What role does the soul play? [Spin-off Old Earth or EC? A new book...]

That sounds rather nonsensical to me… like the following…

  1. The real number line cannot be separated from the context of the number 7.
  2. Non-Euclidean geometry cannot be separated from the context of Euclidean geometry.
  3. Evolution cannot be separated from the context of blackbirds.
  4. The universe cannot be separated from the context of the earth.
  5. Story telling cannot be separated from the context of Santa Claus.

In each case the first thing is an invention of a context for the latter. The mathematics of manifolds is the the more general context of which the mathematics of 3d space is just an example. In none of those cases does the more general thing depend on the specific example. Just because mankind went from one specific example to the more general idea does not mean that someone elsewhere in the universe/existence couldn’t come up with the same general idea from very different examples.

Which remains an issue which I do not comprehend – either what the point is that you are trying to make or the relevance to our discussion.

Not buying that. Not at all. Simple specific examples and more primitive conceptions and ideas do not contain within them the more general theory or the modern analysis. Nope.

I am not buying the idea that the articulation of something is such a trivial addition. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the articulation is as significant an invention and addition as the human mind is a significant addition to life on this planet.

Which just shows the limitation of the point concept and the need to understand and devise the concept of metrics. It is like looking at only the topological properties of geometrical constructions. This make no distinction between a cube and a sphere because it looks at things in only a very limited way.

Actually, manifolds all depend upon 3-D space as their point of reference. But the reverse is not true. Thus extra dimensions are like analogies of the first three dimensions (which, again, only exist as a whole)–coherent, rational, useful analogies.

This is not true. Perhaps a teacher or reference you accessed used concepts from 3d or Euclidean space, as Wikipedia does, to explain the ideas but there is no dependence of manifold mathematics upon the mathematics of 3d space. The claim doesn’t even make any sense. And it isn’t even necessary to use 3d space mathematics to explain manifold mathematics. I know because it wasn’t used in the text from which I studied it, which was Hawking’s “Large Scale Structure of spacetime,” where it was contructed by theorems without any reference to 3d space whatsoever.

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Thanks. But aren"t thoughts and words actually chemical and physical themselves? Feelings are, as well. Thanks.

Yes… but that is again like saying the Bible is paper and ink. To be sure physical things are composite and their existence depends on what they are made of. Disrupt the relationships between those component parts and the things dissolve. But via encoding they are more than just the composite parts. There is information there and the chemistry and physics are just the medium. And so mattconnally is correct the information is so much more than just the medium and there is a power in them to affect things on large scale.

But I know… your point is, there is no need to pull in spiritual or supernatural elements into any of this. All of the above is explained by the physics of chaotic dynamics, whereby the smallest and seemingly most insignificant things can change the world.

But then again none of this rules out the spiritual and the supernatural. So we have a choice. To believe or not to believe. And sometime all it takes is to lay out that choice uncluttered by irrational statements and demonstrably incorrect claims.

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Dear @Randy and @mitchellmckain
I like to use Rob Hoffman’s model for a human because of its simplicity. I think it is good foundation to start from. Hoffman defines the human as a quadrinity, made up of the intellectual self, the emotional self, the physical self (body) and the true self (soul). The goal of enlightenment is to find harmony among all four aspects of self - giving room for each aspect of self to find fulfillment.

Chemical processes take place in the body, but the question for science to help determine is: Are the chemical reactions the cause of the emotion, thought, word, movement, or a reaction to the same. The act of crying for example, can be the body’s reaction to dry conditions, or the emotional self’s reaction to loss, or the true self’s cry for attention.

I would not say this is wrong, but I do use a different model which coincidentally is also a quadrinity. It is the intersection of two simultaneous effective dualities (remember that I am actually a substance monist), body and mind on the one hand and spiritual and physical on the other. Two important principles are:

  1. Body and mind are two very different but interdependent physical forms of life with their own needs, desires, organization, mediums, health, and systems of inheritance – genetic life and memetic life.
  2. Physical living organisms create a spiritual form by the choices they make. But the spiritual is not dependent on an external system for its existence and thus essentially eternal in nature, but they can decay from within due to self-destructive habits.

The relationship between physical and spiritual consistent with scientific findings would have to be one that is mostly epiphenomenal, that is with the physical affecting (creating) the spiritual but the effects of the spiritual on the physical being extremely restricted – operating though such a narrow window that effects can easily be dismissed as coincidental.

So to address your question more directly. The emotions, thoughts, words, movements, and reactions of a person are all part of an extremely complex interacting system. There can be purely chemical effects disrupting all of these in various illnesses, but this does not mean that any of these are purely chemical or independent of the others. Words and ways of thinking can effect emotions, just as emotions can effect ways of thinking.

