The social myth of important social questions not being amenable to rational consideration is a political tool, not scientific truth. The classical literature doesn't help there.
Most people do not believe that everything is measurable unfortunately
Not everything is measurable though. There are (pretty unexpected) constraints on practicality, but also logical restrictions people tend to forget about.
As an interesting example in the context here, consider the question what constitutes history. There are many other things with great import you can't really measure the important part of.
To the point where I just send this to people when they try and argue with me:
Making distinctions based on undetectable differences is just one kind of error in that category: people also make unreasonable distinctions based on detectable differences irrelevant to the decision space.
Point being, that actually all falls under motivated reasoning. People don't really care about the logic, they want their desired outcomes realized.
Not arguing with them might actually help them.
That "soul" concept is far more interesting than you give it credit for. Look into the gnostics and the difference to spirit for instance. People were far less stupid than they're framed as today, misinterpretation and misrepresentation go a long way and a lack of precise words can obscure a commendable intent.
I think even better approach is the way Terrence Mckenna goes through all of this in his book exploring the hermetic tradition
And I agree with you on motivated reasoning but that is arguably just how human intelligence works and in this case everybody in their current time was doing the best that they could with the tools that they had. So I don’t mean to diminish former practitioners of what they called science or epistemological reasoning, or natural philosophy.
At the same time as scientists were constantly identifying when new mechanisms that better describe natural phenomenon retire old social formations around them
In my view the main failure of humanity is not adapting social structures at the pace of epistemological change, this is Carl Sagan’s main complaint in the demon haunted world.
Another issue with EA is that it is yet another trendy thing among nerds and techbros that was iterated hundreds of times in philosophy under general debate on consequencialism/utilitarism. Of course nerds and techbros think of themselves as smarter than everyone else, so they don't bother engaging with that debate in honest manner.
We’ve been here before, many, many times.