Or as VS Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos”, but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans—all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious . And among evolutionary psychologists, faith is nothing but an evolutionary artifact, a predilection that evolved because shared belief increased group solidarity and other traits contributing to survival and reproduction.

According to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul, challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the centre of the universe. There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. For Murphy, though, people make a mistake when they assume people can be “ensouled” only if other creatures are soulless.

“Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,” wrote Dr. Murphy. “All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes—or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.”

... contd.