That, again, is evading the question. Suppose your god yanks the soul out of someone; surely Mr Omnipotent could do that. What happens? What does a soul do for someone? And the answer can’t be “they die”, if human ancestors were wandering around soulless.
Whine, whine. Skeptics started posting by the third post; if the OP wanted only yes-men that failed from the outset. And, regardless of your persecution fantasies I post all the time without mentioning religion.
And how is that less “childish”?
You HAVE heard of the concept of a thought experiment?
And by the way; a believer is in no position to go around calling other people “childish”. They still believe in imaginary friends; that’s childish.
Wrong. If souls existed, they supposedly interact with us; so that means that they interact with energy & matter, since we are made of those.
What, you think I’m a zombie? Dead, yet still posting?
And since a soul supposedly survives death, those aren’t “soul eradicators” anyway.
How can a human live without lungs? Huma ancestors lived without lungs!!!
Again, in the context of Catholic theology the souls becomes essential for living. Bonobos and peripatus to need eternal souls, humans do.
Skeptics…you use that word as if it were relvant. What’s next? We can’t talk about Hamlet’s feelings because “Dude, that Hamlet guy isn’t real, I’m a Hamlet-skeptic, he has no feelings”?
Sure you can not post about religion, I’ve seen you do it and even agreed with you. But the very hint of it tranforms you in…well…the usual.
If you don’t use boom and BFG-9000 it instantaneously lower the level of childishness.
Sure. You HAVE heard about honestly wanting to debate?
DingDingDingDingDing!!!
The pony…its trick.
Yes, because even a deluded-dimwitt like me can see you got the one thing to say. Your skeptical, science-savvy mind should be able to see that.
An atheist can answer this thread without spewing fecal matter, you now, actually contributing.
No, they don’t have to. Science cannot speak of the interaction between matter/energy and non-matter energy.
And since a soul supposedly survives death, those aren’t “soul eradicators” anyway.
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Reading comprehension, dude. Dying of plutonium poisoning must feel like being you, alive; maybe even better knowing the end is certain. It eradicates the soul from the physical world.
Sure, they can be bullshit. But, it’s like my AD&D Druid’s stats and equipment. They may not be real in any physycal sense, but we can still talk about them.
Isn’t it self-evident that if you believe God and religion are nonsense, that your contribution to a thread asking a theological question is thread-shitting if it amounts to some form of, “But there is no God. So the question is irrelevant.” Then the chorus of “Well saids” and attaboys follow. It’s apparently irresistible.
Does it just take a degree of self control that’s not humanly possible to refrain from shitting in a thread whose resolution, it would appear, has no real interest for you? Seriously, WTF?
This doesn’t make any sense to me. Theologically speaking, isn’'t having a soul supposed to influence our behavior? That certainly seems to be what some of the other posters in this thread are saying. And if our souls influence our behavior, then isn’t that a concrete example of an interaction between “matter/energy and non-matter/energy”?
As we learn more and more about neurology, at some point we should be able to detect the influence the soul exerts on our neurons. Chemistry and physics will predict a particular pattern of neurological behavior that will deviate from what we see in the real world. That deviation will be evidence for the existence of souls.
No, according to Catholic theology by your own description souls are NOT necessary for living since the immediate ancestors of humans with souls had no souls and were alive. You are just trying to evade answering what a soul actually does. Again; if God removed your soul, what would happen?
Have you?
You are the one who started spewing insults at me, personally.
Yes, it can. It doesn’t because no such thing actually exists; but if it did, science could.
As usual I regret very much having Der Trihs “on my side” in this thread. But still, to talk about the soul it would help to define it clearly, yes? That’s why I personally am curious how the people responding to this question would define the nature of the soul, how it’s supposed to interact with physical matter, and what exactly the difference is between having a soul and not having one, if there is any.
Reality exists independent of you atheist musings.
On the profound issue of God “permitting” evil, the analgous situation is parenting. Why do parents allow their children to get into trouble, sometimes to harm or even kill themselves? There are many answers, but the clearest, most immediate answer is free will. You are free to do anything as stupid as you wish, regardless of your age.
One of the fundamental mistakes in reasoning that atheists make is to pretend that the universe created itself, out of nothing. Information, energy, intelligence, all from nada. The fatuous pretension of believing this is laughably naive.
Intelligence only comes from intelligence.
Then where did God come from? The Holy Bible answered this question more than 2000 years ago. God just IS. He said “I am.”
Why an eternal universe was so easily believable through the mid twentieth century but an eternal God is inconceivable is a question atheists need to answer.
This is a good question even if it is a slight hijack.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says
To speak about the soul is so spiritual (well, duh) that using the words we use for matter is always an analogy. The soul is what makes us human rather than strictly biological; it is a divine spark inside us, it allows to know good and evil and to experience God.
As to how it interacts with the body…it’s a fucking good question. The unity between is such that even the word interaction seems incomplete, they are one thing. How does non-matter interact with matter, in the end, may not be fully answerable in scientific terms; especially because the soul is not knowable by science.
I’m sure this is not the best answer, not MY best anyway. It’s like fully explainig why I like bananas better than peaches: at some point it’s simply “because I do”.
I hope this helps, somehow.
I’ll try to find a better answer.
First, if pre-Adamites existed without knowledge of a soul, afterlife. or Deity and died & stayed dead, how is that unfair? It’s not like they were dangled something & then had it jerked away. HOWEVER, it could also be they are retroactively raised as all sentient life participates in the Redemption of Christ. In the New Creation we may see beings from all along the evolutionary scale. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some dinosaurs around, just because as we all know and I am sure God agrees, dinosaurs are cool!
