Do atheists believe humans have souls?

I know a few who believe that the soul is a life force and thus when we die, it winks out of existence as well per say. However, I don’t believe that souls exist, and I won’t unless it can be proven.

Reincarnation and souls. I do not believe in the bible or the god/jesus of the bible but I believe we are all more than our physical body.

Atheists aren’t a cohesive group with a set of beliefs are they?

I can only speak for myself here. I don’t believe in the concept because there isn’t any proof. However I may still use the term idiomatically, even if I don’t subscribe to the ideology. Just as I still say ‘bless you’ because it’s polite to do so.

Depends on the atheist. I would say most don’t believe in souls. Not the definition you probably mean, as in our soul is what gives us life and it continues after the physical body is dead.

I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in souls. Not gonna speak for other atheists, or anyone else.

Atheist here. I don’t believe in souls. Nor do I care about them.

Most atheists = Only believe what scientists say (no souls)

Agnostics = shrug (can’t commit to anything, soul, no soul, it’s a crapshoot)

Those with a belief system = believe there is something bigger than themselves. (souls exist)

My personal belief is that a soul doesn’t make any sense.

I think Buddhists are atheists and believe in souls and reincarnation? Or, do I have that wrong?

I believe in the connectome and the genome.

@digitalimpression Agnostics can’t commit to anything. I am not fond of that impression of agnostics. Maybe you were just being tongue and cheek?

I would think be default atheist can’t believe in a soul, as you say, what use would it be? To be without a soul makes humans little more than glorified cockroaches. There would be no point to humans even being on the planet. Humans have caused more injury to the planet than any animal. iIf all that harm to the Earth was just to man can come here, kill each other then go “poof” into the great white zephrum when he dies, man is but a glorified cockroach, at least the cockroach plays a small part in the ecological fabric where man plays none.

@Hypocrisy_Central I won’t get pulled into a debate here so I probably won’t respond but…
What is with this “glorified cockroach” trope? I’ve seen it before in other religious threads/ arguments.

Can’t one find meaning in life without inventing some invisible being(s) to be approving or disapproving? Are you saying life is less special if that is all there is? Bullshit. The frailty of life should make it all the more dear, rare and beautiful – should it not?

And hey what’s wrong with cockroaches, they’ll out live us as a species, that’s pretty much assured. Humanity has a massive impact on the ecological fabric, you even infer as much: “Humans have caused more injury to the planet than any animal.” Not so sure about that as a fact, as it may be prone to hubris, and I am sure there are other species that have left their mark, so to speak; however, the essence of that particular point remains valid.

“To be without a soul makes humans little more than glorified cockroaches.” Yeah, maybe for you, but I don’t need to read Kafka to feel otherwise.

So I guess that would make “soulists” “glorified cockroaches” who also believe things on insufficient evidence…

Atheists do not believe anything as a group. Jainism is an atheistic religion, for example, but it definitely teaches that human beings have souls. Jains believe that we become divine beings through perfecting our soul over many lifetimes. Those perfected souls, however, are not gods in any normal sense.

@JLeslie Buddhists generally do not believe in souls. The doctrine of anatta means “no atman,” where ”atman” is the soul/self that various Hindu religions believed would reincarnate in different forms over time. The notion of rebirth in Buddhism was originally about one’s influence on the future karmic cycle, not about literal reincarnation.

There are forms of Buddhism, however, that arose from a synthesis with the pre-existing religions of places to which Buddhism spread. Some of these hybrid faiths do posit souls and other metaphysical entities that more traditional forms of Buddhism eschew.

@digitalimpression Most atheists are Buddhists, Taoists, or Jains. The modern ontological naturalist, who includes atheism among his beliefs, is still a relative minority among atheists. And even then, it is not all about what science says. There is what philosophy teaches, as well. This might involve something “bigger” to believe in without that bigger thing being God or souls.

What’s the difference between God and Bigfoot? Bigfoot has been spotted.

