whats a soulmate?

They all rely on the same principle that there is an animating force (a God or Gods) to animate an everlasting soul. That entire theory falls down because there is no evidence and no reason to believe in a god. The problem with the God hypothesis is that it asks an even bigger question then it tries to answer. Who created God? Anything as complex as a God must necessarally come into existence late in the universe through a slow, gradual process of evolution. What scientists and creationists agree completely on is that there is no way something as complex a living being (a human say) could come into existence by chance. It's absolutely out of the question but a God who would necessarally have to be even more complex then that which he created (infinitely more complex if you're talking about the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is therefore vastly more unlikely, ie, impossible to have just come into existence by chance. God is the ultimate 'skyhook' it explains absolutely nothing, it's unsupported by any evidence, and completely absurd. So once the idea of a supernatural creator is done away with, any theory of a soul that relates to a God falls down as a result.

And just for the record, I don't accept the idea of a soul because of evidence, logic and reason. It has nothing to do with faith.

Such as? The three 'great' monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all come from the same source; the Old Testament, which was written by a bunch of camel herding Jews more the two thousand years ago.

I can give an explanation and I shall, but think about the logic you're using. Since science can't explain this fact, God must be the answer. Why? That is a silly argument. The same rationalization that our ancestors used. "We dont know where the lighting comes from, God made it." Can you not see the absurdity of that argument? That is an intellectually weak position to hold. Just because we do not know the natural causes for something does not mean we have to attribute it to supernatural causes.

So where did matter come from? Nobody knows for sure, and the only ones who don't admit that are the deeply religious believers. I should say, we know where all matter, bar hydrogen (the simplest chemical element in the universe), comes from. Hydrogen forms stars and nuclear fusion takes place in stars to produce all the other matter. This can now be recreated to produce new elements in laboritories. Hydrogen formed in the big bang. If something called M-Theory turns out to be correct (and it looks that way) then the question of what caused the big bang will have been answered. M-Theory states that there are an enourmous and growing number of parrallel universes existing in something called the multiverse. Think about how our sun is just one star in trillions of other stars in the universe, well our universe is just one is trillions of other universes in the multiverse. Now when two of these collide they form a new universe. You know when you boil water and bubbles seem to pop up from nowhere, that what your talking about.

Now something called the "Anthropic Principle" kicks in. Our universe has certain physical laws and constants that are immutable. There are about 20 numbers that have to be just so for the universe to be as it is. One of the numbers for the production of hydrogen is 0.007. The tinniest fraction either way and the universe would be completely different. Either hydrogen wouldn't form and you would have an empty universe or the hydrogen would be too dense and not form into anything else. No chemistry = no life. People tend to jump to the conclusion here that there must have been a devine knob turner to set the numbers correctly, however the anthropic principle tells us that with the enourmous number of universes in existence, a tiny fraction of them will inevitabley have the numbers that lead to the eventual formation of life, of which we obviously exist in one of those because here we are asking the question.

Theories fall down when evidence proves them wrong or another theory right. Until then any theory is pretty much as valid as any other.


What you fail to consider properly here is the concept of eternity and infinity (that are not only religious concepts). What we can call God, or Nature or the Universe is eternal (in religious theories among others). It's been there forever and everywhere and always will be, in different status, going through various transformation. Therefore nothing or noone created God/Nature/The Universe.

What evidence do you have that the sould doesn't exist?

All you have is an absence of evidence that it exists or doesn't exist. No logical or reasonable mind would come to any serious conclusion from there.


No religion considers it's God as "Supernatural". God is Nature.
Phrases such as "We dont know where the lighting comes from, God made it." just mean that there are some things we will never understand and therefore we're better off accepting them as they are. It means more "We don't need to know how it works" than "We don't know how it works, oh then it's God".
Not that I agree with that ideology, but I understand it and respect it.


Do you have any source on that?

I don't quite see the link between the thermodynamic principles and multiverse theories...

Ponrauil

Not true at all. Firstly, you have to understand the difference between what theory means in the scientific sense and what it means in the colloquial sense; I assume you do. Therefore the theory of evolution, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory of germ disease, the theory of gravitation, the theory of general relativity are all much sounder theories then something like M-Theory because they all have vastly more evidence to back them up. M-Theory is, at this point, impossible to test in a lab or find hard difinitive proof for it, unlike the Theory of Evolution which has mountains and mountains of evidence in it's favour and can be demonstrated to anyone in a lab. So the Theory Of Evolution is an enourmously more valid theory then M-Theory. Theories, or a hypothesis, must be testable and disprovable in order to be taken seriously, if they are not then they don't even make off the starting line.


