Paul Ham’s book, The Soul, A History of the Human Mind_, is a stimulating challenge to our human ingenuity, which we must value in the face of soulless artificial intelligence systems and their narcissistic champions._

In The Soul: A History of the Human Mind, Australian historian Paul Ham probes the history of human thought and the central question people ask about the meaning of life: do we have an everlasting soul? He starts controversially with the factual assertion: “In the beginning, God did not create Heaven and Earth, because the human mind had not yet created God. A primate with a brain capable of conceiving of a god or gods would not appear for billions of years.”

Every culture in every epoch develops a belief about the existence of life and the human spirit. The notion of an everlasting soul is a product of the human mind, its existence a matter of faith that cannot be ‘proven’. The comfort of having an authoritative ‘explanation’ of what it all means ranges from Christ and the resurrection to existential angst, despair about the future and an over-weening belief in ‘the self’ and its right to do as it pleases. We now face a future where technology may take over this quest for meaning.

Worship of enduring phenomena, the sun and moon, morphed into veneration of everything in nature, the universal life force of rocks and streams, then from multiple gods who need to be placated by gifts and human sacrifice to the notion of only one God in both Christianity and Islamic thought.

Ham’s book gives a detailed account of how such beliefs developed into rigid institutional rules and attempts to free the self from the shackles of religious power. One cannot logically challenge beliefs or the faith in a culture’s chosen god(s) whose power over human thought and action is all-encompassing.

But the ‘self’ has always tried to decipher its........

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