Is there any reason to believe that such a thing as a soul exists?
By which i mean a fundamental part of who we are which survives after death. It seems to me that anything which we attribute to the soul is more properly attributed to the brain which of course does NOT survive beyond death.
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I can talk to people that have lost limbs. I can talk to people with pacemakers. But I have yet to talk to anyone that has lost their entire body.
Also what of the person would even survive? If something did survive it has to be so small and... odd that you wouldn't even be considered human anymore. Maybe a soul does exist but we all turn into inhuman monsters, alien things or get eaten by the Egyptian Ammit. Maybe we get enslaved other there. Or drugged up to the point that we just don't care about our grieving loved ones.
The brain and personality, the self itself can be diseased, damaged and shattered beyond repair. So what of the immutable soul that is supposed to be unchanging? Literally nothing IS unchanging. The only thing unchanging is death. That is, oblivion.
Also a soul is a historically "modern" invention. In really ancient Juadism the oldest word is sheol which simply meant grave. At that time when people died they were just dead. No mention of a soul and no afterlife and God himself was a physical being that walked on earth getting in fights with randos and cheating when he was losing. (Genesis 32:25) It was all this physical existence.
It remindss me of when the Greeks actually explored Mt Olympus and couldn't find their gods so they moved them to a spiritual realm instead.
I desperately want there to be something. But there are an uncountable number of ways a soul and afterlife can go wrong and only a handful of ways it can turn out good. That pessimism and sheer scarcity of evidence leaves me with no recourse but to not be convinced.
And finally no one has ever come back from the dead. People that are "dead" for 5, 10, 30 minutes. Even hours are not biologically dead. It takes three days for the majority of the biochemical processes in the body to cease functioning. All that our machines are built to measure is neuro-electrical activity. But just because that activity falls below a certain cut off point for the machine to read doesn't mean there can't be a continuing biochemical state of consciousness going on. It's just that if the electrical activity isn't started again soon that continuity of self can be interrupted and the self lost due to accumulated brain damage.
But for me to be more convinced of NDEs I'd have to see someone come back after three days when I know they have been dead dead. Not just regular dead. And that has never happened. Therefore I can only take NDEs with a grain of salt.
