Neither Here Nor There
So the Monday after my daughter’s Cinderella/Princess birthday party Eric asked a question that really got my brain processing. In my quest to be objective I ran across another question that is a complete rabbit trail but something I have never thought about.
What would happen to the soul in the teleportation process? If technology could disassemble the physical body and then reassemble it in another location, where does the non-physical soul fit in?
I’ve lived with the idea of teleportation my whole life (Star Trek, The Fly, and let’s not forget, Tron) but have never stopped to think it through. Hmmmm, I guess we’ve got more barriers to get over than originally expected to one day make the unspoken hopes and dreams of all people become a reality.
October 18th, 2005 at 5:57 am
Ooooh, this could be fun. I’ve been thinking about the nature of the soul a bit lately and haven’t had time to dig into it…
A couple of blast-off points -
* The non-physical soul seems to be attached to the physical body by a mechanism we don’t understand. How can we improve on that?
* I always thought “near-death experiences” were just so much National Enquirer nonsense. It turns out some heavy hitters (J.P. Moreland, Gary Habermas) have attacked the issue and they find there’s something there. There are lots of stories that make you go “wow”… people that reported on circumstances in the next room while they were being operated on… stuff like that. What’s the deal?
* Where does the soul come from? Is it a product of inheritance from our human parents (traducianism), or is every soul uniquely started fresh by God (creationism - not in the evolutionary sense, though)?
* On teleportation, what about Philip in Acts 8:39?
Sillier questions:
* How about teleportation as a cure for everything… when you’re reassembling the bits, you just decline to reassemble the tumor or virus or whatever. Cool - a human virus scan!
* If you could teleport someone, could you clone him by just reassembling the bits more than once? Would each one be ensouled, or only one?
* Would that be the ultimate life insurance policy, or what? “Regina, I’m sorry, David passed away. Would you like to restore him from backup?” (Kinda gives a whole new twist on the techie notion of “ghosting…”)
* Forget cryogenic storage, just burn me to DVD and bring me back when gas goes back under $3 a gallon.
October 18th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
I guess Acts 8:39 proves that teleportation is possible - for those that believe the Bible. Now if we could just get technology to reproduce what is now considered a miracle of God.
Regarding the near death stuff … yeah there was a thread a while back where Dan Miller was saying that NDEs were contrary to the Scripture but I think he retracked it.
Whoa, I need to look into the idea of traducianism. That’s new for me.
October 18th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
If we are going to pursure the digital route for teleportation as a travel method then I’d just assume drive to Disney World.
Imagine the bandwidth and time it would take to send that much information over copper phone lines?
October 18th, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Ha, yes… never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of DVD’s.
From what I know of the NDE stuff it doesn’t run counter to Dan’s point about “ya die once & that’s it.” The emphasis is on near death. The point they’re trying to explore is simply the nature of the immaterial soul… the NDE phenomena seem to provide the best available laboratory for investigating what’s going on there.
In the cases where somebody has been “brought back to life,” they’ve only been “dead” for a couple of minutes… not exactly three days in the tomb kind of stuff…
October 18th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
This is cool… the guy who first advanced the idea of traducianism is Tertullian, who converted to Christianity around 200 AD. He was the first Christian writer to put his work forth in Latin, and a lot of his writings give us our modern Christian vocabulary (eg the Trinity).
I read somewhere that traducianism is regarded as a heresy in some quarters.
Anyway, he argues at some length against abortion in this work on the soul:
Chapter XXV.-Tertullian Refutes, Physiologically, the Notion that the Soul is Introduced After Birth.
October 19th, 2005 at 11:08 am
I think the question here is really “Is the soul or consciousness connected to the physical in any way?” If so, then teleportation may just remove the soul or consciousness from your body (or vice versa). If not, then teleportation would have no such effect.
Stargate SG-1 proposes that consciousness can be downloaded, as mentioned above, and stored–even transferred to a new body (cloned or belonging to someone else). It must be true, I mean, the Asgard have been doing it for several million years!
October 20th, 2005 at 9:47 am
don’t tell UPS and Fedex but my teleportation transport is almost finished in the garage muahahaha (oh noes I just saw a black helicopter!)
October 20th, 2005 at 11:40 am
I used to think that this very issue made teleportation a very dangerous no-go, but now my thought is more along these lines: if the body gets transported 5 light-years away, and you are woried about the soul being left behind, then you are starting with the assumption that the soul is a material substance, connected to the framework of our 3-dimensions. But then what if the soul is something outside of our 3d framework, and once the body is moved, the soul is still “there” just as much so as if you flew the distance in a spaceship. This goes along simular lines to the argument that God exists *outside* of this framework we call “time”. But that’s just random speculation.
I like the example of Philip, but given that God’s agents were involved, we have to assume that additional/special consideration was made to accommodate the spirit. I would still be wary before stepping into a transporter made by secular athiests (”ah, don’t worry, you’ll be fine. We went through & see, we’re fine!”)
It’s certainly exciting to think that if the Lord leaves us here, we have SO MUCH to learn! And if He takes us home, well then, the REALLY EXCITING technology opens up to us!