Yes, folks, we’re right smack bang in the middle of it. You didn’t realize it, but we’re surrounded by zombies. Your son or your daughter might be one, or your mum or dad, or your best mate. You might even be one yourself.
What exactly is a zombie? A zombie is a body without a soul; the soul has either flown the coop, or been rendered ineffectual by a curse, or a magic spell, or in more recent versions of the myth, by a virus. It’s a sort of inverse ghost, a dis-emsouled body rather than a dis-embodied soul.
Surely zombies don’t really exist? Well yes they do. It’s a fact that most people in the western world, including many Christians, don’t believe they have a soul, don’t believe they are a soul. They think that the idea of the soul is just an illusion, a figment of the imagination of a material brain, controlled by its own biochemistry, at the mercy of genes and environment. We’re not souls, they say, we’re just bodies, going about our material girl and boy business in a material world.
If you don’t have soul, then surely you must be a zombie? But these self-styled modern zombies are rather unorthodox zombies. For a start they don’t act like zombies. Traditional zombies have no human agency, just a very limited, blind, animal agency which drives them to seek out and devour human flesh wherever it is unlucky enough to be found. Our modern zombies actually behave quite differently; in fact they behave exactly as if they were a living soul, with real human agency. They don’t (usually) pine for human flesh; rather they have aspirations, hopes and dreams, they seek to love and be loved, they pursue happiness – all the normal human soul sort of things. None of which makes any real sense if you are just a material body and don’t have a soul.
So it certainly is a zombie apocalypse we’re in in the twenty-first century, but it’s a very paradoxical one. By contrast, throughout most of human history prior to the modern era, most people had no doubt at all that the soul existed. It was the most obvious thing in the world, as plain as the nose on your face. This is the content of Descartes’ famous cogito. The real existence of the soul – the self, the “I”, the living agent I am – was absolutely sure. More sure indeed than the existence of the world outside the soul. Surely it’s obvious that it’s the world outside the soul that is far more likely to be the illusion? After all, we’ve all seen The Matrix!
So why have so many people now started to believe that the soul doesn’t exist (in spite of living exactly as if they had one, and in spite of the fact that it’s the most obvious thing in the world)? Well, apparently it’s science’s fault. Somehow they believe modern science has proved that the soul doesn’t exist. “Scientific materialism” or “naturalism”, it’s called: only matter exists, there’s no such thing as soul, or mind, or spirit, or God, or anything like that. The soul, they think, is yesterday’s idea, a figure of pseudo-science and superstition, no longer meaningful or relevant in this enlightened scientific age.
But no such thing has really happened. Science is not the culprit – science has absolutely not proved the soul doesn’t exist. Yes, science has certainly not found the soul (or mind, or spirit, or God, for that matter), but that’s because it actually hasn’t been looking for it. In fact, science has just assumed the soul doesn’t exist from the outset, then gone ahead and, not surprisingly, not found it. The scientific project (i.e. method) is to find the material causes of everything, and soul is just not a material cause – that is, not something that can be controlled by material action. Soul is itself a cause – a self-cause, a living, immaterial agency.
I couldn’t put it better than Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead:
“Neuroscience does not know what the mind or the self is, and has made a project of talking them out of existence, for the sake of their theories which exclude them.”
But you know, Marilynne, it’s more an accidental, unconscious, unthinking exclusion, not a deliberate conspiracy. Science’s real problem is a singular lack of self-awareness (and aren’t we all guilty of that a lot of the time).
So the soul lives! Yay! No zombie intended, in fact. At the root of soul is living agency, something we have in common with all life. You see it every day in every living thing; in a wilful child, or a stubborn old man (like me); in the single-minded, instinctive activity of any animal; in the vibrant, flourishing growth of any plant. It’s what makes life life and not matter. It’s the unstoppable elán we all feel inside us, we know is us.
All life has agency, but in homo sapiens uniquely agency goes to the next level and becomes self-conscious. Lucky for us! I guess it sounds like species chauvinism, but self-conscious agency is the real game changer. It brings us all sorts of handy things like language, religion, culture, civilisation, science, technology, democracy, world-domination, to name but a few. But just to keep us humble it also brings us sin, and its modern day corollary, world-destruction!
Self-conscious agency is certainly the stuff of the human soul. I mean this objectively, scientifically, not just metaphorically. We see it and experience it every moment of every day. It is at least as real as matter; in fact more real, because it is what we are.
But thinking that the soul doesn’t exist is poison. Christians are always worried about people not believing in God; we’re forever trying to come up with evidence for God, proofs that He exists. Usually this is futile and doesn’t convince anyone. I think the real problem is not people not believing in God, but people not believing they have a soul. If people think they don’t have a soul, there’s no way you can convince them God exists, because what else is God but the soul of the world? They don’t have the slightest inkling of Him. You might just as well try to convince them that Father Christmas is real, or the Big Chicken in the Sky!
So what’s the way out of this Zombie Apocalypse we find ourselves in? Simple. First we need to blow the whistle on science’s phoney refutation of the soul. Then we need to help people realize they are living souls, not zombies. That being done, we can start to point them in the direction of God and Jesus. In that order.
I’ll give the last word to that great philosopher, Ishmael in Melville’s Moby Dick:
“Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks that my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.” (Chapter 7)
I hope you get the idea.
March 2018