When does the soul enter and exit the human body?
I’ve never thought seriously about this – but maybe there is no sudden entrance to the body. Maybe it sort of develops along with everything else. It does seem that a baby has a soul when it is born, when you look at that baby. But then again, when they don’t look back, you wonder. I know, TD for that. This, of course, is an important question when it comes to deciding about abortion. The leaving of the body might seem more clear – when the person takes their last breath, it’s gone pretty quick. However, there may be some people that don’t believe that there is a discreet thing called a “soul” that can somehow exist apart from the body. I am tending to think more flexibly about this. One shred of evidence about how the baby’s soul has traditionally been demonstrated, if not talked about, is that when a fetus is stillborn at the age of say, 6 months, funerals are not held for it, never have been, that I know of. Whereas when full term baby is born dead, they do have a funeral.
The soul is the living being. Adam’s spirit and the breath of life both entered his body and he became a living soul. There is considerable disagreement about when the spirit enters the body. Even many religious people deny that human beings have spirits. Just let me point out that if such is the case, we become extinct at death, and that makes God a fool for creating a new life to reward or punish based on our sins and good works. In the end, I think the most likely explanation is that the processes of life cannot long exist without a spirit invigorating them and maintaining them, so a zygote is a living being from its inception (or conception). Just let me say that my oldest child systematically explored her environment months before she was born. She even grabbed her umbilical cord and gave it a hefty yank on a few occasions. Her intelligence and her personality were both present, and she had not yet drawn a single breath. Life is life.
