Science has proof, and also pokes a bunch of holes in the whole god thing, but humans and animals seem to have souls.
Elaborate.
Well, you've seen roadkill. How is it that each individual piece of roadkill was once a living breathing animal that had its own quirks and habits and likes and dislikes? Same question for a graveyard of dead humans. How can they all be so different? I'm sure we could go all science with it and say something along the lines of, 'Its all brain chemistry and cell position in the CNS', but I don't think that fully explains it.
Quirks in chemical alignment. When you try to put tens of trillions of bits of information together, it can sometimes get a bit weird. Things change.
Not only that, but everything alive is genetically coded to have a slight variation on the parent, in addition to mutation. What are the three things that promote evolution?
- Mutation
- Hereditability
- Variation
Mutation as you no doubt know is a slight change in genetic code from the parent, so that the offspring is more than just a mix of the two. Some mutations are beneficial, like being tall, or stronger, or more disease resistant. Some are not, like Huntingdon's disease. Mutation keeps our species and all other species on the boil.
Hereditability allows us to take genetic material from our parents. It, like mutation, can be positive and negative. My red hair is a hereditary trait; both of my parents carry the mutant MCR1 gene and so I was born a red head. Both of my parents have the genetics for it; it was expressed in me. I acquired my mother's side strong bones, balancing my father's side's weak bones. I acquired my father's side's strong joints, balancing my mother's side's weak joints. I acquired a middling height, (179cm / 5'11"), almost exactly halfway between each parent (152 cm / 4'11.75" and 197 cm / 6'6").
Variation allows us to further be different from our parents. It is expected that we lean one way or another with our hereditability, leaning toward our mother or our father genetically, or a further off ancestor. Me with my red hair, northern dutch looks (small eyes, round cheeks, strong and lean build) look like neither parent, but I take after my father's side (my father's father is north dutch by descent. dad's half north dutch, half south dutch (olive skin, dark hair). My brother takes after the south dutch half, so he looks like dad. My sister is a half-half variation of the south-dutch looking females of my father's family and the celtic looks of my mother's.
Those three factors allow us to have differences.
As for your suggestion that we seem to have souls, that is true, in that a soul is a specialised set of cell networks firing electricity at each other in an unimaginably complex way. It irritates me to have something labelled inaccurately when a more accurate (if more boring and less mystical) label can be applied.
Fakedit: Ninja'd x 16.
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Topic: Atheism/Religion Discussion (Read 184800 times)