The belief in a soul isn’t something that depends solely (ha) on religion, so there is some variation. I know ones who do and ones who don’t. I (agnostic athiest) don’t.

I am generally atheistic in my beliefs and I believe that we have souls.

Just want to echo what many above are saying. Atheism just answers one question: belief in a god or gods. Atheists can be as batshit crazy as anyone else. They can believe in all kinds of unjustified things, such as astrology, bigfoot, fairies, homepathic “medicine”, etc. Of course it’s possible for an atheist to believe in the soul.

This atheist will not believe in the existence of the soul until sufficient evidence is provided to support the claim.

No I don’t believe in them. We’re entirely biology.

I am an atheist and I do not believe in souls. While atheism does not specifically rule out the existance of souls (atheism only rules out deities), I think the majority of atheists also do not believe in souls or other supernatural/magcial phenomena either.

This kinda confuses me because I know @filmfann is far from stupid and yet this is a stupid question. There is only one belief that can be attributed to all atheists and that is the belief that there is no deity or deities, everything else is personal. It’s not like we all get together every Sunday to agree on what our beliefs are.

@JLeslie I was being tongue-in-cheek, however I’m very interested to hear from someone who is agnostic why they are different than what I’ve described. Of course, not in this topic.. that would be off-topic.

@SavoirFaire I refuse to believe that our animal senses are sufficient to explain this entire universe and beyond. It seems very close-minded to be atheistic and specifically deny the existence of deities. If, by your crass bigfoot comment, you are suggesting there is no evidence of God… well.. that’s just silly.

For those of you who say you have souls: How do you know? You have no proof of it. Isn’t that the same as your arguments against the existence of God?
What happens to your soul when you die?

As an atheist I can say that we don’t have souls but we do have rhythm.

Interesting approaches ^^

@digitalimpression It is not about committing, and by saying don’t commit to anything you make it sound like a personality trait that is pervasive in every part of their life. I think many might see me as an agnostic, but I identify as an atheist, because I live as an atheist. I say that because I don’t believe in God, but I never say there is no God. I agree that just because there is no proof does not mean something does not exist. It makes more logical sense to me that God does not exist though. But I don’t feel I have to know, or that I necessarily can know there is a God or an afterlife, or any of those big religious questions. Most agnostics feel how can anybody be sure there is a God or afterlife or soul when there is no tangible proof. I know religious thiests believe there is proof all around us, and I don’t mean to dismiss their thoughts on the topic in my response here, but most agnostics and atheists are looking for scientific reproducible proof.

So for me it has nothing to do with commitment, agnostics simply are open to the possibilities. However, there is great variation among agnostics, just like there is among thiests and atheists, so I do not answer for all agnostics of course.

There are many Fluther questions in the past about atheists vs agnostics, and different types of atheism if you are interested in reading the debates.

Do atheists believe humans have souls?
I guess I’m an atheist because I have a naturalistic view of the world where reality is based on what’s physically observable, and nothing is accepted on pure faith. So I don’t “believe” in deities, an afterlife, or a metaphysical soul that somehow spiritually animates our bodies. I reject the notion of anything that stands outside the laws of physics, and whose existence persists after physical death. Ghost stories are entertaining fiction.

If by “soul,” on the other hand, you mean my mind – consciousness, self-awareness, sense of self, unique individual personality, experiences, memories, knowledge, feelings, drives, etc – then of course we all have souls and I think we call this humanism. Our souls somehow emerge from those tangled masses of neurons we carry in our heads. In this sense, when I die my soul dies, too, because all brain function ceases within minutes.

Douglas Hofstadter, writing in I Am A Strange Loop, speaks of creatures having different “sizes” of souls, measured in arbitrary units called Huneckers. A man’s soul is bigger than a dog’s soul, which is bigger than a flea’s (this is subjective whimsy, of course, because even when viewed as a manifestation of neural processes there is no clear definition.) In this sense the word “soul” is a nice metaphor for “mind” but nothing more.

