soul

Science and medicine seek naturalistic accounts of the observable natural world. This stance is known as methodological naturalism[8] Much of the scientific study relating to the soul has been involved in investigating the soul as a human belief or as concept that shapes cognition and understanding of the world (see Memetics), rather than as an entity in and of itself.

A counterargument points out that just because the brain has regions that deal with colour and other aspects of vision, one does not argue that the genes produce an area to promote the illusion of a blue sky. By analogy, if there is a 'God sense' just as there is a sense of vision, it seems to argue for the objective existence of an extra-mundane reality.

During the late 19th and first half 20th century, researchers attempted to weigh people who were known to be dying, and record their weight accurately at the time of death. As an example, Dr. Duncan MacDougall, in the early 1900s, sought to measure the weight purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death. MacDougall weighed dying patients in an attempt to prove that the soul was material and measurable. These experiments are widely considered to have had little if any scientific merit, and although MacDougall's results varied considerably from 21 grams, for some people this figure has become synonymous with the measure of a soul's weight. Experiments such as MacDougall's have not been repeated with current precision equipment and research tools, and snopes.com concludes of one researcher that:

"MacDougall's results were flawed because the methodology used to harvest them was suspect, the sample size far too small, and the ability to measure changes in weight imprecise. For this reason, credence should not be given to the idea his experiments proved something, let alone that they measured the weight of the soul as 21 grams. His postulations on this topic are a curiosity, but nothing more."

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