9 Answers

  1. Since it seems pointless to answer this question in a scientific framework, I will only tell you what can be learned on this subject in Orthodox anthropology.

    Christian teaching about the soul cannot be called strict, because unlike Christology in the field of human studies, we do not have fundamental dogmatic definitions and a unified view of the soul and body developed in detail, so I will try to express only my personal opinion.

    Despite the relative acceptance of Aristotelian anthropology, in which the soul is not eternal, Christians have always professed the opposite, thanks to the authority of Revelation, which, of course, has more weight than the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, so that none of the Christian teachers doubted the eternal existence of each individual soul, based on the words of Christ and the apostles.

    At the same time, such eternal life will be the life not only of the “naked” soul, but of the soul together with the spiritualized body after the resurrection of Christ. There is a true nuance that despite the eternal life of each person, in heaven or hell, any such life is ultimately eternal only because God supports it with His divine energies, so this is an eternal loan of life from God. �

    However, we have only spoken of eternal life in the sense of existence itself, while the soul's sojourn in hell is commonly referred to as eternal death. So in Christianity we can speak of the “death” of the soul in the sense of its excommunication from God due to sin and in the sense of its endless stay in hell.

  2. Representatives of idealistic philosophy (for the most part) tend to believe that the soul, due to its non-corporeal nature, is indestructible and indestructible, i.e. immortal.

    For example, the ancient philosopher Proclus justifies this by saying that “everything that is somehow capable of disintegrating and dying is either corporeal and composite,” and “the soul is disembodied,” and therefore ” Every soul is imperishable and indestructible.” That (and) the Roman philosopher Boethius, in principle, does not raise any doubts, ” the souls of men are in no way mortal.” And the Dutch philosopher Spinoza thinks about this in a similar way: “The human soul cannot be completely destroyed along with the body, but something eternal remains of it.” But at the same time, the philosopher makes a clarification: not the whole soul should be immortal, but only a certain part of it. Then what is the soul-a composite entity… And what is it composed of and what is (then) in it, according to the philosopher, (that) “something eternal”…

  3. I'll go in from the other side.

    Eternal, immortal is only the One, God, the Absolute, which contains the entire universe, all possible dimensions, everything in general. It is infinite, never born, and therefore will not die. Further.

    The soul is either completely identical to the concept of “God” or “Absolute” – this can be the case if we imagine that all the lives in the world are lived by one and the same soul in turn – and then it is immortal; or everyone has their own soul, separated from the souls of other people, it once began, and, therefore, inevitably ends-that is, it cannot be immortal.

  4. The answer depends on what you call the soul. If this is some mystical entity that can exist separately from the body, then I don't see any reason to think that something like this exists in the world. I think it's pointless to talk about her birth and death.

    If the soul is all that is connected with the inner world of a person, his emotional and spiritual activity, then it, of course, ceases to exist with the death of the body.

  5. The Scriptures clearly say that the soul can be destroyed. This is stated in Matthew 10: 28: “And do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. But the state of the ruined soul is another question. The soul is eternal, and therefore the torment of the ruined soul is also eternal. That's why God warns you to make the right choice once and for all. If the soul was destroyed without a trace, then this is practically not a bad decision, because this would be the end of everything-both bad and good. But it is the eternal suffering of the ruined soul that explains all the horror, in contrast to the saved one, which will return to God, to the Creator. These aspects make the wise wonder where they will spend eternity.

  6. In order to sell something unnecessary, you need to buy something unnecessary, as they say. In order to talk about the mortality of the soul, we need at least to know whether there really is such an entity. And science has no reason, even close, to believe that the soul, in any form, even exists phenomenon.

    You can accuse me of being materialistic here, but that's not the point. The fact is that physicists, to date, have more or less figured out the structure of matter, and have a pretty good idea of what interacts and how. And the soul must somehow interact with the real world in order to influence it. If you believe that the soul is your personality, your set of experiences over a lifetime, what you make decisions with, in fact, being the “main control center” of your body, and at the same time it is some immaterial entity that cannot be measured, touched or otherwise identified, then these properties are mutually exclusive.

    No, no one disputes that you can offer some new mechanism, but so far something is somehow deaf. More and more, the suspicion is creeping in that the very concept of “soul” is nothing more than a failed hypothesis, which in all this time has not been demonstrated at least one hypothetically possible way of interacting with the real world. We damn well discovered dark matter, although it interacts only gravitationally, although this is an extremely weak interaction, not enough to somehow strongly affect objects the size of us, its influence is noticeable only at the level of galaxies. Two-way interaction with our brains requires measurable… erm… interactions. Quantum physicists simply say :” if it were, we would have found it a long time ago, today we are sure that there are no unknown interactions at the quantum level that could directly affect our lives.” No one says that quantum physics is complete, or that we know all the interactions. But the physics unknown to us yet cannot affect “ordinary” matter.

