RE: Kingdom Hearts and Atheism
January 7, 2018 at 4:37 am
(This post was last modified: January 7, 2018 at 5:46 am by vulcanlogician.)
(January 6, 2018 at 11:41 pm)Mikeykitty123 Wrote: Hello everyone, this is Mikey. I am going to talk about Kingdom Hearts and how it corresponds with Atheism.[my emphasis]
In Kingdom Hearts, there are creatures known as "Nobodies".
Human beings who have no hearts, or soul. Nobodies are believed to be just certain "accidents" and are nothing but empty husks with no emotion.
If a Nobody gets killed, their body returns to the person they were.
What's that have to do with atheism? Well everything.
Nobodies claim themselves "are not supposed to exist, yet we still do." Nobodies also lack a "heart", or a "soul" as they were treated as in the KH series.
The Ancient Greeks saw the soul as an animating force in a person. They knew that a human being was alive and that a rock wasn't. Because they didn't understand the physiology of the body, they assumed that a living body was occupied by a force. When people died, their bodies were no longer animated because that force had left them. They called this force psyche or "soul."
Plato thought that the soul had three parts: a part which made the body desire (the appetitive part), a part which aroused the body with emotion (the spirited part), and a part responsible for logic and calculation (the rational part). Today we see a direct link between these three functions and different areas of the brain. Calculation is handled chiefly in the frontal cortex; desires arise because of activity in the amygdala. Emotions arise due to activity in other parts of the brain. Plato, having no knowledge of modern neuroscience, could not have understood the brain's involvement in such phenomena.
Plato and his contemporaries were wrong. A soul is not necessary for love and emotion. These things are causally linked to brain activity. Much science has been done proving this. Once one understands that a soul is not necessary to produce human emotions, one can dispense with the concept of the soul to explain these things. As long as you have a living, functioning human brain, love and emotion are possible. Once that brain dies, you will never laugh or love again.
Quote:It is kinda similar towards how some atheists believed that life was created by chance and/or there is no such thing as souls or the afterlife.
In KH Dream Drop Distance for 3ds, it is explained that Nobodies DO have hearts. Nobodies have simply evolved and learn to live just like the people who have hearts.
In other words, the hearts grew inside the Nobodies and the Nobodies become their own people.
In your analogy, we (human beings) are like the Nobodies-- except there are no "somebodys" or ensouled individuals with which to contrast us. The evolutionary process selected lovers. The non-loving human prototype vanished into extinction long ago. Why did the evolutionary process select for love? Probably because those who formed close bonds with family, tribe, and sex partner tended to survive and reproduce more than those of the species who did not. But despite its being here due to the whims of nature, we can enjoy love for its impact on the human experience. We don't need to validate that with the concept of a soul.
