Soul

When was the last time you backed up the data on your computer?
If you think the data is valuable to you, you should have a very recent backup in a very safe place. I'm not intending to induce cyberguilt today though, but something much more important.

What is the human soul? Is it an immaterial something that inhabits our bodies, floating away when we die, hopefully to be with God? That's one use of the word. Or is it used in the Bible in the 'Old King Cole' sense of a human personality?

Perhaps the soul could be described in the language of today's technology as the information that makes us us. The data that defines who we are. The software that runs on the computers we know as human brains. Technology provides us with a hitherto unavailable analogy for what the soul is.


Software, or at least data, can be transferred from one computer to another, as older ones break down and wear out. In fact I will take a very lazy option now and paste a chunk of my website that I first published in 1997 (with some updated numbers). Because the data is persistent and is still there. Good thing it was not on paper! (I promise I won't mention that again)



A person consists not in the physical structure which facilitates our thoughts, the human brain, but in the information which describes the interconnexions that are there. It's not the hardware that's important, it's the software.

I used to write games for computers with about 48 000 bytes of working memory. I can still run those games now, on my computer with 4 000 000 000 bytes - but they go a lot faster. If I'd programmed one of those "learning" algorithms, and let it use any available memory, it'd now have a stupendously greater capacity for "learning" than I imagined when I wrote it 25 years ago.

So what? Well, I believe God is at least as careful when he makes backups as I was back when I wrote programs. If he's at all bothered about us, he'll keep a copy of the software even if he allows the hardware to break. We are the software - we get to run again on the spiritual equivalent of some future supercomputer, long after our brains and this universe have gone away. This heightened state of being, together with its correspondingly magnified relationship with God, is what is commonly called "heaven".


John 11:38-44 NIV
38 Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. 39 “Take away the stone,” he said.
“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”

40 Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

41 So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. 42 I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

43 When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” 44 The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Location:Shed