Here’s a trivial thing I noticed a while ago. For some reason it stuck in my mind. In a comments thread at a political website, people were arguing about whether or not Mitt Romney’s religion would affect his chances in the primaries. I’m not getting into that. What interested me was a comment left by one of the participants:
All religions have strange beliefs. Belief in a invisible massless soul is as strange as you can get.
Apparently we are meant to understand that a belief in something invisible and massless is inherently ridiculous. But why?
Certainly there is nothing inherently crazy about the idea of something invisible. All sorts of things are invisible to the human eye, yet they surely exist. And some things are just invisible, period. As far as I know, there’s no way to obtain a visual image of a quark, but there seems to be no doubt that quarks exist.
The key word, then, is not invisible but massless. Yet here too, it seems unreasonable to assert that nothing can exist without mass. After all, until recently it was assumed that the subatomic particles called neutrinos had no mass. I remember Isaac Asimov going on at some length about the strange massless property of neutrinos in one of his popular science books. This was the conventional wisdom for many years, although recent observations have suggested that neutrinos do have some slight, barely detectable mass, after all.
If, for decades, it was perfectly acceptable for neutrinos to be both invisible and massless, and nobody ridiculed scientists for believing and asserting precisely this, then why should the concept of an invisible, massless soul be any more risible?
The answer, of course, is that science – considered by many to be the ultimate arbiter of the facts of reality – has stamped its imprimatur on the idea of the neutrino, but not on the idea of the soul. In fact, some of science’s more militant propagandists have asserted that there is not and cannot be a soul, though their arguments are more ideological than empirical. (They simply assume that materialism is true, then draw the conclusion that nothing nonmaterial can exist. This is circular reasoning.)
In sum, we were expected (until lately) to accept the reality of an invisible massless neutrino, but to reject and ridicule the reality of an invisible massless soul. All because science "says so."
What this amounts to is an appeal to authority. Strictly speaking, this is a logical fallacy, but it might be acceptable if science were the relevant authority in this matter. Is it? Science is a tool of investigation supremely adept at ferreting out the truth about things like quarks and neutrinos but, arguably, not at all suited to dealing with matters of consciousness and spirit.
And by the way, what kind of visibility and mass are possessed by consciousness? How do you weigh a thought, or see an emoti0n? You may be able to map corresponding brain states or weigh parts of the brain, but this is not the same as seeing and weighing the content of consciousness – which is, of course, ineffable, yet real. One might even argue that the content of consciousness is the most real thing we know.
In any event, it’s interesting to see how the skeptical position sloppily accepts an obvious double standard. Invisible and massless entities are accepted without demur if they are consistent with the materialist worldview, but rejected out of hand if they contradict materialism.
It’s an argument that, like the humble neutrino itself, doesn’t seem to carry much weight.