Tough Questions for Christians #23: The Soul

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When someone talks about going to Heaven, they talk about being happy there. They talk about being with their family and their friends. Well, that implies that they have some emotions, as well as memories of their physical life.

We know that emotions are chemically driven, we can reproduce emotions. We can give you drugs to elicited specific types of emotion. Psychoactive drugs affect the way the brain works, in ways that we can measure and we can watch. Now their affect on the brain varies depending on the particular drug.

Some drugs can prevent you from saving short-term memories into long-term memories, a good friend of mine had a knee replacement surgery and they gave him a drug that prevented him from remembering anything about it. He doesn't even remember making it to the operating room.

There are also drugs that are euphoric, they cause your brain to release endorphins and make you ecstatic.

The point is, the drugs affect the brain.

You look at someone with Alzheimer's disease, they are losing their memory. Losing the ability to recall events, starting usually with the most recent then following all the way back to the ability to even walk or even feed themselves.

These are diseases of the mind. We can see that brain trauma can completely remove your memories, as well as diseases like Alzheimer's can cause them to degrade on their own.

So, memories and emotions are both ties to a physical mind, to an actual brain. So, what's left for a soul?

If you're saying your soul has it's own memories and it's own emotions, then what exactly is happening with these psychoactive drugs?

Is Prozac not really affecting the brain at all, but actually affecting the way the soul works, making the soul happy?

Is Alzheimer's not a disease with the denigration of the mind itself, but actually of the soul? Is a person's soul degrading and no longer going to remember real events?

Since memories and emotions are both proven to be biological, what is left for a soul?

TOUGH QUESTION FOR CHRISTIANS # 23:
SINCE MEMORIES AND EMOTIONS HAVE BEEN PROVEN TO BE BIOLOGICAL, WHAT IS LEFT FOR THE SOUL?



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