Eternal Soul And Reincarnation

Concepts of eternal soul and reincarnation have been around for centuries. Recently I had a conversation with someone who attempted to bring these concepts into the scientific realm, arguing that the electrical impulses of the brain after death “have to go somewhere,” and where they go is off into the universe until such time as they come back as another being.

That struck me as completely bogus, but I needed a while to contemplate things before answering with something more than merely “shooting from the hip.” So I conducted some research on where electricity in the human body comes from. I did find several articles, but the easiest for most people to comprehend is probably this YouTube video. Although the video only addresses the biological, scientific, facts and makes no inference of the consequence, that is something that we need to do. Essentially, as the video demonstrates, electricity in the human body (and any living organism for that matter) is a chemically induced reaction. Logic would then dictate that ceasing such chemical reactions would result in death. The charges do not “go” anywhere. They just cease to be produced.

In fact, whether we are talking about what happens inside the body at the atomic level or we are talking about how lightning is produced, all of it involves friction and an exchange of positive & negative “charges” of some sort or another. Remove those variables and you do not have electricity.

But what does the Bible state about mankind in this respect? Regarding human life, here is a short list of what the Bible says:

1. The original man was formed from the ground (Genesis 2:7)
2. Man was animated (powered) by “the breath of life” from God (same scripture)
3. Once dead, nothing else remains of the individual (Genesis 3:19, Ec 3:19; 9:5)
4. His “spirit” (Hebrew for “breath”) returns to God in that God decides if and when a person is brought back to life (Ec.12:7)
5. Being given the promise of future life (as a human) through the resurrection (John 11:25)

So just as the YouTube video implies, once those charges cease to happen, the body dies. Or, as the Bible quite succinctly puts it, “dust we are and to dust we return.” Nothing in the Bible supports that we are anything more than creatures made from earth's substances. Except for the "breath of life," no "soul" (the essence of some spiritual, metaphysical existence) was infused in man and nothing of that sort is even eluded to in scripture. The soul is the person.

Supplemental: I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of Einstein's theory that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it does seem that theory has been over-generalized and misused to propose all sorts of metaphysical beliefs. However, the dissipation of energy from a dying human body seems akin to the power loss of most man-made batteries today. The electrical charge continues dropping until the unit ceases to produce a charge. The charge doesn't "go" anywhere (i.e. "off into the universe"). If anything, the heat the battery produces, especially in its struggling last moments, seems to be the "exchange" of energy from one form to another. The same goes for humans -- it is heat, not electrical energy, that rises from the dead body into the atmosphere around it. (See also "Conservation of Energy")

Article on death: http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200001136

Article on resurrection: http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1001077254

Six days after my posting my blog article, the following article appeared March 16, 2017, in Popular Science (popsci.com): Some corps heat up.

About