Well, you're right that no (intelligent) force created the universe but it hasn't been around forever. Time began with the big bang, which took place approximately 14 billion years ago, so it most certainly had a beginning. It also hasn't been everywhere because the universe is constantly expanding; if it always existed everywhere, how could it possibly be expanding?



You're falling prey here to that illogical reasoning that it's somehow up to me to prove that something doesn't exist, which I've already shown is impossible to do, when it is always up to the person making such a claim to prove that it does exist. Answer me this honestly, do you believe in Zeus, Baal, Amon Ra, Thor, Wotan, Poseidon, Lord Zenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? I would hazard a guess that you don't, and if so, why not? You can't prove they don't exist, all you have is a complete absence of evidence for their existence or non-existence. By your reasoning you should either believe in such things or at most be agnostic regarding their existence. The truth I'm sure is that you are (and I would guess every person reading this thread) an atheist with regards to practically every god man has ever created. Some of us just go one god further.




Absolutely not the case at all. All of three 'great' montheistic religions profess the existence of a supernatural creator, as does Hinduism. The only religion that doesn't is Buddhism, but that's really more of a philosophy then a religion.

By saying that you've completely changed the most widely understood definition of the word God, to the definition of nature. That's a sort of Einsteinian religion. Einstein was a complete atheist but he described himself as a religious man and he talked about God alot, but he used God as a sort of personification of all that we don't yet understand about the universe and he had a huge reverance for that. That becomes misleading because when he says something like "God does not play dice with the universe", people understandably don't realise that the God he's talking about is not the one people naturally think of; he's talking poetically about the laws of physics.

I don't know about that. I mean it is the classic "God of the gaps" theology that is so present in theologians and religious believers. I hear it all the time from people. "You can't explain how life came about, so God must exists. Oh you can explain how life came about, well you definitely can't explain how the universe came about, so God exists. Ha!" When you talk to seriously educated theologians or read their work, they are the ones who most strongly fight against the 'god of the gaps' theology because they know full well that science will eventually fill in all the gaps and then there will be no room left for god.


Yeah, that's a common question. I can't answer it for you because I just don't have that information to give off the top of my head. I know there is an answer as I've come across it before, because as I said, it's a common question.

There's a fantastic documentary you can watch online presented by Brian Greene called "The Elegant Universe" which I'm sure will answer your questions. It can be found here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

Martin Rees, the President of The Royal Society, did a Q&A about the whole multiverse theory. You can read it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/s...tin_rees.shtml

Being able to test theories in labs and prove things, or sometimes just confirm a guess, does help theories getting cerdibility. However when you have several theories for the same concept, until one of them is proven right beyond any doubt, all the others still hold on as possibilities. Ok, each theory is not as plausible as any other (as I said in my previous post), but until one of them "beats" all others, you'll find scientists working on them, and rightly so. For example the Big Bang theory is the one that seems the likliest when it comes to the origins of our Universe (or at least to the farthest point in time that we can understand with our current scientific tools and knowledge), but there are still other theories being studied and no one today can say with 100% certainty that the Big Bang is what happened.

To get this back on the "Soul" issue, I don't think credible experiences, by credible I mean taken seriously by reknowned scientists, have been carried out. The problem probably is that we'd have to set a universal definition of what the Soul is.
But that just leaves the concept as an unsolved mystery. No one can rule out it's existence and no one can assure it exists.


Time "as we know it" began with the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang it is believed that matter was concentrated in a very small volume, pretty much as it is in a blackhole, where space and time are bended to an extent that another space-time than ours is possible. For example, Jean Charon (the guy I put a link about earlier) believes in conditions of a blackhole space-time is "reversed", in the way that there would be one dimension for space, and three for time.
What we can call God, for lack of a better word , may have been there already and even before that.

About being everywhere while the universe is expanding, you can just picture that like a compressible gas trapped in a volume. You can expand the volume all you want the gas will still occupy all of it and be "everywhere". If God, or the Spirit, as Jean Charon rathers calling it, is indeed present in fundamental particules, then it's everywhere matter is and goes.


