I wasn’t aware until now that those six points were not only pillars of the OP’s argument but he apparently believes each is derived from the previous statement.
Perhaps it would help us, Othello1, if you could explain why the mortar is holding the bricks together, so to speak.
We are physical beings, we live in a physical universe and have no access to anything that is not physical, we have no ability to conceive of anything non physical. Simply believing that something spritual exists in any form you choose to believe may be very beneficial to your state of well being, attempting to interpet or describe it is pointless. I don’t see the physical universe as being the end all of everything but I have no idea where it goes past that point. I feel like it just makes more sense to have a reason for existence and a reason for the physical universe and everything in it. We are stuck with concepts based on our physical ability to comprehend. Maybe thats as good as it gets.
Hang on, there’s a bit of a contradiction here. You seem to be admitting that you have absolutely no way to demonstrate anything non-physical (although, again, I’m left wondering what that even means); and then you say it “makes sense” that there is something out there. No, no it doesn’t. You cannot by any reasonable means establish its existence; simply assuming that it exists is the opposite of rational.
It’s okay “not to close the door” on the idea of “something else.” It’s usually unwise to declare, in advance, that something is impossible.
It’s unlikely as the Pope converting to Judaism…but it’s possible that someone will develop a camera that takes pictures of souls. (Sort of what Kirlian photography was thought to be by gullible chumps.)
What HoneyBadgerDC said is essentially agnostic: “I have no idea.”
The next statement, “I feel like it just makes more sense to have a reason for existence” is also not unreasonable, if perhaps based more on wishing it were so than on any evidence.
Evidence is the key, and, to date, there simply isn’t any. (One may or may not add an “Alas!” as one personally prefers.) But…who the heck knows: tomorrow, some kind of evidence might pop up. Some bloke might suddenly and consistently get very strong results on the Rhine ESP card tests. Cool!
Oh, we can conceive of anything we want. The ability to conceive of something doesn’t, in and of itself, make it real.
I’ll go out on a limb here for the OP, as it seems others are reluctant to do so: Souls don’t exist, Occam’s razor withstanding. The soul is a construct of the human mind, the only place where such a thing resides.
You can’t, or shouldn’t, use as a foundation of your argument for the existence of something supernatural the existence of something else just as supernatural that also cannot be proven.
Your argument falls on its face right there. It is not a given by any stretch of the imagination.
If the atmosphere is just a complex group of chemical reactions, the atmosphere should act in ways that are totally predictable based on physical reactions determined by atmospheric chemistry.
If that’s so, then why can’t we predict exactly what temperature it will be on July 25th 2015 at 4:00 PM in Monterey California at the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center? I mean, this is the most advanced weather prediction organization in existence on Planet Earth, and it can’t even provide detailed weather predictions past a week or two. Despite the physics and chemistry of water and air and sunlight being extremely well understood, weather is inherently unpredictable.
So do thunderstorms have souls? Do sunny days have souls?
Just because a system is determined solely by deterministic physical laws doesn’t mean that we can actually predict the behavior of the system. Here’s a simple video of a double pendulum. The only forces acting on it are gravity, friction, and wind resistance, yet after a few seconds it is impossible to predict the position of the second pendulum end, even given precise measurements of the starting conditions of the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VmTiyTut6A
I don’t think that double pendulum has a soul. It is entirely deterministic, and yet we can’t in actual practice determine the outcome of the operation of this pendulum. And I submit that human beings, and mice, and bacteria, are much more complicated that this pendulum. Every living cell of every living creature has hundreds or thousands of molecular mechanisms that are more complex than that double pendulum. Since you can’t exactly predict the state of the double pendulum more than a few seconds in advance, how can you expect to do the same thing to a bacteria? And if you can’t exactly predict the state of the bacteria, how could you expect to do the same thing to a mouse? And if you can’t do it to a mouse, how can you expect to do it to a human being?
Othello1, what is the best verifiable evidence you have for the existence of spirits and/or souls?
That’s a better example than mine.
Basically the universe, as far as we can tell, is indistinguishable from one where we do have free will, since we can’t predict what someone will do. That’s just the same as the universe seems indistinguishable from one without a god, even if the creator is hiding outside the universe without contacting us since the creation.
Okay, Smartypanters! If there is no soul, where does soul music come from?
Huh? Gotcha Ya!
Pterry. So neener.
Yeah, I’ve had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we’ve come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People aren’t wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person’s soul. However, this “soul” does not exist ab initio as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man’s unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
Was this a whooshing energy field that I just passed through? :dubious:
What did you say about the hats?