felix dakat wrote:Plato thought human soul is part of eternal realm of unchangeable reality, distinct from physical world including human body that becomes and perishes and “never really is.” Christians influenced by Plato taught physical world including our own bodies exists only to serve God’s purpose of saving or damning human souls and world as we know it will pass away, while our eternal souls remain.
In view of early modern natural philosophers like Descartes, Bacon, and Newton, everything else in world but human soul is composed of atoms like tiny billiard balls moving in void, totally determined by natural law, while human soul is supernatural and free of laws. Thus, what looks to us as thoroughly secular science was originally part of effort to separate human souls from natural world to provide support for traditional Christian belief in supernatural nature and immortality of soul. In world of early modern science, human beings were sometimes seen as only ones in world having any experience at all. God and angels and devils had experience, too; but, in world of nature, nothing had experience because physical world was built of atoms that were simply very tiny pieces of matter that were lifeless and totally devoid of experience. Hence, nothing made of them could have experience either. Since our own bodies were believed to be composed of atoms, there was no way to explain how even our bodies could have any experience. It was only supernatural, divinely created human souls that could have experience in this otherwise mechanical, barren, atoms-in-the-void, non-experiencing natural world. Human souls, they believed, are not part of natural world.
Thus did modern world become disenchanted. Despite the fact that the higher mammals were manifestly as conscious of pleasure and pain as other humans save that they do not share our language, they were viewed as purely mechanical clockwork. How convenient this was for vivisection and the tortures of agricultural-industrial complex. If we recognize the consciousness of an actual entity, we are ipso facto burdened with responsibility to it.
Thank you for your remarks.
My stance is human beings are living animals with higher intelligence only. Soul is a
comfort given by both the imagination and the God (the Conscious Earth).
It's upset that the Earth is conscious cannot be proved unless more scientific breakthroughs allow us to have more understanding on the whole mechanism (e.g. the formation of the Earth's core and the ways she manipulated us such as any invisible waves etc.). It is close to the truth that a manipulator has influenced our world from the very beginning and rule over us with her invisible hands. I wonder if there is a one or more creators who created our world as well as this manipulator. It remains a question. However, the manipulator who decided everyone's destiny must exist. Our future is decided by both the God's will (the Conscious Earth / the manipulator) and our Free Will.
Destiny and Fate. It created many coincidences in everyone's life to make us believe that there is a God, but it is actually different in the argument that she does not create the world.
This manipulator was being created with our world from the very beginning and she is exactly the Earth herself. Her power led our ancestor to regard her existence as the creator. The physical differences created religions.
When people say God, they actually refer to a manipulator, not a creator.
Teru Wong