Hofstadter describes things left behind after a person dies – photographs, letters, and so on – as “soul shards.” For example, the printed musical symbols that represent one of Chopin’s etudes in a sense contain a little piece of Chopin’s soul, because some of his thoughts and feelings while he was alive are revealed to us. In this sense, optimistically, the soul may partly survive physical death. If an asteroid destroys Earth then all bets are off.

@filmfann – Maybe we’re all AI characters (like a really, really, really advanced version of The Sims) on God’s desktop teracore, 100 Zettabyte, PC with the network name “Earth.”

And when we die, maybe He copies our memories and personality matrix (soul) to a 10 Petabyte thumbdrive and then runs a behavioral analysis program to determine whether to copy it to his server named “Heaven” or or the one named “Hell,” for further processing and analysis…

Atheists that believe in supernatural things always confuse me lol. I don’t believe we have souls.

@gasman __If by “soul,” on the other hand, you mean my mind – consciousness, self-awareness, sense of self, unique individual personality, experiences, memories, knowledge, feelings, drives, etc – then of course we all have souls and I think we call this humanism.__
That is not at all what I mean.
I don’t think consciousness, which is certainly observable in animals, has anything to do with the soul.

Atheists can believe in souls. They just probably don’t because there is no empirical evidence of them. When you die what you were vanishes! Noone has ever been proven to send a message back from the dead.

The only people who’ve spoken from the other side are attested to in religions. Which atheism discounts.

Don’t we all have a deep inner identity that is calm and is not disturbed by the flux of events. I don’t know what it is but the word soul seems to describe it. In my view it will not survive death but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an existence, dim and uncertain though it may be.

All people have souls. It isn’t possible to be a human without a soul. I have always heard it said that our mind, will, emotions constitute our soul. Spirit is who you are in essence. That is the indestructible part of you. Your body will be done with eventually but you will always live forever and ever.

@smilingheart1 Fascinating claims. Would be nice to have some supportive evidence though…

@everephebe Are you saying life is less special if that is all there is? You got it. If all humans left this planet in the next 90 days what would really suffer? What animal in nature could not survive less man be on the planet? Would the rain forest defoliate itself? Would oil spontaneously gush from the ground? Would radiation clouds automatically materialize? Would the water become polluted, or remain that way? If all there is, is that man lives out his 70–90 years trying not to kill, or be killed, by his fellow man he is insignificant, the world doesn’t really need him to carry on.

I’ve been called an agnostic by atheists and by theists, an atheist by theists and a theist by atheists.

I’m none of these. I’m a skeptic. I don’t believe in theism nor in atheism. Because I don’t buy into your thesis doesn’t mean I buy its antithesis, however much you may wish it were so.

I believe most of what I see, some of what I remember, and little of what I hear. I have ideas and opinions, but few (if any) beliefs (that’s one of the few.)

I define “belief” as “an opinion that isn’t allowed to be wrong”. You may not accept my definition. Certainly this defintion is different from the one at dictionary.com. I think my definition is more specific and useful.
Definitions are important in any inquiry or debate. I don’t have an opinion on the existence of God nor that of souls until I have a rigorous and useful definition of those terms.

/rant

@digitalimpression One need not be a theist or believe in souls to think that our “animal sense” are insufficient to explain the universe, and I said nothing to the contrary. Indeed, one could be a thoroughgoing empiricist who believes that our senses are all we have to gather information about the universe and still think that they are insufficient to explain the universe if one also believed that we should not take the limits of human understanding for the limits of reality (a very common position among theistic and atheistic epistemologists alike).

It is quite ironic for you to be calling anyone close-minded, however, when you opened your response with a flat refusal to believe something (and no qualifications about evidence or merely not having been convinced yet). Regardless, while there are close-minded atheists—and close-minded members of just about every group one can think of, dogmatism being a rather common malady of the human mind—being an atheist does not in itself necessarily make one close-minded. An atheist might hold his view only tentatively, for instance, and be open to further information.

