At Mind Matters News: Do any dogs go to heaven? If so, why?

WJM, I bought both e-books, and am halfway through the first. I will go back and read the blog posts after I finish the text. I like your prayers. :) AnimatedDust

Did you read the linked article? Did we read the same OP?

Yes, I read the OP. It was not necessary to read the article. The OP was about the uniqueness of humans and by implication how they were designed. Differently from everything else. Somebody has an emotional attachment to a pet and doubts his religious beliefs because of it. That seems vacuous to me. I understand the emotional feelings for pets, especially dogs. It has zero to do with the purpose of creation except we are emotional creations. jerry

BA77 said:

Whatever WJM. It seems to me that you are just beating around the bush with trivial details that really don’t matter towards the main point I was making.

So, let me get this straight: for you, the main, most important point is that the Christian NDEs are more enjoyable than the non-Christian NDEs; but the fact that non-Christians have non-Christian NDEs at all is "trivial?" Well, all-righty then. William J Murray

Jerry said @91:

The OP was about the uniqueness of humans. Evidence for design?

Did you read the linked article? Did we read the same OP? From the OP and the article:

One, perhaps unexpected, factor that he mentions as shaping his overall approach was youthful dissatisfaction with Catholic Church teachings about the immortality of animals…

From the article:

To even entertain such a hope, one must begin by believing in some form of human exceptionalism and immortality.

and this:

Lewis believes that animals receive a sense of self or personality from association with their human masters. We give our pets names and they answer to those names (hopefully), and perhaps recognize themselves by them. “If a good sheepdog seems ‘almost human’ that is because a good shepherd has made it so,” says Lewis. Lewis suggests, acknowledging that he is going out on a theological limb, that animals “attain a real self in their masters in a sense similar to the way human attain real life in Christ.” “And in this sense,” suggests Lewis, “it seems to me that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.”

To maintain that hope from the Christian perspective, then one must believe in human exceptionalism (or at least CS Lewis tried to make that argument.) One need not believe in "human exceptionalism" in non-Catholic perspectives to "entertain" that hope; in many belief systems, all animals go to heaven, just like humans, wild or domesticated. ID has nothing to do with the argument in the article. It's strictly a Christian-rooted argument for whether or not the Catholic idea of human exceptionalism provides for some animals joining us in heaven because of their association with us. William J Murray

Whatever WJM. It seems to me that you are just beating around the bush with trivial details that really don't matter towards the main point I was making. I'll let my case that I have presented thus far, especially as laid out in post 7 and 8, ride as it is (Bugatti style :) ). Have a good day. bornagain77

Then you and KF might take that up with whomever originated this post

The OP was about the uniqueness of humans. Evidence for design? jerry

Jerry @89:

Christianity is not part of ID (except 1) and as Kf said should be discussed elsewhere.

Then you and KF might take that up with whomever originated this post. What does it have to do with ID? Is the question, "Do dogs go to Heaven" not a de facto invitation to discuss perspectives about "heaven" or what we call "the afterlife?" William J Murray

Christianity is simple. Three things: 1) There is a God. 2) Jesus Christ is God/sent by God to reveal Their plan which is salvation or eternal life. 3) Jesus established a way of life/religion to achieve salvation. The key part to accepting is 2. ID actually takes care of 1 but common sense points to it. Number 3 is based on the sayings of Jesus/scripture which was recorded shortly after He lived on earth. The essential elements to reach salvation is belief then love. Love of God. Love of neighbor. But humans being human rarely believe and love everyone. It’s a real struggle to do both especially love. Christianity is not part of ID (except 1) and as Kf said should be discussed elsewhere. Aside: as far as what happens to pets, I would leave that up to the creator of the universe. He is a very smart person. jerry

If we are going to use the Bugatti vs Yugo analogy, here's a question: why isn't everyone driving around in a Bugatti? Obviously, the cost is too high. If driving around in a Yugo is the only way I can hold my wife dearest in my heart, the only way we can maintain the kind of relationship that is everything to me, I'll take the Yugo over the Bugatti every time. To extend the analogy, I've been driving a Yugo for decades here and I'm completely satisfied with it. I'm overjoyed, ecstatic with my Yugo-driving life. You can't sell me on giving up that Yugo by saying I'm "dooming" myself to the Yugo experience in the afterlife based on NDE evidence because that's exactly what I want. You'd have to make the argument that the Yugo afterlife experience is not an option to make any case for me "giving up" my Yugo here, but the problem is that, for me, any non-Yugo experience in the afterlife might as well be hell. William J Murray

BA77, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that in order to support Christian doctrine of what actually exists and does not exist in the afterlife, you have to make the case that non-Christian NDEs as reported are not of real things. Making the case that they aren't "as good" as Christian NDEs does not support Christian doctrine; in fact, it contradicts it, at least as far as I can see, absent any argument that those experiences represent something that does not actually exist. William J Murray

BA77 said:

Hmmm, “subconscious expectations”? That sounds downright Freudian in its presuppositions.

I consider it more an extension of the kind of relationship we have evidence for in quantum physics between mind/consciousness and our experience of reality.

As to you trying to equate these foreign NDEs with Judeo-Christian NDEs, again, Ithat is like you showing me a Bugatti, the world’s most expensive car, and then showing me a Yugo, a notoriously poorly built car, side by side and then you trying to convince me that the Yugo is just as good of a car as the Bugatti is.

Nope. That's not my argument here. I'm saying that in Christian doctrine (as it has been thus far explained to me,) there are no Yugos. Your argument that non-Christian NDEs are "not as good" as non-Christian NDE's requires the admission that non-Christians have non-Christian NDEs.

As to to your belief that ALL people who have not accepted Christ should immediately be going to hell during their NDEs, perhaps you can quote the exact scripture that says that?

That's not the case I'm making. The case I'm making is that the evidence is clear: non-Christians almost always have entirely non-Christian NDEs. Relative levels of enjoyment of NDE's would only matter if it was a clear-cut case of those NDEs conforming to the Christian perspective of what is available in the afterlife. That is not what is happening, at least from the evidence.

Well so much for your belief that all people in foreign cultures who have NDEs should immediately be going to hell.

That's not what I said. I said that if we are going by the NDE evidence, if Christianity is true, the only afterlife scenarios available for anyone to have would conform to Christian doctrine, whether they were Christian Bugattis or Christian Yugos. But, that's not what the NDE evidence indicates; it indicates a wide variety of afterlife experiences which appear to be, generally speaking, culturally dependent. To be clear again, BA77, I'm not arguing here that non-Christian NDEs are "as good as" Christian ones because that is not relevant to the argument I am making here. You can continue to go forward as if that is what I'm arguing if you wish, but it has nothing to do with what I'm actually arguing. William J Murray

AD said:

That’s where you want to be, even though you don’t know it yet.

No, that's not condescending at all. ; )

Then you get her, face to face, physical, forever,

Well, I do if she's there. If not, I'm out of luck.

...though Scripture says, you won’t be married to her in heaven, because we are all married to Christ,

Hard pass on that.

... but we will be every bit as fulfilled. We have to trust that there are greater things that we can’t yet conceive of, so maybe you need to hold judgment just yet on that concept.

I'm sure there are all sorts of things that I cannot conceive of yet because I have experienced things in life that I could not have even conceived of before. I'm quite certain there are experiences in the afterlife I can't conceive of now. The problem (for you in this discussion) is that my current paradigm has worked for decades in moving me into ever-increasing, previously unimaginable depths and breadths of enjoyment, including deeper and more profound, satisfying and fulling love, joy, happiness, peace, enthusiasm, wonder, etc. It has overcome all obstacles and challenges, removed angst, worry, frustration, worry, etc; delivered me from despairing, agonizing grief; it has delivered experiences there are no words to adequately describe. I've felt such pure joy that I could not, in this body, endure it for more than a few seconds. I've experienced the love of my wife, and my love for her, so deeply and profoundly, producing such delight that all I could do was cry and laugh until that sensation passed. After her death, her touch has produced such searing pleasure that the first time it happened I recoiled out of shock. My mind couldn't even process the sensation for a while. If this is going to turn into you trying to convince me become a Christian, here's the problem with that goal: the only way you can do that is to convince me that I will enjoy the Christian Heaven more than anything else I currently experience or can possibly experience otherwise. Vague promises of "even greater fulfillment" if I completely change course from that which has been consistently successful at delivering ever-increasing depths of enjoyment - fulfillment, joy, love, excitement, wonder, peace, etc. - for decades now, is just not going to come close to making that case. Let's say I make it to "heaven" and Irene, my wife, did not make the cut. Am I supposed to find that situation enjoyable? Am I supposed to be happy and joyous if that turns out to be the case? What if some of my children don't make it; am I supposed to be okay with that? Again, hard pass on any existential arrangement where that's even a remote possibility. William J Murray

WJM states:

If you’re attempting to make the case that non-Christian NDE’s are “less wonderful” or “less euphoric” or “less loving” or whatever, again, that may be a product of cultural expectations and conditions that lead people to afterlife conditions that correspond to their subconscious expectations."

Hmmm, "subconscious expectations"? That sounds downright Freudian in its presuppositions. :) As to you trying to equate these foreign NDEs with Judeo-Christian NDEs, again, Ithat is like you showing me a Bugatti, the world's most expensive car, and then showing me a Yugo, a notoriously poorly built car, side by side and then you trying to convince me that the Yugo is just as good of a car as the Bugatti is. That simply ain’t going to fly in my book. For instance, here is a 'typical' Judeo-Christian NDE,

After 3 near-death experiences, this man’s mission is to comfort dying veterans - May 7, 2021 Excerpt: During those 28 minutes, Brinkley says his consciousness traveled through a tunnel, where he encountered a spiritual being of light, and underwent a grueling replay of his entire life, as seen not only from his own perspective, but everyone he’d ever encountered. Something he says was extremely humbling. “I saw my entire tire life past performing a 360 degree panorama, I had missed nothing. You know how many hairs were in the nose of the doctor who pulled you from your mother. You know everything that there is from the time you open your eyes. You have complete cognitive awareness, no doubt about it. And that’s all happening at the same time, no doubt about it. Then you watch the same life from a second-person point of view, as if you were your own best friend. So you can see how silly, how funny, how dumb, how stupid it was, but it’s one of your best friend, you know. There’s no judgments, just looking. And then you literally become every person that you ever encounter. And you feel the direct results of your interaction between you and that person. So no one gets away, with anyone, anything.” DANNION BRINKLEY https://www.wkrg.com/news/after-3-near-death-experiences-this-mans-mission-is-to-comfort-dying-veterans/

In contrast, your latest citation, (which among other things that these Japanese NDEs lacked when compared to Judeo-Christian NDEs), your study noted a lack of “a realm in which all knowledge exists,”

Only one experiencer referred in his interview to the 10th element, “a realm in which all knowledge exists,” and his reference was only an implication, https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE76-Japanese-and-western-JNDS.pdf

Again, this not a minor 'missing detail' for foreign NDEs in my book, i.e. No matter what you believe, Yugos simply are NOT Bugattis! They are only superficially similar. There is simply nothing within both of your citations that you have cited to me that comes remotely close to the 'exceptional quality' of Judeo-Christian NDEs. WJM, you go on,

The evidential problem with your argument, BA77, is that these people did not meet the Christian God, or some other representative of the Christian God, to warn them or tell them to convert to Christianity. They did not find themselves in hell. They found themselves in an afterlife world that largely met their cultural expectations."

As to to your belief that ALL people who have not accepted Christ should immediately be going to hell during their NDEs, perhaps you can quote the exact scripture that says that? I can't seem to recall that exact scripture right now. But I can recall this scripture,

2 Peter 3:9 The Lord isn't slow about keeping his promises, as some people think he is. In fact, God is patient, because he wants everyone to turn from sin and no one to be lost.

I can also recall something called Purgatory, which is defined as "an intermediate state after physical death for expiatory purification."

Purgatory,, is according to the belief of some Christians,,, an intermediate state after physical death for expiatory purification.[2] The process of Purgatory is the final purification of the elect,,, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned.,,, The Church of England, mother church of the Anglican Communion, officially denounces what it calls "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory",[13] but the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and elements of the Anglican, Lutheran and Methodist traditions hold that for some there is cleansing after death and pray for the dead.[14][15][16][17][18] The Reformed Churches teach that the departed are delivered from their sins through the process of glorification.[19] Rabbinical Judaism also believes in the possibility of after-death purification and may even use the word "purgatory" to describe the similar rabbinical concept of Gehenna, though Gehenna is also sometimes described[by whom?] as more similar to hell or Hades.[20] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatory

Well so much for your belief that all people in foreign cultures who have NDEs should immediately be going to hell. Moreover, as to Christ revealing himself to people who had no prior knowledge of Him, among other stories I have heard of Christ 'unexpectedly' revealing himself to people who were 'seeking truth', I can also recall this fairly recent story of Christ revealing himself to a Buddhist monk in a vision.

BUDDHIST MONK TURNED MISSIONARY: TRANSFORMED BY A VISION AND GOD’S WORD June 28, 2019 https://bethanyinternational.org/news/buddhist-monk-turned-missionary-transformed-by-a-vision-and-gods-word/

I'm sure I could easily find several more stories like this. I'm pressed for time right now though. Thus, apparently, my supposed 'evidential problem' with foreign NDEs seems to be a product of your own imagination. In fact, IMHO, both of your studies. that you have cited to me. have, in the end, supported my position of a "Christian' heavenly paradise that exists above this temporal realm, and have disconfirmed your position that foreign NDEs are going to that 'Christian' heavenly paradise that, (as far as our best science e can tell us), really does 'physically' exist above this temporal realm, (i.e. see special relativity and NDEs at posts 7 and 8).

2 Corinthians 12:2-4 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.

bornagain77

BA77 said:

Well WJM, since I hold, via special relativity, that Judeo-Christian NDEs are actually going to a physically real heaven that exists in a higher dimension above this temporal realm, don’t you think those differences with heaven, that they tried to downplay, are pretty doggone significant?

There are significant differences and similarities between cultures and the component features of NDEs they experience. If you're attempting to make the case that non-Christian NDE's are "less wonderful" or "less euphoric" or "less loving" or whatever, again, that may be a product of cultural expectations and conditions that lead people to afterlife conditions that correspond to their subconscious expectations. The evidential problem with your argument, BA77, is that these people did not meet the Christian God, or some other representative of the Christian God, to warn them or tell them to convert to Christianity. They did not find themselves in hell. They found themselves in an afterlife world that largely met their cultural expectations. You might be able to make an argument from the NDE evidence that the Christian Heaven is better in some sense than other known afterlife situations, but you can't make the argument that the Christian existential afterlife arrangement is what everyone experiences when they have an NDE. You can't even argue that no other belief system produces enjoyable NDEs. The NDE evidence does not indicate that there is one particular set of afterlife realms, corresponding to one particular religion or spiritual perspective, that everyone visits during an NDE. It also indicates that there are different pathway experiences into different "worlds." William J Murray

AnimatedDust @81: First, the links to my books you asked for: Love After Life https://www.amazon.com/Love-After-Life-fulfilling-relationship/dp/1710255412/ Forbidden https://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Transdimensional-Relationships-William-Murray/dp/1675523568/

As for your lack of desire for anything Christianity has to offer, it seems very obvious to me, as someone who has studied it extensively, though not in the sense of CHARLES and BA77 extensively, that you know next to nothing about it, as based on your own remarks about it. If you did, you wouldn’t have asked the questions you did about heaven.

