The Soul Fallacy Quotes

“If our memories and consciousness are to survive death, as most religious people believe, then memory and consciousness must reside in some nonmaterial entity. But if that's the case, then why do we lose memories when we experience brain trauma or disease, or ingest drugs? If consciousness dwells in the soul, then why do we become unconscious under anesthesia or from a blow to the head?”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“I will show you that the authors who assert otherwise, a group of people I call the New Dualists, are simply not playing by the rules of the scientific game. Instead of trying to convince the scientific community of the validity of their conclusions, the New Dualists pitch their extraordinary claims directly to the general public, banking (sometimes quite profitably) on the fact that nonspecialists will not be able to tell the difference between good science and bad science.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“Our dualist intuitions lead to beliefs that cloud important societal debates, such as abortion, stem-cell research, and the right to die with dignity. Our intuitive notion of justice, and therefore our entire criminal justice system, which is unusually harsh and biased in the United States, as we will discover, may also be premised on dualistic assumptions.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“Pope John Paul II famously articulated the idea in a message delivered to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1996, in which the Holy Father declared that the human body might originate from preexisting living matter, but the spiritual soul is a direct creation of God. Explaining the mind as a product of evolution, claimed the pope, was incompatible with the truth about man.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“Even if you are a moderate believer who is open to almost everything science provides, the very fact that you still indulge in magical thinking leaves you prone to making decisions in your life based on ideas that have no rational support. For example, you might deny your child medical care or vaccination because to do so would conflict with the teachings of your church.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“The materialist philosopher Epicurus, whom we met in chapter 2, was one of the first thinkers to realize that “death is nothing to us” because “when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”28”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. —Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 2012 One”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“On a general level, the case against the soul is similar to the argument against the luminiferous ether of the nineteenth century, an invisible substance with mysterious properties, which was believed to serve as the medium for the propagation of light. The ether was an idea that was once entertained by the most serious scientists, but as understanding progressed, the need for such a substance became superfluous, and the ether hypothesis was eventually abandoned.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“In medieval Europe, during the Great Plague, people often had their lips sewn shut and their tongues cut off for fear that they would blaspheme and offend God. This was a perfectly rational practice, if brutally sadistic, based on a deeply flawed theory. Replace God's wrath by the germ theory of disease and the sadistic practice loses its raison d’être.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs

“Descartes famously argued for the existence of two fundamentally different substances: the physical matter of bodies and the spiritual stuff of souls. In Descartes's system, souls and bodies causally interact. Your soul pushes your buttons, so to speak, and makes you do the things that you do. Conversely, what happens to your body is felt, or experienced, in your soul.”
― Julien Musolino, Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain From Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs