Christianity and Islam view the soul as a divine connection

The argument

Christianity establishes the soul as an immortal divine essence that is separate from the physical world. The physical world of our bodies and objects around us, and the spiritual world of God and the divine where our soul resides, has a clear distinction. The soul constitutes who a person is, and it is what animates and gives the body life. When the body dies, the soul carries on. When our physical world ceases to matter at the death of our body, we enter into the spiritual world of God as a soul. There, the soul is judged based upon our actions in the physical realm, and will eventually be sent to either heaven or hell. It remains active during this time with God until it is eventually re-birthed back into a physical form during the second coming of Christ. Souls are characterized as active, being capable of positive and negative experiences and emotions in the spiritual world, and interacting with other souls. The Islamic idea of the soul is very similar to Christianity's ideas. The soul is an essence that makes a person themselves and is deeply connected with and modeled after God. In addition, the soul goes through the same motions of life, judgment, and resurrection. However, Muslims have slightly different beliefs about the soul as well. Muslims do not believe the soul is eternal, but that it is created by God and placed into the fetus in the fifth month of pregnancy (after which it is immortal, but it is not everlasting in both directions.) This constitutes a tie between the physical body and the soul; while Islam states that the soul does not reside in a specific part of the body and continues after the body's death, it is interconnected with the body, unlike in Christianity where the soul is on a completely different plane than the body.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Various Christian branches' beliefs on the soul slightly vary. Some believe the soul is dormant while awaiting resurrection, not active. In addition, others believe that souls in hell do not suffer endlessly, but are merely destroyed, therefore denouncing the idea of the soul as eternal.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The summary flattens variation the tradition itself contains. Christian teaching on the soul is not settled in the way described: some churches hold the dead to be unconscious until resurrection, others that the lost are destroyed rather than punished endlessly, and the bodily resurrection central to the creeds sits awkwardly with a soul that is already complete without a body. The premise also folds immortality, judgment and general resurrection into one doctrine when they are separate ideas with separate histories. [Rejecting P2] "Islam shares a similar view" overstates the resemblance and understates the differences. Describing the soul as "God-modeled" imports a Christian image, and the framework named — creation, placement, the intermediate state, resurrection — is organised around God's act rather than around an essence that animates a body. Treating the divergences as matters of detail is what allows the premise to arrive at a single shared conception. [Rejecting C] The conclusion also does not answer the question the position sits under. That these traditions have discussed the soul for centuries is not in dispute; whether we have one is, and a survey of what has been believed supplies no evidence either way.