"Dr. Empirical: ""For the longest time, scientists were forced to posit the existence of black holes, even though we didn't have an actual image of one, because the information they had demanded that black holes exist. Just last week, we finally got visual confirmation of a black hole with the above image — though even there, you can see it only because of the bent ring of light circling its orbit. Our conclusion about the soul is kind of like that: something that can be seen only in light of extrinsic factors, the existence of which is demanded by those factors."""