I don't have to know all of the details to understand the existential arrangements. The gist of it is, God supposedly created me and put me in this world, and I have an unspecified amount of time to make the correct pertinent decisions regarding my life, such as "loving god" or "accepting Jesus" or "accepting forgiveness and striving to be as "good" as possible" before I die and my fate is eternally decided. Is that about the gist of it, or do I have something fundamentally wrong? If I have that about right, I know all I need to know to take a hard pass.

You seem to remain in a state of rebellion,

Are we going to attempt to psychoanalyze each other from each of our perspectives? Is that how you want this conversation to go?

and haven’t considered seriously, the possibility that this Christian God really did create you and your wife.

Well, not the Christian God in particular, but I've seriously considered the idea that any God "created" me and put me into any particular, limited existential arrangement. So, it wasn't just the Christian God that got thrown out after those considerations.

One question though, are you now convinced, from your replies here, that life continues after death?

As I said, I've always believed in the afterlife. It's actually something I've never doubted. It's just that now I'm aware of all of the evidence. Plus, I've visited there a few times. And, there's the fact I've been talking to my dead wife and interacting with her for four years now, so ... William J Murray

Thank you so much for replying, WJM. I hadn't checked this in a while. I want to spend some time on your replies, but wanted to pen a few thoughts on first review of those replies. In the meantime, would you start by pointing me/us to a link on Amazon for your work? I would like very much to check it out. I intend to search it after I hit send, regardless. I have searched for your writings before, without success. I usually end up with writings of William J. Murray, the son of bitter atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair. As for your lack of desire for anything Christianity has to offer, it seems very obvious to me, as someone who has studied it extensively, though not in the sense of CHARLES and BA77 extensively, that you know next to nothing about it, as based on your own remarks about it. If you did, you wouldn't have asked the questions you did about heaven. You seem to remain in a state of rebellion, and haven't considered seriously, the possibility that this Christian God really did create you and your wife. Nothing much can develop if you remain in a state of pseudo-intellectual superiority to the one who made everyone and everything in this universe. You won't be able to hang with him in any intellectual sense. The last few chapters of Job will (should) demonstrate the inefficacy of arguing with God. One of the claims is that at the final resurrection, when Christ returns, we will once again be in physical bodies, immortal, incorruptible, and imperishable. The choice of free will in this time/space continuum is accept or reject. The choices by then will have been long actualized, eternally. No one in heaven will want to disobey the will of God. Everyone who does, won't be allowed in. Sign me up, as one with a long list of sins who needs that kind of Grace. If you remain convinced, by your wealth of lack of evidence, (amply warned about in Proverbs) God will simply grant you your choice, and you will be separated from the one necessary being in the universe, eternally, as your choice is eternally actualized. That would likely include any future interaction with your wife, regardless if she made the same choice. To view God as less important than her, means you've really not seriously considered that she and you are both gifts given by the most amazing person in the universe. And to view her as necessary for you, and God contingent, means you haven't fully worked through all this. You actually haven't even begun to. N.T. Wright refers to the final destination as "Life after life after death." Then we are in paradise restored, Eden restored, without everything we find abhorrent in this life. That's where you want to be, even though you don't know it yet. Then you get her, face to face, physical, forever, though Scripture says, you won't be married to her in heaven, because we are all married to Christ, but we will be every bit as fulfilled. We have to trust that there are greater things that we can't yet conceive of, so maybe you need to hold judgment just yet on that concept. If this God really is the author of the whole show, then humility and submission shouldn't be anathema, as they seem to be for you now. He gets to make the rules. But he also blessed you with the ability to turn him down. Hopefully that's after an adequate assessment of the information available to you. I suspect that with your giant intellect, you should do far more homework. (To whom much is given, much is expected.) As Lewis once said, "If you aim at heaven, you get Earth and everything else thrown in. If you aim at Earth, you get nothing." *From memory, might not be exact. Your wishes won't transcend your death. Your choices, will, however. More later, but I wanted to write a few preliminary thoughts. Ironic, but the one thing your giant intellect seems to want to cast off, is the one thing that all the claims of the Bible you haven't read validate. That, the big hole in William J. Murray, that is causing him to miss the final piece of the puzzle, is truly God shaped. Thank you again for your reply, and please do send us a link to your thoughts. I am seriously interested in them, and I am sorry for the loss of your wife, in the sense that we all know that to be. One question though, are you now convinced, from your replies here, that life continues after death? AnimatedDust

WJM, from the abstract of the paper you cited,

"In this article, we examine Japanese NDEs and compare their features with generalizations based on observations of Western NDEs. The main differences between Japanese and Western NDEs are the interpretation of the light and the concomitant lack of interaction with it, the image of heaven, and the absence of the life review. We suggest that these characteristics are ac- counted for in terms of cultural differences.

Well WJM, since I hold, via special relativity, that Judeo-Christian NDEs are actually going to a physically real heaven that exists in a higher dimension above this temporal realm, don't you think those differences with heaven, that they tried to downplay, are pretty doggone significant? Moreover, in their paper they only mention one person 'seeing a dark tunnel'. And I saw no discussion of that one person's NDE. As you know from posts 7 and 8, the tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension, because of special relativity, is very important to me for establishing the validity of actually going to a higher heavenly dimension. Among other missing features, they also discussed a "lack of the sense of being loved in Japanese NDEs". i.e. Not a minor missing feature! In short, I found that this study, like the previous study you cited to me, found only very superficial similarities with Judeo-Christian NDEs. (By researchers who apparently had a bias towards trying to find as many 'superficial' similarities as they could with Judeo-Christian NDEs). Like I told you about the previous study that you cited to me to try to defend your position that foreign NDEs are just as heavenly as Judeo-Christian NDEs are. it is like you showing me a Bugatti, the world most expensive car, and then showing me a Yugo, a notoriously poorly built car, side by side and then you trying to convince me that the Yugo is just as good of a car as the Bugatti is. That simply ain't going to fly in my book. Shoot, the quote-unquote "lack of the sense of being loved in Japanese NDEs" is enough, all by its lonesome, to convince me of the fact that Japanese NDEs are no where near being anything like the 'exceptional quality' that Judeo-Christian NDEs are.

"The only human emotion I could feel was pure, unrelenting, unconditional love. Take the unconditional love a mother has for a child and amplify it a thousand fold, then multiply exponentially. The result of your equation would be as a grain of sand is to all the beaches in the world. So, too, is the comparison between the love we experience on earth to what I felt during my experience. This love is so strong, that words like "love" make the description seem obscene. It was the most powerful and compelling feeling. But, it was so much more. I felt the presence of angels. I felt the presence of joyous souls, and they described to me a hundred lifetimes worth of knowledge about our divinity. Simultaneous to the deliverance of this knowledge, I knew I was in the presence of God. I never wanted to leave, never." Judeo-Christian Near Death Experience Testimony

Again, this is not a minor missing feature for Japanese NDEs. Verse:

1 John 4:: 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

bornagain77

I’m not sure what you think the NDE evidence for Christianity would be, if there are no “true Christians”

:)) Christian God created all people so all people(no matter their beliefs) will have universal experiences regarding those short moments of soul leaving the body. Sandy

Sandy said:

PS: Catholics and Protestants are not the representants of Christ’s Church because they split from Christ and His Church in 1054.

Well, if that's true, then we can probably safely say that virtually nobody with pre-Council of Lyon Eastern Orthodox beliefs is represented in the NDE data. I'm not sure what you think the NDE evidence for Christianity would be, if there are no "true Christians" represented in the data. William J Murray

The existence of NDE to all human beings confirm Christian doctrine of one God that created all humans and of life after death (immortality of soul)that shatter any argument from evil against God. Life after death confirm that this world is a place of test in which moral law (no pleasure law ) and free will will select the winners and the losers of this contest. Jesus Christ let us the most higher morality ever known by humans. Christianity is not true is the TRUTH. The end. PS: Catholics and Protestants are not the representants of Christ's Church because they split from Christ and His Church in 1054. Sandy

Sandy, I neither deny nor ignore BA77's arguments or evidence. He has made an excellent case that the portal into the Christian heaven is through Jesus. The experiential accounts of Christian NDEs serve to help make that case. My point is not that his argument is flawed or his evidence isn't valid. My point is that experiences of the afterlife appear to be largely cultural in nature, an example being that paper I linked to on a study of Japanese NDEs. IMO, one must dismiss or ignore all other accounts of NDEs on an a priori basis in order to reach the conclusion that the afterlife is entirely limited to the Christian heaven and the Christian hell (or any additional Christian afterlife realms, like purgatory.) One must also take into account that the vast bulk of the research done prior to 2000 was conducted in western, Christian cultures - mostly from Protestant and Catholic experiencers. Also, the diversity of experiences corresponds to other avenues of afterlife research, which paints a picture of enormous afterlife diversity, not of one specific set or kind of experience that solely corresponds to a single spiritual or religious perspective. William J Murray

BA77, an article you might find interesting that compares Japanese and Western NDEs: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2017/01/NDE76-Japanese-and-western-JNDS.pdf Dr. Bruce Greyson is probably the current "world expert" on NDEs, producing a large volume of articles on the subject appearing in various medical and other scientific journals. Here is a source for his articles: https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/publications/academic-publications/?wpv-category%5B%5D=near-death-experiences&2author-names%5B%5D=&date-of-publication%5B%5D= William J Murray

Bornagain77 The website, where anybody could write anything, contained about 25 or so foreign NDE testimonies.

:) You can't convince someone with this kind of "testimonies" when they reject Bible testimonies who are much more convincing and have more evidences than any NDE experience. It's about mindset. Also we have people who believe in afterlife for the wrong reason or in a wrong way. To make a soup you need right ingredients to right place and at the right time. Sandy

Seversky asks:

How do we know the NDEs reported by members of other faiths are wrong and those of Christians are right?

Once a person is familiar with the evidence, IMO it isn't reasonable to talk about "right" and "wrong" experiences of the afterlife. IMO, it's like people from a small town in rural Alabama visiting various locations around the world and then reporting back what they found. The afterlife, from the evidence, appears to be an incredibly diverse environment with diverse people living in diverse communities, having very diverse experiences. William J Murray

Seversky, Here's a good general summary of the evidence, from 2014. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/ Querius, About the fraud thing. Not saying this is what you're doing but it's easy to wave off people's testimony about their experiences as fraudulent, or to selectively do so when there is a set of that testimony that doesn't fit one's beliefs. When you actually go over the evidence and the testimony, you find out that most people are very reluctant to share this information with others. When you actually talk to those people, it's very difficult to not find them perfectly credible. That article I linked describes several lines of evidence that indicate NDE's are real, meaning that people having them are experiencing something actual and real. There are entirely different lines of evidence about what we call "the afterlife" besides NDE's, including communication with the dead and people here who have the capacity via OBE to visit "the afterlife." Four years ago I started seriously looking into all this, and what I found was a mountain of evidence, including decades of ongoing scientific research, that IMO unequivocally demonstrates the continuation of conscious life after death. IMO, one would just have to basically wave off a tsunami of evidence in order to not come to the conclusions that yes, our individual conscious life not only survives life here, it precedes it. William J Murray

Seversky, If you read Bornagain77's post #68, you might learn that some people have hellish NDEs and others have heavenly ones. How do you know that they're not dependent on each individual? Frankly, I'm not a fan of NDEs due to the very real possibility of fraud, but also I understand that they're not uncommon and some out-of-body experiences associated with them are very convincing. There are even groups of people that meet to talk about their own experiences. Since you're asking these questions, maybe you could consider looking up some of these studies and report back what you find out. -Q Querius

How do we know the NDEs reported by members of other faiths are wrong and those of Christians are right? Are all these eyewitness reports of heaven largely consistent and do they provide any more detailed information other than bright lights at the end of tunnels, a vague sense of being in the presence of others and an overwhelming sense of bliss or ecstasy? Seversky

BA77 said:

WJM, I may be wrong, but from your line of questioning, It looks to me like you are looking for something to be dissatisfied with in heaven?

I'm asking questions about what Heaven is supposed to be like under Christianity, as per - I would suppose - the Bible. Thanks for providing the quotes you did at the end. I'll assume that's as specific as it gets. I'm well aware of your arguments on these matters and I'm very well read/informed on the NDE evidence, as well as other kinds of evidence about the afterlife, from around the world. William J Murray

WJM, previously you argued with me that foreign Near Death Experiences (NDEs) were just as 'heavenly' as Judeo-Christian NDEs. I disagreed and I provided several studies from foreign, non-Judeo-Christian, cultures that backed up my position. The studies from Thailand, China and Japan, ranged from depressing NDEs (China), to unpleasant NDEs (Japan), to hellish NDEs (Thailand). Here is a 'typical' NDE testimony from Thailand.

Near Death Experience Thailand Asia - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8M5J3zWG5g Near-Death Experiences in Thailand - Todd Murphy Excerpt:The Light seems to be absent in Thai NDEs. So is the profound positive affect found in so many Western NDEs. The most common affect in our collection is negative. Unlike the negative affect in so many Western NDEs (cf. Greyson & Bush, 1992), that found in Thai NDEs (in all but case #11) has two recognizable causes. The first is fear of 'going'. The second is horror and fear of hell. It is worth noting that although half of our collection include seeing hell (cases 2,6,7,9,10) and being forced to witness horrific tortures, not one includes the NDEer having been subjected to these torments themselves. http://www.shaktitechnology.com/thaindes.htm

In response, and to try to back up your position that foreign NDEs are just as heavenly as Judeo-Christian NDEs, you provided me with one study and a website, (a website where anybody could write anything), that purported to show that foreign NDEs were just as 'heavenly' as Judeo-Christian Near Death Experiences. The website, where anybody could write anything, contained about 25 or so foreign NDE testimonies. More than half of them did not live up to their billing as being just as heavenly as Judeo-Christian NDEs. And some of the testimonies came from foreign countries where Judeo-Christianity is present as either major, or as a significant minor, influence. Only handful of the testimonies on the website had me scratching my head as to their uncanny resemblance to Judeo-Christian NDEs. But seeing as anybody could write anything on this website, and seeing as I had no further background information on the people who actually wrote these testimonies, I held their testimonies as being suspect. i.e. They could be true, they could be not true. I simply had no way to check the veracity of those handful of testimonies that were remaining and that had me scratching my head. In the more trustworthy study that you provided me, (I don't have the link to your paper handy right now and If you could re-provide the link that would be helpful), which you held to back up your position, I noted that the NDEs in the study only had a superficial resemblance to 'heavenly' Judeo-Christian NDEs, but, most importantly, the authors of the study themselves noted, several times, that foreign NDEs were marked by their lack of a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension. In fact, if I recall correctly, the absence of a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension was a major recurring point of their study. As I explained to you, the absence of a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension in foreign NDEs is not a minor omission for foreign NDEs in my book. In fact, as I outlined in posts 7 and 8 of this very thread, the existence of a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension, (and of a timeless eternity), are exactly what we would expect beforehand from special relativity, (one of our most powerful theories in science).

