Free Republic

“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor. “But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don't come from the brain.” Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brain surgeries later, he concluded that reason and free will do not reside in the brain. In this episode, he reveals what he’s found. “Neuroscience is just...

A Preliminary Study on The Biblical Meaning of “Soul”. In the Old Testament the word for soul is “nephesh” and in the New the word is “psuche” — with both terms having the same meaning. “Whoever touches the dead body of anyone and fails to purify himself defiles the LORD's tabernacle. That person must be cut off from Israel” (Numbers 19:13). The bold words in the above verse is the Hebrew word “nephesh”, commonly translated as “soul” in numerous places in the OT Scriptures. Is it valid to question WHY the translators didn’t use the word “soul” in these two...

The Platonic Soul It is fitting to give Plato the first word on the question, “What Is Man?” For Plato was the first thinker to isolate man out of his connection to clan and tribe, making the human individual -- man as he is in himself -- a proper subject of investigation. This shift of attention to the individual psyche marks a decisive, revolutionary break with the characteristic habits of thought of the ancient world, the cosmological consciousness, which conceived of man mainly in terms of his connections to units larger than the individual, and envisioned a cosmos filled with...