What does the (hypothetical) soul take with it?
April 7, 2015 at 12:51 pm
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2015 at 2:20 pm by emjay.)
Given that no Christian (with a few exceptions described in a later post by Jenny A) disputes the fact that the physical body is left behind when a person dies and the hypothetical soul goes into the hypothetical afterlife, what I would like to ask Theists is what of the person goes with the 'soul'? Memories, learned behaviours, and I would say all aspects of personality are 'stored' in the neural networks of the brain. If I were to believe in a soul, all it could be for me was the focal point of all this stored information - in life. But there are many degenerative diseases of the brain, and other neural abnormalities, that directly influence personality in life: dementia for instance progressively destroys personality for many years prior to death, and some lucky or unlucky people, depending on how you look at it, are physically unable to feel pain or fear from birth. Therefore if the 'soul' takes someone's existing personality to the 'afterlife' what does it take in the case of dementia? If it takes their personality when they were younger and before the disease, at what arbitrary point? In any case the brain is always in flux and a person is not the same from day to day so how can you find that arbitrary point if it's not the point of death? And as for the people unable to experience pain, if they went as they were, then Hell would be meaningless. It seems to me that the idea of the soul doesn't take into account individual differences in the brain and the only way it could work for everyone was if a brand new mind/body accompanied the 'soul' into the 'afterlife', but if that was the case, how would it be you?
