I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to sat. No big deal… it’s kind of tangential to this thread.
Humans got souls the moment a big black monolith appeared somewhere in Africa. I’m surprised nobody said that yet.
But seriously, I agree with Dawkins here - Evolution and (christian) Religion are ultimately incompatible. It’s interesting to see how people try to combine both.
There is no supernatural. Things are, or they are not. If they are, they are natural. If they are not, they are, well, not.
A Soul, if it exists, would be something natural. I don’t understand where this completely arbitrary separation comes from - there are things, but then there are things. Like, special things. They have an impact on us, but they are … special. Not like the rest. Different. How? Why?
And if souls do what most Christians claim that souls do, i.e. influence the meat of our brains to allow us to make moral decisions, or know God, or whatever, then souls are absolutely verifiable.
In other words, the soul, in its most common formulation, is a testable theological hypothesis.
That’s why the question in the OP is interesting. By conducting a thought experiment about when souls arrived on the scene as man evolved, we’re also considering which hypothetical models of the soul are consistent with our existing body of biological knowledge and what measurable physical traces they might leave behind for us to detect.
Then test them:) If you know the scientific method then do it YOURSELF:)
Don’t depend on the scientific community, if they exist it is simple enough for everyone to test on their own, come up with your own methods, test, refine, and retest:):)
In the point soul/matter interaction I can honestly say my knowledge reaches a point where I simly accept the idea without going deeper. I really do not know how. I cannot imagine
Death. When God gave souls to the last pre-human animal and it became human, the soul became a necesity of life for that species. Like lungs in humans but not in fish
Very well, thanks.
Yes, it can. It doesn’t because no such thing actually exists; but if it did, science could.
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Whine, whine, whine.
No it coudn’t by Catholic definition of soul.
No it couldn’t because by definition science cannot speak of spiritual things.
DO ask questions. Don’t mindlessly ask questions.
Soul ripped = death.
Not necessarily. I’m willing to acknowledge that the influence of the soul on neurological functioning may be very delicate and subtle.
If, for example, humans had brains that were the size and complexity of hamsters, yet we were still able to think and reason at our current level, that would clearly indicate that something anomalous was going on. Or if humans who suffered serious head injuries were still able to think and talk normally, that would also be strong and easily observable evidence for the existence of a soul.
But clearly the situation is not that simple. The physical human brain obviously plays a very large role in cognition given its size and the fact that when it’s damaged our mental processes are impaired. So if the soul does exist and is influencing our behavior, its effects must be very well-hidden – gentle nudges rather than overt shoves. Such a subtle influence will almost certainly require very careful experiments to tease out from the natural physical processes of the brain.
When we are done with that can we go back to how many angels fit on the head of a pin?
First of all there is only the word of some Human, who wrote or said, God said anything, there is no proof that Moses was even a historical person. Also, who created the place for the God to be? If God is a Supreme being as many believe than he would need a place before He could exist or he would nor be in existence.
The meaning of the saying “Iam” could mean existence itself. It is a matter of belief not fact!
A good human parent doesn’t know ahead of time that a child will do evil things. I know if I were an all knowing being and I knew my child would be a Hitler I wouldn’t let a man near me for months. I would not knowingly concieve a evil Human,and i would like to think God knew better than me. If I so chose to have a child that I knew would do evil i would consider myself as much at fault.
I am still searching for the answer to what is the difference between life and soul ? When a person dies,life leaves the body so whare does it go? Why should the soul suffer for the body or the body for the soul?
We first have to prove that angels exist!
God is All There Is and nothing exists outside of Him. A theistic mathematician might conceive of Him as The Set of All Sets.
Each soul is eternal and is forever safe within God as an indispensable part of Himself. The soul is pure Spirit and is literally a creative extension of God’s Will within Himself. Souls exist beyond number.
All souls share God’s Mind, the only Creative instrument there is. In this, they are and always will be collectively Co-creator with God, God’s Only Son.
Because their wills are free, they can imagine their minds to be separate from Mind and that they have thwarted God’s Will. This, of course, does not affect their Reality. When they do this, however, they turn from Universal Knowledge to subjective belief and imagine themselves separate from God and from each other, lost in a fractally changing a space time continuum. The result of this illusion (imagined projection) is a lot of drama, laughter and tears and total insanity.
