One cell, one soul?

The consensus amongst the “right to life” people I hear from is that a fertilized human egg is fully human and has a fully human soul. Those of them who believe in original sin believe that if harm comes to that egg, old God-O-Love will send that soul, somehow transmogrified into an adult human consciousness, to some magic, invisible place that is less than comfortable. This assumption is a cornerstone of the religious opposition to several kinds of research that use fertilized eggs or multi cellular clumps of stem cells.

Without arguing about what kind of soul and what kind of personality a thing comprised of 16 or so cells would have in its afterlife; I still have to ask if the soul it possessed as one cell is now diminished in each cell to one sixteenth of its soulness or if souls multiply as well. If they do, of course, I have to wear black every day to mourn for all the soul-laden cells that die every day, but if they don’t, there is no other conclusion that this original soul deposited into the egg I grew from still resides in one cell in my body. What if it dies? I might have become soulless decades ago and not know it. I mean, if it’s long gone, can I forget about Hell, or is that cell already there?

Or perhaps souls follow the physical laws governing gasses. Perhaps they expand freely into all the cells of one’s body and quickly withdraw as each cell ages. That being the case, my soul would be have considerably more volume that it had, say 20 years ago, although it would be less dense and presumably cooler according to Boyle’s Law or was it Charles’? Of course a soul with physical properties that followed physical laws would be measurable and would therefore by subject to empirical science and that’s simply not acceptable since it might lead to conclusions that question belief. Best not to go there; God insists on his privacy, at least according to those in the God business.

But say that the one cell, one soul model obtains, as would be suggested by the wisdom of the anti stem cell research people. Without my body to keep them all together, would they go their own way? Would some head north and some south and would God have to coordinate the purchases of harps and pitchforks to accommodate them, or does a majority rule apply: if my hands did wrong, do my feet have to go to hell too?

But let’s get back to the beginning. If both gametes that unfortunately combined to make me, had no souls, where did the primal eggsoul come from? If they had souls, which one was passed on to me, and why then am I not simply a part of my mother’s or father’s soul or some chimera composed of both as my genome might suggest? If neither had a soul, then that would argue for the gaseous model as the parent souls might have withdrawn from each component cell, but if so, then there must have been divine intervention at the moment of conception or I, at the moment of DNA absorption by the egg-me would not have a soul (as has been suggested by some parties.) That calls into question God’s wisdom in starting something he didn’t intend to finish since miscarriages, stillbirths and things like Ann Coulter do occur. If there was not divine intervention, than the “life begins at conception” mantra is invalid. It’s invalid anyway since both gametes are very much alive, soulless or not. The question is rather: when do human rights begin and this is a case where science is fuzzier than Bible babble. The Bible would suggest that life begins with breath along with the right to be called human and tends to use the world soul as a metaphor for individual life. So do the Biblical inerrancy / stem cell with a soul crowd have a Bible to stand on in the first place?

Are you following any of this? I could go on and on into strange territories of absurdity as one inevitably does when following the example of scholasticism wherein we argue from a received position backwards toward conclusions that often lead into the Cimmerian forests of absurdity.

With a nod toward Occam, which is all I’m going to give him, I will suggest that the only argument that makes sense is the absence of souls which renders the above arguments and all their infinite and contradictory ramifications into some arbitrarily huge crock of shit.

Let’s recognize instead that being human is not a property of a string of twisted DNA any more than a blueprint is a building and that becoming human is a process with no definite boundaries and let’s do the research and reap the benefits and stop trying to find answers in the ancient words of people who knew nothing as interpreted by modern politicians who don’t care to know anything and want to make damn sure you don’t learn.