Souls

The Merman's Children.

I was taught that intellect and will were the two faculties of immaterial, immortal souls. Thus, animals were merely material organisms, unable either to reason or to make morally relevant decisions. It follows from this that, if merfolk are able both to reason and to act either rightly or wrongly, then each merperson already has a soul and does not need to go through any process or procedure in order to acquire one. But we have to recognize that people have believed many different things about such matters. Greek souls were rational. Indian souls are trans-rational. St Paul wrote not about souls surviving bodies but about spiritual bodies rising from buried physical bodies like plants rising from buried seeds.

CS Lewis and others, including my former self, have argued that movements of atoms in brains cannot constitute knowledge of the world. They cannot. It follows from this that our mental processes are something more and other than movements of atoms in our brains. We can either try to understand such processes or regard them as the last gasp of the God of the gaps. I accept souls as a premise in some fiction but nothing more.