For me it is simply uncanny that there would be such a strong correspondence between what we know to be true from special relativity and what is reported to be true from NDEers of a ‘timeless eternity’ and of going through a tunnel to a higher, ‘heavenly’, dimension that is above this 3-D temporal realm during their NDEs. I would go so far as to say that such a strong correspondence between Special Relativity and their NDE testimonies, (since these people, in all likelihood, don’t know the intricacies of special relativity), is proof, in and of itself, that their NDE testimonies of a heavenly paradise above this temporal dimension are trustworthy and true. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/philosophy/at-mind-matters-news-do-any-dogs-go-to-heaven-if-so-why/#comment-732631

So WJM, as far as one of our most powerful theories in science, i.e. Special Relativity, can tell us, and as far as the millions of heavenly Judeo-Christian NDE testimonies can tell us, heaven is physically real place that exist in a higher dimension above this temporal dimension. And that powerful 'scientific' argument, from Special Relativity, (scientific evidence establishing the physical reality of heaven), is the starting point from which I would base any further arguments that I might make as to what might be, or what might not be, in heaven. After all, if I wanted to make arguments for the reality of heaven that I could not back up with solid science, I might as well be a Darwinist for all my arguing would be worth. WJM, in post 24, (and as you reiterated in post 66), you asked many questions as to what might be, or what might not be, in heaven.

Post 24: "In the Christian version of Heaven, is there no wildlife? No butterflies, cardinals, blue jays, buffalo, whales or elephants? What about trees, flowers, grass? Is there no food? No steak and potatoes, lobster? We never get to see or experience a lion again? And what is this about spouses? Do marriages exist in heaven or not? Are there movies, TV, books to read? Rock ‘n’ roll bands? Is all the music orchestral? Is there no night time, or any temperature variance? What about free will? Also, do we remember the people we love that didn’t get into heaven, or do we have to live with the knowledge and grief that they are either gone or suffering for eternity?" Post 66: "Is there free will in heaven? Do we retain our memories and relationships? Is it that the people who make it there cannot do evil things, or is it that they can, but would not? Do mountains, rivers, deserts, cities, small towns, cabins by the lake exist? Do the seasons change, is there a day and night cycle, are there stars and the moon? Does a universe exist? Can we visit other planets? Is there food in heaven? Is there sex? Can I change what I look like, or am I stuck looking the way I look now for eternity? Is there romance? Do people fall in love? Is there marriage? Can we have children there? Is there a wide variety of music? Are there concerts? Is there stuff to learn about, responsibilities we take on like jobs? Is there art – paint supplies, canvas, etc? Is there a wide variety of clothes? Do we have physical bodies? Are there sports? Games? Entertainment, like movies or TV shows? Or are we more like glowing orbs of pure bliss? Eternity is a long time, man. Do any of you know what you’re getting yourselves into?

WJM, I may be wrong, but from your line of questioning, It looks to me like you are looking for something to be dissatisfied with in heaven? Yet, from my reading of hundreds, (perhaps over a thousand), Judeo-Christian NDEs, there is ZERO dissatisfaction with heaven. As Mickey Robinson emphasized in his NDE, "we will NEVER be bored in heaven". (see post 8 for a link to his video testimony), I also found several mentions of animals, flawless countrysides, crystal clear streams, amazingly beautiful cities, libraries, occupations, and/or work, etc.. etc.. etc.. in my reading of Judeo-Christian NDEs. As to what might be in heaven according to what the Bible itself says, I agree with you that most of what is out there floating around in popular culture about heaven is vague. Dr. Randy Alcorn addresses that concern in the following recent 2021 video from the CS Lewis institute, (and also in a scholarly book he wrote in 2004). (Of note, I have not watched the video yet, (nor have I read his book), so the video will be new to me also).

Randy Alcorn - Heaven - video - Feb 9, 2021 - C.S. Lewis Institute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTyW7Vit_9M Heaven - By: Randy Alcorn - TYNDALE HOUSE / 2004 As the years pass and we watch more and more of our family, friends and mentors pass away, it is only natural to ask questions about heaven. However, our understanding of heaven is often limited to a few half-forgotten Sunday school lessons and the insubstantial images provided by popular movies and T.V. Fortunately, in Heaven Randy Alcorn provides us with a thoroughly researched and biblically definitive description of heaven. As Alcorn addresses our most serious questions about heaven, including the nature of judgment, and answers a few of our less serious questions as well, including the accessibility of cafe mochas in the sweet by and by. Readers will develop a deeper understanding of our eternal destination and find the courage to strive for heaven while living on earth. https://www.christianbook.com/heaven-randy-alcorn/9780842379427/pd/79422?kw=29064775092&mt=b&dv=c&event=PPCSRC&p=1186432&gclid=CjwKCAjwq7aGBhADEiwA6uGZp6ZKTJsABAS5dL_oHC_sKAMd_QhdHU-kRGPYfK2C5MivJXHSatxbzxoCX7kQAvD_BwE#CBD-PD-Description

Verses:

Psalm 16:11 You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Mark 16:19 After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Matthew 6:31-33 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

bornagain77

WJM, proper place for that is a forum on systematic theology. KF kairosfocus

Why is it no one is answering my questions about the Christian heaven in #24? There seems to be disagreement on at least some issues, but they are mostly indirect arguments. Does the Bible not detail the conditions of heaven? Honest question out of ignorance. Is there free will in heaven? Do we retain our memories and relationships? Is it that the people who make it there cannot do evil things, or is it that they can, but would not? Do mountains, rivers, deserts, cities, small towns, cabins by the lake exist? Do the seasons change, is there a day and night cycle, are there stars and the moon? Does a universe exist? Can we visit other planets? Is there food in heaven? Is there sex? Can I change what I look like, or am I stuck looking the way I look now for eternity? Is there romance? Do people fall in love? Is there marriage? Can we have children there? Is there a wide variety of music? Are there concerts? Is there stuff to learn about, responsibilities we take on like jobs? Is there art - paint supplies, canvas, etc? Is there a wide variety of clothes? Do we have physical bodies? Are there sports? Games? Entertainment, like movies or TV shows? Or are we more like glowing orbs of pure bliss? Eternity is a long time, man. Do any of you know what you're getting yourselves into? I mean that seriously. It all seems extremely vague to me so far, but I chalk that up to my own ignorance about Christianity. What people are saying above isn't really helping to alleviate my ignorance. The only direct answers I ever got about this from what may or may not be considered a Christian was a Jehova's Witness that came by every so often and we'd talk for a while. Under his beliefs, we don't go to heaven in the endgame; we live on a new Earth paradise, where we have all the things I listed above. At least that was an end result with specificity, one that was truly appealing to me. William J Murray

Mohammadnursyamsu,

You pay attention to objective issues with science, and you pay attention to subjective issues with religion.

I don't pay much attention to either. I pay attention to what I enjoy, and to what seems to work in making my life as personally enjoyable as possible. William J Murray

WJM, I don't buy it, you don't really get subjectivity. 1. Creator / chooses / spiritual / subjective / opinion 2. Creation / chosen / material / objective / fact Your enjoyment would be in category 1. But really, it is obvious one should have general consideration for all what is in category 1. Which means, other people's emotions, and generally the spirit of any decision in the universe anywhere. I don't know how to pay dedicated attention to subjective issues, other than praying to God. Talking to God in worship, it is just the perfect way. Because God rules over all, so if you pray to God, then you are dealing with all what is subjective. It is just perfect. But anyway, any other way you can figure it, the result must be to pay dedicated attention to subjective issues, as in bona fide religion. If you understand subjectivity, this should be obvious. You pay attention to objective issues with science, and you pay attention to subjective issues with religion. mohammadnursyamsu

WJM you didn't speak with your wife. The person that you think is your wife is a fallen angel=demon. Did you make some kind of promise to "somebody" if get you in touch with your wife? This is witchcraft. Telling us you don't like what offers The Christian God that means you are an undercover sorcerer or under influence of a sorcerer . Sandy

Mohammadnursyamsu said:

Because really what that can only mean is,...

Because that is objectively what those words mean? Because that what I must mean, objectively speaking? That may be what it means to you, but that's not what I meant when I said that. Perhaps you haven't read what I've said in this forum before about the subject. Everything I do and think is in service to my personal, subjective enjoyment. So yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about the subjective. I just don't call that activity "spiritual." William J Murray

WJM, that is just outrageous that you are ambivalent about spirituality. Because really what that can only mean is, that you don't pay dedicated attention to subjective issues. You pay attention to objective issues, science, material, but you don't pay attention to subjective issues. mohammadnursyamsu

To be fair, I find myself ambivalent about all religions and "spiritualities" I have read or heard about in my life. It's not just Christianity. William J Murray

AD, I'd like to focus on something you said:

Get outside of yourself, and consider the possibilities of an intellect far greater than yours, who completely understands you, and yet loves you anyway, also wants an eternal relationship with you.

This is the single greatest problem I personally have or face with this perspective: I do not want what Christianity or Jesus offers, so far as it has been offered by various sources in my 62 years of life, nor can I offer what Christianity demands. I cannot love God more than my wife. I do not have any love for the Christian God as it has thus far been presented, or the "heaven" it offers. This is why I ask questions, such as I did in this thread, about the Christian heaven. I don't mean this disrespectfully, but I'm personally underwhelmed by the information and descriptions of the Christian God and the Christian heaven and the Christian description of existence and reality, at least to this current date. It leaves me ambivalent. But, that's me, personally. I fully accept that for many others, the Christian God, heaven and that existential reality is something they have a deep, abiding love for and relationship with. If they feel about those things at least to the degree (who knows, perhaps even more so) the way I feel about my wife. I can hardly find fault with them or disrespect them for going with and following that kind of deep, abiding, fulfilling love. William J Murray

Also, not that he likely cares, but for my money, BA77 is hands down the best arguer for Christianity I have ever seen, including the past and present supposed "giants" of such arguments. I have always been blown away at how much pertinent evidence and information he has available, the research he has obviously done, and how he weaves it together seamlessly into his arguments. He is truly a wonder, and I respect the heck out of him. I don't often argue with BA77 because he leaves nothing to argue about. His arguments are exhaustive, logically sound, evidential, and really, things of beauty to read. I "argued" with him for weeks about the evidence for the geocentric theory, but I was only trying to understand the evidence. Once I understood the evidence, it was clear he was right, and I told him so. William J Murray

AnimatedDust @ 54, First, I want to thank you for your very kind and sincere words. I greatly appreciate it and you heartfelt concern for my future. Second, it is not my desire to pry you from your beliefs. I respect your beliefs. I have no reason to doubt anything written as factual events in the Bible, including the resurrection of Jesus. It is my sincere belief that those who believe as you, KF and BA77 and others here believe, will realize your amazing and wonderful fulfillment of your faith. I am truly happy and feel joy for you and what you now experience and will in time come to experience. I've always believed in life after death, even when I was a young child. I've experienced a few events that should have killed me, but in that moment when I thought I was certainly going to die, there was never any fear whatsoever. I've never feared death. Now, what you (and everyone else here) doesn't know: the reason I know what my wife means to me in all it's terrible, devastating, despairing beauty and glory is because she died in April of 2017. She battled cancer for a little over 2 years before she was finally free of this world. That's why I stopped writing here for about a long time; nothing mattered to me except finding a way, if it was possible, to reconnect with her. I devoted myself to it 24/7 because, as I found out then in its fullness, she was and is everything to me. Before you think that you are sorry for my loss, I didn't lose anything. I gained so very much. For months I was in agony and despair I didn't know a human could survive. Unless you have experienced the death of your "soul mate," or a child, you have no idea what it is like. It is unimaginable. Today, over four years later, I am so grateful for the experience I don't have the words to properly express it. The experience changed me completely, and led me through a torturous path of exploration and discovery I could not have even thought of had she not died, had the depth of my love for her not been so completely revealed to me; you truly do not know what you have until it is taken away from you, and some part of you believes: I'll never have her again. She's gone. It's over." Even though I consciously believed in the afterlife, that is not what my subconscious had been trained to think because of the way people and society acts when people die. My subconscious reacted with the full force and fury of that thought: she's gone forever. Long story short, with an enormous amount of help from her, we reconnected, established communication, interaction, and developed our relationship far beyond what it was before, and we had thought, in that "before," this is as good as it can possibly get. I have visited with her physically in her "world," several times. We speak with each other constantly throughout the day. We can visit with each other any time either of us wish in ways it would take books to set up and explain properly, including psychological, emotional and physical sensations there just aren't words for in this world, except to perhaps call them "divine." I wrote and self-published on Amazon about this, wrote a daily, public blog as I was going through it, and co-founded a FB group specifically for those that have and their "significant person" die who was, and is, their "everything," who have no desire to "move on, " but rather desire to move forward with their relationship with their (dead) partner, to find a way through the grief back into a happy, joyful continuing relationship with their loves. I've spent countless hours on the phone and in zoom meetings, and in the group, working with hundreds of people. I don't charge anything for any of this, and my books are available for free to group members. Scores of people have told me that I saved their lives, gave them hope and helped to guide them back from the edge. Family, friends and society (at least in USA society) do not treat people in this situation kindly (for long) because, as everyone in that group can testify, people are uncomfortable around the grieving who refuse to "move on" from the dead. When I first met some of those people in our Zoom group, they couldn't even speak without breaking down and sobbing. Today, they experience no more grief, are full of happiness and joy, and some have also physically visited with their partners in that world much more often and for much longer periods of time than I and my wife. I don't say any of that for self-aggrandizement; I say it to disclose that this has been my life for the past four years. I am now, and have been for over two years now, more joyously happy and fulfilled than ever, am even more in love with my wife than I thought possible, and serving a community of people (yes, because I enjoy it) that have nowhere else to turn. Because I dislike anyone thinking I am an authority on any of this, last year I stepped down from my leadership and admin roles and handed the whole thing off to younger people who are more comfortable dealing with and being leaders for the growing membership, now getting close to 1000 members. Also, I wanted to spend more time with my wife, my family, painting, and developing my thoughts during this phase of my life. To be clear, if my relationship with my wife and the complete love I have for her dooms me to an eternity of pain, so be it. Absent a complete mind-wipe, that is my fate regardless of any other circumstances if I cannot be with her. I love her completely, ultimately, no matter what. I understand this about myself; there was no enjoyment of life before her; there is no enjoyment of life without her. She is my "it," and I say that because this is how she described her love for me; I am her "it." That's just the way it is for us. William J Murray

At post 5 Sandy claimed that animals are just automations,

Nope. No animal have soul ,all are automatons . God put in their vegetative brain some software that give us the impression that they have some understanding, intelligence but all are preseted programs that run on certain ,triggers ,stimuli. - Sandy

Yet research conducted by Rupert Sheldrake strongly suggests that animals are not just mindless automations but they also have some sort of spiritual component to their being like humans do.