And I think Jesus will occasionally ride one, just to mess with some people.
As for the 12000 year old American native ancestors, I said that ensoulment could have been as long as tens of thousands of years ago. But not knowing what their awareness was RE God, souls & afterlife, they could well have been pre-Adamics.
That doesn’t work, since parents are not omnipotent, not omniscient, nor did they design their children from scratch. The relationship between God and humans isn’t much like parenting at all, except a severely abusive one.
Except that simply isn’t true; we evolved from lesser intelligences, and less intelligent species evolved from species that weren’t intelligent at all.
And there’s nothing more “naive” than being a believer. Than someone who thinks that his own evidence free, logic & physics denying fantasy just happens to be true. Never mind that religion has over and over again been proven wrong, or that it’s wildly contradictory; believe because you want to believe. That’s “naive”. Pure self indulgent fantasy.
In other words, shut up, don’t ask questions and mindlessly believe. Why? Because a book written by deeply ignorant barbarians says so!
Because there’s plenty of evidence for a universe, none for a god. And because the universe isn’t logically incoherent, nor is it a myth made up by primitives.
So if your god ripped out your soul you’d become a sociopathic atheist?
And what makes you think that? if the soul actually existed, there’s no reason to think it would be unknowable by science.
An assertion offered without evidence; there is no reason whatever to believe that this is true. Unless, perhaps, you think it must be true because it uses the same word twice in a parallel structure.
Not really on-topic, but I have to ask: why will you believe this so easily about God, but ridicule the exact same argument when it’s made about the universe itself? :dubious:
But what makes it possible to witness, observe, or verify this difference? In other words, suppose I build a robot with an artificial consciousness that precisely counterfeits the working of a human brain – it has thoughts, memories, opinions, morals, emotions, everything. What is it that makes me a “person” and the robot just a machine?
Full disclosure: in my view, there is no meaningful distinction. The robot is just as much a living individual as I am, and it’s only a technical detail that it would be incorrect to call it “human.”
It’s really funny how you think being snotty and condescending somehow advances your argument.
This is contradicted by the evidence.
Perhaps it is impossible for “something to appear out of nothing”. But all that means is that the Big Bang must have had SOME cause. There’s no reason to identify that cause with the Christian God, particularly when so much of what we DO know about the beginning of the universe contradicts what’s written in the Bible.
If the soul has a measurable effect on the material world (as you say it does by allowing us to know good and evil and experience God) then the soul is ABSOLUTELY knowable by science. All we have to do is track down how the behavior of our neurons deviates from what chemistry and physics would predict. That deviation would be concrete evidence for the soul at work.
I’ve always been a bit baffled that Christian scientists haven’t looked harder for the evidence of the soul. After all, no other manifestation of the divine is so accessible to empirical investigation. You can’t count on miracles happening on command, and prayer is also subject to divine whim. But the soul, as described by church doctrine, exerts a constant and measurable influence on the behavior of the flesh. It’s like a petri dish for experimenting with theological hypotheticals.
No doubt it’s because attempts to prove religious concepts using science result in science disproving the religious concept, instead. Or no results at all.
First of all, the experiment you are proposing is well beyond our capabilities at present. Secondly, if we were able to detect some deviation, an actual scientist would look to change our theories of chemistry and physics-- not postulate that he discovered “the soul”.
Science doesn’t concern itself with the supernatural. If it comes under the umbrella of science, it is, by definition, natural.
If it did everything a soul is supposed to do, I’m sure that they would call it a soul sooner or later.
The only reason that it doesn’t concern itself with the supernatural is that the supernatural doesn’t exist. If it did, science would concern itself with it. It might refuse to call it “supernatural”, but it would.
It’s unclear if it’s beyond our capabilities now or not. Depending on how the soul influences the behavior of the neurons, it might actually be detectable with current technology if we were to actively look for it. I was just commenting on the curious fact that Christians don’t seem to be interested in looking for evidence of the soul, even though according to the doctrine of most denominations the evidence should be there. I mean, plenty of Christians spend a lot of time talking about all the amazing things God does around the world on a daily basis. It seems like they’d take a similar interest in the miracle that occurs in their head every minute of every day.
Of course, even if we don’t go actively looking, we’ll probably stumble on it accidentally as we learn more and more about how the brain works. And such an anomaly won’t be able to be accounted for by changing the laws of chemistry or physics, since it would be an anomaly that appeared only inside living human brains. If chemistry and physics work differently inside the brain than outside, then you can’t fix things just by changing the rules of chemistry and physics which apply universally. Instead you have to look for another source of influence.
Absolutely. I never said anything about “the supernatural”.
I’m not sure who you mean by “they”. If you mean scientists who are Christians, then maybe they would, and they’d be “kicked out” of the scientific mainstream. There is no scientific consensus on “everything a soul is supposed to do”.
Doesn’t exist as part of the material world. Although that might be redundant…
Not if they discovered something that acted like a soul is typically supposed to, and which could be independently verified by other scientists. They might come up with a more “sciency” sounding official word for it, but most would refer to it as a soul in normal conversation. And by “they”, I mean whichever scientists discovered it of whatever religion, if any.
Science is by nature hostile to religion because religion is consistently wrong, not because scientists themselves are necessarily personally hostile to religion. If souls were discovered, if the discovery could be verified by other scientists then souls would become part of the scientific mainstream. Yes, a scientist who claims to have discovered evidence of the soul in the real world is going to get " “kicked out” of the scientific mainstream" for the simple reason that no such evidence exists; but that’s simply because like pretty much all religious ideas the soul is imaginary. Not because science would reject the idea if it turned out to be true.