The Science of Stephen King

At the end of his study, MacDougall concluded that there was, indeed, a weight of the human soul: twenty-one grams. This finding instantly intrigued the public, and soon the New York Times published an article about the experiment, calling the doctor “reputable.” Just as quickly, fellow doctors and scientists argued that MacDougall’s work was not sound, nor provable, as he insisted. His most egregious error was that he had much too small of a sampling, only six patients. This did not deter the doctor, who several years later, announced he would take photographs of the soul leaving the body at the time of death. He produced several images that some felt was proof of an “ethereal” light above the dying patients’ skulls. However, Dr. MacDougall’s work is not nearly rigorous enough to be considered proper scientific proof.

Science writer Karl Kruszelnicki has noted that out of MacDougall’s six patients only one had lost weight at the moment of death. Two of the patients were excluded from the results due to “technical difficulties,” a patient lost weight but then put the weight back on and two of the other patients registered a loss of weight at death but a few minutes later lost even more weight. MacDougall did not use the six results, just the one that supported his hypothesis. According to Kruszelnicki this was a case of selective reporting as MacDougall had ignored five of the results.3

Despite this, MacDougall’s experiment has grown into a legend that many believe proves the existence of the soul. It has even infiltrated popular culture, such as in the film 21 Grams (2003). In an article for Discover magazine, Ben Thomas explains why MacDougall and those who believed in his theory at the time were driven to believe:

To understand why MacDougall wanted to weigh the soul—and why he thought he could—it helps to understand the environment in which he operated. His work is rife with terms and ideas recognizable from early psychological theorists Freud and Jung. There’s a lot of talk about “psychic functions” and “animating principles”—a grasping for the precise scientific language to describe consciousness, and life itself, in a world still ignorant of FMRI [functional magnetic resonance imaging] and DNA.4

Radiocarbon dating, along with analysis of the writing, was used to determine the age of the Dead Sea Scrolls, original texts of the Hebrew Bible, although scientists were only able to narrow them down from the fourth century BCE to the middle of the fourth century CE.

While science and technology have developed leaps and bounds since the dawn of the twentieth century, humans are still curious about the intersection of religion and science. When Sally in Needful Things unknowingly sells her soul for what she believes is an authentic fragment of Noah’s Ark, she feels as if her religious beliefs are concretely proven. The pursuit for relics is a hallowed tradition, and many archaeologists have devoted their careers to uncovering items or structures that align with religious texts. One recent example is Hezekiah’s Gate:

In the Hebrew Bible, King Hezekiah despised false idols, and he destroyed everything related to his father’s godless beliefs. Decades ago, a gate was found in the city of Tel Lachish, and excavations in 2016 cleared most of the structure. The six rooms covered an area of eighty by eighty foot and today stands about thirteen feet high. It doubled as a shrine and was likely also forcibly retired by Hezekiah in the eighth century B.C. According to the Bible, the gates of Tel Lachish was an important social hub where the elite would sit on benches. The building’s size, as well as seats found inside, indicated that the ruins belonged to the historical shrine-gate. In an upstairs room, researchers also found two altars. Each had four horns, all of them with intentional damage, another possible sign of Hezekiah’s intolerance. Elsewhere in the shrine was a stone toilet. Biblical texts mention the placement of latrines at cult centers as a method of desecration. Tests proved the toilet had never been used and was probably installed for such desecration purposes.5