Phillipcampbell’s Weblog

What is death?  Is a man dead when his heart stops beating?  Is he dead when his lungs cease to take in oxygen?  Is a man dead when his brain ceases to produce detectable brain waves?  While these descriptions describe certain symptoms often associated with death, they can all be overcome artificially.  They are not death itself; they are only symptoms of death.

  A heart can be defibrillated back into rhythm using electricity.  Lungs can be replaced by a mechanical breathing apparatus.  A person’s brainwaves can be reproduced using electrical impulses.  Every physical activity of the human body can be re-created in a corpse immediately after death.  So why is it that people cannot be resurrected using scientific methods?  The answer lies in the fact that while science can re-create every physical symptom of human life in a corpse there is more to human life than that which can be physically emulated.  Therefore, in death human beings lose the intangible portion of that which previously made them alive.  This non-physical component of humans that is separated from the body at death is called the soul.  A soul cannot be measured, it cannot be weighed, and it cannot be harnessed and placed in any sort of physical container except for the body in which it had originally been packaged.  Even then however, it cannot have been placed in its original body by man.  This is certain because man has not the technology to handle spirits of any kind.  If man could harness a living soul, he could bond it back to the corpse from which it came and then resurrection will have taken place; mankind would be immortal.

     Therefore, to answer the question that began this post: death is the separation of the soul from the body.  This soul or spirit cannot be detected through any physical manner but it can be deduced using the reasoning I have put forth here.  Men believe in a number of things that can only be deduced but not seen.  Engineers and scientists the world over believe in the power of the atom, yet who has ever really seen one? Men believe in gravity because they see things fall to the Earth, but seeing the effects of gravity, much like seeing the effects of death, does not allow one to see gravity itself any more than it allows one to see the soul escaping the confines of the body at the instant of death.  Men believe in radio waves because using a radio, the waves can be translated into sound waves which mankind can detect.  While this scientific explanation suffices to explain radio waves, who has seen one, or heard one, or smelled one, or touched one, or tasted one and realized that the waves exist around them?  The answer is no one.  People cannot detect radio waves, yet by reasoning they know that such a  thing exists.  The same is true of the human soul.  No one is conscious of a soul’s presence but one cannot help but to logically deduce that it exists merely by seeing a person before and after death.  

     There is no need to reach for the Bible, or search through history or traditions in order to prove this to one’s self.  The only thing one needs to affirm the existence of the soul is to have witnessed a single corpse, even if this corpse were on a television show.  (The concept of death is the same whether real or simulated.) The heart, lungs, liver, brain, skeletal and muscle systems, along with the blood and nerves are all present in a corpse.  Every physical component that a corpse had when he was alive he will still have when he is dead.  Why then can he not respond when we say to him, “Rise up and live once more.”?  While all physical aspects of a living creature are still present in a corpse, the soul that once animated the body is gone.  Since mankind cannot put it back, death is permanent.