There's something very important to you that science didn't discover: your soul.

"I'd like to reflect on some reasons we ought to believe we have a soul rather than believe we are merely a complex bundle of flesh, bones and blood. Lest some of you think I am preaching to the choir here--like we all know we have a soul--I'm not entirely sure that's the case. I'm not entirely sure that every Christian is deeply convinced that he has a soul. I think most are if they accept the Bible, but not all necessarily. Or at least maybe they are intellectually convinced that they have a soul but are not quite sure why that matters.
But I will tell you one thing, if you go out into the marketplace of ideas with this notion that we are more than our physical bodies, you are going to run into conflict. Especially in higher education. There is a movement afoot, and it has been for quite awhile, that you are nothing more than your physical body. The movement is called physicalism. Only physical things exist, in other words. Non-physical things don't exist. We're not in the dark ages anymore. We aren't required to revert to religious occult forces to explain things. We know by science what exists and what doesn't. We know by science what is important and what isn't. We know by science the answers to the deeper issues of the universe. Scientific discovery tells us that and therefore we can abandon some of this ancient lore. The fictions: like we have a soul, or there's a heaven and hell, or there are demons and Satan. Things like that. Just get rid of all of that stuff. It's not necessary anymore. It's just part of our folklore and we know better now. In fact, if you try to even make the point that you believe in such a thing as a soul, people will look at you like you are some kind of an idiot. Like, where have you been the last two millennium? Wake up and smell the decade, kind of an attitude.
Science simply cannot speak directly to the question of the soul, and certainly science cannot prove there is no such thing as a soul, or spirits, or demons, or angels, or things like that. Science is not equipped to conclude that there is no such thing as a soul. It just can't do that because it measures physical things. Although science has attempted to do that.
How can we know that there is such a thing as a soul when we can't see it and when we can't measure it by the standard means we have of knowing. Referring to science and empiricism, knowing something through exploration using the five senses. This isn't, in fact, the standard way of knowing things at all. The way that we know most things is by reflection through the soul.
I want you to reflect on the things that are most important in life. Based on this reflection, I think we can come to some understanding about how much science does and doesn't tell us, and how adequate or inadequate, as the case may be, our senses are in being used by science to give us meaningful or useful information about the world. Ultimately meaningful answers.
Nothing that is ultimately valuable to you can be classified, studied, probed or analyzed empirically by the five senses using science.
Think of the things that you consider most important in life. Make a list. Somebody asks you what's really important in life? What will you answer? The first thing on most people's lips will be happiness. Ask a person what they want out of life and they'll say they want to be happy. If you are a little deeper, a little more profound you might say the most important thing in life is love. You've got happiness, you've got love. But you might add any number of things to this list, because even if these are the most important, you've got other things that are very important. Friendship, knowledge, liberty. Freedom from pain. Or if you lean towards political correctness, you might say tolerance, understanding, diversity, sensitivity to others. So now you have your list, whatever it happens to be.
Have you noticed something? Have you noticed that nothing we've listed is in any way physical? You can't smell knowledge. You can't weigh friendship. Love doesn't have a shape. It doesn't have a physical texture. Happiness cannot be heard. Do you know what is interesting about this observation? It's this. Nothing that is ultimately valuable to you can be classified, studied, probed or analyzed empirically by the five senses using science. That is a remarkable observation.
When you think of the things that are the most important to you, or to any human being, really, the whole list of things that are of the deepest significance, that have the most substance to them, the highest degree of importance, these are all things that are not physical at all. If they are not physical, the senses cannot apprehend them. And if the senses cannot apprehend them, then science can't say anything about them. In other words, science can't say anything about any of those things that are ultimately important.
I realize that is a mouthful. It may seem like a brazen comment. I admit it might be a bit overstated. But if you think for a moment, someone might say that science gives us medicine. Medicine can make us healthy. Health brings happiness. Maybe. But I'm not so sure that healthy people are happy. In other words, I'm not sure health brings happiness. I'm not at all convinced that sick people aren't happy. There are many examples to the contrary in both cases. Yeah, science can bring health and I guess health is valuable. I would acknowledge that. But it might be overrated. There might be a counter-example there. In any event, science doesn't probe happiness itself. It merely supplies you with tools that can aid your happiness, but often the same tools make you miserable. Drugs can ease pain, but they can also produce an alley full of drug addicts.
Somebody might think about this for a minute and say, Okay, there are some other things that are really important that are physical. Pleasure makes people happy. Pleasure is something entirely physical. I'm sorry, but that's mistaken. Not only is pleasure not entirely physical, it is not at all physical. You say, "What? Are you crazy? I eat food, it gives me pleasure." I understand that. "I have sex, it gives me pleasure." I understand that.
You do things that are physical, that have an impact on your physical body, but the sensation of pleasure is not in your body. You know why? You know how I know this? Because you cannot measure pleasure by physical standards. How can you possibly measure such a thing? You might measure it in neurological activity. You know, C-fibers firing. I eat something, it tastes good, and we can track how the neurological activity takes place in my body when I am eating something that is pleasurable. But now a critical question. How do you know that this particular neurological activity--strawberries touching the tongue, creating a chemical response through the body--how does anyone know that that activity feels good? You can't know that by looking at your machine. Someone's got to tell you how it feels. That's how. You need the report so that you can correlate specific brain activity with the feeling of pleasure or the feeling of pain.
Somebody's got to say that that particular sensation feels good or hurts before you can judge whether any brain state is pleasurable or painful. In other words, the feelings must come first, then the scientific assessment because there is a correlation going on here. This makes the point that the pleasure isn't in the hardware. It's not in the neurological connections of the body. The pleasure is someplace else. It is in the soul. In order to do a correlation, you must have two different things that coincide with each other. In this case, neurological activity, nerve responses to a strawberry on the tip of your tongue, and a conscious feeling, the pleasurable taste of strawberry. They are two different things, you see. You must have a conscious first person report about his feelings before you can correlate those feelings with any particular brain activity. Therefore, the two must be different.
The first one is physical and can be measured and observed physically. Touching the strawberry to your tongue and measuring the neurological response. But you don't know if that neurological response produces pain or pleasure until somebody tells you from their conscious experience, an experience that no imaginable physical test can ever get at. It must be reported. The physical activity is in the body. The feeling is in the soul. The brain and the soul are two different things so science can't even measure a feeling of pleasure, only presumably the physical brain states that correlate with the pleasure.
We all know this in a kind of rough and ready way. Somebody gives you a vigorous backrub. They have to ask whether it feel good or hurts? In other words, the physical state doesn't tell us by itself. You can put all kind of electrodes all over a person's body while you are giving them a tough, hard backrub and you will still have to ask them how it feels because none of the neurological testing can tell you how it feels. Does that feel good or does that hurt? We need a report from a conscious mind, a mind that can feel the difference.
How about this response: It hurts, but it feels good. Have you ever said that? Now, you make sense out of that in a purely physicalist way. It's painful, but I like it. It's a good pain. You see, even if the pain could be reduced to a mere physiological, neurological response, even if the meters could show that pain was really being felt, there is still an additional element of passing judgment on it, making an assessment, and those things clearly are not physical.
Let me sum this up. There is a view that science is the only thing that gives reliable information about the world. People say, I stick with science because that tells me true things about the world. This view is called scientism. The reason is that in their understanding, only physical things exist and science is best adapted to probe the physical world. My point is, this view is false. A moment's reflection shows us that the most important things in the world are not physical at all and if they are not physical, and science measures only physical things, then science can't tell us anything about the most important things in life.
Indeed, for science to work at all, we need a soul on the inside to tell us what the outside feels like, looks like, smells like, tastes like and sounds like. Though science might probe the sense of smell and the sense of sight, science cannot tell us anything, not one single thing about the sensation of smell and the sensation of sight. Somebody's got to report that. Someone on the inside; science is on the outside. It has to be a first person report and this is why science, necessarily a third person activity, cannot report on it. So, rather than science being the beginning and end of all knowledge, science is dependent on the soul to give it its information. To prove the point, you can't know from any physical test whether a person is in pain or in pleasure. There is no scientific test that can tell you that. Even if there was, even pain can be pleasurable to some people. So you still need the report. If you say, Sure you can know physically whether a person is in pain or pleasure. How's that?
I know which nerves are the pain nerves, and that's how I know when somebody is in pain. What do you mean? How do you know which are the pain nerves? Well, because, and then you are going to have to say, When I pluck this kind of nerve, people tell me it hurts. And that will be the end of your argument. Because you can't know which are the pain nerves, in other words, which nerves correlate with the feeling of pain, unless somebody reports to you the feeling. Therefore, the feeling is not the same as the nerves. The nerves just lead and produce the feeling in the soul. The soul uses the nerves to explore its world and feel either pain or pleasure or any of a number of other things.
What this all means, it seems to me, is that science doesn't tell us anything important. All of the important things are intangibles, things that don't lend themselves to scientific discovery or to scientific analysis. Now one thing that science can do, and this it often does, it says that those things we thought were most important end up really being insignificant or meaningless in the long run. Why would science say that? Precisely because science can't speak to that. The attitude is, since science can't speak to it, then it must not be significant. That strikes me as rather arrogant."
Science and physisists and psychitsrsist are finding new things out every second of every day! We find out new things about ourselves and about world every day that those in the 1928's never could have known.