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I’m late to this discussion but last year our Los Alamos Faith and Science Forum considered what the soul might be.
As someone on the discussion wrote: maybe you don’t need your spiritual soul until you die!
I sort of follow Polkinghorne who says that, since we are a unity in being your, when you die nothing is left excepting God’s complete knowledge of you and as such can reconstruct you on the last day
But this misses the many events which seem to show beings in heaven interacting with us. In our discussions we came to an interesting idea. That your soul is God’s loving knowledge of you

I don’t know that I would go quite that far! I only know that the effect of the spirit on the physical must be very subtle. It leaves open the possibility that the spirit is important for the subjective experience of consciousness. It certainly seems to me that consciousness requires taking some ownership of ones choices and I cannot help seeing a connection with the way I think our spirit takes its form from the choices we make.

The problem with this idea is that you are left with a choice between two possibilities…

  1. God is a cruel sadistic monster who resurrects suicides who didn’t want the life He gave them just so that He can torture them some more.
  2. There is an escape from the consequences of our actions and choices so ultimately they are somewhat lacking in meaning and value.

This supports the methodological naturalist approach that the spiritual body is simply eternal in nature, and this is confirmed by Paul in 1 Cor 15. This suggests that it would be very much against the natural order for God to euthanize spirits in order to spare them the negative consequences of their own actions and choices. I believe in a God who makes the rules and sticks to them so that we just have to learn how to manage with those rules. Adjusting the rules to make things easier just doesn’t seem right to me, and so I do not believe God does such a thing.

Hello, Matt. I’m coming to this discussion a bit late, so I hope you won’t mind a few thoughts from me about your original question.

My thoughts don’t fit neatly into any of the longstanding theories about the soul that have circulated in various religions at various times and places. So you may not like my thoughts! But here goes . . .

Although Western Christian orthodoxy long ago split up its theories about the soul into diverse doctrines such as creation, humanity, sin, the Last Things, and the like, in the early centuries of Christianity, writers such as Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, and Augustine of Hippo wrote extensively on the soul. So there’s a long history of such questioning in Christianity. I don’t particularly agree with Tertullian et al, but I think that as Christians today it’s not only important for us to ask questions about the soul, but necessary as a means of stitching together some of the most difficult questions we have about God, Creation, the afterlife, and especially how to build a relationship with God while we’re here on Planet Earth.

I know that most Christian denominations take the doctrinal view that God doesn’t create our souls until there’s a physical body to attach the soul to. (I’m simplifying, of course.) But I disagree with this view. I personally believe that the soul preexists our lives as human beings. I’m not saying that all souls have existed since the beginning of Time – but I am saying that each of us is a child of God, a child who is uniquely loved by Mother Father God, a child whose true soul nature exists in the quantum universe to which we’re are born as souls and to which we return as souls once our lives as human beings are complete.

From a scientific point of view, I believe that a much stronger case can be made for consciousness as a quantum non-Materialist phenomenon than as a purely baryonic, Materialist phenomenon. After all, probably 95% of God’s Creation consists of non-baryonic enery, so to say that God isn’t smart enough to be able to bring forth life (i.e. soul consciousness) at a quantum level (as opposed to a purely baryonic level) does strike me as a bit of insult to the amazing God who has created the amazing and good Creation we live in.

As for the mechanics of how God would or could manage to arrange things so we, as children of God, could incarnate for a short time in 3D biological bodies (for the purpose of better knowing and loving our beloved God), the best analogy I’ve seen during many years of study as a Christian mystic is this one: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/caterpillar-butterfly-metamorphosis-explainer/.

A quote from the article says this: “the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on.”

If you think of the soul as having a complex set of “imaginal discs” related to our unique emotional, intellectual, temperamental, and talent-based soul attributes, then it’s not such a big stretch to suppose that a God who can juggle a vast Creation can also juggle the specifics of moving our “imaginal discs” straight into our DNA, where they can gradually unfold into the intertwined attributes of heart, mind, soul, and strength that Jesus spoke of when he talked about love.

So what I’m saying is that some of our human attributes can be linked directly to our soul’s “imaginal discs” and some of our human attributes can be linked to the “3D toolkit” God gives us so we can experience baryonic life. It’s all intertwined, though, and it’s meant to be this way so we have the chance to struggle with our Free Will.

The interpretation I’m suggesting here raises a whole bunch of difficult and painful questions about our human lives that, to be honest, are probably more frustrating than the Christian doctrines of creation, sin, and Last Things. No doubt creation + sin+ eschatology is an “easier sell” than the idea of good souls incarnating in 3D bodies to see what Forgiveness and Free Will feel like when you’re not totally blanketed by Divine Love each and every day . . . but this is what my experiences as a mystic have taught me.

Thanks for listening!

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Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for your eloquent words. This is the type of position that I would gladly help you to reinforce. It is the topic of my third book, Torn Between Two Worlds: Material and Ethereal .

I agree that the consequences of this belief for modern Christians are enormous, relative to the issues that are discussed in churches or in this forum. The red herring for me in this whole story is that it was the emperor of Rome who declared the preexistence of the soul to be anathema, not the church. The emperor Justinian make Trump look like a teddy bear.
Best Wishes, Shawn

@Realspiritik @Shawn_Murphy

It looks to me like we are looking at a spectrum in religion between too much emphasis on the physical and too much emphasis on the spiritual.