    But all right, let the physicists say what they want. Who are they to talk about the soul? You never know that we do not know any mechanism by which something from there does not work for them. But what about neurophysiologists? Neuroscientists, in general, are also quite skeptical about the idea of a “soul”. It's not that they can't think of a single mechanism by which the” soul ” is connected to the brain and decision-making, but this very concept is not very necessary. Studying various disorders in the brain, they argue that the very picture of the world that we experience is quite different from reality. Some particularly extreme cognitive scientists timidly assume that our very ” I “is nothing more than a clever illusion created by the brain, and most of the decisions we make, we make quite unconsciously, bypassing this” I”, and our” I ” only after the fact comes up with a plausible story that we tell ourselves. And yes, the fact that we often come up with a plausible story for our decisions after the fact is not a radical idea. This is already a fact.

    Well, figs with them with physicists, neurophysiologists and other scientists, let them be damned materialists, but this is not all the problems with the”soul”. Okay, so “eternal life” violates the very law of conservation of energy. Let's forget about it, imagine that in “that world” it simply does not work. What about the fact that brain damage affects the personality itself? What about the fact that our behavior is affected by chemicals in the most obvious way?

    But there is one more thing. The very “eternity”. Purely from a philosophical point of view (and there is no other point of view on the soul, by and large), the very idea of eternal life is still quite strange. Seriously, what are you going to do forever if you don't know how to entertain yourself on the weekend? Eternity is eternity, by definition. It's something that never ends. Will you have an infinite memory, or will you forget everything that happened more than a thousand years ago? Your personality is controlled by your brain and brain chemicals, and your decision-making is dictated by energy and metabolic constraints in the brain. Can this “soul” be called “you” if it doesn't have any of these restrictions? What about people with organic brain damage? what will happen to their identity? What will happen to people with multiple personalities?

    And still, what will you do for eternity? Take a hundred trillion years to count all the grains of sand on all the beaches of all the planets in our galaxy? Okay, but this exercise will only take a tiny fraction of Eternity. On the scale of eternity, these one hundred trillion years take less time than blinking once on the scale of your entire life. than blinking once on a scale of a hundred trillion years. Eternity will never end, by definition. You can live a billion Eternities and still have the same eternity of Eternities as on the very first day. And personally, it scares me even more than the fact that one day I won't be around at all.�

    We are mortal. Our “soul” does not outlive our body, apparently. And this is the main value of life. We're all here once. And it would be nice for us to leave this world in a better form than the one in which we accepted it. Why? Yes, nor why. I just personally found the meaning of my life in it. Mutual assistance and the ability to find a common language is what makes us human. So, let's just be human?

  7. The human soul is not immortal. It didn't exist in the first place. At a certain point in time, it is formed through the descent of the Spirit into the realm of thought. But what has a beginning has an end. In relation to the short human life, we can say that the soul is immortal, but in fact, after many epochs, it ceases to exist. But this does not mean the end of a person, the end of his life. Just as a person continues to live as a soul, despite the fact that the physical body has died, just as life continues after parting with the soul, but already in a pure and developed Spirit.
    The soul is a somewhat limited expression of an undeveloped Spirit on planes of being lower than its own. The human personality is a manifestation of the soul in the grossest form of matter. That is, the Spirit is the highest and most authentic seed, the spark of life. The soul is this same spark, manifested in an extremely refined, almost immaterial world.

  8. Yes, the soul is mortal. Why I think so, because in the world we are exploring, absolutely everything is subject to time. There is nothing that exists forever, from which we can conclude that there is no single reason that the soul will exist forever.

  9. This question was already asked more than two thousand years ago by the characters of Plato's dialogue “Phaedo” – Simmius, Kebet, Phaedo, etc.. And Socrates ' answer is also given there – remarkable in its originality and logic. In his fourth argument in favor of the immortality of the soul, Socrates exposes the temptation of objectification of the soul (which his interlocutors sin), i.e., the desire to present the soul as an object, a kind of “ideal body”, at the same time separate (different) from the physical body, and associated with it (languishing in its fetters). The same objectifying concept of the soul is shared by most modern people, regardless of whether they recognize it (its existence) or deny it. Socrates, on the other hand, quite definitely asserts that the soul is not something that resides in a living body. From this understanding, the pseudo-question arises: what happens to the soul when the body dies? Does the soul die when it leaves the dead body, or does it live a different (mostly)non-human life?

    According to Socrates, the soul is not something that is alive, i.e. it has life, but life itself, which makes it possible for something to become alive. And such a “principle of life”, by definition, cannot be anything other than alive, otherwise it simply cannot be the beginning of anything alive. We observe the transition of the living into the dead (body) and vice versa in the temporal aspect or their relativity in the structural aspect (organic and inorganic matter), but life itself and its opposite – death-are not transitional and absolute. A rather complex ontological explication of this circumstance is beyond the scope of this argument, but it is epistemologically obvious: if we assume the transitivity of life and death as principles (i.e., in terms of the present question, we assume the mortality of the soul, its possibility of dying), then we will not be able to distinguish not only life from death, but also trivially distinguish a living body This is analogous to as if having lost the ability to distinguish left from right as such (i.e. as pure alternative spatial reference points), we would not be able to “look to the right”, “walk a hundred meters and then turn left”, “take a book from the right shelf” , etc., etc.�

    Answering the question literally: the soul cannot die by definition, because it is life, and life cannot be dead:) �

    PS. In addition to the above, another answer to my other question about the soul https://thequestion.ru/questions/322459/chto-takoe-dusha/answer/451987#answer451987-anchor

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