Socrates, whom many believed to be the first great philosopher, while also agreed that the soul was separate from the brain and that it did survive physical death did not believe that its basis was religion and perceived to on more rational grounding. He believed that the soul or the part of a human that actually thinks and feels is immortal, which again is similar to what those with religious standings believe. His most plausible reasoning behind this is quite simple. For something to be destroyed it would have to be able to be broken down, but the soul has no parts that can be detached from one another and that because the soul is not a physical thing it cannot be burnt, crushed, or mangled, therefore it can not be destroyed (Rachels 2012).
There are plenty of objections to the possibility of there being a soul. Science, for instance, would have pointed to a definite no. There is Scientist who has relentlessly studied the brain. They have developed techniques to even map the brain and thought patterns with brain-imaging. One such essay that argues there is no soul, wrote by Stephen Cave, called Argument Against the Soul, believes that there isn’t a soul because people that have experienced brain damage or permanent brain loss, such as Alzheimer, causes individuals to act completely different than they once were. To me, that argument seems flawed though. Take a car for instance, if the motor fails or becomes irrevocably damaged does it stop being a car? It will not run properly and may not even function at all but at the end of the day, it’s still a car. Perhaps its that we simply do not have the technology to fully understand the body and mind. After all, it was only a few hundred years ago that majority of the world believed it to be flat.
