Post
by Tobias_Marco » Fri Mar 23, 2012 1:47 pm
<First let me start by saying that I am sorry that it took so long to get this answer posted.>
<I believe that it would be very hard to talk about the diffrence between humans and other life forms for very long without somebody bringing up the consept of the soul.
There are many questions that come up when thinking about souls, what are they? does every life form have a soul or just human beings?
Some people believe that any animal who is smart enough will have a soul, others say that souls are like fairies and unicorns, they are pure make believe, they don't really exsist.
Do human beings have souls? Do apes, or monkeies, what about dogs or cats? Does a whale or a dolphan have a soul?
Based on what I have read I think that most people who believe that humans have souls also believe in the theory of intelegent design, just like most people who believe in evolution also believe in the big bang theory, howevery it should be noted, however quickly, that there is nothing in any of these four theories that says that they HAVE TO, or even SHOULD be joined with any of the others, or that they couldn't be combined in any combination that you can imagion.
It is possable that there is an intelegint designer(s) who arranged for the big bang to happen, then formed the first singal celled life form, and has been guiding evolution this whole time along a desired path, weeding out unwanted lifeforms and encuraging ones that have desired trates, much like a gardner or a dog breeder looks for desired trates in the life forms that they work with. Now after many, many, many years humans, dolphans, dogs and some birds reach a point where they develop souls, as well as some other life forms.
HOWEVER, I should point out that just because I say that it is a possability, that does not mean that I believe that it is true.
The reason that I bring all of this up is because there is a theory that if you had a powerful enough computer, and if you told it the exsact mass, location and valucity of every sub-atomic partical in exsistance, then this super computer could acurately predict anything and everything that would ever happen until the end of time.
Lets say that such a computer was real and that it scaned the universe 1000 years after time began.
If this theory is correct then this computer can predict when you will read these words, what you will have had for your last meal before reading these words, and what you will be wearing as you read them, all because every choice that you make is nothing more than randum electro-chemical reactions that HAD to happen in the order that they happened based on all the OTHER reactions that have happened all starting from the first chemical reactions that ever ocured.
However, if the soul is real, then no matter how advanced your computer is, it will not even be able to predict what shirt I will be wearing a week from now.
THis is because if the soul exsists then it is not governed by those electro-chemical reactions, in fact it is the soul that somehow governs and manipulates the electro-chemical reations within your brain.
Some people believe that love and other emotions are nothing more that hormonal changes within the brain and other parts of the body (I personaly believe that this is at least true of lust, but that true love and lust are as diffrentt as day is from the color brown. But more on that in another topic!)
Other people say that love and other emotions are something far more than just hormons, if this is true, than those emotions must be based in the soul.
If free will really exsists, and choise is more that just electro-chemical reactions, than it is all part of the soul.
According to Christianity (there is that "C" word) Adam and Eve were the first humans, and they are a fruit that somehow gave them the knowlege of what is good and what is evil, ever sence then that knowlege has been built into the soul of every human being ever born, however many choose not to listen to the voice in their head that tells them the diffrence.
However the real question here is "Have I made myself clear, does every person reading these words, or hearing them read aloud, understand the meaning that I am trying to get across?"
I have often been misunderstood, even when I think that I have made everything so clear that even a small child should be able to understand me, I fear that not everyone will understand my meaning, so I will explane it another way.
I am a man who really likes watching movies, sometime ago I watched a movie called "V for Vendetta"
In the movie "V for Vendetta" (SMALL SPOILER!!!) there is a kind of love that forms between a woman names Evey and a man who wears a mask who calls himself "V", about 1 hour and 48 minutes into the movie they are dancing and this is how the scean plays out:
Evey: "I don't understand."
V: "What?"
Evey: "How you can be one of the most important things that has ever happened to me and yet I know almost nothing about you. I don't know where you were born, who your parents were, if you had any brothers or sisters. I don't even know what you really look like."
V: "Evey, please. There is a face beneath this mask, but it's not me. I'm no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it or the bones beneath them."
Evey: "I understand."
(END SPOILER)
What Evey is saying that she understands in that moment is that V was saying that he is his soul, not his body. The body is much like this computer, when it first came out of its box there were millions of computers just like it, in the same way there are millions of babies born every day, that are more or less exsactly alike. However everytime something happens to this computer it changes a little and becomes less like the other computers in the world, its softwear changes. Everytime a baby reseaves any kind of input that input is prossesed by the brain, and changes the way that this new input is prossesed. Maybe this processing of input is nothing more than electro-chemical changes within the brain, or maybe there is something more then that, maybe there is something that we call a soul, something that goes beyond the electro-chemical.
As it happens I am a Star Trek fan, and like any Star Trek fan, I know what a Klingon is. When a Klingon dies, they throw the body away, like so much trash. They believe that the warrior's soul has left that body, the body is now nothing more then an empty shell to be thrown away.
Can I prove that the soul exsists? Can I tell you that it weighs a given number of grames? or that it has a given form? Is it a solid, a liquid, a gas or a plasma?
Well I can be sure that it isn't a solid.>
<In movies like Ghostbusters they tell you that ghosts are made of some kind of "ecto plasma", if that is true, then this is what the soul would be made out of, a kind of exodic matter, that scientce has not yet come to understand.>
<If ghosts, demons, angels and souls are real, then they are all made out of the same kind of exodic matter.
What properties that exodic matter has I can't really explain at this time, however it exsists in such a way that it can pass through 'normal' matter.>
True education, true science, true religion is the search for truth.
Matthew 28:16-20, John 3:14-20