The Worth of a Soul

In Luke chapter 1, the opening lines of the section of Scripture known as the "Magnificat", Mary expresses her love for God, saying:
46..."My soul magnifies the Lord,47And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
She talks here about her soul - connecting with God, giving Him praise - and her spirit - rejoicing in God, her Savior.    In 1st Thessalonians chapter 5, Paul writes, 23 Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I believe we have to regard ourselves as spirit-beings, made in the image of God, and we have a choice whether or not to follow Jesus and to be born again, to have our spirits brought to life by Him, and to allow our souls to be shaped and activated by the presence of the indwelling Christ.   We are uniquely created by God, and He has given us a distinct personality - emotions, character traits, and brain functions that cannot be reduced to mere intelligence or information.   We are complex, fearfully and wonderfully made, and designed to have a relationship with our Creator.

Jesus taught in Mark chapter 8 about the value of a soul:
34When He had called the people to Himself, with His disciples also, He said to them, "Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.35For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it.36For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?37Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

I came across this piece on the U.K.'s Daily Mail website and when you stop to consider what some particular futurists can have in mind, one could savor - and shudder at - the possibilities.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, made some rather unbelievable claims at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York recently. He said that in just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity. He also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.

He said: 'Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.'

He referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing.

In Kurweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, he plots this development and journey towards singularity in a graph.

This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person's intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

He also added that this will be possible through neural engineering and referenced the recent strides made towards modeling the brain and technologies which can replace biological functions.

In his book, Fantastic Voyage, In this book he discusses immortality and how he believes the human body will develop.

He said: 'We're going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more."

'In fact the non-biological part - the machine part - will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part. So even if that biological part went away it wouldn't make any difference."

If you think this really sounds like science fiction, well, you're right, but this guy is a major player at Google - it is clear he, and others of the same thought stream, really believe this stuff, and as you look at rapidly developing technologies, one could project that the parts of our bodies that don't function properly could be replaced by machine parts and contend that our brains could be scanned, "cloned", our intelligence loaded on to a hard drive our server and essentially kept alive forever.

From the viewpoint of a Christian worldview, there are so many issues that arise from this way of thinking, and I'll spare the ethical arguments for today.  But, there is a word that is strikingly absent to me in what I've read - the worth of a soul.

And, it is because of our souls, formed by our Creator God, that makes us unique in the universe.   We are not merely bites and bits of intelligence, with a brain that can be interchanged and loaded on a shelf.   We have a unique identity and personality that far transcends what a machine, the creation of man, can duplicate or express.    

There is a tendency of man to skew toward the immortal - we want to live forever, we want to extend our lives and in essence, to cheat death.   Well, the promise of Scripture is that we will live forever, or more accurately, we will exist forever - either in eternal life with Jesus Christ by virtue of accepting Him as Lord and Savior or in eternal death apart from God in a place of eternal punishment.   And, it is not determined by strictly information in our brains or our biological makeup, but by the choice we make to allow the Spirit of God to regenerate our spirits, to core of who we are, and to redeem our souls as we experience the new birth.  

We are spirit, we have a soul, and we live in a body.   While technology can help in so many ways in the scientific realm, even helping to improve our mental capacity in instances where the brain is adversely affected, or to improve our physical bodies when there is severe injury, we cannot ignore the spiritual components of our very beings and recognize that we have a soul - mind, will, and emotions - that are energized by what flows from our hearts.   Our souls are extremely valuable, unique, and designed to be sensitized to the presence of God.   Rejoice in that, cherish that - our souls are so much more than just mere intelligence or information.