaninglessness, particularly when grieving, because death can reinforce the idea that existence is random and fleeting. Consequently, there may be a strong motivation to think like a creationist, with the grieving party likely to re-establish a sense of meaning and purpose over time.
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Is God sending a message, or is it just a cloud? Jeffrey Pang via Wikimedia Commons.
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| Is God sending a message, or is it just a cloud? Jeffrey Pang via Wikimedia Commons. |
Morality, the Afterlife, and a “Just World”
An intuition that may add a moral component to soul beliefs is the expectation of a “just world” (i.e., that people get what they deserve). Karma is an example of this expectation becoming part of a religion, but it can also emerge independently of religion.
For example, young children appear to believe in “immanent justice,” which involves thinking that a person experienced misfortune because they previously did something morally wrong. Similarly, many indigenous societies interpret personal difficulties, illnesses, and calamities (e.g., a miscarriage) as evidence that the unfortunate person did something wrong (e.g., committed adultery). The just world intuition may therefore determine some of the meanings that people wrongly attach to natural phenomena (see previous section).
Belief in souls and a just world may have culminated in the belief that souls are morally judged after death (e.g., by a deity). Indeed, if justice does not occur in life, there is no other time for it. The result may have been societies in which "moral" behavior became more common (i.e., less selfish and more cooperative) because people feared the afterlife consequences.
Many scholars think that beliefs about divine judgment were favored by natural selection because, in our evolutionary past, people succeeded by living and cooperating within groups. Expulsion often meant death, and so people who intuitively cooperated were more likely to survive and pass their genes and beliefs onto the next generation.
Thus, it may be no coincidence that many soul beliefs include a moral component (heaven, hell, karma, etc.). Indeed, a study found that good or evil people are perceived to be more “immortal” than people who are neither.
The Simulation Constraint
This final “intuition” more precisely concerns the absence of any intuition that helps us to understand death. In other words, people have a tough time imagining what it is like to be dead. We cannot mentally simulate it. We may say, “he is dead,” “she is dead,” and “they are dead,” but there is no “he,” “she,” or “they” anymore. There is no state of “being” dead.
Consequently, people tend to discuss the dead as if they were still alive. For example, when discussing burial objects, some extinctivists say that they want these objects “with me” as if there is still a “me” in the grave. And, when quizzed about a deceased person, some extinctivists say that the person “knows they are dead.”
Consistent with the study about the mouse and the alligator, these studies suggest that psychological states (knowing, feeling, etc.) are the most difficult states to simulate being without.
The simulation constraint may be a consequence of the intuitions listed above and/or of how we simulate the future, plan for it, and order our memories episodically. Once again, evolution does not create perfection, and carving out an exception for death as a future event that we do not experience appears to bestow no evolutionary advantage.
Conclusion
So how did a belief in souls evolve? Did the belief emerge indirectly because of intuitions that might have evolved for other reasons, or did it become necessary because of the evolutionary benefits of believing in moralistic afterlives? There is evidence for both, and the story might go something like this:
Why do People Believe in Souls?
In our distant past, natural selection favored humans with intuitions for dualism, creationist thinking, offline social reasoning, and a just world. It also left humans with difficulty simulating mental death, and a desire for loved ones to live on. Each addition caused the idea of a "soul" to look more plausible than observation and logic would support. The result was widespread, cross-cultural belief in souls. In some cultures, the intuition and desire for a just world caused people to construct moralistic afterlives for souls of the dead to reside in. The belief in moralistic afterlives helped some human groups to behave morally and to cooperate in the real-world, which benefited them during human evolution and allowed them and their beliefs to propagate further.
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