Theologies claim godly and grand sources for the life force, while scientific minds describe the soul as the remarkable product of complex synapses and motor neurons.
Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, described the comments as "extraordinarily tasteless".
What we do know is that in 1981, another great design mind described it, if memory serves, as "the silliest thing I've ever heard".
Sir Oliver Popplewell, a recently retired High Court judge, who is therefore free to speak his mind, described an article by Mr Blunkett as "whining" and politicians as "control freaks".
Ron Howard, who directed Russell Crowe and Mr. Bettany in "A Beautiful Mind," described Mr. Bettany in a telephone interview as "very present, very relaxed and engaging and totally un-self-conscious".
Eleanor Roosevelt, who later changed her mind, described her as "a great person, receiving the recognition due her as an individual valiantly fighting in the forefront of the world's battle".
It is a work of astonishing originality, both in its subject matter (childhood and the growth of the mind, described with a pre-Freudian insight unprecedented in literature) and in its form.
"Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me.
Michel Gondry, who directed "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," described for The Guardian lucid dreams in which "I generally end up having sex with the first girl I can find".
But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," described as an "intellectual disaster".
