That man has an immortal soul is evident

Corrado Gnerre

I am a believer, but many times I have doubts about the existence of the spiritual soul. Today, then, theories are spreading that deny the spirituality and immortality of the soul, explaining everything in biological and geneticist terms.

Dear …, it seems to me that your doubts can be easily answered starting from the exercise of freedom. In man there are two freedoms: natural freedom and moral freedom. The first is the simple possibility of choice, the second is instead the obligation to adhere to the good. The first is a presupposition of the second, but the second – obviously – is authentic freedom, which – as it happens – coincides with a moral obligation, because there is no freedom without truth. Hence – for example – the error of liberal ideology according to which freedom judges the truth and not vice versa. But be careful: peculiar to man is not only moral freedom, but also natural freedom. In fact, the animal has no free will, it cannot act beyond its instincts.

So far, dear …, there is enough agreement. However, there is a single difference, when it is said that this exercise of freedom comes only from the brain, therefore from matter and that’s it. Here, however, a great contradiction arises. The body, and everything organic, is expressed through impulses and drives. From this point, the Enlightenment man called La Mettrie was right to say that man is nothing but a machine. Obviously he was right according to his logic: if man is only his body, he is but a machine. Just as the infamous de Sade was also right: if man is nothing but a machine, and if the machine works only through his impulses, man can only indulge in every impulse regardless of whether this is morally legitimate.

But where is the mistake of such a belief? If man has only his body and his thought is only his brain, man himself could never formulate acts of will in contrast with instincts. That is: if human reason had a material nature, therefore it was of the same nature as instincts, it could not give commands in contrast with the instincts themselves. The very fact that this happens means that man’s reason has a different nature from instincts. If the instincts have a material nature and pertain to the corporeal dimension, reason has a spiritual nature. An animal will never be able to respect a food diet, man yes … of course, it depends on his willpower … but he can do it.

Now, dear …, I will give you some arguments to strengthen your conviction of the immortality of the soul. From a biological point of view it is known that our current organism is not the organism we had ten years ago, and not simply in the sense that it has grown and aged; rather in the sense that it has totally changed. No cell from our body that existed many years ago exists anymore, those have been replaced by others. This means that the body changes and radically changes, while the thought, the self, one’s identity remain immutable. This demonstrates the incorruptibility of the soul compared to the corruptibility of the body. The soul-body bond – which undoubtedly exists – does not mean that the soul suffers the corruptibility of the body: in fact, if the corruption and death of the body leads to the death of the soul, then it should be verified that, with the aging of the body, even the soul would weaken and we know well that this does not happen. Your identity, your self, the sensitivity of this are not dependent on the age of the body. Of course, man’s thought can sometimes be altered, but not because it automatically follows the age and weakening of the body, but because it is linked to the organs, so that if these do not function properly, thought would also be affected. And so much thought is not linked to the age of the organism that, when the organs in question resume their normal functioning, thought returns to being the original one.

One could, however, dear …, make an objection: but if the thought is incorruptible, while the body is, because when the brain activities are compromised (state of coma or anesthetic sleep), the thought of man is nonexistent? The answer is already contained in the words we have previously expressed. For example, a brain injury does not weaken intelligence, but rather the internal sensory faculties of memory and imagination, which are indispensable cooperators of intelligence itself, and which have their organ in the brain. The way of knowing is always proportionate to the way of existing. As long as the soul is united with the body, it knows through the senses, otherwise it knows in a different way. In this regard, an example can be given. The human body must feed itself through the blood, but the way in which the blood must nourish the body can vary. The essential element is the blood that must nourish the body, the accidental element is the way through which the blood must nourish the body. In fact, in intrauterine life, the body receives blood from the mother; in extrauterine life, he must obtain it autonomously through nutrition and breathing. The fact that the human organism at the beginning of its life necessarily needs its mother, does not mean that she will need it forever.