If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?
I do not. When the brain stops working it’s just the end. I wasn’t raised religious and I’ve never ‘felt’ anything spiritual. I respect people who do, but I just don’t - it doesn’t make sense to me.
Not that I’ve a choice but I do feel a sense of calm in the fact that when I die there’s nothing. We’re just a blip in a never ending universe.
No.
I’m kind of an agnostic, so naturally my point of view is: it’s hard if not impossible to tell.
I don’t really believe in a soul but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was such a thing. Maybe we’re all going back home after we die, maybe we just stop existing. Maybe it’s both. It’s hard to tell.
Is it, though? Nothing in physics supports the existence of, or even the need for, a soul.
Sure. Given that the realm of souls claims to be outside of physics, this isn’t surprising. Now whether that all makes sense or not, I do not know. As I said, I don’t believe in it but I accept the possibility 🤷♂️
Well, quite literally everything is physics, so if a soul exists, it has to be supported by physics.
That is the view of the atheist faith (that all that is currently known by science is enough to know), but the replier is agnostic, in which we don’t know what we don’t know.
Atheist faith doesn’t exist, atheism is absence of faith. Atheists are more into facts and less into belief. If you have to believe in something for it to become true, it’s nonsense.
Atheism doesn’t mean belief in nothing. It means a lack of belief. They don’t have “faith in science”. They simply have no need for faith. And they certainly don’t believe that everything that is currently known is all we will ever know, only that there’s no point in basing your life on things you can’t know.
Agnostics are willing to speculate or hedge their bets, whereas atheists prefer to assume the obvious: that there probably is nothing higher guiding our lives, we’re on our own and should not deceive ourselves otherwise.
The soul lives in the gaps in our knowledge. It is an artifact of the conscious mind, the part of us that allows us to reconcile the unknown and unknowable with the everyday experiences of our senses.
It is immortal in the sense that nothing is ever truly gone, both because echoes of it ripple outward across time and space, but also because the experience of time itself is inextricably bound with consciousness.
There isn’t any particular definition of “soul” that I believe in, but I think that there are many open questions about what consciousness is and how it works. Until we know more about that, I reserve my judgement on whether something that could be called a soul exists.
