The first atoms were hydrogen and these burnt in countless nuclear suns to provide atoms like carbon and oxygen. These suns exploded and the dust then coalesced to form planets and many found new suns around which they could rotate. Earth is one of these. Bathed in energy, life then evolved leading to the humans of today. Humans in their wonderment invented religions while science was yet in its infancy. These religions were early explanations for how the world worked. With little understanding of science religions were forced to use many metaphors. For example, the term “original sin” is now the natural genetic aggression of jealousy, envy, hate, and so on. The term “God” is now the big bang or something similar. The term “soul”, originally something “immaterial”, is now genetic and cultural ideas passed down the generations.
Time to drop the metaphors and move onto a different model! Imagine a tray of coloured balls. By rearranging the balls a new pattern can be created. There is now something different that was not there before. In one way the pattern is constructed from atoms, in another way the pattern is more than the atoms themselves. Like the tray, the genes of the body are patterns of atoms that have been endlessly added to, subtracted from, and rearranged for billions of years through the evolutionary process. The now incredibly intricate pattern of atoms is more than the atoms themselves. Reusing the word “soul” (and discarding “original sin” and “God”) this pattern of atoms could be called the “genetic soul”. Individual genes could be called genetic ideas and all together these ideas represent an organism’s genetic knowledge.
Similarly, brains started a few hundred million years ago to allow animals greater flexibility of actions. New cultural ideas thought up by a human or passed through communication are also patterns of atoms and could be called the cultural soul. The human then has two souls, genetic and cultural. These patterns are not idle and have a direction that is the “will”. The main genetic will is survival and eventually reproduction. The main cultural will is to support the genetic will. This support is enforced by a pleasure/pain reward system using hormonal washes in the brain.
This model is based entirely on science and does not rely on propositions such as “God works in mysterious ways” when flaws in the logic of religions are found.
For greater detail and the development of these ideas see the full text.
Contact
Winfried Hoerr
wmhoerr@gmx.com
Started in 2014 and occasionally edited.
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