Soul or no soul dilema.

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This hypothetical scenario is aimed at those who believe human beings have a soul and the soul goes to a heaven or hell on death. I'm interested what believers in a soul would have to say.

The state of science at the moment:
The human genome has been sequenced, animals have been cloned successfully, there are machines that can create specific sequences of genes. So, ethics aside sooner or later the following is likely to happen, probably within the next 50 to 100 years. If not in the West, certainly in clandestine laboratories in Russia, China or elsewhere:

Hypothetical experiment:
Scientists create a complete sequence of human DNA, based on their own recipe and choosing the desired characteristics of a human from the options available that will be compatible in creating a viable living organism. On the simple level this will be things like the colour of the skin, eyes and hair, gender, general build and perhaps lots of other mix and match features depending on which sequences they choose to use. This man-made genetic sequence is inserted into a cell from which all genetic material has been removed and the cell grown to a full term baby either inside a woman (used purely as an incubator) or if the technology is sufficiently advanced enough - inside a machine based incubator.

Soul or no soul? Heaven and hell?
The baby grows and becomes a man, just like any one of us. Maybe he doesn't even know his laboratory origins and is given the story that he was adopted at birth. In reality he has no genetic mother or father and has been created by the skill of man. Does he have a soul? Did the scientists create a soul? Suppose the man becomes a Christian and leads a Christian life will his man-made soul go to heaven?

Suppose the scientists make major changes to the DNA sequence they create and the "creature" is more or less human, what then? Suppose they create a creature that is somewhat different to a man and is more like a great-ape such as a gorilla, what then?

Is there a line somewhere that says a "creature" is a man or not and if it has a soul? Do gorillas have souls? A gorilla's DNA is 97.7% the same as a human being.

Do all animals have souls? What of any man-made creatures synthesised totally in a laboratory? Maybe scientists will create totally new animals that have never existed before. What of them?

There is no empirical evidence for the existence of a non-material soul in humans or in any other living thing.

I have no doubt that humans (and variants thereto) will be cloned in the near future if they have not already been cloned.

Think of Joshua, Son of None.

ruveyn

My guess is that believers will say it's all part of God's plan, the Lord works in mysterious ways, or something along those lines. Well, maybe dressed/concealed in a better verbage and with deep insights of how God's mind works, too.

I don't believe in a separate, metaphysical soul, but I don't believe that this is a real problem for those who do.

I believe the most common belief is that God makes souls and infuses them into people. Under this assumption, God would make and infuse the soul for this person like normal. For an omniscient being, knowing what goes on in a laboratory and what goes on inside a womb aren't really different.

There is one assumption that you make that's entirely unwarranted -- that just because the technology for human cloning exists (or soon will exist), doesn't mean that people will use it. There's already a controversy over whether or not this is a good idea. I think it most likely that human cloning will end up totally illegal, or very nearly so.

Ancalagon, I think the OP deals with your criticism in this manner:

Wikipedia has an extensive article on the soul http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul but it seems to always have a religious basis as an essence of an individual that is inserted by a supernormal being and endures after death. Like a huge host of other religious linguistic creations it has no basis in material reality and is on the same level as phlogiston or the cosmic ether. These verbal antiques may be amusing or useful marginally in other connotations as a substitute term for essence but not to be taken seriously by people who deal with the real world.

But what if it is the other way round?
What if it is the physical entity that creates the soul rather than the soul being inserted?
It might then be that any living entity could create some form of soul through its bioelectrical action.

You are aware that not all beliefs require the soul to be able to exist independently of a body anyway? For example the Christians specifically believe in the resurrection of the body (but in some new form with some unknown enhanced form). This means that there is no need for the soul to be able to exist independently. Of course the idea of an immortal soul does exist in many other belief systems and has also found its way into many Christian doctrines even though it is not actually required.

A more interesting/tricky question would be to consider the role of a possible spirit in all this...

I'm leaning towards a combined individual/collective soul--as opposed to none altogether. I don't believe in freewill or a separate self. But I do believe in a Divine Equation... that everything has consciousness and intelligence, by virtue of playing an integral part of the Equation. If the equation is God or collective consciousness, then each part is a hologram or reflection of the entire equation. This intelligence is so interconnected that it is virtually impossible to say where one leaves off and another starts. It seems we have both a shared consciousness [and collective soul] as well as an individual consciousness [and individual soul]....and we each have our very essential role to play in that shared performance or life drama.....lila as it is sometimes called.

Our individual/collective soul sometimes is a particle and sometimes is a wave....It operates as a multidimensional particle or wave, with many levels and layers. I have no problem intuiting how any soul manifests similtaneously as both particle [individual consciousness/soul] and wave [collective consciousness/the ocean of Divine Equation].

I also believe our star, the Sun....figures dominantly in any consideration/constellation of soul/no soul. Whether we possess individual or collective souls or a combination....they are intimately bound up with our star. And these souls are probably paradoxically both individual and collective.

The nature of our souls could be a sympathetic vibration of our star essence, given to us by the star of our solar system. We are made of star dust...

Our souls could be derived from mind-consciousness-intuition-instinct or other kind of intelligent behavior which we don't know too much about...like the behavior of quantum particles, waves and fields..

The universal self is where its at we are all the same differences are an illusion we all deserve freedom satre talked of bad faith or fear stopping us