Did Dinosaurs Have Souls?

by Tom Slattery

At some point in time what might now be called humans or possibly proto-humans evolved an awareness of their own mortality. Out of this may have grown a concept of a "hereafter" where an essence within the formerly living would go. This may not have been when a concept of "soul" was born, but "soul" probably derives from it.

Concurrently with speculation on the "soul" our proto-human ancestors must have gained a proto-scientific awareness of their resemblance to animals and our basically animal nature. While lacking language development to articulate it clearly, they probably realized what we now clearly know, that we are not only animals but parasites that must take life, from carrots to cattle, in order to sustain our lives.

Some of us now realize that every time we bathe we take the lives of millions of microorganisms that inhabit our epithelium. Taking life is what we must do to live.

Back in time when human life was grubbier and not greatly different from animal life human minds acquired the concept of "mystery." "Mystery" stood in opposition to "observation," to the proto-science of trying to understand the observable world. Mystery was the unknowable and even the indefinable. And this mystery gradually grew in articulation and myth to include a human "soul" that separated us from animals, even from animal spirits.

Not all religions are concerned with a "soul." Hinduism claims reincarnation. Something that Western religions might call a "soul," but is probably not, is reincarnated as another life form. The goal of Buddhism is Nirvana, or "nothingness," and an escape from this almost endless cycles of reincarnations.

But I write here as one who came to awareness surrounded by Western religion, and my concepts are entirely modified by it. And so I wonder about the "soul" in this context.

If it is true that humans have souls, would we be the only living beings with them? Judeo-Christian tradition claims that we are. And yet those who have lived with and loved moderately intelligent animals like dogs, cats, raccoons, parrots, or other animals are left to wonder what might have become of an essence within them when they expired.

And if animals and perhaps plants, too, might have souls, where would it logically stop. Would a termite have a soul? Would a tuberculosis bacterium have a soul?

Or where might souls have begun? Did trilobites and dinosaurs have souls? And if this could be so, might it go back to the very first self-replicating DNA molecule? Did the first self-replicating DNA molecule have a soul?

And consider this. What if humans might, possibly soon, find life on other worlds, maybe even close by on Mars, life that is not based on the DNA molecule? Would that body life, or some of it, have souls?

For those Christians who take the Bible literally, there would seem to be little problem with this. God created Adam and Eve as separate from other life forms and presumably gave them souls. And if Christian literals choose to believe this, it solves the problem for them.

Others who take the Bible seriously but less literally amid the revelations of science see it as a teaching metaphor. They are left with many of the same doubts as atheists and agnostics. Before modern science thinking about this was easier.

Bishop James Ussher was a serious researcher who used what knowledge he had. Isaac Newton was only eight when Ussher published his theory. Leeuwenhoek was eighteen and had not ground his first lens. A good mind like Ussher might take the knowledge of our time and arrive at a different set of conclusions.

Even if the universe and our world in it were not created, as Ussher claimed, in 4004 BC or thereabouts, then the creation story is still a good device for demonstrating beginnings. It gives us the beginning of the universe from a void (not unlike the present Big Bang theory), the beginning of stars and planets, and the beginning of this peculiar life-form called humans, whether separate from or tied to the continuity of life.

One could take the Adam and Eve metaphor and interpret it as the one vital change in a proto-human DNA molecule somewhere around 100,000 years ago that made us what we genetically all are today, humans. So one might have a basis for saying that along with that change in the DNA molecule came the soul.

But there were other intelligent human-like creatures around when that change occurred. There were the Neanderthals. They used fire, made relatively sophisticated tools, apparently buried their dead amid obvious concepts of religion, and would seem to have had language to conceptually deal with fire, tools, burials, and complex living in proto-technological communities.

So did the Neanderthals have souls? And then did the far more distant proto-human ancestors of the Olduvai Gorge millions of years before them have souls? And might this acquisition of a soul have occurred near a time when proto-humans, unlike animals, began to control and use fire?