Jaytee, a dog who knew when his owner was coming home: The ORF Experiment - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA5wAm2c01w Comment on the video: "This exact thing happened every night with my dog on my return home from work. My mother noticed that my dog would go sit by the front door, whimper slightly and not move from that spot until I walked in about 10 minutes later. I did not catch the same train home each evening. My mother also noticed that during the time that my dog was ‘stationed’ at the door, he would not look at my mother, or acknowledge her in any way, even though my mother and the dog had be best buddies all during the day up to the moment he went and sat by the door. He was a special little dog - I really loved him" Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home: – April 26, 2011 - With a scientist's mind and an animal lover's compassion, world-renowned biologist Rupert Sheldrake presents a groundbreaking exploration of animal behavior that will profoundly change the way we think about animals--and ourselves. How do cats know when it's time to go to the vet, even before the cat carrier comes out? How do dogs know when their owners are returning home at unexpected times? How can horses find their way back to the stable over completely unfamiliar terrain? After five years of extensive research involving thousands of people who have pets and work with animals, Dr. Sheldrake proves conclusively what many pet owners already know: there is a strong connection between humans and animals that defies present-day scientific understanding. Sheldrake compellingly demonstrates that we and our pets are social animals linked together by invisible bonds connecting animals to each other, to their owners, and to their homes in powerful ways https://www.amazon.com/Dogs-That-Their-Owners-Coming/dp/0307885968

bornagain77

Wow. So Sandy doesn't understand that humans are animals. Are you a plant, gas or mineral, Sandy? Even Linnaeus placed us in the Animal Kingdom. Sandy:

Yes, you are.

Yes I am human. And yes all humans are animals. ET

WJM @25 "That’s me. Heaven is meaningless to me without my wife. There’s no condition or pain hell can possibly serve up that compares to the pain of even the idea of not being with her, much less the experience itself." (BA77, this is a remarkably vulnerable and honest comment from WJM. Let's give it its due.) WJM, you are one of the most amazing intellects I have ever run across in my internet forays. I find incredible value in your eloquence and substance of things as they relate to consciousness. I read almost everything you write. Lately, I have noticed a turn in your thinking, that if I have it somewhat right, shows a gap in your big picture skills, because of your admitted lack (admitted here as well) of knowledge of the claims of Christianity. BA thoroughly articulates them in sometimes excruciating detail on a daily basis. How much time do you spend on his links and assertions? It's pretty obvious that us humans are wired a certain way, and that materialism didn't do it. You've thoroughly repudiated the material position repeatedly, game-set-match, yourself. But in all your recent banter about qualia, and such, and what we are experiencing as humans in sensory and cognitive functions, and their attendant integration, you seem to be missing the big picture. What does all this mean, and why are we this way, would be two questions. It's been said that everyone worships something. The Christian position is that anything you place greater importance on than God, will ultimately destroy you. You've just put out there that your wife is the most important thing in your life. I assume she feels the same about you. If you put all your emotional eggs in that basket, you're going to be profoundly crushed in the end. She may die tomorrow. You may die tomorrow. If nothing is worse than her death to you, you are in fact making a good thing, an ultimate thing, and there's no way it can be sustained forever. And we know forever, because we can apprehend the concept. The claims of Christianity give you an out, where you get her, and relationship with God, forever. If you place everything on her, you get nothing but despair. I am surprised you haven't done the math on this, given your giant intellect and problem solving skills in other areas of complex human consciousness. The thing is, we are told, we must become like children, to grasp what all is at stake here. If you're ignorant of Christianity, why aren't you doing something about it? I'm nobody but an admirer, but why not start with the claims of the resurrection? If it could be established to your satisfaction that there is physical life after death, wouldn't it make great sense to explore those claims to their fullest? Because if that's true, what else on this earth matters? If you have the incarnate God where he should be, He who created not only you, but your wife, and knew the kind of relationship you'd have, why wouldn't you turn your full attention to him, in order that your relationship with your wife might continue eternally? All other roads lead to bones and dust. All of your recent talk of qualia of the smell of oranges and such miss the bigger picture. What is the nature of the designer who made you/your wife and everyone else with a nose to be able to enjoy a pleasant fragrance that way? Or a beautiful melody? Or a majestic sunset? We are an integrated part of a world and a universe with a purpose, and you seem to not be able to see that, because of your giant intellect. Get your brain out of the way, and open your mind in ways not heretofore considered! BA is always talking about the Shroud of Turin, and how that image got there, and NDEs. Have you spent any time exploring his links? There are many things contained therein that should make anyone, including you, take pause. The similarities in what people experience near death should be given considerable pause. It is INCREDIBLE, and incredibly similar!! And he's pointing out how Quantum Mechanics is scientifically validating higher planes of existence! How did that darned image get on the Shroud? More radiation in less time than any machine extant in 2021 is capable of producing. SAY WHAT???? I don't think I have ever seen you comment on ANY of that. Anyway, I am not very articulate, but I hope I have given you some pause. You sound like you would give anything to keep your wife forever. What if you didn't have to give anything, but instead, only receive something, as one receives a gift? It would require humbling yourself, and possibly considering that your giant intellect is a gift as well, and you've never even considered that, nor thanked the super-intellect who gave that to you. Keep ruminating about qualia, and you may miss the very thing you wanted most, who has been right under your nose the entire time. Here's the dirty little secret: THIS UNIVERSE IS ALL FOR US. ...And a creator whose love is so boundless, that everything we see in the universe is a manifestation of that love. Nothing else explains beauty, justice, flowers, hummingbirds, music, ballet, nebulae, and the skin on a baby's butt. Humble yourself, pick up N.T. Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God". About 900 pages of high level scholarship. You're totally ready for it. Once you're clear that Jesus Christ did physically rise from the dead, you can use your remaining years to thank him for every breath, and your wife's every breath, and sign on to the one program that gets you everything plus her, forever. What's your alternative? Unspeakable darkness if you lose her, as you admittedly fear? Get outside of yourself, and consider the possibilities of an intellect far greater than yours, who completely understands you, and yet loves you anyway, also wants an eternal relationship with you. It's a choice. What's holding you back? Thanks for reading. --AD AnimatedDust

Our animal friends do in fact appear to have souls (albeit simpler and without some of Man's mental faculties) and survive death, despite materialist skeptics and religious scriptures and doctrines and other fallacious sources. As just part of the evidence, there are numerous NDEer’s reports that they were reunited with beloved deceased pets during their NDEs. Lest these reports be dismissed as reassuring hallucinations generated by the unconscious mind, the general reality of NDEs has been very convincingly established by multiple types of empirical evidence, the most important of which is the numerous files of veridical NDEs where many NDEer's accounts contain facts which they could not possibly have known through their physical senses, as later verified by investigators. In fact the most important type is when the NDEer's brains were disfunctional from trauma or disease, such as cardiac arrest. A couple of examples of paranormal experiences of reuniting with beloved animals, from https://thebark.com/content/near-death-experiences-will-our-dogs-be-waiting-us : An NDE:

"...there are many tantalizing anecdotes and case reports of dogs coming to greet their human friends. For example, there was a patient named Alma, who, as she approached death, expressed a deep sense of peace. When asked where this peace came from, she told a story about having survived a fire many years earlier, during which she had lost consciousness and been burned severely. "I remember leaving my body. I could see myself on the ground below and the ambulance guys working on me. It was all very strange. Then I felt myself moving away. I saw a beautiful light and heard this amazing music that just brought me such peace. Eventually I found myself in a big yard where I’d grown up. I saw Sadie, my best childhood friend, a cute little Schnauzer. She was running toward me, wagging her tail. I’d missed her so much when she died. Yet, there she was, coming to greet me. After an emotional reunion, Alma’s mother joined them and encouraged her to “go back.” Alma didn’t want to return. “I felt so happy, so loved. I wanted to be there forever.” As her mother spoke words of encouragement, Sadie licked Alma’s face. “She was licking me like crazy and I was laughing with joy. Then I suddenly woke up in the burn unit with the worst pain I’d ever felt.” Over the following months, as she endured many agonizing treatments, including several large skin grafts, Alma clung to those moments with her mother and Sadie. “I was never afraid of death again. I know I’m going to be okay. I know Sadie and Mom are waiting for me.”"

.................. An end-of-life experience:

"Though dogs may appear in end-of-life dreams at any age, they are especially likely to arrive in the dreams of dying children.....Children often do not know someone who has already died. As a result, the deceased who have loved them best and come back to them in the end are often beloved pets. There was the case of a 13-year-old named Jessica who was having dreams about her deceased black Lab. “I dream of my old dog, Shadow, that passed away. He is in a good place,” she said. “He occasionally comes to see me, and I have a feeling he is there to say it is okay. I’m in a safe place.” Jessica’s dreams of Shadow occurred just prior to her death. They brought the child “solace and the comfort of knowing she would be entering a sheltering, safe, and familiar territory alongside her furry friend.”"

doubter

@51 And you have just proven you are not worth arguing with You are straight wrong and delusional To the point of absurdity You don’t even know what you are quoting You are literally just wrong And you are literally insane if you think people owning pets do so because the pet looks up to them like a god. I’m sorry this is your perception. And your comment saying that Pets are subordinate also tells me that you have a very corrupted view of the relationship between humans and animals Either you are literally crazy or you are a paid troll because must NORMAL people don’t respond that way after being caught misquoting the Bible and just being plain wrong AaronS1978

AaronS1978 Sandy do you understand that means people with riches parish like a beast This has Nothing to do with the soul of animals it means that they will be lost in probably die a very harsh death Again your logic falls short because suddenly this person doesn’t have a soul so humans can just lose their soul and not exist so there’s no eternal damnation like hell waiting for them because you don’t have a soul if you die like one of the beasts Your attempt to try to draw that animals have no soul from that once again fails because you leave out key critical portions of that entire psalm Like one through nineteen So NOPE Like for a Bible thumper you really suck

I know it's difficult to accept you love some automatons who gives you the ilusion of self importance because the poor animal is under your subordination and look at you like to god (a false god ) . Anyway my main idea was no pet or animal values more than the most despicable human being. Sandy

Sandy do you understand that means people with riches parish like a beast This has Nothing to do with the soul of animals it means that they will be lost in probably die a very harsh death Again your logic falls short because suddenly this person doesn’t have a soul so humans can just lose their soul and not exist so there’s no eternal damnation like hell waiting for them because you don’t have a soul if you die like one of the beasts Your attempt to try to draw that animals have no soul from that once again fails because you leave out key critical portions of that entire psalm Like one through nineteen So NOPE Like for a Bible thumper you really suck Almost as bad as sev when it comes to your understanding of Christianity AaronS1978

And finally, at 36, Seversky asks these questions,

Is it some amorphous “unifying principle” which binds the body together(?) That sounds more like The Force from Star Wars.

To be clear of what the definition of amorphous is,

a·mor·phous adjective without a clearly defined shape or form.

You are kidding right? Your soul is precisely what gives your body the exact shape and form that your body has. Without a soul, the trillions, (upon trillions) of molecules in your body would, in fact, be amorphous, "without a clearly defined shape or form" to cohere to. You soul is exactly the reason "why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death"

The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings – Stephen L. Talbott – 2010 Excerpt: Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. ,,, the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? Despite the countless processes going on in the cell, and despite the fact that each process might be expected to “go its own way” according to the myriad factors impinging on it from all directions, the actual result is quite different. Rather than becoming progressively disordered in their mutual relations (as indeed happens after death, when the whole dissolves into separate fragments), the processes hold together in a larger unity. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings

Seversky then asks,

Is it some “immaterial essence” or “animating principle” whatever that might mean?

Yes. By golly, you are getting closer to what a soul actually is. Seversky then asks,

What do you think it is and, if it exists as something, how do we detect it?

Well, as was already pointed out at the end of post 32 and continuing on through post 33, we already have 'detected' the soul, in that we have detected quantum information, which is 'non-local', (i.e. beyond any space-time materialistic explanation), and which is 'conserved', (i.e. cannot be created nor destroyed), to be ubiquitous within molecular biology, "in a wide range of important biomolecules". Please see the end of post 32, and continuing on through post 33, to see how advances in quantum biology now provide the Christian Theist with strong empirical support for his belief in the physical reality of 'immaterial' souls that are capable of living beyond the death of our material, temporal, bodies. But to go beyond the evidence I listed in posts 32 and 33, and to further, 'empirically', bolster the claim that 'non-local', i.e. 'beyond space and time', quantum principles are at play, (not only on the microscopic scale of the molecules of our material bodies,) but are also at play on the macroscopic scale of our material bodies, I can refer to a few more pieces of empirical evidence. First, as the following study found, "it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment,” says Vaziri. “The response that the photon generates survives all the way to the level of our awareness despite the ubiquitous background noise. Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way.”,,, The researchers even go on to remark that they have no clue how such is possible, I.e. “What we want to know next is how does a biological system achieve such sensitivity? How does it achieve this in the presence of noise?"

Study suggests humans can detect even the smallest units of light – July 21, 2016 Excerpt: Research,, has shown that humans can detect the presence of a single photon, the smallest measurable unit of light. Previous studies had established that human subjects acclimated to the dark were capable only of reporting flashes of five to seven photons.,,, it is remarkable: a photon, the smallest physical entity with quantum properties of which light consists, is interacting with a biological system consisting of billions of cells, all in a warm and wet environment,” says Vaziri. “The response that the photon generates survives all the way to the level of our awareness despite the ubiquitous background noise. Any man-made detector would need to be cooled and isolated from noise to behave the same way.”,,, The gathered data from more than 30,000 trials demonstrated that humans can indeed detect a single photon incident on their eye with a probability significantly above chance. “What we want to know next is how does a biological system achieve such sensitivity? How does it achieve this in the presence of noise? http://phys.org/news/2016-07-humans-smallest.html

Moreover, the evidence that quantum mechanisms is at play on the macro level of the human brain is revealed by the following. In the following article it is noted that Multielectrode recordings have revealed zero time lag synchronization among remote cerebral cortical areas.

