The question as to whether I could believe in God came to center on another: does the soul exist? I don’t mean soul in the sense of “seat of understanding,“ or “creative spark“, but in the strict sense of a thing having originated in God and having rapport with the same. The body/soul dichotomy is implicit in this idea of the soul; its being, by necessity, something other than its cruder partner.

If man had no soul, what might be the reference point to God? Without it there could be no capacity to experience Him because everything having to do with man would now be strictly carnal, and a strictly carnal thing must certainly be denied any interface with God.

I thought that a good place to learn about the soul would be the Ramchal’s Da'ath Tevunoth (The Knowing Heart), a dialogue between the body and soul on the subject of faith. The book struck me as so otherworldly as to be meaningless. I mean, it flowed, it was poetic, but I didn’t find a single convincing argument on the subject of ensoulment.

Everybody knows that doctors have figured out how to alter emotional states by altering chemical makeup. Everybody knows that the condition of the body will always, unerringly, affect the soul, while the soul has little or nothing to do with the body’s ailments or pleasures.

When you have a headache and you’re feeling grumpy and take some aspirin, things change for the better right away. Without the aspirin who knows how long it would be before this feeling of comfort returned?