False Argument #8: Science Has Proven The Soul

The twentieth-century frontier experiments conducted by Duncan MacDougall M.D. of Havervill, Massachusetts are worthy of mention. As a skeptic, it should be noted that MacDougall approached his research from a methodological naturalist’s point of view, writing with detectable resentment towards the blind faith demanded from theologians and so-called metaphysicians regarding the existence of the spirit / soul. Thus his experiments suffer from confirmation bias in that McDougall set out with a specific goal, to disprove existence of a soul that transcends death.

His hypothesis was simple enough:

…the soul substance so necessary to the concept of continuing personal identity after death of the material body must still be a form of gravitative matter…”

Hence it must have weight.

MacDougall tested his hypothesis by monitoring the weight of six terminally ill human beings during their passing moment. Consenting subjects were placed on bedding arranged on a framework which hung upon very delicate platform beam scales capable of measuring changes in weight as little as a few grams. The selected patients were all in advanced stages of severely exhaustive diseases such as tuberculosis or diabetic coma, reasoning that patients with such illnesses pass with little or no involuntary muscular activity, so they decrease the chances of confounding the results. Six humans were tested, but only the first five tests can be accepted; the sixth individual expired as MacDougall was setting the scale.

In each of those five cases, researchers noted an immediate but varying loss of weight coinciding with the exact moment of death, usually around a half an ounce, so much so that one of the scales actually clanked down as the patient's line went flat.

Various explanations were offered to explain this sudden loss of weight, but no reasonable explanation that I know of has ever been offered. Of further interest is that fifteen canines weighing between 15-20 pounds were tested in the same manner, and the results were uniformly negative.

The experiment lead McDougall to conclude,

The net result of the experiments conducted on human beings is that a loss of substance occurs at death not accounted for by known channels of loss… this fact alone of a space-occupying body of measurable weight disappearing at death, if verified, furnishes the substantial basis for persisting personality or a conscious ego surviving the act of bodily death, and in the element of certainty is worth more than the postulates of all the creeds and all the metaphysical arguments combined.

Did MacDougall conclude his findings were proof that we have a soul / spirit? Not by any means, but that's how people generally tar others who bring MacDougall's findings into a reasonable discussion about whether evidence consistent with the spirit / soul exists, by saying, "This doesn't prove the soul / spirit."

True, but if atheists don't need 100% certainty to justify their belief that there is no God, why should non-atheists need 100% certainty to justify their belief in the soul / spirit?

Many affirm what Hamlet told Horatio:

…there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

And some also append "and science" to the end of Hamlet's little jaunt.