,,, zero time lag neuronal synchrony despite long conduction delays - 2008 Excerpt: Multielectrode recordings have revealed zero time lag synchronization among remote cerebral cortical areas. However, the axonal conduction delays among such distant regions can amount to several tens of milliseconds. It is still unclear which mechanism is giving rise to isochronous discharge of widely distributed neurons, despite such latencies,,, Remarkably, synchrony of neuronal activity is not limited to short-range interactions within a cortical patch. Interareal synchronization across cortical regions including interhemispheric areas has been observed in several tasks (7, 9, 11–14).,,, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2575223/

And as the following article states, "It’s certainly true that electrical activity in the brain is synchronised over distances that cannot be easily explained. Electrical signals travel too slowly to do this job, so something else must be at work.,,,"

The Puzzling Role Of Biophotons In The Brain - Dec. 17, 2010 Excerpt: It’s certainly true that electrical activity in the brain is synchronised over distances that cannot be easily explained. Electrical signals travel too slowly to do this job, so something else must be at work.,,, ,,, It’s a big jump to assume that photons do this job. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422069/the-puzzling-role-of-biophotons-in-the-brain/

Moroever, evidence suggesting that quantum mechanisms are at play on the macro level of the human body itself is also revealed in the following article where it is revealed that a subject perceives a sensory stimulus on the skin at the moment the skin is touched, before the stimulus reaches the brain and before full deliberative consciousness occurs.

Do Perceptions Happen in Your Brain? - Michael Egnor - December 1, 2015 Excerpt: The sensory experiments of Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist at U.C. San Francisco in the mid 20th century, demonstrated that a subject perceives a sensory stimulus on the skin at the moment the skin is touched, before the stimulus reaches the brain and before full deliberative consciousness occurs. Libet was flabbergasted by this result,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/12/do_perceptions101261.html

As Benjamin Libet himself remarked, "In spite of the delay for a sensory experience, subjectively there appears to be no delay."

Reflections on the interaction of the mind and brain - Benjamin Libet - 2006 Excerpt: "In spite of the delay for a sensory experience, subjectively there appears to be no delay." - Benjamin_Libet https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052421/http://www.telefonica.net/web2/lupelandia/piramidescerebro/Libet.pdf

Darwinian materialists simply have no clue how such instantaneous actions are possible at the macroscopic level of our 'material' bodies. (Shoot, Darwinists can't even explain instantaneous actions at the microscopic level of atoms and molecules). In fact, as Jim Al-Khalili, an atheist, pointed out, Darwinian biologists have not taken the principles of Quantum Mechanics into consideration at all in their studies of molecular biology, even though Erwin Schrödinger himself theorized that Quantum Principles must be at play in life way back in 1944.

Jim Al-Khalili, at the 2:30 minute mark of the following video states, ",, Physicists and Chemists have had a long time to try and get use to it (Quantum Mechanics). Biologists, on the other hand have got off lightly in my view. They are very happy with their balls and sticks models of molecules. The balls are the atoms. The sticks are the bonds between the atoms. And when they can't build them physically in the lab nowadays they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule.,, It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics in the way to explain it." At the 6:52 minute mark of the video, Jim Al-Khalili goes on to state: “To paraphrase, (Erwin Schrödinger in his book “What Is Life” (1944)), he says at the molecular level living organisms have a certain order. A structure to them that’s very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. In fact, living matter seems to behave in its order and its structure just like inanimate cooled down to near absolute zero. Where quantum effects play a very important role. There is something special about the structure, about the order, inside a living cell. So Schrodinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life”. Jim Al-Khalili – Quantum biology – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOzCkeTPR3Q

One wonders how much further along the entire field of quantum biology would be if the materialistic presuppositions of Darwinian evolution had not been hampering biologists from even studying the principles of 'quantum biology' for all these years,,, ever since Schrödinger first theorized that Quantum principles must be at play in life way back in 1944? So in conclusion, and to sum this post up, (and with what I've already written in posts 32 and 33 in mind), the Christian Theist can now appeal directly to empirical evidence from quantum biology to support his belief in the physical reality of a 'immaterial', and eternal, soul that is capable of living beyond the death of his material, temporal, body.

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

bornagain77

@Davidl1 Nope. Atheists agree with you . :))) Psalm82:6 I have said, “Ye are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High.” Psalms 49:20 Man, though he is in honor but understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish. Sandy

Psalm 69:34 "Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moves therein." I remember in my bachelor days praying in my room... and if Spike and Hazel were in there with me I would exhort them with something like, "pray with me you wretched creatures!" LOL Andrew asauber

@ 45 THANK YOU!!!! AaronS1978

I'm certainly not an expert on these things, but I think there is Biblical support for the idea that animals are more than automatons. Genesis 9:5 says that God would demand an accounting from "each animal" (in addition to humans), and Genesis 9:9, 10 says that God established a covenant with both humans and animals. Both of those scriptures indicate that animals have free will and are not just automatons Nephesh, the word that is translated to soul, is used to describe both animals and humans. Ecclesiastes talks about how humans and animals have the same eventuality. I think Ecclesiastes also talks about what happens to the "spirit" of an animal when it dies. Frankly, It's hard to see anything that supports the idea that animals are just meat robots (as somebody here has posted in the past). davidl1

@ 27 BA77 No no no no it’s not Catholic doctrine The only thing in Catholic doctrine is we have a rational soul that is eternal This is an in-house issue that is hotly debated like the death penalty I’m Catholic I am most certainly of the opinion that my fur babies and my scaly friends have souls Honestly I think all of life does Just we’re the ones made in god’s image And have the capacity to disobey God’s law AaronS1978

@ 38 Me thinks You might be a bit of a whackadoodle Your Response to me at 38 is odd :))))) Maybe it’s supposed to be >D or :D laughing face So a few things God does not specifically say that animals do not have souls, he also does not specifically say that we have souls short of he made us in his image Also in the Bible God does not mention that animals are nothing more than mindless automatons, and humans should think the same if they wish to follow him (be Christian Jesus is pretty silent on this matter as well) I mean nowhere in the Bible is this mentioned that once However the Bible mentions animals in a positive sense a myriad of times from helpers, symbols and sometimes in a negative sense such as the golden calve. But God works through animals to communicate with other humans and to teach lessons Animals were important enough to command Noah to gather two of each (male and female) for the ark. God also uses a whale to teach Jonah very important lesson. not to mention the very beginning of Genesis God created animals first and then offered them to Adam as companions the very thing you are condemning I also took notice of the fact that when you quoted me @ 38 you conveniently left out the part where you say I am worse than rapists pedos and murders you say I’m worse then a pedophile, a rapist, and murderer but not worse than the liar? And much like how God is silence about whether animals have souls your silence obviously means that I am not worse than a liar…………. This is obviously bad logic but it is the logic that you have deployed in regards to whether or not god’s creatures are just thrown into a waste bin or return to God The only thing you can honestly say is that God is silent on the matter to us and God isn’t exactly silent You are not the judge of nor do you know what God does with God’s creation The fate of those animals are in God’s hands and if God wishes them to be with him they will be with him You and I have no say in the matter And You calling me worse than a pedophile a murderer and rapist because of my understanding of the matter is uncalled for It is insulting because you obviously don’t understand the gravity of what those individuals do to the victims and how they destroy their rights, their freedom, and their lives AaronS1978

ET Humans are animals.

Yes, you are. :))) Sandy

Seversky then asks,

Does it (the soul) just drift away after death? Where does it (the soul) go?

Well, as I am sure you are well aware, in Christian theology it is held that souls do not just 'drift away', but that, ultimately, there are two final destinations for souls. Either a soul goes to heaven to live in the presence of God eternally, or else a soul is separated from God in what is termed a 'second death'. in hell. Moreover, as I've already pointed out in post 7, the Christian Theist can appeal directly to Special Relativity itself, one of our most powerful theories in science, to support his belief in the physical reality of heaven. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/philosophy/at-mind-matters-news-do-any-dogs-go-to-heaven-if-so-why/#comment-732631 Likewise, the Christian Theist can also appeal to General Relativity, again one of our most powerful theories in science, to also support his belief in an 'infinitely destructive eternity' that exists 'below' this temporal dimension. In other words, the Christian Theist can appeal directly to General Relativity to support his belief in the physical reality of hell. For instance,

Space-Time of a Black hole – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0VOn9r4dq8 “Einstein’s equation predicts that, as the astronaut reaches the singularity (of the black-hole), the tidal forces grow infinitely strong, and their chaotic oscillations become infinitely rapid. The astronaut dies and the atoms which his body is made become infinitely and chaotically distorted and mixed-and then, at the moment when everything becomes infinite (the tidal strengths, the oscillation frequencies, the distortions, and the mixing), spacetime ceases to exist.” - Kip S. Thorne – “Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy” pg. 476

What is interesting in all this is that, (while the Christian Theist can appeal directly to Special and General Relativity to support his belief in the physical reality of heaven and hell), Atheists, on the other hand, have no evidence whatsoever that the Multiverses that they have postulated to try to ‘explain. away’ the fine tuning of the universe are real, nor do Atheists have any evidence that the ‘parallel universes’ that they postulated to try to ‘explain away’ quantum wave collapse are real. In short, while Atheists may try to claim that the Christian's belief in heaven and hell is purely imaginary, the fact of the matter is that two of our most powerful theories in science both support the Christian's belief in the physical reality of heaven and hell.,,, Whereas on the other hand, the only thing that is truly imaginary, as far as the science itself is concerned, is the atheists' belief in multiverses that they postulated to try to 'explain away' God. Moreover, the atheist's 'appeal to imagination', (in order to try to avoid ever having to admit that God is real), turns out to be a sad and recurring theme for atheists. As ironic as it may seem, Imagination itself turns out to be the Atheists' primary evidence that they use to try to argue against the reality of God.

Basically, because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist (who believes Darwinian evolution to be true) is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable, (i.e. illusory), beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. the illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who also must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the hopelessness of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is simply too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft). Who, since beauty cannot be grounded within his materialistic worldview, must also hold beauty itself to be illusory (Darwin). Bottom line, nothing is truly real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, beauty, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,, April 2021 - Detailed Defense of each claim https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/philosophy/philosopher-mary-midgeley-1919-2018-on-scientism/#comment-728595 https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/evolution/from-philip-cunningham-the-human-eye-like-the-human-brain-is-a-wonder/#comment-727327

Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist and/or Methodological Naturalist may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for naturalistic explanations over and above God as a viable explanation), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists themselves are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. This would all be very, very, humorous were it not for the very real 'eternal' consequences that are involved for their souls. Verse

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

bornagain77

Sandy:

If I find one animal that killed a human being your “animals are perfect ” is destroyed.

Humans are animals.

To be virtuous or to sin you need reason and free will. Animals don’t have neither.

Humans are animals. ET

Seversky asks

Is it (the soul) the entire human person minus the body(?)

Yes. As I already explained in post 32, without a 'soul' to ground their sense of personal identity the entire concept of 'self', i.e. of there being an "I", becomes a 'neuronal illusion' for the atheist. i.e. The atheist winds up in catastrophic epistemological failure! As Rene Descartes, and many others, have pointed out, our sense of self, i.e. "I am", i.e. "I exist as a real person", is the most sure thing that we can possibly know about reality. In fact, Descartes, in his infamous 'method of doubt', (which he conceptualized in his argument as an malicious demon who was fooling him about everything he was perceiving,),,,

Method of Doubt Excerpt: “Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false. So, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt. (AT 7:18, CSM 2:12) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/#MethDoub The evil demon, also known as malicious demon[1] and evil genius,[2] is a concept in Cartesian philosophy. In the first of his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes imagines that an evil demon, of “utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.” This evil demon is imagined to present a complete illusion of an external world, so that Descartes can say, “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon

In his 'method of doubt', Rene Descartes, via his malicious demon, found that he could doubt the existence of all things, including, and most importantly, doubting the existence of his very own material body, but he found that he could not doubt the fact that he existed in order to do the doubting in the first place. As Descartes explained, “we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt….”

Cogito, ergo sum Cogito, ergo sum[a] is a Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”.[b] The phrase originally appeared in French as je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed.[1] It appeared in Latin in his later Principles of Philosophy. As Descartes explained, “we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt….” A fuller version, articulated by Antoine Léonard Thomas, aptly captures Descartes’s intent: dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum (“I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am”).[c][d] The concept is also sometimes known as the cogito.[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum

Descartes is hardly alone in his belief that everything we can possibly know, and/or say, about the material world must first start with the fact that we, undeniably, have conscious, immaterial, minds. Three giants of quantum mechanics, Planck, Schrodinger and Wigner, also held this view,

“No, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Max Planck (1858–1947), the main founder of quantum theory, The Observer, London, January 25, 1931 “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” Schroedinger, Erwin. 1984. “General Scientific and Popular Papers,” in Collected Papers, Vol. 4. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences. Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden. p. 334. “The principal argument against materialism is not that illustrated in the last two sections: that it is incompatible with quantum theory. The principal argument is that thought processes and consciousness are the primary concepts, that our knowledge of the external world is the content of our consciousness and that the consciousness, therefore, cannot be denied. On the contrary, logically, the external world could be denied—though it is not very practical to do so. In the words of Niels Bohr, “The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation.” In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that “life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws,” could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists.” – Eugene Wigner, Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, pp 167-177.

From the conclusion that he could only be certain of the fact that he existed in order to do the doubting in the first place, Rene Descartes then went on to use that conclusion from his ‘method of doubt’ as a starting point to then argue for the existence of God.

René Descartes (1596—1650) Excerpt: 5. God a. The Causal Arguments At the beginning of the Third Meditation only “I exist” and “I am a thinking thing” are beyond doubt and are, therefore, absolutely certain. From these intuitively grasped, absolutely certain truths, Descartes now goes on to deduce the existence of something other than himself, namely God. https://www.iep.utm.edu/descarte/#SH4a

It is also VERY interesting to note that Descartes' malicious demon, that he used as a philosophical tool in his 'argument from doubt', that is fooling Descartes' about everything he is perceiving, has made a modern day reappearance in the population genetics of evolutionary biology. (In some kind of poetic sense of cosmic irony), It turns out that, if Darwinian evolution were actually true, then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory. Donald Hoffman has demonstrated, through numerous computer simulations, that if Darwinian evolution, and the materialistic presuppositions therein, were actually true, then ALL of our perceptions of reality would be illusory.

The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality – April 2016 The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman uses evolutionary game theory to show that our perceptions of an independent reality must be illusions. Excerpt: “The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/ Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is? – Video – 9:59 minute mark Quote: “Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it is fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution. So, in my lab, we have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality. Others see just part of the reality. And some see none of the reality. Only fitness. Who wins? Well I hate to break it to you but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality, but are just tuned to fitness, drive to extinction that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those (accurate) perceptions of reality go extinct. Now this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage?” https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY?t=601

There is a 'small' problem for Darwinists with the fact that, if Darwinian evolution were true, then ALL of our perceptions would be illusory. Reliable observation happens to be an absolutely vital, and necessary, cornerstone of the scientific method itself.

