By Dinesh D’Souza
San Francisco Chronicle (California), page E3
November 18, 2007
There is a powerful strain of atheism that teaches that human beings are nothing more than matter. In this materialistic view, the soul is a fiction, a “ghost in the machine” that has been invented by religion for its own purposes. After all, we never encounter this ghost within the material frame of human beings.
What we do encounter is brains, arteries, blood and organs. These are all made up of the same atoms and molecules as trees and stones and are assembled by a process of evolution and natural selection into this intricate machine we call Homo sapiens. From this perspective, man is a kind of intelligent robot, a carbon-based computer. Consequently, man should be understood in the same material terms that we understand software programs.
“If we do indeed possess an immaterial soul,” physicist Victor Stenger writes in “God: The Failed Hypothesis,” “then we should expect to find some evidence for it.” But science has found none, which leads Stenger to conclude that the soul is a myth.
