Soul existence cannot be proved by science

By: Aaron Sakulich

Posted: 1/14/05

Every week I write an article for the Sci-Tech section about the occult. For some reason, no one ever cares, unless I write about UFOs, in which case I receive grammatically poor death threats and get called names on the Triangle message boards.

As much as I wanted to write about UFOs this week to see what new words people would invent to describe me (9 out of 10 illiterate peasants seem to prefer "The Iron Craptic" instead of The Iron Skeptic, which is a reference to that show on the Food Channel where that Japanese Liberace forces cooks to do his bidding), I just couldn't help it. I have to move into the mainstream occult, because it's come to my attention that a portion of the population believes the human soul weighs 21 grams.

Like crop circles or alien abductions by 'grays', the exact moment that the urban legend of the human soul weighing precisely 21 grams can be traced. Before Betty Hill reported being abducted by the little gray men you see so often on the X-Files and bumper stickers, no one had ever heard of them before, yet after she appeared on TV they were reported more and more frequently, the fact that she was a mentally unstable occultist unable to tell reality from fiction non-withstanding.

Before Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Massachusetts entered the scene in 1907, no one really thought that the human soul had weight. It was just there, an invisible, metaphysical thing that separates from the body at the moment of death and sort of cruises around afterwards. Dr. MacDougall had this brilliant idea: Take a dying patient, put him on a bed connected to an elaborate scale, and wait for him to die.

He did this a grand total of six times. Two of the tests were useless because the patient died before he had time to adjust the scales; two showed a dramatic loss of weight at the moment of death, but that increased with time; one showed a loss of weight at the moment of death, but that reversed itself a few minutes later; and the last showed a weight loss of 21 grams right at the moment of death and nothing else.

What really burns me up about this is that there is just enough science to make it appear as a reasonable experiment. There's nothing wrong with the hypothesis. There's not even anything wrong with the experimental method, except for the fact that because this happened in 1907, Dr. MacDougall was using a crude beam scale that could easily be thrown off by the patient's movement.

Yet to conclude anything from one result, one out of a mere four tests, a result that was impossible to reproduce, is reprehensible. When occultists try to tell me that I'm tall because I was born on a day in which Bigfoot stood underneath an ascending Mars, that's fine. I disagree, but it's like disagreeing with my 2-year-old step-nephew when we play chess. When someone tells me that the human soul has weight, and that science has proven this, it makes the blood in my veins boil.

Using science as a cover for making religious statements is a perversion. They're different fields entirely; to try to argue that a soul does, or, for that matter, does not, exist based on science is an insult to both science and religion. Dr. MacDougall gave his religious beliefs weight by abusing the respectability of science; this is nothing short of a grotesque crime.

I'm not claiming that the soul does not exist; I'm claiming that its existence can not be proven by science. Science and religion are both respectable fields that should not, and cannot, be mixed. If people have souls, they're certainly not made of meat.

Aaron Sakulich is a senior majoring in materials science and engineering.