Steps of the Scientific Method Observation/Research Hypothesis Prediction Experimentation Conclusion http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html

Thus, since the reductive materialism of Darwinian evolution denies that we have ‘reliable observations, and instead claims that ALL of out perceptions of reality are illusory, then clearly Darwinian evolution can never be based upon the scientific method itself. And therefore, to state the obvious, Darwinian evolution is, once again, (in a rather dramatic fashion), falsified in its claim to be a true scientific theory. Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for our perceptions if Darwinian theory were actually true, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics predicted. As the following experiment found, “reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”.

New Mind-blowing Experiment Confirms That Reality Doesn’t Exist If You Are Not Looking at It – June 3, 2015 Excerpt: The results of the Australian scientists’ experiment, which were published in the journal Nature Physics, show that this choice is determined by the way the object is measured, which is in accordance with what quantum theory predicts. “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Truscott in a press release.,,, “The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of the journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence,” he said. Thus, this experiment adds to the validity of the quantum theory and provides new evidence to the idea that reality doesn’t exist without an observer. http://themindunleashed.org/2015/06/new-mind-blowing-experiment-confirms-that-reality-doesnt-exist-if-you-are-not-looking-at-it.html

Apparently science itself could care less if atheistic materialists are forced, because of the mathematics of population genetics, to believe that ALL their perceptions of reality are illusory! Of personal note, I believe that Rene Descartes, if he were alive on earth today, would find it very humorous that his 'method of doubt' is playing out in science. And I think he would find in doubly humorous that it is playing with none other than that atheistic theory of Darwinian Evolution. Indeed Darwinian evolution itself is playing the a leading role of his malicious demon. Which is to say, apparently Descartes’s malicious demon that is fooling our minds about EVERYTHING we are perceiving turns out to be none other than Darwinian evolution itself! The historical irony of how the entire situation between Descartes and Darwinian evolution has played out is simply too delicious.

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

Of note, I will, if possible, try to address some of Seversky's other questions later. bornagain77

AaronS1978June 15, 2021 at 4:58 pm By the way the only one being a judge here is you……………….

That makes you kind of awful

you failed to see that I was setting a trap for you

:)))) Sandy

Soooooooooo you don’t understand the soul. Why would anyone. Maybe when we start to truly understand QP and the mind then and only then would we start to understand the soul. All livings have something. It’s part of our Intuition. We as humans have something a bit more. I don’t have an exact answer. Why would I. Why would any one. it is something only God knows and we only have a glimpse of But Your skepticism is no more proof it doesn’t exist as my skepticism of dark flow is proof that it doesn’t exist either Both can be described as hypothetical answers to observations we as humans don’t quite understand For me I think Thomas Aquinas came close to getting right However your descriptions and mocking of the soul are as immature as those descriptions deployed to describe god and Jesus as magic men in the sky AaronS1978

Bornagain77/32

Seversky states that, “I don’t believe in the existence of souls – whatever that means –”. From his “whatever that means” statement it is clear that Seversky has no clue why the existence of souls are postulated as being necessary in the first place.

I'm not the only one judging by the different concepts of what a soul is and/or does. Is it the entire human person minus the body when that fails? Does it just drift away after death? Where does it go? Is it some amorphous "unifying principle" which binds the body together. That sounds more like The Force from Star Wars. Is it some "immaterial essence" or "animating principle" whatever that might mean? What do you think it is and, if it exists as something, how do we detect it? Seversky

By the way the only one being a judge here is you………………. Your response to me is not that of a loving compassionate Christian but that of a Judge mental tyrant I mean you just said I was worse than a pedophile, rapist, and a murder That makes you kind of awful AaronS1978

Oooooooh Sandy you poor thing take a closer look at my comment and you will realize I was being a sarcastic jerk If you read through what I said you realize that I had said rapist pedos murders and LIARS Now think a little bit, think about what that means If the criminal was a liar and they told me that they are a liar then I would let them drown But if they said that they weren’t a liar well why would liar tell me the truth? I would then let them drown It’s a lose, lose, heads I win tails you lose set up In your attempt to make me look Hypocritical you failed to see that I was setting a trap for you I already realized what you were attempting to do and I gave it right back to you as a joke Good on you though Second of all common sense if you got a murder on your boat you’re gonna die that’s a matter of self-preservation not playing God But that’s just a dash of common sense Still a Christian and I don’t believe in the death penalty AaronS1978

As well, DNA itself does not belong to the world of classical mechanics but instead belongs to the world of quantum mechanics. In the following video, at the 22:20 minute mark, Dr Rieper shows why the high temperatures of biological systems do not prevent DNA from having quantum entanglement and then at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper goes on to remark that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it.

"What happens is this classical information (of DNA) is embedded, sandwiched, into the quantum information (of DNA). And most likely this classical information is never accessed because it is inside all the quantum information. You can only access the quantum information or the electron clouds and the protons. So mathematically you can describe that as a quantum/classical state." Elisabeth Rieper – Classical and Quantum Information in DNA – video (Longitudinal Quantum Information resides along the entire length of DNA discussed at the 19:30 minute mark; at 24:00 minute mark Dr Rieper remarks that practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it) https://youtu.be/2nqHOnVTxJE?t=1176

What is so devastating to the reductive presuppositions of Darwinists with the finding of pervasive quantum coherence, (and/or quantum entanglement and/or quantum information), within molecular biology, is that quantum coherence is a non-local, beyond space and time, effect that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its existence. As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”

Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php

Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal so as to be able to explain the non-local quantum coherence, (and/or entanglement and/or information), that is now found to be ubiquitous within biology. Whereas Christians readily do have a beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to so as to explain quantum entanglement. As Colossians 1:17 states, “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

it is also important to realize that quantum information is also conserved. As the following article states, "In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed."

Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time - 2011 Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-quantum-no-hiding-theorem-experimentally.html

The implication of finding 'non-local', (i.e. beyond space and time), and ‘conserved’, (i.e. cannot be created nor destroyed), quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, “the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”

Leading Scientists Say Consciousness Cannot Die It Goes Back To The Universe - Oct. 19, 2017 - Spiritual Excerpt: “Let’s say the heart stops beating. The blood stops flowing. The microtubules lose their quantum state. But the quantum information, which is in the microtubules, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed. It just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large. If a patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says, “I had a near death experience. I saw a white light. I saw a tunnel. I saw my dead relatives.,,” Now if they’re not revived and the patient dies, then it's possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.” - Stuart Hameroff - Quantum Entangled Consciousness - Life After Death - video (5:00 minute mark) (of note, this video is no longer available for public viewing) https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2012/10/life-after-death-soul-science-morgan-freeman/

Thus in conclusion, although Seversky may see no need to postulate a 'soul', we find that, without a 'soul' to appeal to, the entire reductive materialistic framework of Darwinists collapses in on itself from the weight of the philosophical, mathematical, and physical objections against the reductive materialistic framework. Moreover, we now find, via advances in Quantum Biology, physical evidence for the existence of souls. In short, Seversky's denial of the existence of souls is contradicted on numerous levels from several different disciplines of study, especially including empirical science itself. Verse:

Mark 8:37 Is anything worth more than your soul?

bornagain77

Seversky states that, "I don’t believe in the existence of souls – whatever that means –". From his "whatever that means" statement it is clear that Seversky has no clue why the existence of souls are postulated as being necessary in the first place. There is a rather gaping hole in the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists. Without a 'soul' to appeal to, Darwinists simply have no 'unifying principle' in order to explain why the trillions, (upon trillions), of protein, DNA, etc.. etc.., molecules of a human body cohere together as a unified single whole. As Stephen Talbott put the 'elephant in the living room' question confronting the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists, "the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?"

The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings - Stephen L. Talbott - 2010 Excerpt: Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. ,,, the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer? Despite the countless processes going on in the cell, and despite the fact that each process might be expected to “go its own way” according to the myriad factors impinging on it from all directions, the actual result is quite different. Rather than becoming progressively disordered in their mutual relations (as indeed happens after death, when the whole dissolves into separate fragments), the processes hold together in a larger unity. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings

Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic explanations, simply have no "bottom-up' way of getting from the level of material particles in a body to the 'top-down' unifying principle that is necessary to explain why the material particles of a living creature cohere together as a single unified whole 'for precisely a lifetime'. i.e. Darwinists simply have no 'soul' to appeal to. In fact, since Darwinists have no way of getting from their 'bottom-up' materialistic explanations to the 'top-down' unifying principle that is necessary to explain why the trillions, (and trillions), of molecules of any living organisms cohere together as a single unified whole 'for precisely a lifetime', then the entire concept of personhood also becomes 'illusory' for the Darwinists. As Dr. Dennis Bonnette explains, "It turns out that if every part of you, down to sub-atomic parts, are still what they were when they weren't in you, in other words every ion,,, every single atom that was in the universe,, that has now become part of your living body, is still what is was originally. It hasn't undergone what metaphysicians call a 'substantial change'. So you aren't Richard Dawkins. You are just carbon and neon and sulfur and oxygen and all these individual atoms still. You can spout a philosophy that says scientific materialism, but there aren't any scientific materialists to pronounce it.,,,"

Atheistic Materialism – Does Richard Dawkins Exist? – video 37:51 minute mark Quote: "It turns out that if every part of you, down to sub-atomic parts, are still what they were when they weren't in you, in other words every ion,,, every single atom that was in the universe,, that has now become part of your living body, is still what is was originally. It hasn't undergone what metaphysicians call a 'substantial change'. So you aren't Richard Dawkins. You are just carbon and neon and sulfur and oxygen and all these individual atoms still. You can spout a philosophy that says scientific materialism, but there aren't any scientific materialists to pronounce it.,,, That's why I think they find it kind of embarrassing to talk that way. Nobody wants to stand up there and say, "You know, I'm not really here". - Dr. Dennis Bonnette https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCnzq2yTCg&t=37m51s

Hey, you don't have to take Dr. Dennis Bonnette's word for it, Richard Dawkins himself agrees with materialistic philosophers who hold that consciousness is an illusion that is generated by your material brain. And as should be needless to say, if your entire conscious experience of the world is merely an illusion that is generated by your brain, then that necessary makes your entire concept of yourself as a person a 'neuronal illusion' also.

At the 23:33 minute mark of the following video, Richard Dawkins agrees with materialistic philosophers who say that: “consciousness is an illusion” A few minutes later Rowan Williams asks Dawkins ”If consciousness is an illusion…what isn’t?”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWN4cfh1Fac&t=22m57s

To drive this point home, here a few more quotes by Atheists insanely denying that they really exist as real persons,

The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness - STEVEN PINKER - Monday, Jan. 29, 2007 Part II THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. http://www.academia.edu/2794859/The_Brain_The_Mystery_of_Consciousness "There is no self in, around, or as part of anyone’s body. There can’t be. So there really isn’t any enduring self that ever could wake up morning after morning worrying about why it should bother getting out of bed. The self is just another illusion, like the illusion that thought is about stuff or that we carry around plans and purposes that give meaning to what our body does. Every morning’s introspectively fantasized self is a new one, remarkably similar to the one that consciousness ceased fantasizing when we fell sleep sometime the night before. Whatever purpose yesterday’s self thought it contrived to set the alarm last night, today’s newly fictionalized self is not identical to yesterday’s. It’s on its own, having to deal with the whole problem of why to bother getting out of bed all over again.,,, - A.Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, ch.10

Thus, although Seversky may find no need for a soul, without a soul to appeal to the atheist simply has no unifying principle to appeal to to explain why the trillions, (upon trillions), of molecules of the body cohere together as a single unified whole 'for precisely a lifetime'. Moreover, without a soul to appeal to, the atheist also loses the ability ground their own sense of self identity. i.e. The entire concept of 'personhood' becomes a 'neuronal illusion' for the Atheistic materialists. Moreover, besides this rather powerful philosophical argument that the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution can't possibly be true, with the extension of Godel's incompleteness theorem into physics, mathematics and physics also join in and prove that the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution can't possibly be true, Specifically, in the following article sub-titled, "Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics", it is now proven that “even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,,” and that “the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.",

Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics - December 9, 2015 Excerpt: A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable,,, It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, "We knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and Gödel in the 1930s," added Co-author Professor Michael Wolf from Technical University of Munich. "So far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description." http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html

Moreover, besides the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution, and their implicit denial of the existence of the 'soul', being philosophically, mathematically, and physically, impossible, there is also the fact that Christian Theists can now appeal directly to empirical evidence to support their belief in the physical reality of a immortal soul. Specifically, 'non-local', (i.e. beyond space and time), and 'conserved', (i.e. cannot be created nor destroyed), quantum information is now found to be ubiquitous within molecular biology. As the following more recent 2015 paper entitled, “Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules” stated, “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” and the researchers further commented that “finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,,

Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules – Mar. 6, 2015 Excerpt: “Most of the molecules taking part actively in biochemical processes are tuned exactly to the transition point and are critical conductors,” they say. That’s a discovery that is as important as it is unexpected. “These findings suggest an entirely new and universal mechanism of conductance in biology very different from the one used in electrical circuits.” The permutations of possible energy levels of biomolecules is huge so the possibility of finding even one (biomolecule) that is in the quantum critical state by accident is mind-bogglingly small and, to all intents and purposes, impossible.,, of the order of 10^-50 of possible small biomolecules and even less for proteins,”,,, “what exactly is the advantage that criticality confers?” https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552

And as this follow up 2018 article stated, "There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,,"

Quantum Critical Proteins - Stuart Lindsay - Professor of Physics and Chemistry at Arizona State University - 2018 Excerpt: The difficulty with this proposal lies in its improbability. Only an infinitesimal density of random states exists near the critical point.,, Gábor Vattay et al. recently examined a number of proteins and conducting and insulating polymers.14 The distribution for the insulators and conductors were as expected, but the functional proteins all fell on the quantum-critical distribution. Such a result cannot be a consequence of chance.,,, WHAT OF quantum criticality? Vattay et al. carried out electronic structure calculations for the very large protein used in our work. They found that the distribution of energy-level spacings fell on exactly the quantum-critical distribution, implying that this protein is also quantum critical. There is no obvious evolutionary reason why a protein should evolve toward a quantum-critical state, and there is no chance at all that the state could occur randomly.,,, http://inference-review.com/article/quantum-critical-proteins Gábor Vattay et al., “Quantum Criticality at the Origin of Life,” Journal of Physics: Conference Series 626 (2015); Gábor Vattay, Stuart Kauffman, and Samuli Niiranen, “Quantum Biology on the Edge of Quantum Chaos,” PLOS One 9, no. 3 (2014)

bornagain77

it depends if the criminal is a

Hahaha...so you play God's role and decide the death of a human being that maybe after this event would have returned to God. You are worse than a murderer , pedo or rapist but you feel virtuous because you are a pet lover? Please don't tell others that you are Christian . You are not. Sandy

@ Sandy “In your boat is only one place left ,you have to choose between a criminal that is drowning and your beloved pet. Who you choose” This resolves literally nothing, it’s a version of the trolley exercise thought experiment. My choosing a human over the animal has nothing to do with whether the animal returns its creator. A Darwinist can simply cry kin selection and I would pick the human too. Second it depends if the criminal is a rapist or pedo, murderer, or liar. If so, they get to stay in the drink and Checkers gets to stay dry in the boat with me @BA77 When your right you are right I think he is a chat bot or paid to be a token atheists AaronS1978

That’s why animals, et al, are perfect

If I find one animal that killed a human being your "animals are perfect " is destroyed.

