Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

But no one has detected this entity. There is in fact much firmer evidence for the existence of “dark matter,” the hypothesized substance that is invoked to explain the shape of galaxies, than there is for any spirit or soul. At least dark matter can be detected indirectly through its gravitational effects. We can talk about someone’s soul and whether it is capacious or shriveled, but we realize that we are speaking metaphorically. Various locations for an immaterial individual essence have been proposed—the heart, the brain, and the liver—but autopsies yield no trace of it, leading some to speculate that it is delocalized like the Chinese qi. In 1901, an American physician reported that the human body loses three-quarters of an ounce, or twenty-one grams, at the moment of death, arguing that this meant the soul is a material substance. But his experiment could not be replicated, suggesting that the soul, if it exists, possesses neither location nor mass. One can’t even find the concept of the “immortal soul” in the Bible. It was grafted onto Christian teachings from the pagan Greeks long after the Bible was written.2