Is there any scientific evidence of the existence of the human soul?
No.
Witness Michaelangelo. 
I recall reading years ago about experiments that weighed people at the moment of death, and a slight decrease in weight was observed. The same was not true of animals, which, if I’m not mistaken, have no soul according to the Bible.
I’m not about to assert this as fact, but has anyone seen anything like this? If in fact such experiments were carried out, it might be interpreted as an answer to the OP.
The best scientific evidence is against the existance of an immortal soul. To whit, when someone is given a prefrontal lobotomy, they are turned into a gibbering monkey. Where’s their soul then?
Denying the body function doesn’t effect the soul.
Thats like saying when the body dies, the soul does too.
And another one moves on to “Great Debates”
I don’t believe in the existence of souls. However, since souls have no physical existence, I can’t imagine how any physical experiment could be evidence for or against their existence. If someone loses some brain functions, supposing that an unchanging soul exists provides some comfort, but something that cannot be observed is not science.
I heard that story about the weight of a corpse decreasing at the “moment of death”. It’s always something someone heard. If that were true, I would think that measuring the decrease in weight should be routinely used to establish the time of death.
I think Opus1 summed it up nicely.
I didn’t just hear about it DrMatrix, I actually read about it and the difficulty of doing it precisely. Any simple way of doing it (like the way it was originally done) will have so much error in the system that the measurement would be meaningless. I forget all the reasoning in the article I read, but eventually, the author decided that you’d have to launch the soon-to-be-deceased into a stable, perfectly well calculated orbit, wait for death, and see how the orbit changed. Of course, there are a few problems - like keeping the person alive in the vacuum long enough to take your measurements, and avoiding explosive decompression - you know, just minor things.
Very touchy subject for non-believers.
See this thread Reincarnation, the Sequel! for a good discussion.
Well, there’s no evidence for the soul. That’s about as good as it gets, people, because any evidence against the soul will be explained away by believers.
There is one question that is overloooked (by the faithful and non-believers alike), what is your definition of a soul? Unless you define it in terms that can be quantified and isolated you have little chance of finding any evidence pro or con.
Weaseling out of things is what separates us from the animals…except the weasel.
Then how could the original measurement have had meaning?
Am I reading you right? A measurement was taken, but any attempt to reproduce the results would be meaningless using currently available technology. What you dismiss as minor things are just convient excuses as to why the results cannot be duplicated.
Padeye
I’m not sure how a non-believer can define a soul. I’m afraid I must leave that to the faithful. As to what seperates us from animals, I believe that it is vanity to deny the fact that we are animals.
As far as I remember, someone once did the experiment (back in the 1800s sometime) and reported a weight loss at the time of death. However, the loss was so minute that it could have been (and probably was) caused by air currents, a slight nudge, or wishful thinking. The article I read was trying to make the point that the reported loss was so small that to detect it reliably would require going to some bizarre extremes - it was a rather tongue-in-cheek article.
Sorry for not being terribly clear.
…the major problem being that change in mass does not cause any change in orbit. If a spacesship splits in two, they don’t go into different orbits, right? They’d continue to float next to each other in the same orbit.
If anyone would like to do the research, I believe that “Omni” magazine did an aricle on this 15 or 20 years ago. I recall they did record a minute change in weight at the time of expiration. I’m not being lazy, I’m leaving on vacation in an hour.
Were it possible to weigh a body accurately enough then I reckon you would see living bodies gradually decrease in weight through respiration (CO2 more dense than O2) and evaporation through breath and sweat.
Boy, it would be nice if that were true, ticker. Empirical observation leads to a different conclusion, at least in the period since I’ve had enough income for both food and beer.
Science has no evidence for or against the existence of a soul.
That weight-after-death drek appeared in tabloids…a lousy source for any kind of information.