  1. At the Gnostic end of the spectrum, the physical is an evil creation of the evil Demi-urge and we are originally spiritual beings now trapped in a physical prison.
  2. There are a whole range of approaches that put a little more emphasis on the spirit than the physical such as keeping this idea that we are originally spiritual beings or souls that are spending a time of testing or acquiring a bodily form in the physical universe.
  3. In the middle, there is a recognition since God is spirit, then this represents the more fundamental reality, but the physical is a creation of God for a very good purpose, a womb for the conception and maturation of the human spirit. But the ultimate purpose is the creation of spiritual beings with a living parent-child relationship with God and the physical existence having served its purpose is naturally left behind.
  4. Likewise there is a whole range approaches that put more emphasis on the physical than the spiritual. One of these would be seeing our current physical existence as a distortion of an orginal more perfect physical existence – expecting that the return of Christ will change the universe back into one where there is no death or illness.
  5. At the extreme end of the spectrum in this direction, there is only the physical and the “soul” is nothing more than the essence of life itself or a memory of our physical existence in the mind of God, while “spiritual” is just a word describing our relationship with God. Thus it is expected that life after death only consists of a physical resurrection into this universe but under the rule of Jesus returned as king of the world.

Obviously the spectrum as I have described it, with myself in the middle at 3, shows my bias against the preexistence of the “soul” as something to which I am very much opposed.

Dear Michell,
You place yourself in the middle of list and I would also place myself there with one edit to your statement as noted above. I have said many times that I am not Gnostic.
Best Wishes, Shawn

I agree that there’s a spectrum in religion with regard to the physical and the spiritual. No argument there.

It’s become popular in recent years to believe that only the Gnostics preach a preexistent soul.

Speaking only for myself, I’m as far from Gnosticism as it’s possible to get while still believing in the soul and in the loving, forgiving God Jesus taught us about. I have no interest nor any belief in Gnosticism’s dualistic cosmogonies. In my view, Gnostic cosmogonies have nothing whatsoever to do with God or the soul or Jesus’ teachings on same.

As you no doubt know, various religious trends such as Platonism (and its subsequent incarnations), Jewish Apocalypticism, and apophatic mysticism have had a lot of influence on Gnostic ideas about the soul. But just because some religious thinkers have held paranoid, unloving, dualistic theories about the preexistent soul doesn’t mean that every theory about the preexistent soul must be similarly paranoid, unloving, and dualistic.

The theory that I hold about the soul and about our relationship with God doesn’t appear on your five-point chart, as I’m suggesting a theory that involves a full and holistic and mysterious integration of all aspects of the soul self and physical human self as a temporary – but good! – bundle of selfness that starts and ends with the preexistent soul. (So you can go ahead and infer that I’m no fan of 1 Corinthians 15, either, because I’m not.)

I guess you and I will have to agree to disagree about the possibility of the soul’s preexistence.

God bless.

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That can certainly be a culturally agreed upon understanding of the term as it is for Christians. I naturally understand “soul” in a less supernatural way. For me “soul” refers to something essential about each person. Anyone can at any moment choose to act in a manner that is congruent with that soul or they are free to act out of fear or for some other motive. But I don’t see why we should assume that essence must be immortal, or separate from the body for that matter. If people are not born tabla rasa then there must be something essential about a human being. But I think people are born embodied and ensouled and the degree of importance we attach to each is pretty fluid. Our choices probably feedback on whether we see ourselves as souls with bodies or bodies with souls.

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Hi Jennifer, those are some interesting thoughts. As far as an immaterial soul, I would certainly agree with you, but I try not to speculate much beyond simple dualism. (As to the soul’s pre-existence, I think we’ll have to leave that to special revelation.) I would include rationality, morality, and emotion all under the category of the immaterial soul. The Bible freely interchanges the words for mind, heart, and soul.
As for the relationship with the quantum world I do find that very interesting. Physicist Henry Stapp wrote an excellent book titled Quantum Theory and Free Will in which he argues that quantum mechanics makes it abundantly clear that free will is an immaterial phenomenon.

Interesting. @heddle do you have thoughts on quantum theory and free will? Thanks.

Oh I’m not clever enough to have my own thoughts on anything quantum :grin:

Me neither! I thought it was really interesting. I will try to look that up too. Thanks for the suggestion. I am really interested in what free will could be.

Just my opinion, butI don’t believe QM and free will are related. Free will from quantum indeterminacy would at some level be a “random” will, for which we would not be morally culpable. I think the only view of free will compatible with moral culpability is a supernatural free will with actual free choices that really do change the universe’s future timeline. I don’t believe there is and scientifically explainable free will, and all attempts to do so (e.g., Dennett) come across, to me, as woo clothed in sciency language.

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