The evidence of science, when brought together with an ancient
argument, provides a very powerful case against the existence of a soul
that can carry forward your essence once your body fails. The case runs
like this: with modern brain-imaging technology, we can now see how
specific, localized brain injuries damage or even destroy aspects of a
person’s mental life. These are the sorts of dysfunctions that Oliver
Sacks brought to the world in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.4
The man of the title story was a lucid, intelligent music teacher, who
had lost the ability to recognize faces and other familiar objects due
to damage to his visual cortex.
Since then, countless examples of such dysfunction have been
documented—to the point that every part of the mind can now be seen to
fail when some part of the brain fails. The neuroscientist Antonio
Damasio has studied many such cases.5
He records a stroke victim, for example, who had lost any capacity for
emotion; patients who lost all creativity following brain surgery; and
others who lost the ability to make decisions. One man with a brain
tumor lost what we might call his moral character, becoming
irresponsible and disregarding of social norms. I saw something similar
in my own father, who also had a brain tumor: it caused profound changes
in his personality and capacities before it eventually killed him.
The crux of the challenge then is this: those who believe they have a
soul that survives bodily death typically believe that this soul will
enable them, like Nathalie in the story above, to see, think, feel,
love, reason and do many other things fitting for a happy afterlife. But
if we each have a soul that enables us to see, think and feel after the
total destruction of the body, why, in the cases of dysfunction
documented by neuroscientists, do these souls not enable us to see,
think and feel when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed?-http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/13-03-20/#feature
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