Twilight Zone?

There is a GREAT discussion going on in the Wisconsin Humphreys blog! So, too much to say and so little space! Point is that our brain is too finite to understand the Infinity of God - however you perceive Him. He can never be figured out in our small little minds. The "belief" in Him must be just that! BELIEVED! And where does that belief come from? Mind? Soul? Spirit? Emotion? Body? Hmmmm....Here are a couple of sites that are darned interesting about the mulitple dimensions we live with and the few that we live IN. Also some on the spirit v. the soul. Anybody ready? Let the games begin...

Spirit/Soul:
http://www.bible.ca/su-spirit-soul.htm
http://www.dtl.org/dtl/treatise/soul-spirit-1.htm
http://www.pickle-publishing.com/papers/soul-and-spirit.htm

Dimensions:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/Tye.brane.ws.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#Extra_dimensions

TODAY...

"It is a moment of light surrounded on all sides by darkness and oblivion. In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another just like it and there will never be another just like it again. It is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious it is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you ARE aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all. "This is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it". Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The point is to see it for what it is because it will be gone before you know it. If you waste it, it is your life that you are wasting. If you look the other way, it may be the moment you've been waiting for always that you're missing. All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or have not yet emerged from them. Today is the only day there is."
Today,it is beautiful in Tulsa Oklahoma...68 degrees, sunshine, light breeze. I and my loved ones have their health, their minds, (well, most of them do)and good jobs to feed their families. The weekend is coming up and Rick and I are spending it together...we may not remember what we did, but we will remember who we did it with and how the times we share each day becomes more meaningful and cherished with each day that passes. Enjoy your family...put your efforts there...you will be paid back in spades. And besides, do you really think those other people will be there for you when you need that drool wiped from your face?