As for the joke I closed my previous response with, it was exactly that: a joke. A sense of humor goes a long way here on Fluther.

@koanhead That seems to be an unnecessarily antagonistic definition of belief. I believe that there are six eggs left in my refrigerator, and it would be simply fatuous to suggest that this is not a genuine belief. Yet if I go downstairs and find there are only five, I’m certainly not going to go into denial or any sort of cognitive despair over the matter. My belief will simply change.

@SavoirFaire Like anyone else, you are certainly free to use the language as you see fit. I choose to narrow down usage when I can, so that words have distinct meanings.
In your cited usage of the word “belief”, what separates its meaning from that of “opinion” or “idea”? Why is disagreeing with your preferred definition, which you do not cite, “fatuous?”

I have two eggs in my refrigerator. I regard this idea as a fact, because I remember having counted the eggs yesterday when I cooked some of them. If I look in the refrigerator and find that there is some other number of eggs, I will be surprised but not particularly upset. The new fact, produced by observation, replaces the old fact. No belief is necessary.

Perhaps you have another, less “antagonistic” and “fatuous”, but equally specific definition to suggest? I don’t suggest that mine is the best one possible, just that it’s more useful than others I’ve found.

@koanhead: “Like anyone else, you are certainly free to use the language as you see fit.” Unfortunately, your definition of belief is so removed from what philosophers and common people alike use that it no longer serves the purpose of language (to communicate).

I highly suggest that you investigate this term further, and try to focus on the fact that belief is really a psychological or mind state. It is that, pure and simple. I may accept that something is true. That says nothing about whether or not this is a justified belief or the degree of certainty.

I believe you are being unreasonable in that you are unable to accept that you believe you have 2 eggs in your refrigerator. I don’t care whether or not you have sufficient or any evidence. You believe it. Now we get to move on to why you believe it. Your mind believes that there are 2 eggs in the refrigerator.

@tom_g Meaning does not inhere to words. Words acquire meaning when they are defined. If my definition (made for the purpose of debate) does not suit you that does not mean that it’s any less worthy than your own uncited definition.

“your definition of belief is so removed from what philosophers and common people alike use” – This sounds like an appeal to authority via common usage. I agree that it isn’t useful to use words in unexpected ways in conversation without being prepared to explain one’s meaning. I have explained my meaning and am prepared to accept a different definition of “belief” as soon as someone suggests a better one.
I am not prepared to accept a flat-footed assertion that I’m “unreasonable” in defining a word for the sake of debate, nor that your implicit definition of “belief” is more reasonable or less fatuous than my explicit one.

I seem to have highjacked this question with a point of semantics. I apologize.
While this is a “Social” question and therefore it might be acceptable to have such a lengthy off-topic discussion, I’m open to being told to shut-up about it or moderated if need be.

With that said, I do believe that semantic distinctions can be important, and am willing to continue the debate as long as my interlocutors find it interesting too.

@koanhead Like @tom_g said, your usage is too far removed from both ordinary and philosophical usage to be helpful. Note that this is not an appeal to authority because we are not talking about truth or falsity, but rather usefulness. Some philosophers of language would suggest that word meanings are public, and thus that there are correct and incorrect meanings determined by usage. We need not address this issue, however, to see the point that has been made above.

Your use of “fact” is also problematic. There can be no false facts—this is a contradiction in terms—and so it cannot be a fact that I have six eggs in the refrigerator if there are actually five eggs in the refrigerator. Indeed, note that I could have written “in fact” instead of “actually” in the previous sentence. Facts are independent of what I think, meaning there is a difference between what I take to be a fact and what is a fact.