Yes, and you don't hold anymore evidence than I do. What I don't understand is this : You say you don't believe in Soul because there is no evidence that it exists. Yet there is no evidence that it doesn't exist either. Why do you need evidence one way and not the other? Why rule out the possibly of it existing with as much certainty as you do?


I'm agnostic.


I think we don't have the same definition of "Supernatural".
While I'd agree that most "believers" would consider God to be supernatural, I don't think official religious intitutions do. They are more inclined to say that God is not above or outside this existence, but IS this existence.



Guilty as charged .


Einstein wasn't atheist, but agnostic (though jewish). He's always made it clear in his writings that he didn't believe in God (as in the three monotheist religions).

Here's a quote from him :

"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

And I'm inclined to agree with him on that one.


For the Christian or Islamic God maybe. But to me God (Spinoza's God) can be explained and understood. Scientific progess has never deemed my idea that there is a "Force" behind it all, it's even reinforced that belief.


Thanks for the links (and this enjoyable discussion). I will check them out.


Ponrauil

Wow...

Well, we know for sure the big bang did happen, what caused it is still in question but your completely right about theories constantly being updated and replaced with better ones.

I couldn't agree more. Your definition of a soul is clearly very different then say The Pope's , and your's is more plausible, so yeah one would certainly need to define what sort of soul one's talking about at the beginning.

Absolutely, all you can do is put a probability factor on it.


That's very fanciful, doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just very, very fanciful. How time relates to blackholes is very interesting, and scientists have found that it is theoretically possible to travel back in time given what we know know about blackholes. I know you're talking about something different, but when people talk about God existing before time, it just makes no sense. To postulate that means you have to throw all logic out the window.


I just cannot make sense of a disembodied existence. It's not that it's wrong, it's just logically incoherant, for lots of interesting philosophical reasons. One is that what I think makes all of us feel like individuals and cherish our embodied life, as it is now, is that there are a great of deal of different pleasures and satisfactions and fears and dreads, which define our individuality, and our existence, and it all has to do with having a body. The idea of not having a body and still being identifiable as myself seems to be impossible. I mean how would it know that it had once been me. I can jump 4 feet or whatever but a disemobied entity can neither do it nor not do it. I mean how would it know if it's here where I am or where you are. I'm here typing on my computer rather then where you are mainly by virtue of the fact that my body, this lump of stuff that I am, is here and not there. There are lots of lumps of stuff that are the centre of individuality. The idea of a disembodied entity continuing to be identifiable either to itself or to anyone else whom it expects to meet later on is absurd, it simply makes no sense at all. So while I don't rule out your soul absolutely, I think it is so staggeringly improbable that without some evidence or a logically coherant reason for believing in it, I take it no more seriously than Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.


I'm sorry, I don't agree with that at all. Every one of the major religions (bar Buddhism which doesn't believe in a God) identify God as a superhuman, supernatural creativy entity, one with infinite knowledge, power and goodness (don't even get me started on the contradictions of those attributes) who created us in his own image, who was never created but existed forever.


Yeah, that's pantheism, which is just sexed up atheism. Einstein most certainly was an atheist with regards to the Judeo-Christian, personal god.

"I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. [Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism. Article by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1997]"


Right, but again like the soul, you would have to state clearly that your definition of God differs greatly from what most people define it as. I suppose in a way I too believe in Einstein's "God" because I too have an immense reverance for the natural world but I wouldn't call that God and I would never say I believe in God because I think it's very misleading. I'm an atheist and I suppose you could say I'm a deeply religious non-believer.


No worries man, it's been fascinating. I'd never heard of your idea of a soul and it's an interesting one so thank you for sharing it. I think it's great that we can have a conversation about these things and it doesn't turn into a brawl, although I've never understood why people think it must.

Yes. Charon's idea of reversed space-time (one space dimension, and 3 time dimsensions) inside very dense entities such as balckholes also implies that space is irreversible (as time is in our space-time) while matter is "free" to "move" in time.
Electrons, which have a density close to the one of a blackhole, hold this mystery for scientist that with our current knowledge and tools, they can say either "where" an electron is or "when" an electron is, but never both.


I agree with you here when it comes to the "Official" () God.


