What is man?
Man is one of God’s creatures, consisting of a body and a soul. The soul is made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27) endowed with intelligence and free will. (CCC 362)
Man is a unity of body and soul. He is not just body or just soul and man is not two entities, the body like a house and the soul like a ghost. We are not haunted! The soul and the body are united in one substance called the human being.
What is a soul?
1. The soul is spiritual:
- It is invisible, no physical matter in it, you can not measure it or weight it.
- It is beyond time and space; the entire soul is in every part of the body at the same time (it is not as though part of the soul is in the foot and, if the foot was cut off, some of the soul would be gone)
2. The soul is immortal:
- It is not composed (made of atoms and molecules), therefore it cannot decompose.
- We know that our wrong actions will be accounted for and judged by God. This justice demands that we (our souls and our body) be alive after death.
- The desire for ultimate happiness has been placed in us by God. Logically, there will be a place after death where God will fulfill this desire he wanted us to have.
- God would not destroy what he has created to live for all eternity.
3. The soul is endowed with intellect and free will:
- By the gift of intellect we can know and understand truths and make judgments as to what is right and wrong (mirroring the All-Wise and All-Knowing God).
- By the gift of free will we deliberately choose to act in a certain way (mirroring the Infinite Freedom which God possesses).
The soul is the difference between a living body and a corpse. A dead body cannot move, eat, speak, sing, be happy or sad; it just decomposes.
Why don’t we decompose now? Because of OUR SOUL!
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