If you do, then what exactly defines a soul in your view?
Nope. There’s no spiritual anything. The whole universe is kinda magic on its own, why people have the need to make up bullshit is beyond me.
Souls don’t exist, you’re just your body (and brain), try to enjoy the life you have, there will be nothing else afterwards.
Nope.
The mind is what the brain does; when the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.
No,no evidence was ever shown.
It comes down to how you define “soul”.
Do I believe there’s a consciousness that transcends death or exists separately from our physical existence, no.
But if you start talking of ship of Theseus/transponder incident/mind upload -type mental exercises, then yes, I believe “self” is an evolving pattern and a collection of experiences that could theoretically be replicated in another physical manifestation or even in a completely different medium. You could call that, too, “soul”.
That’s about how it’s explain it.
deleted by creator
No. Souls dont exist.
all these “deleted by creator” posts in a thread about atheism sound a bit ominous. @[email protected] are you ok?
Check the post history. Its ok. Probably just lemmy lagging and he deleted the duplicate posts.
Thank you, I was just making a bad joke about OP being deleted by his creator for being an atheist. Sorry, I’ll show myself out …
No. We are nothing but bags of meat that, over millions of years, evolved a way to think. We feel so high and mighty about ourselves that we made up “something special” about ourselves to set us apart from every other bag of meat on the planet.
We feel so high and mighty about ourselves that we made up “something special” about ourselves to set us apart from every other bag of meat on the planet.
Not necessarily. If there is such a thing as a soul, I see no reason why all the other bags of meat wouldn’t have one as well.
Many others don’t believe animals have souls
But many do.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a common misconception, but agnosticism is the one that is the lack of belief, and applying the scientific method to one’s belief system. It’s the “we don’t know what we don’t know” approach, which defines the scientific method.
there’s no point in basing your life on things you can’t know
I certainly don’t disagree.
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.
atheist faith describes people who BELIEVE that god does not exist
besides the fact that I do exist…
if there is no evidence that god doesn’t exist, or that god does exist, then yes, there is no reason to believe god exists, but apart from the absurd and extremely vast absence of evidence that would point towards proving even the slimmest of traces of existence, that is also an epistemological challenge in that our perception is extremely limited and we don’t know, as ritswd said, what we don’t know.
so we have a lot of evidence, but there exists an extremely small and remote possibility that our theories are wrong, just because we’re dumbfucks with very smol brains & tiny eyes that can only see 3 dimensions
so saying with 100% certainty that god does not exist is a dogmatic belief in our conclusions.
To be clear, it’s highly likely that what we consider to be a “god” or a “satan” (as well as physical places we cannot see/reach where these two reside) isn’t real, based on evidence that we’ve come upon today scientifically, but that also doesn’t mean there isn’t some form of a higher being that we are unable to recognize as such because of our limited abilities that you’ve explained above.
No, it’s a logical conclusion. God isn’t needed for the existence of the universe and thus doesn’t exist. Sure, there’s minuscule chance that’s wrong and if it ever happens I’ll be among the first who’ll say I was wrong. Until then, science says God doesn’t exist.
You’re right. Just a note
there’s minuscule chance that’s wrong
This is the scientific perspective. All signs point to no. But as always, we might have missed something. I think this is the agnostic perspective, even the “agnostic atheist” perspective. I think, and I might be wrong, that the pure “atheist” perspective is that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no God.
But if there’s a tiny retarded chance that for some reason there is something as absurd as a god… lol.
…then that’d be me of course
I know that it’s a common belief in atheists that it’s not a faith. But if you take a step back, it’s hard to deny that there is some belief in the sentence: “if science has neither evidence of something nor of its absence, it doesn’t exist”.
The opposite of that is: “if science has neither evidence of something not of its absence, then science doesn’t know yet, and until then, neither can we”.
It’s fine to believe in things. I’d say it’s not great though, to think so highly of one’s own belief that one wouldn’t want to call if a belief.
And it’s common belief of theists that everyone has to believe in something. I don’t believe in anything. I believe people, like the scientists that discover stuff, but that’s believing someone, not in something. Pretending it’s the same is ridiculous.
I don’t know if that’s what you were implying, but I’m not at all a theist. And as a scientist, I can remind you that the scientific method is to keep researching topics that are inconclusive. To conclude something as non-existent because the research is inconclusive is not the scientific method.
What you are doing is listening to the science indeed, and drawing faith-based conclusions that something doesn’t exist because it wasn’t proven to exist. Which is fine, a lot of people do that to base all kinds of faiths, but it’s disingenuous to pretend that you’re not.
It’s not inconclusive, it’s improvable which basically means “why even bother?”
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.
True, but physics does not explain everything yet. Ask an astrophysicist, and neurophysicist, or a quantum physicist, and they’ll probably have a long laundry list of things we don’t understand yet.
And so, accepting the possibility does not mean rejecting physics. It only means we haven’t gotten there yet, and maybe there are things about the human experience that physics hasn’t yet even begun to grapple with.
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.
I believe in our consciousness giving us unique personalities and the ability to make complex decisions. Anything past that doesn’t make sense to me, and goes against all logic or understanding we have of the universe.
It’s kind of really hard to say if I belive in something or not when you don’t offer a definition, I don’t believe in anything outside of the brain, consiousness and what makes me me, which could be a definition of soul, I do believe in, but again, that’s just a result of my brain braining.
It seems like a way to take all the things I don’t understand particularly well, and put them in a category that I fail to define precisely.
My preference is not to do that, because I have a hard time believing in something that I can’t characterize reasonably well.
I don’t believe in a soul that’s separate from the body, or that lives on afterward. But the way that “inanimate” matter can spin up thoughts and feelings and a consistent personal experience that can last for decades… It’s almost fair to call that thing a soul. It’s fair to talk about nurturing your soul and growing a soul.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we are the universe’s way of understanding itself.
The universe growing souls like flowers, or something
i don’t believe in god but i think life is infinitely profound; as profound as an idea like the soul. so i guess it depends on your definition of soul and how creative or spiritual you are
No
