Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

Beyond The Mirror – A Bill Allin Column

Feb 16, 2007

What Is The Truth? (Part 7)

[Caution: What follows may be offensive to some people because it is based on fact, reason and probability, not on an established belief set (religion). If you are offended by anything that does not support your belief set, you should choose to not read this article.]

In the last part of this series, we saw that the cellular parts of our bodies change form (becoming either energy or another form of matter) and become part of a universal whole after we die. It seems likely that their component atoms will be distributed in some other form--be that as energy or as matter--after that rejoining. Though energy and matter can interchange, nature seems to direct that each prefer its original state, thus matter would continue to be matter and energy usually stays as some form of energy.

When we die, our body joins the larger whole of the universe (that which "is"), to be redistributed in a different form. So far, religion has nothing to disagree with science here.

But there is more to us than matter, than body parts and potential energy. In theory, science could clone a human from one or two cells today. Science could create a large blob in human form, just as it has cloned sheep and several other animals. That would not necessarily make it human. Cloned animals, for example, are sterile.

What that human blob would also lack is personality, or soul, or whatever you want to call the part of you that makes you distinct from the protoplasm you weigh on your bathroom scales.

That ethereal part of you didn’t exist before you were born. You created it (or it was created for you), and it grew influenced heavily by the environment in which you grew up and in which you have lived since reaching adulthood.

That spirit--to give it a name so we can refer to it--began when you started to learn, even before you were born. Your spirit is unique to you. Even genetically identical twins have different personalities, thus unique and separate spirits.

Science has no way to explain this. Science doesn’t even want to tackle an explanation for fear of looking stupid, which it is on this subject.

Something unique came into being before you were born, your spirit. Perhaps it existed in some form before you were conceived, perhaps it began within you. In any event, it exists. You see it as well as your own face when you look into a mirror. Smile and you should see something more than a face. (Go ahead, try it. I'll wait here.) We don’t know for certain what that is, but it surely exists because we can feel it and it interacts with others of its kind.

We know that absolutely nothing in nature is known to disappear, even if it changes form when a biological entity dies. Science calls it conservation--nothing simply disappears.

Going by the laws of nature that science teaches us, we have every right to believe that our spirit continues after we die. Every scrap of scientific evidence we have at our disposal supports that belief. Our spirit is eternal. The laws of science support this conclusion.

Some of us may confuse our spirit with our bodies, but most of us realize and accept that our spirit, our personality, is distinct and separate from our body. When we die, our body continues in some other form.

Now we have good reason to believe that our spirit continues as well. Science led us to it.

What happens to our spirit after our body dies and decays? That is where faith has a role. Science backs away because science refuses to acknowledge that anything that is not cellular in nature exists.

Believe what you want about what happens after that, but you know that every part of you continues eternally.