You ask what the difference between a belief and an opinion is, but this seems to me a mistaken question. A belief is something one holds to be true or would be willing to assert, thus I would say that an opinion is a kind of belief. An idea, meanwhile, is separate because one can entertain an idea (e.g. “three-legged unicorn”) without endorsing or asserting anything about it.

What @SavoirFaire said. Seriously.

I also want to add that the fallacy you were looking for when you responded to my statement is “argumentum ad populum”. But like @SavoirFaire stated, words are labels that help us discuss concepts. I could start using the word “anger” to mean “an emotion of extreme rage felt by males of Eastern European descent, accompanied by foot-stomping”. However, it would not be useful, because I would not be able to use this word around anyone because it would not mean what everyone else thought it meant.

Both of you have gone to great lengths to point out that my definition is wrong, while neither of you has proposed a better one, nor even stated what yours is.
I submit that it’s more helpful to have an explicit definition which isn’t quite accurate than an implicit one. If we can’t agree on what words mean, we can’t have a meaningful discussion about those words. If our definitions are not explicit then we can’t agree on meanings.

@SavoirFaire If you have a problem with my use of the word “fact” in that context then that suggests that you have a different idea of what the word means then I do. When I said “fact” I implicitly included the idea of “a memory of an observation”. The observation was not false, and the memory was accurate, but something happened and the number of eggs changed on the next observation. This is the sort of thing that happens when meanings are implicit.

What exactly is a “mistaken question?” I didn’t ask it by mistake, and the fact that you at least attempted to ask it suggests that you found it valid. If you’re implying that I asked the question as some sort of rhetorical trick, you give me too much credit for cleverness and not enough for earnestness.

I’ll point out again that my definition was proposed for the sake of argument. I have used it in conversation before, but I don’t expect it to be accepted as common usage nor to cover all cases. I concede that it’s not an optimal definition, and have invited all comers to propose a better one.

As an atheist I firmly believe Aretha Franklin to be the Queen of Soul.

@koanhead First, I have offered an explicit definition of “belief.” A belief is something one holds to be true or would be willing to assert. That definition is part and parcel of why I think your question about the difference between a belief and an opinion is confused (it commits a category mistake, and thus is a mistaken question). Beliefs and opinions are not opposed, but rather the latter is one way of being the former.

As for facts, they are states of affairs in the world. We don’t believe facts, we believe that certain propositions are true (and thus that they reflect facts). One might object that ordinary language often uses “fact” and “truth” interchangeably. This would be correct, despite how vehemently professional epistemologists might urge us to avoid such a conflation. Still, allowing the conflation does not affect the issue at hand, for the problem with your usage of “fact” remains even if we disregard the technical distinction between truths and facts.

Consider the following situation: you count the eggs, and find that there are six. According to your usage, we should now regard that as a fact. The next day, you go to the refrigerator again expecting to find six eggs. It seems, then, that you should say that we still regard it as a fact. When you open the refrigerator, however, you discover that there are only five eggs inside. As there are no false facts, it cannot have been a fact that there were six eggs in the refrigerator just prior to opening it.

What are we to say about this? It seems correct to say that you regarded it as a fact that there were six eggs in the refrigerator, and I have already made the distinction between “regarding as fact” and “being a fact.” Once we know that it is—and was—not a fact that there were six eggs in the refrigerator immediately prior to it being opened up the second time, however, what are we to call the assertion that you were disposed to make (i.e., the assertion to the effect that six eggs could be found inside the refrigerator)?

The answer to this seems quite clear—particularly given ordinary English usage. What you had was a belief. That belief was regarded as a fact, but was not actually a fact (the professional epistemologist would say that it was regarded as true, but was not actually true). It was mistaken—a mistaken belief. That is the most sensible thing to call it. What your definition seems to be of is a dogma.

I don’t believe in Peter Pan, Frankinstein, or Superman.
Nor do I believe in the soul.

♪♫ ...‘cause all I wanna do is bi-cycle… ♫♪