Not that I am going to change my beliefs, but you present arguments that at the very least impose boundaries on the possible functions of souls, if they exist.

One possibility, assuming that souls exist, one that fits within your boundaries, is that souls have very little influence on physical life.

That is, souls just go along for the ride and its experience while inhabiting one earthly specie after another of increasing sophistication, until the soul becomes sufficiently developed to not bother with earthly life anymore. So biological life on the earth is just a throughput of undeveloped souls coming in one end and developed souls going out the other. Then souls could be constantly progressing even though the species they happened to be in in any given lifetime was not progressing.

However, I do not find this speculation very comforting. I would hope that the soul would be strongly interacting with say human consciousness. The more independent the soul is from us, the less likely that we will participate in the future life of the soul.

• God is needed less and less to explain the universe - johnpowell - March 19, 2001 - 19:39 UTC
  • Those rare cases are my personal experience - yanniru - March 19, 2001 - 21:49 UTC