The disembodied existence I don't believe in either.
What I believe in is the organisation of matter led to life, and the organisation of matter+life led to Spirit (or Soul). If you consider that Spirit is present in fundamental particles, your soul is present in the electrons and protons of the atoms making up your body. This has interesting consequences such as :
1-When you die, the specific organisation of matter and life that you were "dissolves" itself. As you turn to dust and your matter dissolves, your spirit dissolves itself just as well.
2-When you have children you transmit some your own matter organisation, and therefore your spirit.
3-Since electrons exchange information among themselves, which they are believed to be doing without loosing information themselves, as our spirits dissolve matter is constantly "updated" to contain the whole memory of what we were. And this from the beginning of our Universe. That means the tiniest physical fragment of what you are holds your spirit as a whole as well the universe's memory.
4-There's as much spirit in me as there is in the keyboard key I just pressed. I'm just a more complex organisation of matter (I hope ).

I could go on... As Martin Rees says in the interview you gave a link of, it's all more speculation than anything else for now, but it's fascinating. Points 1 and 2 here open a whole new way to consider a form of life after death for example.
Point 3 supports the attractive intuition many people that we're all connected. It also supports the fractal theory, which I'm quite fond of.

Imo that description here comes more from the metaphores used by religions, which a lot of believers indeed are unable to go beyond, and non-believers use to critic religions, than their original and "official" conception of God.


Keywords :"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest"

Here's what follows your quote :

"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being."


Then you're more agnostic than atheist. Welcome on board



Ponrauil

LOL! No, no, no. I'd go along the lines of Douglas Adams and describe myself as a "militant atheist" just so no one mistakes me for an agnostic . But just because an atheist has a sort of quasi-religious feeling towards nature, as I'm sure all scientists do, does not make them agnostic. Richard Dawkins (my hero ) is very much like that. Sam Harris, another very famous and outspoken atheist, is a very spititual guy.




So just to ask you one final question. Do you believe in an afterlife, and I mean that in the most widely understood meaning. Do you believe you, your conciousness, your sense of self, will survive your own death and live for eternity?


Well the origional, and offical, conception of God (for all three monotheistic religions, four I suppose if you count Mormons) comes from the Old Testament. The God of all those religions is Yaweh, who was created in the OT, and it's very clear from reading that that He is a supernatural character and all the religions attribute supernatural powers to God, such as the ability to cure diseases, punish sins, save a few people from a flood while he lets babies drown in their beds etc. etc.

Fair enough



Ok before elaborating here, let me say that if what follows is indeed what I believe, it's still all speculation and "work in progress" . It's all based on the idea that our spirit and memory is fully held inside each and every tiniest fraction of our body, the electrons of each atom composing it.

No, I do not believe that my own consciousness will survive.

What I believe will survive my death is the information of what and who I was, both physically and spiritually. Mainly through my children who will have received directly that information, but also in everything else as my being will have dissolved itself (as I mentionned in a previous post).
My children will therefore be partially organised like me, and partially like their mother. Their genitical code being a mix of our two genetical codes, their organisation will be a mix of our organisations, their spirit will be a mix of our spirits. Therefore my girlfriend and I will both survive as one new being with it's own consciousness through each of our children.

As our children have children themselves and the next generations come along, my being will dissolve, but who I am will be present through my descendance as long as there is one.

I also believe that everything that we could sum up as nurture and that sticks into our conscious and unconscious memory is transmitted. Since nurture comes from all our interactions with other people, our environment etc... the smallest influence that I will have had on friends or colleagues or JT posters ( ), my tiny own part of their nurture, will be transmitted to their own descendance.

Even as my body turns to dust and the atoms that used to compose it happen to be recycled into a worm, a plant or a rock, the information of who and what I was will be in there.

And this process has been going on since the Big Bang and will go on forever.

It probably can sound a bit crazy, but hey : the atoms composing us where created inside stars that are now exctinct. Doesn't that sound nuts? Well it's a scientifically proven fact.


You have to consider that such stories have been deformed throughout centuries, even before being gathered to build up the Bible, and came from real events that at the time, with the scientific knowledge people had, could only be considered as divine interventions. Had you and I been there at the time, we would have come to the same conclusion.

In modern times however, I'm confident that the moderate part of religious institutions, those who are open to science even just a bit, use these stories as metaphores to guide people in their lifes, and they consider God more as Everything, Everywhere and Always than one isolated supernatural entity.


Ponrauil