My Immortal Soul

I find it very hard to believe in the supernatural.

It's worth it, however, to define what I mean when I say "supernatural", which seems to be different from what most people mean.

What is it that, in most people's opinions, qualifies ghosts or telekinesis as supernatural? Nothing about such phenomena is above nature. Surely ghosts obey some natural rules; most people would agree that they look a certain way, behave a certain way, and are incapable of performing certain things, for example interacting with physical objects. If a ghost tried to pick up a pencil, you could predict the outcome: its hand would pass through the pencil.

As far as I'm concerned, it is the existence of these rules that defines "nature". Nature is the whole universe and everything in it, and it is all subject to various natural laws, be it Newton's third law or "ghosts cannot pick up pencils". This, in turn, means that nature is, theoretically, completely predictable; we can perfectly predict the result of a collision of two particles, or the presence of a particle in a magnetic field, and so on. And since these laws encompass everything in existence, obviously nothing we see is supernatural.

Now, in light of this, let us examine the following chain of events: I, while walking in the street, see an acquaintance, and wave at him. We can break it down like so:

1. Photons from the sun hit my friend and are reflected in my direction.
2. The photons go into my eyes, and the visual information is transmitted to my brain.
3. My brain performs some miraculous image processing, facial recognition, and data retrieval, reaching the conclusion that this is an acquaintance of mine.
4. ???
5. My brain sends some signals down to my muscles.
6. Certain muscles contract, moving various parts of my hand in some directions.
7. I wave.

Some of these steps are fairly understandable. We know how muscles work, we understand the function of the human eye, and we are certainly on our way towards understanding how the brain does some of what it does. But what about step 4? Why, in a nutshell, do I wave?

The automatic answer is that I choose to wave. I could also choose not to wave. Something within the black box that is step 4 has decided that I, whatever "I" means, want to wave. It has taken all the information from the eyes, it has scanned my memory for familiar faces, it has consulted a vast database of experience to find the socially acceptable thing to do when recognizing an acquaintance in the street, it has considered my mood, and has reached the conclusion that I want to wave.

You could, of course, narrow down each of those steps, break it down to the smallest parts, end up with a list of hundreds of steps describing all of the most basic physical, biological or chemical interactions that make up this simple event. You could break step 4 into many smaller steps as well, but somewhere you would still end up with one step, let us name it Step X, that deals with whether or not I actually want to wave. Which brings us to the big question:

Is the mechanism behind Step X natural?

If Step X is natural, then it obeys natural laws, and is a direct result of the chain of events that precedes it. Given the exact circumstances, we could calculate the outcome. Or, in other words, free will is impossible because it is all predetermined, and determinism must be true.

If Step X is not natural, then its mechanism is above and outside nature; it exists somewhere outside the physical universe and can reach into it and affect it without being subject to its laws. I am no great theologian, but it seems to me that such a mechanism, the entity that performs this step, can be safely referred to as a soul.

That's it, more or less, that's my conclusion. Either the universe is deterministic and we are all meaty machines, or we have an actual supernatural soul. 

Not such a bad choice, actually.

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* One argument I have heard against this conclusion is that a third option exists, and that is randomness, i.e. not all natural laws are predictable. I do not accept it, because I don't believe in a random nature and have never heard of any laws that even claim to be random, and never mind the fact that proving randomness is literally impossible. But be that as it may, it may still be viewed as a sort of determinism, in that our reactions are governed by the quirks of quantum mechanics rather than any sort of free will, so I guess the final conclusion should be phrased as: if free will exists, then souls exist.