We have chosen to believe that God is beyond us but accessible. God is beyond belief but He can and, given our belief in belief as reality, must be reached thru it. Jesus offered some guidelines for changing one’s beliefs in separation to a single belief in oneness. At that point, the individual awakes to the realization that it’s all been just a dream and remembers God, just like Jesus did.
And just like Jesus, it is now our mission to spread the Word that sin is a lie and judgment is always one of self on self. When everyone realizes this, and only then, Salvation has come to earth.
Go to it.
Well if we are going to go for wild, fact-less speculation with nothing to back it up, I’ll posit that the soul is a blue turtle except on Thursdays when it is kinda purplish. Go to it.
Sounds like adhay is defining “God” to be “everything that exists.” That’s pretty much the definition of pantheism, which is mostly the same thing as atheism. I’m an atheist, and I believe in “everything that exists.”
Seen anything else in this thread? I agree that this should be in IMHO.
Whatever works for you.
Do you see yourself a part of everything that exists or as apart from everything “else” that exists apart from you?
What’s the difference? If I take the set of “everything that exists,” then clearly, I am part of that.
Sounds like adhay is positing that “everything that exists” is a sentient, conscious entity. And that souls exist which are “pure spirit”. I dunno about you but this is a pretty far cry from my brand of atheism.
Frankly I found his thesis a bit difficult to parse; it seems that the theory is that reality itself is a figment of our imaginations - a deranged hallucination, maybe? (I don’t know what “a fractally changing a space time continuum” is, really.) My read of it is that this fractal reality isn’t objectively real, so that would make us all solipsists, I guess. Solipsists wallowing in an insanity we deliberately chose, to be specific.
So, I guess in this model, cro-magnons didn’t have souls because there were no cro-magnons; we just made them up. I’m presumably hallucinating this message board, so none of you have souls either, and neither does anyone I imagine I’ve met, since nobody else that I imagine I encounter is actually real. There’s just me, wallowing in my own delusion, imagining that adhay exists and is telling me to realize that reality is an illusion like he did.
Though I can’t help but wonder, if adhay woken up from the dream and is now seeing the true reality of universal monotonous oneness, how is he managing to post on the message board I’m hallucinating? It’s not impossible that I’m misundersanding his thesis.
Um… no, not if it it’s the thing that causes consciousness to exist. Problem is you’re using a common but totally nonsensical definition of a soul.
If there is such a thing as a soul, I suggest that these hypothetically soulless people would be reduced to simply writhing randomly and uselessly like Galvani’s dissected frog.
I was going to say this pretty much, but you covered it well. Parents simply don’t have the power to do what OrvilleWright was suggesting. And anything that even came close would likely harm them in other ways. So it kinda isn’t even possible at all.
This is a good question.
I’d like to ask though, if you counterfeit it, does it still experience those things? That’s the question, and I’m not sure if that can be answered. On the other hand, if it’s completely identical to the working of a brain, whose to say it’s not “grabbing” a soul of it’s own just like (presumably) when a brain is formed?
And what do chemistry and physics predict on this? Isn’t this overestimating what we know about cognitive function right now? I’d think before any evidence of a soul were to be found we’d have to have a clearer understanding of such things. Right now there isn’t any scientific basis to say one way or the other. Until claims can be tested, there isn’t any reason to say so, especially given how… academic? the question is.
I remember reading that in the 18th or 19th century, some scientists tried to find evidence for a soul by weighing a person right before and after their death and measuring any change. Theoretically, at the moment of death, the soul would be exiting the body, and this would cause the body to slightly decrease in mass.
Of course, this assumes that souls are composed of baryonic matter (we can’t very well say that souls are massless, otherwise they would catastrophically exit the body at the speed of light, since anything with zero mass must always travel at c). Now perhaps souls are composed of some kind of exotic matter that’s not currently part of the standard model of particle physics. But given that the soul exists in this universe, it would have to be detectable somehow, and in some way interact with normal matter (in much the same way that dark matter is invisible and almost nonexistant except that it interacts with normal matter via gravity).
Hey, maybe we can create soul particles at the LHC. Has anyone submitted a proposal for this yet?