They don’t need to be Redeemed. They don’t sin.

To be virtuous or to sin you need reason and free will. Animals don't have neither. Sandy

BA77, My questions are out of ignorance. I don't know what the Christian version of heaven is, or if there is discussion of it, or several interpretations, so I'm asking questions. William J Murray

WJM apparently takes Seversky shallow view of Christianity seriously and asks, "So, In the Christian version of Heaven, is there no wildlife?" That is not my version of Christianity, and that is not what I've heard from extremely deep Judeo-Christian Near Death Experiences of extremely beautiful cities and of extremely beautiful 'countryside'. And frankly I've never heard any preacher or priest ever preach against wildlife in heaven. I've heard simply that there will be no death nor evil, nor etc.., in heaven. How 'no wildlife in heaven' 'supposedly' became Catholic doctrine I have no idea. As the OP itself mentions, CS Lewis himself, not a minor 20th century apologist for Christianity, opposed this view. I myself can think of a New Testament scripture right off the top of my head that seemingly contradicts this supposed 'doctrine' of the Catholic Church.

Matthew 10:29-31 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

bornagain77

Sandy:

No animal have soul ,all are automatons

That is your opinion but that is all it is. ET

Anyone ever see the movie "What Dreams May Come" with Robin Williams? In that movie, the character played by Robin Williams dies and finds himself in heaven. He learns that his wife committed suicide and is in hell. Robin goes to hell to try and save his wife, even though he's told that once you go there, you can't get back or bring a loved one back, it's never been done before. Robin's position is that he'd rather spend eternity in hell with his wife than spend eternity in heaven without her, because she *is* his heaven. That's me. Heaven is meaningless to me without my wife. There's no condition or pain hell can possibly serve up that compares to the pain of even the idea of not being with her, much less the experience itself. William J Murray

So, In the Christian version of Heaven, is there no wildlife? No butterflies, cardinals, blue jays, buffalo, whales or elephants? What about trees, flowers, grass? Is there no food? No steak and potatoes, lobster? We never get to see or experience a lion again? And what is this about spouses? Do marriages exist in heaven or not? Are there movies, TV, books to read? Rock 'n' roll bands? Is all the music orchestral? Is there no night time, or any temperature variance? What about free will? Also, do we remember the people we love that didn't get into heaven, or do we have to live with the knowledge and grief that they are either gone or suffering for eternity? These are the kinds of specifics that it might be nice to know before having to make any eternal choices on the matter. William J Murray

Aaron asks Seversky, "are you not reading what I’m writing about this?" Aaron, after years of dealing with Seversky I can tell you with certainty that, "No, Seversky does not ever read, or at least he does not act as if he has ever read, anything that might seriously challenge his atheistic, even anti-Christian, worldview." He repeats, basically, the same talking points against Christianity over and over again no matter how carefully KF and others have repeatedly refuted his talking points. Seversky's never really goes into any philosophical nor scientific depth in trying to defend his Atheism, but his main talking point is always something superficial. Something superficial that is usually something along the line of Richard Dawkin's argument in his book "The God Delusion" of "I find the God of the Old Testament to be a 'malevolent bully' and therefore I don't believe in Him". In short, Seversky's primary reason for not believing in God, again from what I can tell, is simply a matter of 'emotional' preference for Seversky, not a matter of objectively weighing the evidence. Seversky, for superficial emotional reasons, simply does not personally want God to exist no matter what the scientific evidence may say to the contrary of his position, nor how compelling the philosophical arguments may be against his position. In short, Seversky has some kind of 'cosmic authority problem' against God that is preventing him from ever being scientifically and philosophically reasonable with those who challenge him.

"I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” (”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)”

bornagain77

Re: Cats If you have an NDE and see things in the room or building around you (while the eyes of your body are shut), which are corroborated afterwards, then you will have perfect evidence of what is meant by "Soul" - it is You....sans your physical body (which you will eventually leave to be deposited in a grave or urn). Christian theology teaches that no sin enters Heaven. Humans, having self consciousness and Free Will, can choose to love others (Love) or love themselves over others (Not Love). Mankind as a connected body of sorts - like an M Field (Morphogenetic Field) - shares this common, connected consciousness with its mix of Love and Sin, which caused a separation from God, the Creative Source, the All-Pure, Undivided, Unity Who is Love. This is known as "Original Sin." Christian theology teaches that God "so Loved the world" that He Incarnated in order to join mankind and then to draw that M Field, all mankind, back into Union with the Creative Source of All, by living a life of perfect Love and Perfect Accord with the Divinely Willed Plan for His earthly life, rather than following self-centered will. It was in this way that mankind was "redeemed" from Original Sin. This is called in Christian theology, The Redemption of Man. Because man can sin, live feeling selfish, hateful, proud, etc., Christian theology teaches that a human person must be Redeemed from sin and be free of sin to enter into Heaven, because Sin has no entry there. So this becomes a Teaching in Christianity, that only persons who are Redeemed and free of sin go to Heaven after they leave their earthly body. This became a doctrine or law of the Church. Since animals are not Redeemed, they don't fit the qualifications for entrance to Heaven - as far as the theology goes - so they are excluded from the equation. But although it's true that animals are not Redeemed - they don't need to be. They don't sin. They don't have the free will and self consciousness to willfully choose self over another. They don't tear themselves away from The Vine. So animals, et al, don't participate in the theological categories of sin and Redemption, so that is why they are mot included in the theological discussion about "who enters Heaven." But animals have never been separated from the Creative Source, from God. They live Of Him, with Him, and In Him. When their earthly bodies are finished with their part here, they live On in the Eternity of God's Divine Life of Love. Out of Love, by Love and for Love, the physical UniVerse was extended to manifest God's Beauty, Power, Sanctity and Being. Cats, et al, are all united with God. They do not have the Free Willed Self Consciousness which can willfully live as an autonomous being. That's why animals, et al, are perfect - because the Creator acts through them, nihil obstat. Cats, et al, are never separated from the Creator. They "live and move and have their being" in God. God Lives them. Like a Vine living through its branch - when kitty's body is finished participating in the MasterWork of the Divine Truth and Beauty, kitty lives forever in the Bliss and Eternal Life of the Creator, being beautiful abd unique Eternally, and being Loved eternally. People have reported during NDE's seeing their Loved Ones in Heaven with their pets. Once kitty has come into being by the Divine Will, kitty will remain alive Forever in the Forever Home of his/her Divine Creator. Once Alive, Always Alive. Once created, Life is Alive Eternally. Life is Life - not Death. Humans, as image and likeness of the Creator, with self-consciousness and Free Will - who are capable of Loving (or not), can and do live in a way as though separated from "He Who Is," "I Am Who Am," God. We live as though separate from the One Who beats our heart and moves our lungs, divides our cells and grows our hair. Our self will, our moral life effects who we are. If we are one with Love when we die to earthly existence, we will go back to the Source of our life and being - to God's Eternal Life - Heaven. (Been there, done that - NDE). If the Love that You are has morphed into self-centeredness, you will not be able to enter into the Divine Love of Heaven. You can go to be purified of selfishness (Purgation), or if you choose your self over the Creator, He will let You have Your freely willed wish, and you will go to spend the Absolute Here and Now where Love is Not....with all the other Souls who also choose loving themselves over Actual Love (not a happy place). So this is why cats and others are not mentioned in the Redeemed Group that go to Heaven. They don't need to be Redeemed. They don't sin. But they are Never separated from God, along with the rest of the Beautiful Creatures Whom He has Created out of "the Highest Wisdom and Love which Cannot be Contained." Once Alive, always Alive. They will live on in Heaven. For man, though, it's up to us where we spend the Absolute Here and Now: with our Creator and all His Beautiful Creatures, or without Him, with "me, myself and I," the Unholy Trinity, and all the others who are like-minded. Without Love, eternal life is Hell. Thank God for kitties, each one a living work of Art. How Beautiful the Artist Who has Created them all! marian

Everything I wrote in response to Sandy is true

Pets are irrelevants compared with people.

It's very easy to resolve our fight by responding to this question: In your boat is only one place left ,you have to choose between a criminal that is drowning and your beloved pet. Who you choose? Sandy

Ok Sev learn something ACCURATE about religion would you! Here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_of_Assisi A Whole saint dedicated to the well being of animals Everything I wrote in response to Sandy is true You can read genesis Christianity DOES NOT discard pets as trivial Or are you just picking what Sandy says because it personally fits your distain for religion? If you are your biased is not welcome And if there is no soul (fortunately it doesn’t depend on your belief) then your forever home is dirt and everything you care about is ultimately meaningless and amounts to nothing AaronS1978

Sev are you not reading what I’m writing about this AaronS1978

I am thankful to have had the good fortune to share my life with a number of cats over the years and they have proven to be more congenial companions than many of the humans I have known. I don't believe in the existence of souls - whatever that means - and I would not be much interested in a heaven that did not provide the ultimate "forever home" for them or a God that, by Christian belief, apparently discards them as worthless. Seversky

You understand that God uses animals to communicate with people correct and has done so multiple times even in the Bible It also says in the Bible not to abuse his creation It says nothing about pets but we are to be good stewards over all that exists Which means his creation which he has left us as good stewards of this includes animals They’re not really pets, they never really belong to us, we are to take care of them And in the garden of Eden animals are presented as companions before God makes “woman” Eve from Adam’s rib I do not take a literal interpretation of the fall of man but I use it as an example showing that animals were presented first They are by no means irrelevant and we are not good stewards if we think they are AaronS1978

If souls are said to be real (and the evidence from NDEs, SDEs, after death communications, mediumship, past life memories….etc provide good reason for believing they are) then I believe all living things have one. Any Heaven/afterlife without my furry friends is one I don’t want to be a part of. RoyRogersMcFreely

But just from experience there are more humans I can’t stand then there are animals that I love

And that was oddly arrogant statement

True.

Who gave you that authority and I know it wasn’t God or Jesus

Your pet who you love more than me. “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. Nowhere in the Bible Jesus say something about your pet . Pets are irrelevants compared with people. You would have an excuse if you were a child.

But just from experience there are more humans I can’t stand then there are animals that I love

Yep, because your pet gives you a false sense of importance and when you are bored just send it to his cage without explanations. :))) Sandy

Are you one of those people that takes a literal interpretation on loving thy neighbor to the point of absolutely having no emotions outside of love for them First of all Jesus says love the neighbor like I have loved you to the Apostles I admit freely I am not capable of doing this But I will try And also I can love you but I don’t have to like you Me not liking you does not determine whether or not I am Christian and if you think it does you have a very failed understanding of Christianity AaronS1978

I think you don’t understand that you can’t determine whether I’m a Christian or not I’m a Christian And that was oddly arrogant statement you made which is exactly why I have the perception of people I do Why do you believe you get to determine who is Christian and who is not? Especially on this matter Who gave you that authority and I know it wasn’t God or Jesus AaronS1978

But just from experience there are more humans I can’t stand then there are animals that I love

Well then I guess you don't know that you are not Christian. Yet. Sandy

@ Sandy I am a staunch Catholic born and raised And I’m just gonna have to disagree with you on that, God is the most important thing to me, God is the source of meaning for everything that I do But just from experience there are more humans I can’t stand then there are animals that I love Even when I was a child I’ve had a natural knack for animals like my mom Even hostile animals migrate to me and calm done While on the other hand I was tortured and bullied for years by humans and I have experienced many ill from humans God created all of the creatures on the earth He just gave humans the option to be jerks Well animals can be jerks to And I understand you are probably of Thomas Aquinas’ Philosophy of the soul which I do agree with all up until you get to the material soul of the animal AaronS1978

People who bind to pets too much they actually don't have a healthy relation with God and other human beings. There is an "emptiness" of heart that can't be filled by a pet, only by God. Sandy

While I understand that animals do not have immortal souls as humans have, I do hope that somehow my deceased cats (and all creatures), Spike and Hazel, have found rest at home with their Creator. BTW, I plan on surprising my lovely wife with two kittens for her birthday in August. Andrew asauber

Now that we have outlined the basics of Special Relativity, (i.e. Time Dilation and Space-time curvature), it is VERY interesting to note that there is a VERY strong correspondence between what we now know to be physically true for special relativity and what Near Death Experiencers tell us happened to them 'on the other side' of death. In the following video clip, Mickey Robinson gives us his 'sobering' Near Death testimony of what it felt like for him to experience a ‘timeless eternity’.

‘In the ‘spirit world,,, instantly, there was no sense of time. See, everything on earth is related to time. You got up this morning, you are going to go to bed tonight. Something is new, it will get old. Something is born, it’s going to die. Everything on the physical plane is relative to time, but everything in the spiritual plane is relative to eternity. Instantly I was in total consciousness and awareness of eternity, and you and I as we live in this earth cannot even comprehend it, because everything that we have here is filled within the veil of the temporal life. In the spirit life that is more real than anything else and it is awesome. Eternity as a concept is awesome. There is no such thing as time. I knew that whatever happened was going to go on and on.’ In The Presence Of Almighty God – The NDE of Mickey Robinson – video (testimony starts at 27:45 minute mark) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voak1RM-pXo

And here are a few more quotes from people who have experienced Near Death, that speak of how their perception of time was radically altered during their experience.

