What I have to say here concerns Christians only.  It does not necessarily apply to Muslims, Judaists, Buddhists or members of any other religion (though it may).  And it certainly does not concern the entirely separate issue of whether or not there is a God (of some kind), which cannot be answered either by science or religion.  However, since anything up to 40% of Americans are Christians who believe that God directed evolution, my argument should affect quite a lot of people.

At first sight, the notion that God used evolution to create the world (and ultimately humans) seems to make good sense.  After all, how else would He have done it?  With His thumb?  But if you really start to think about it, there emerges an extraordinary problem that, to the best of my knowledge, nobody else ever raised before.

It concerns the soul.  We all have one, we are told, and it is immortal.  But exactly how did we come by it?

Note that, if you are an orthodox Christian of any recognized brand, there’s no way you can fudge this one.  The notion of the soul and eternal life are central to Christianity.  It was to save our immortal souls that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected.  Take that away, you’re left with nothing but the Golden Rule and Jesus as…as…well, just a community activist.

There are only two options.  Either the soul evolved, or it was inserted by divine and inscrutable means.  Let’s consider each of these alternatives in turn.

If the soul evolved, it must have met at least these three conditions.

a) There was variable material for natural selection to work on.

b) There was some kind of selective pressure involved.

c) The process of ensouling cannot have been instantaneous.

Consider (a).  What was the variable material?  What were the bits of potential soulfulness that selection had to work on?  I can’t even imagine what they would have been like.  But unless there was something, souls could not have evolved.

Consider (b).  What was the selective pressure?  Nothing can work as a selective pressure unless it is something that, however marginally, increases the fitness of the individuals concerned—that’s to say, ensures that they have more offspring than those who aren’t getting souls.  How would a soul do this?  The reverse is more likely: having a soul would have encouraged a turning-the-other-cheek approach that, prior to civilization, would have been a good recipe for shortening life.

Consider (c).  This means that at some time in the process there must have been people with incomplete souls.  Remember the old argument, “What use is five percent of an eye?”  Well. a lot more use than zero percent—a simple thingy that can tell light from dark gives you quite a bit of information about the world and allows you to exploit at least one or two opportunities and escape at least one or two dangers.  So, we have a pretty good notion of what 5% of an eye would have been like.  But what would 5% of a soul have been like?  Or 25%, or 50%?  Limited life warranty?  Reduced compassion?  The question makes no sense.  Either you have an immortal soul or you don’t.  There’s no possible halfway house, any more than there is between being single and being married.

At this stage I’m sure many Christians will be smiling in a slightly superior way.  They never supposed for one moment that souls evolved.  They always knew that God put them in.  Somehow.  Miracles happen—get used to it.  But read on, folks.   The worst is yet to come.

So God inserted the soul.  When?

If you believe in evolution as well as the Christian God, you must believe that, as far as their physical bodies went, humans evolved.  You can’t be like Wallace and say, well, everything up to the apes evolved, then God created us.  Christians are always saying you can’t just pick and choose what you believe about God and Jesus, you take the whole package or nothing.  Same is true about evolution.  You can’t just pick the bits you fancy and cut out the bits you don’t.   Humans evolved—live with it.

But their evolution was a gradual affair: there was no moment at any time in the whole process where you could say, X and Y weren’t human, but their kids Z and W were.  So when did this soul-insertion begin?  Whenever it began, it can only have been an arbitrary date.  Mom and Dad didn’t have souls, their kids did.  On what basis, rational or otherwise, could God have chosen the date?

Note you were better off with the old Adam-and-Eve story.  If they’d had souls, everyone else would have, by whatever means people who don’t believe in evolution think characteristics in general are inherited.  But if you have evolution and divine action working alongside one another, what’s evolved will be inherited, but what about what’s not involved?  There’s no mechanism for inheriting that.  Besides, what would it mean to have a parent’s soul, or a combination of both parents’ souls?  So every baby that pops out of the womb would have to have a fresh, clean, unused soul inserted in it.

And we’re still stuck with the question, who got the first soul, when, where, and why them and not somebody else?

As I see it, none of the options I’ve mentioned makes any kind of sense.  So the orthodox Christian is forced to say, “Well, we have souls, so God must do the whole thing by miraculous means beyond our power to imagine.”  Okay, but if you do that, your argument is circular, and you’re appealing to mumbo-jumbo, and you might just as well go the whole hog and believe that God made the world in six days six thousand years ago, dinosaurs and all.

So who got the First Soul?