People speak of having a soul, but often their concept of the soul - what it is, what it does, etc. - is vague. In what follows I lay out how I think of the soul. I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself and I recognize that some of these ideas may not be entirely consistent or orthodox. I'm also not sure how much clarity this will bring to the concept, but even so, here goes:
First, I use "soul" and "mind" synonymously. We are souls, we have bodies (cf. I Cor. 15:45). The soul is immaterial. It's not just a gossamer substance like cartoonish depictions of ghosts. Only material substances have parts so the soul, being immaterial, has no parts, it's what's called a simple substance.
Being immaterial, souls are invisible, non-spatial, and non-localizable. They may not actually be within us in any ordinary sense.
Evidence from Near Death Experiences (NDEs) suggests that souls can exist and function to some extent independently of bodies. They can think, perceive, and perhaps communicate with each other, but to fully interact in a causal way with the physical world they must be embodied.
Moreover, souls can be thought of as the essence of a person. A person's essence is an exhaustive description of that person consisting of every true proposition about that person. Thus, the soul is information, but information must be stored in some medium like a data base, hard drive, book, or a mind. The only data base which could adequately contain all true propositions about every person who has ever lived is the mind of God, so we might think of every individual soul as a discrete "file" in the Divine "database."
If this is correct, if each soul exists as a person's essence in the mind of God, then we can assume that that person is indestructible, immortal, unless God were to choose to "delete" the file, in which case the person would be annihilated and cease to exist.
Since souls must be embodied to function fully they must interface with a physical body.Thus, at some point after the death of our present body God "uploads" the file of information or rather a portion of it, into another body (I Cor. 15:40-42).
Perhaps God withholds that portion of the description of us which would diminish our experience of this new condition so that we are not, for example, beset by chronic illness or certain physical limitations or unsettling memories.
But why think we have a soul or mind in the first place? Why not apply Occam's razor and assume that we are merely physical beings made of matter and that there's nothing non-physical about us? Why not assume that our brain accounts for the entirety of our cognitive experience and that what we call a mind is simply the functioning of the brain, much like what we call digestion is simply the functioning of the stomach? And how would an immaterial substance like soul or mind interact with the material substance of the physical world, anyway?
I'll attempt to answer these questions over the next two days.
