What does science say about souls?

Until the mid 19^th Century, most of us believed that we had a soul. It was what separated us from the animals. This belief could be modified to accommodate slavery, Malthusian economics and to allow dogs into Heaven, but the principle was pretty stable.

A hundred years later, thanks largely to Darwin, and innovations such as quantum mechanics and Auschwitz, such a view seemed childlike, romantic, or in the case of the Clergy, downright dogged. The ‘soul’ became just another invention of the under-informed, over-excited primitive imagination, like faeries, Valhalla and insidious whispering serpents. We have Science now.

Yet ask a scientist to explain consciousness, the thing it feels like to be, the is-ness of us – the approved proxy for the soul – and it quickly becomes apparent that the problem has been shelved, rather than solved.

‘Fine!’ we cry, ‘We reject God, superstition, the demon-haunted world. What have you got to go in the hole?’ And Science shrugs, as if the central mystery of existence is no more important than an eccentric taste in socks.