By Tom Slattery
Might there be a soul? Or if not a "soul," then at least a permanent or at least life-of-the-universe-length record of our pitifully brief and insignificant lives? To illustrate possible paradoxes intrinsic to any attempt to find tangible evidence of religious concepts, let's take a look at a wild hypothetical possibility of a discoverable "soul."
Our negligible and probably irrelevant planet zooms through space in twists and turns of gravitational pulls and orbits at a net velocity of maybe a million miles per hour. And if not approximately that, then it still does go at some considerable net velocity in some net direction.
When humans invented writing they also invented analogies and metaphors to visualize the collected deeds of a person's lifetime. It was thought to be written down somewhere, written in some great book somewhere. Even playful quasi-deities like Santa Claus keep a "list" of who is naughty and who is nice.
After Edison's first phonograph and its successor audio and video tapes, and now CDs, we have a very slightly advanced analogy. As the planet Earth zooms through space at somewhere like a million miles per hour it may record deeds and misdeeds and perhaps even kindly or sharp words in some matrix yet to be discovered.
In my short science fiction novel Norikaeru I lightheartedly proposed a "neutrino matrix" in which all things and appearances might be recorded. That may give some a handle on it.
So as we pitiful squabbling, backbiting, fighting, and yet sometimes kind and helpful, Earthlings zoom through the vastness of space we may be unknowingly leaving a trace of our deeds and words as if on some vast phonograph record, audio/video tape, or CD.
Could it be tested scientifically? Maybe. One would have to look for it, though. Anyone actually looking for it would probably be scorned as a crackpot by the scientific community and yet be less than revered by a wide range of religious believers who would have their own dearly-held preconceptions.
So this would seem to be a "dangerous idea" for those who might risk actually pursuing it. The danger in it is that this kind of idea lurks at the very basis of civilization. Good may or may not be rewarded on Earth, or even in heaven. But there may nonetheless be some record of our deeds and words, and even our thoughts.
NSA may wish they could data-mine it, with or without Congressional authorization. But the idea that something of our conscious selves may leave a record and therefore last beyond our lifetimes goes beyond being good for rewards in an afterlife. It even goes beyond being good for Good's sake.
It is that we "were," and maybe then are eternally (or nearly eternally?) "are." Whether good or bad, we may leave a record that we cannot take back, cannot alter. That would seem a powerful motive to consider our words and actions and their consequences before initiating them.
Who might "read" or "watch" or "listen to" this great CD in the sky? Some might quickly say The Creator. Others might envision these recordings playing to one another across dimensions. Others might propose that when our Big Bang-caused universe reaches its limit and begins to collapse back into a singularity all of this data will be played back as streams backward across the esoteric imprint.
This may be a dangerous idea for another reason. If, as playfully proposed above with the NSA, someone might find the imprints and the mechanism for imprinting, it would also seem to mean that they would find ways to alter it, to mine it for data, to change the past as well as the future.
And should we limit this paradox to the soul? It would also be valid if we should use science to find the material essence or physical quality of God or ultimate meaning. And here is an audacious consideration. If we humans might scientifically find the material essence or physical quality of God or at least ultimate meaning it would mean that we might change even God, certainly ultimate meaning.
By "change" is meant not an intellectual interaction with God as the biblical story tells about Abraham. This would mean an ability to change the very substance of God, like changing the substance of a human by a liver transplant or changing the substance of computer software with a virus.
It could come to that. And in some far distant time down the path our planet is taking us, if scientists could do that, would they want to do that? The present human cloning debate might seem trivial against such an awesome question.
But back to the soul. If the "soul" would be such a flimsy entity as to allow this, what kind of a "soul" would that be? Thus, do we really want to know what the soul might be?
© Tom Slattery 2005 Published by Karisable.com