‘Earthly time has no meaning in the spirit realm. There is no concept of before or after. Everything – past, present, future – exists simultaneously.’ – Kimberly Clark Sharp – Near Death Experiencer ‘There is no way to tell whether minutes, hours or years go by. Existence is the only reality and it is inseparable from the eternal now.’ – John Star – NDE Experiencer

As well, Near Death Experiencers also frequently mention going through a tunnel, towards a extremely bright light, to a higher heavenly dimension:

Ask the Experts: What Is a Near-Death Experience (NDE)? – article with video Excerpt: “Very often as they’re moving through the tunnel, there’s a very bright mystical light … not like a light we’re used to in our earthly lives. People call this mystical light, brilliant like a million times a million suns…” – Jeffrey Long M.D. – has studied NDE’s extensively – abcnews nightline The Tunnel and the Near-Death Experience Excerpt: One of the nine elements that generally occur during NDEs is the tunnel experience. This involves being drawn into darkness through a tunnel, at an extremely high speed, until reaching a realm of radiant golden-white light. – near death research

In the following video, Barbara Springer gives her 'sobering' testimony as to what it felt like for her to go through the tunnel:

“I started to move toward the light. The way I moved, the physics, was completely different than it is here on Earth. It was something I had never felt before and never felt since. It was a whole different sensation of motion. I obviously wasn’t walking or skipping or crawling. I was not floating. I was flowing. I was flowing toward the light. I was accelerating and I knew I was accelerating, but then again, I didn’t really feel the acceleration. I just knew I was accelerating toward the light. Again, the physics was different – the physics of motion of time, space, travel. It was completely different in that tunnel, than it is here on Earth. I came out into the light and when I came out into the light, I realized that I was in heaven.” – Barbara Springer – (7:40 minute mark) Near-Death Experience Documentary: “Shadows: Perceptions of Near-Death Experiencers” https://youtu.be/HR0x57aMv-k?t=460

And in the following audio clip, Vicki Noratuk, who has been blind from birth, (besides being able to see for the first time in her life during her Near Death Experience), also gives testimony of going through a tunnel at a "tremendously, horrifically, rapid rate of speed" to a higher heavenly dimension.

“I was in a body, and the only way that I can describe it was a body of energy, or of light. And this body had a form. It had a head, it had arms and it had legs. And it was like it was made out of light. And it was everything that was me. All of my memories, my consciousness, everything.”,,, “And then this vehicle formed itself around me. Vehicle is the only thing, or tube, or something, but it was a mode of transportation that’s for sure! And it formed around me. And there was no one in it with me. I was in it alone. But I knew there were other people ahead of me and behind me. What they were doing I don’t know, but there were people ahead of me and people behind me, but I was alone in my particular conveyance. And I could see out of it. And it went at a tremendously, horrifically, rapid rate of speed. But it wasn’t unpleasant. It was beautiful in fact.,, I was reclining in this thing, I wasn’t sitting straight up, but I wasn’t lying down either. I was sitting back. And it was just so fast. I can’t even begin to tell you where it went or whatever it was just fast!” – Vicki’s NDE – Blind since birth – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e65KhcCS5-Y

And the following people, who both had NDEs, both testify that they firmly believed that they were in a higher heavenly dimension that is above this three-dimensional world and that the primary reason that they have a very difficult time explaining what their Near Death Experiences felt like to other people is because we simply don’t currently have the words to properly describe what that higher, heavenly, dimension actually feels like

“Regardless, it is impossible for me to adequately describe what I saw and felt. When I try to recount my experiences now, the description feels very pale. I feel as though I’m trying to describe a three-dimensional experience while living in a two-dimensional world. The appropriate words, descriptions and concepts don’t even exist in our current language. I have subsequently read the accounts of other people’s near-death experiences and their portrayals of heaven and I able to see the same limitations in their descriptions and vocabulary that I see in my own.” Mary C. Neal, MD – To Heaven And Back pg. 71 “Well, when I was taking geometry, they always told me there were only three dimensions, and I always just accepted that. But they were wrong. There are more… And that is why so hard for me to tell you this. I have to describe with words that are three-dimensional. That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s really not adequate.” John Burke – Imagine Heaven pg. 51 – quoting a Near Death Experiencer

For me it is simply uncanny that there would be such a strong correspondence between what we know to be true from special relativity and what is reported to be true from NDEers of a 'timeless eternity' and of going through a tunnel to a higher, ‘heavenly’, dimension that is above this 3-D temporal realm during their NDEs. I would go so far as to say that such a strong correspondence between the Special Relativity and their NDE testimonies, (since these people, in all likelihood, don't know the intricacies of special relativity), is proof, in and of itself, that their NDE testimonies of a heavenly paradise above this temporal dimension are trustworthy and true. And, as should be needless to say, all of this evidence puts the 'scientific' atheist in a severe bind in regards to his 'non-belief' in heaven. In short, the 'science' of special relativity itself, one of our most powerful theories in science, strongly supports the Christian Theist in his belief in the physical reality of a heavenly paradise that exists above this temporal realm, and strongly disconfirms the Atheist's non-belief in heaven. Verse:

2 Corinthians 12:2-4 I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.

bornagain77

Before we ask if humans will be reunited with their beloved pets in heaven, (I'm personally in the affirmative camp), we first have to ask, "Is heaven even a real physical place in the first place?" That most atheists claim to be 'scientific' and also claim to not believe in God, then that pretty much compels us to ask, "Is heaven even a real physical place in the first place?" And although modern science has betrayed the atheist in his 'non-beliefs' time and time again, the scientific evidence for heaven is a particularly interesting betrayal of the 'scientific' atheist in his beliefs in that it undermines all the atheist's 'non-beliefs' in one fell swoop. First, it establishes the physical reality of heaven. And by default of establishing that fact, it also establishes, albeit indirectly, the reality of God and the reality of immortal souls. In scientifically establishing the fact that heaven is a physically real place, the Christian Theist can appeal to none-other than Einstein's Special Relativity itself. Special Relativity, along with General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Electrodynamics, (which is a combination of special relativity and quantum mechanics), belong to a unique class of scientific theories for which we can find no disagreement whatsoever between the mathematical predictions of those theories and what we able to measure for those predictions, (in so far as measurement accuracy will allow). In other words, Special Relativity, along with General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Electrodynamics, is, (again, in so far as measurement accuracy will allow us to say), are to be considered 'prefect' mathematical descriptions of the universe. What is interesting about those 'perfect' scientific theories is that they are not based on three dimensional Euclidean geometry, such as Newton's theory of gravity is based on three dimensional Euclidean geometry, but is that they are all based on higher dimensional mathematics.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences – Eugene Wigner – 1960 Excerpt: We now have, in physics, two theories of great power and interest: the theory of quantum phenomena and the theory of relativity.,,, The two theories operate with different mathematical concepts - the four dimensional Riemann space and the infinite dimensional Hilbert space, respectively. So far, the two theories could not be united, that is, no mathematical formulation exists to which both of these theories are approximations. All physicists believe that a union of the two theories is inherently possible and that we shall find it. Nevertheless, it is possible also to imagine that no union of the two theories can be found.,,, https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf Four-dimensional space – with 4-D animation: Excerpt: The idea of adding a fourth dimension began with Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the mid 1700s and culminated in a precise formalization of the concept in 1854 by Bernhard Riemann.,,, Higher dimensional spaces have since become one of the foundations for formally expressing modern mathematics and physics. Large parts of these topics could not exist in their current forms without the use of such spaces.,,, Einstein’s concept of spacetime uses such a 4D space, though it has a Minkowski structure that is a bit more complicated than Euclidean 4D space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space

In fact, the higher dimensional nature of special relativity was a discovery that was made by one of Einstein math professors in 1908 prior to Einstein’s elucidation of the 4-D space-time of General Relativity in 1915. (In fact, in 1916 Einstein fully acknowledged his indebtedness to Minkowski)

Spacetime Excerpt: In 1908, Hermann Minkowski—once one of the math professors of a young Einstein in Zurich—presented a geometric interpretation of special relativity that fused time and the three spatial dimensions of space into a single four-dimensional continuum now known as Minkowski space. A key feature of this interpretation is the definition of a spacetime interval that combines distance and time. Although measurements of distance and time between events differ for measurements made in different reference frames, the spacetime interval is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which they are recorded. Minkowski’s geometric interpretation of relativity was to prove vital to Einstein’s development of his 1915 general theory of relativity, wherein he showed that spacetime becomes curved in the presence of mass or energy.,,, Einstein, for his part, was initially dismissive of Minkowski’s geometric interpretation of special relativity, regarding it as überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit (superfluous learnedness). However, in order to complete his search for general relativity that started in 1907, the geometric interpretation of relativity proved to be vital, and in 1916, Einstein fully acknowledged his indebtedness to Minkowski, whose interpretation greatly facilitated the transition to general relativity.[10]:151–152 Since there are other types of spacetime, such as the curved spacetime of general relativity, the spacetime of special relativity is today known as Minkowski spacetime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime

There are two interesting, empirically confirmed, facets of Special Relativity that are interesting to look at, (i.e. Time Dilation and Space-Time curvature), in establishing the physical reality of heaven. In regards to Time Dilation, one of the most intriguing things to learn about special relativity is that, for any observer traveling the speed of light, time, as we understand it, will come to a complete stop for them,

Time dilation Special relativity indicates that, for an observer in an inertial frame of reference, a clock that is moving relative to them will be measured to tick slower than a clock that is at rest in their frame of reference. This case is sometimes called special relativistic time dilation. The faster the relative velocity, the greater the time dilation between one another, with the rate of time reaching zero as one approaches the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s). This causes massless particles that travel at the speed of light to be unaffected by the passage of time.,,, Gravitational time dilation is experienced by an observer that, at a certain altitude within a gravitational potential well, finds that their local clocks measure less elapsed time than identical clocks situated at higher altitude (and which are therefore at higher gravitational potential). Gravitational time dilation is at play e.g. for ISS astronauts. While the astronauts' relative velocity slows down their time, the reduced gravitational influence at their location speeds it up, although at a lesser degree. Also, a climber's time is theoretically passing slightly faster at the top of a mountain compared to people at sea level. It has also been calculated that due to time dilation, the core of the Earth is 2.5 years younger than the crust.[32] "A clock used to time a full rotation of the earth will measure the day to be approximately an extra 10 ns/day longer for every km of altitude above the reference geoid."[33] Travel to regions of space where extreme gravitational time dilation is taking place, such as near a black hole, could yield time-shifting results analogous to those of near-lightspeed space travel. Contrarily to velocity time dilation, in which both observers measure the other as aging slower (a reciprocal effect), gravitational time dilation is not reciprocal. This means that with gravitational time dilation both observers agree that the clock nearer the center of the gravitational field is slower in rate, and they agree on the ratio of the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation#Gravitational_time_dilation

The Theistic implications of this are fairly clear to see. As Dr. Richard Swenson noted, "The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality. Light, you see, is outside of time, a fact of nature proven in thousands of experiments at hundreds of universities."

"The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality. Light, you see, is outside of time, a fact of nature proven in thousands of experiments at hundreds of universities. I don’t pretend to know how tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday. But at the speed of light they actually and rigorously do. Time does not pass." - Dr. Richard Swenson - More Than Meets The Eye, Chpt. 11

To grasp the whole concept of time coming to a complete stop at the speed of light a little more easily, imagine moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light. Would not the hands on the clock stay stationary as you moved away from the face of the clock at the speed of light? Moving away from the face of a clock at the speed of light happens to be the very same ‘thought experiment’ that gave Einstein his breakthrough insight into special relativity. Here is a short clip from a video that gives us a look into Einstein’s breakthrough insight that allowed him to formulate special relativity.

“In the spring of 1905, Einstein was riding on a bus and he looked back at the famous clock tower that dominates Bern Switzerland. And then he imagined, “What happens if that bus were racing near the speed of light.”, (narrator: “In his imagination, Einstein looks back at the clock tower and what he sees is astonishing. As he reaches the speed of light, the hands of the clock appear frozen in time”), “Einstein would later write, “A storm broke in my mind. All of the sudden everything, everything, kept gushing forward.”, (narrator: “Einstein knows that, back at the clock tower, time is passing normally, but on Einstein’s light speed bus, as he reaches the speed of light, the light from the clock can no longer catch up to him. The faster he races through space, the slower he moves through time. This insight sparks the birth of Einstein’s Special Theory of relativity, which says that space and time are deeply connected. In fact, they are one and the same. A flexible fabric called spacetime.”) – Michio Kaku Einstein: Einstein’s Miracle Year (‘Insight into Eternity’ – Thought Experiment – 6:29 minute mark) – video https://youtu.be/QQ35opgrhNA?t=389

That time, as we understand it, comes to a complete stop at the speed of light, and yet light moves from point A to point B in our universe, and thus light is obviously not ‘frozen within time, has some fairly profound implications. The only way it is possible for time not to pass for light, and yet for light to move from point A to point B in our universe, is, (as Einstein's math professor Hermann Minkowski pointed out), if the space-time of light is of a higher dimensional value of space-time than the temporal time we are currently living in. Otherwise light would simply be ‘frozen within time’ to our temporal, 3-Dimensional, frame of reference. One way for us to more easily understand this higher dimensional framework for time that light exists in is to visualize what would happen if a hypothetical observer approached the speed of light. In the first part of the following video clip, which was made by two Australian University Physics Professors, we find that the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer approaches the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light.

Optical Effects of Special Relativity – video (full relativistic effects shown at the 2:40 minute mark) https://youtu.be/JQnHTKZBTI4?t=160

To give us a better understanding as to what it would be like to exist in a higher dimension, this following video, Dr. Quantum in Flatland, also gives us a small insight as to what it would be like to exist in a higher dimension:

Dr. Quantum in Flatland – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5yxZ5I-zsE (Of note: This video was once featured on Anton Zeilinger's 'outreach' page)

bornagain77

Only humans have immortal souls. buffalo

Nope. No animal have soul ,all are automatons . God put in their vegetative brain some software that give us the impression that they have some understanding, intelligence but all are preseted programs that run on certain ,triggers ,stimuli.

And the scripture doesn’t reveal

Yes it reveals. Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. While all animals were created : Then God said, “Let the land produce And God said, “Let the water teem with PS: To love animals is normal ,but to love animals more than any other humans it's crazyness. Sandy

I used to tolerate Rome. This is one of the reasons why I stopped. Dogs are vastly more moral than humans. If Heaven has anything to do with morality, dogs should be first in line, not out of line. Rome not only thinks dogs don't belong in Heaven, it seems to think we shouldn't have wives there. We should simply spend all our time with Jesus. I had enough of that lifestyle in prison. It might be heavenly for Catholic men. Not for me. polistra

Listen Sev No one said you can post here and it is an obvious fact that cats were created strictly by the devil Having several cats and being a cat person I know this to be true they are purrrrrrre evil Which is why I love them The tortoise on the other hand completely bullies the other cats and the cats know their place for the tortoise is Satan itself AaronS1978

I’ll be honest with you I’m Roman Catholic I was raised that way and I have always felt that way Very much like Kristof Koch we either all have something or we all don’t and I’m in the firm camp that we all do The image of God gives us capacities that they don’t have but God can give them soul he created them all and he can make them eternal for they do not sin All living things seem to have the secret sauce that makes them what they are we just have something a little bit more And the scripture doesn’t reveal whether or not they live eternally or if they don’t but they are god’s creations so why wouldn’t they AaronS1978

No, dogs don't go to heaven. The cats don't let them in. Seversky