The ancient Prometheus fire-bringer story is not incorporated into in the Bible. Possibly this is because it represents not a change by Nature or God in the scheme of everything. It is about a human choice, a human discovery. In its distant origins, the Prometheus story is couched in terms of gods and half-gods. But it is a story apart from creation stories in the Bible. It represents a vital technological acquisition of humans, fire, something that along with tools/weapons, clothing, and spoken language would give humans an edge over brute forces of large and dangerous creatures.

In the Adam and Eve story we find a not too dissimilar acquisition story. In consequence of not resisting temptation, Adam and Eve acquire proto-clothing. Apart from the story, clothing not only allowed us humans to live in hostile cold climates it defined us as separate from and above all other life forms. No other animals genuinely fabricate and wear clothing.

Other animals make tools. Other animals use simple languages with very limited vocabularies. Other animals have been seen using impromptu weapons. Fire, clothing, and a vastly larger vocabulary that goes beyond mere communication and into concept formation separate us from them.

Is intelligence tied to the soul? If "soul" might hinge on intelligence or its uses, what about the threshold of intelligent machines that we have now come to? Could an intelligent sentient machine have a soul? When that machine is superseded by a new generation of superduper computers and tossed into a dumpster, might its soul go to heaven?

Moreover, what about those genetic humans who have to be institutionalized because they lack the intelligence of even higher animals? Do we all agree that they have souls?

Or, if we humans might, all too soon as it now appears, bio-engineer a new Nietzschean superman or wonderwoman with a larger intelligence quotient, would our very human creation acquire a human soul? Or would it, like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, be soulless, joyless, and envious of its human creator with predictably destructive results?

A research team at the University of Kentucky recently claimed to have seen multi-cell growth from combining human DNA from a muscle cell with a de-nucleated egg cell from a cow. Theoretically if this had been implanted into a human womb it would have developed into full-term birth of a human being. Would this human being have acquired a "soul" at the moment of scientific conception of muscle-cell DNA and a de-nucleated cow's egg?

It would seem that those who might be concerned with souls and saving souls would be wrestling with questions like this. Of course the simple way out is to say that only genetic humans have souls. But then at what point?

Several large and influential religious bodies assert that fertilized embryos have souls. Hundreds of thousands or fertilized frozen human embryos are now immersed in tanks of liquid nitrogen. As much as possible, these have been blessed by those who feel that it is necessary to bless them.

But where in the DNA molecule the soul may reside remains unknown to them or the rest of us. Others understand a fertilized human egg to be merely a complex chemical without a soul. And no one can really say, with even minimal scientific certainty, one way or another, whether a fertilized human egg may have a soul.

"Soul" is a word derived from Germanic languages. The ancient Latin-speaking and Greek-speaking civilizations that once ruled the world from the Indus to the Atlantic used the word-core "spiritus," literally breath, or the similar word-core "pneuma," from which we still use terms for "lung" like "pneumo-thorax."

In other words, these ancients who played large roles in forming our modern Western religions felt that "breath" indicated presence of the soul. Religion in ancient times was as much government and law as sacred. Birth and death records were kept by religious organizations. Breath and heartbeat meant a record of life. Lack of them meant that the "spirit" or "soul" was not present. It was partly a matter of bureaucratic definition. Breath was life, was the "spititu," was the "pneuma" that translates today from Greek into English as the "soul."

Ironically it has been scientific knowledge that has pushed the window back to the union of sperm with egg. When Moses and the Buddha and Jesus were walking on this planet no one had yet invented a microscope that could see the sperm fertilizing the egg. Therefore no religious figure could proclaim that a fertilized egg had a soul. Only science made this proclamation possible.

Before science there was only the convenient "spiritu," the breath that was the soul, and that served society, religion, and philosophy quite well.

But now we have microscopes, in fact a great variety of microscopes. Moreover, these have been used in processes of transferring DNA from one living cell to another. There are, right now, living children who have three or more biological parents. And soon these children will have their own children.

If the soul is passed along from parents into a fertilized egg, from which parent might it come? And now that there may be three or more separate contributions of DNA making up a child, have we added additional soul-material? Or is it, as some may believe, that the Great Spirit governing all souls is suddenly alerted by a coming together of two (or more) separate contributions of DNA and instantly dispenses a soul to the combination?

