Disproving The Soul

[Michael]

Baqal. I'm not certain about anything :-) I just find existentialism more useful when considering the soul (or what it is to be 'me'). Artists of all types have mined that approach so well, that I find it a compelling approach. And I would say that approach is warp and weft through the bible itself; the human experience is described in a series of amazingly diverse narratives. What it is to be human is explored through narratives; we find what it is to be human through understanding the story of the peoples throughout the ages. Sure science throws some light on this, but the arts, including history, really speak to us about who we are. We don't need to measure everything; sometimes Dostoevsky or Steinbeck or Orwell or Shakespeare or Munch or Gorecki, or even the writers of the bible, can speak profoundly to what it is to be human, to what it is to be a soul, without a measuring device in sight. But in order to hear those voices we do need to shift the soul from something we have to something we are. "Who am I?" is a very different question to "Of what am I made?" Both are important questions, but I find the question of 'soul' to be more productively linked with the former than the latter (both Aristotle and Aquinas would disagree vehemently with me, so I'm not unaware I'm going down a path that some of the greatest thinkers of our race would tell me is wrong).

Anyway, that's just my experience, and I do accept there is always a certain tension between the world of ideas and the material world. I've pushed back on materialism here not because I think it's wrong or useless (quite the contrary) but because I think, like science, it can't explore everything.

I think that's probably all I'll say on this, as I think I've covered the key things I wanted to throw into the mix of this thread, and especially because I've just been reminded that I promised to make the family a banana cake, and we must get our priorities straight - cake always comes first :-)