VIDEO: Does the Human Soul Exist?

People have always wanted to know what happens after death. Do we really have an immortal soul? Does it really go to Heaven/Hell? Is there really an afterlife?

Anyone can write on Evonews. Start writing!

Well, those are questions we’ll never get definite answers to, no matter how much we research the subject. But that doesn’t stop us from coming up with various theories.

Here are some clues that may prove the human soul actually exists and that we all have one.

According to Wikipedia, in many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal essence of a living being.

Soul or psyche are the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, etc. Depending on the philosophical system, a soul can either be mortal or immortal. In Judeo-Christianity, only human beings have immortal souls.

For example, the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas attributed “soul” to all organisms but argued that only human souls are immortal. Other religions (most notably Hinduism and Jainism) hold that all biological organisms have souls, as did Aristotle, while some teach that even non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) possess souls.

Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, understood that the soul must have a logical faculty, the exercise of which was the most divine of human actions. At his defense trial, Socrates even summarized his teaching as nothing other than an exhortation for his fellow Athenians to excel in matters of the psyche since all bodily goods are dependent on such excellence.

The findings of science may be relevant to one’s understanding of the soul depending on one’s belief regarding the relationship between the soul and the mind. Another may be one’s belief regarding the relationship between the soul and the body. Science has never proven, nor disproven the existence of a soul.

Neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field, and its branch of cognitive neuroscience particularly, operates under the ontological assumption of physicalism. In other words, it assumes—in order to perform its science—that only the fundamental phenomena studied by physics exist.

Thus, neuroscience seeks to understand mental phenomena within the framework according to which human thought and behavior are caused solely by physical processes taking place inside the brain, and it operates by the way of reduction by seeking an explanation for the mind in terms of brain activity.

Physicist Sean M. Carroll has written that the idea of a soul is in opposition to quantum field theory (QFT). He writes that for a soul to exist: “Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of ‘spirit particles’ and ‘spirit forces’ that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments.”

Biologist Cyrille Barrette has written that “the soul is a word to designate an idea we invented to represent the sensation of being inhabited by an existence, by a conscience”. Barrette explains, using simple examples in a short self-published article, that the soul is a property emerging from the complex organisation of matter in the brain.