If that might be the case then this Great Spirit may have to keep an eye on all intimate acts of a certain kind and their reciprocating organs. Might this not share elements of voyeurism that one might find in certain seedy "live show" establishments in Hamburg, Amsterdam, or New York City, but of course times billions every day in private bedrooms all over our crowded planet?

This Great Spirit who dispenses souls at the appropriate instant might actually find relief from that enormous boredom when presented with occasional new human-invented in vitro fertilizations. At any rate, these are conceptual consequences that flow from regarding an instantaneously dispensed soul at the chemical union of two (or more) genetic DNA molecules.

If, however, this might not be the case and the soul might be passed from two (or more) human parents into a fertilized egg, then logically and historically this soul had been passed down from their parents and their parents' parents, and so on. And we could trace it way back beyond the dinosaurs and the trilobites to the first one-celled life forms and ultimately back to the very first DNA molecule.

And unless we might believe that at one very recent point in that unimaginably long chain of DNA-based life, a slight structural DNA change, mutation or not, allowed humans to have souls when the great body of life for billions of years did not and does not, we might have to accept amoebae with souls and trilobites with souls and dinosaurs with souls.

Of course one may go with concept of soul held by the ancients. There is something more insightful in the concept of breath being related to the soul than in the concept of a chemical merger of two (or more) human DNA molecules giving rise to a soul.

The air we breathe is largely recycled. We breathe the air that Socrates breathed, that Akhnaten and Nefertiti breathed, and that all people living and dead more or less share. We breathe the air that dinosaurs breathed. We breathe the oxygen that was once dissolved in the sea and the trilobites breathed. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide becomes plant material, and some of its oxygen is released immediately to be breathed in again by animals and humans. The rest decays and is released eventually to be breathed and recycled again.

When a human baby takes its first breath, it joins this sharing. It becomes a living part of this marvelous recycling, for all of its hopefully long life. It joins the community of life on this planet, past, present, and future. It literally becomes one with humanity and all of nature to the most ancient time. And if ancients might have been wrong about this being the soul, it certainly would seem a treasure in itself worth perpetuating and celebrating in religion.

Since no average everyday human has genuinely come back from the afterlife to give us an even tiny clue, and since no one has found, weighed, and measured a human soul, I am left to assemble these wandering wonderings from my all too human mind.

f there might be a soul, it may have guided me in writing this. Writers and artists have through the ages spoken of being guided by a muse or by something in their souls. We have a word for it: inspired! And in the etymology of this word we can again find the Latin "spiritu," or breath. An inspiration is breathed into a creative person.

And yet regarding the soul this way disassociates it from the province of mystery. This is "scientific" and an attempt to fix a beginning for every human soul in an observable physical location in time and in doing so opposes the essential mystery.

Even more to the point, and more dangerous for the province of mystery and religion, is fixing a beginning for the human soul at the moment of conception. For this not only limits the soul to an observable location in time -- to the temporal universe -- but to a conceptual system that is entirely dependent on the discoveries of modern science through its own contrived technologies.

Religious leaders who have done this have done great and terrible harm to their own religions and to the larger sense of mystery. Moreover the religious leaders are unambiguously culpable in acts of harm done to their fellow human beings in the name of this great and terrible wrong that they have unwisely pronounced as unarguable religious truth. In following their very arguable pronouncements as undeniable truth their misguided followers have maimed and killed a significant number of health care workers.

"Right to Life" is not rooted in a concept that no life can be taken because we humans must daily take life to survive. The meaning is rooted in a concept of a definition of human life and its relationship with the mystery of the human soul.

Declaring "right to life" in this context, declaring, that is, that the human soul begins precisely at the moment of conception, trivializes religion and mystery and moves it into the temporal universe. These religious leaders would have us all groveling around in the functions of our physical beings to the exclusion of any underlying mystery.

Those who work with and from creative processes, including creative scientists, will almost across the board tell you that it is something more, something truly mysterious infused into them during their creative processes as if from somewhere outside. There are, of course, a variety of scientific psychological explanations for this. But those are in the province of the observable world. The conceptual province of religion and mystery exists apart from this.

Did any dinosaurs ever feel this "spirit" of creativity, too?