The human soul

However, you don’t need me to remind you that you yourself are more than a wonderful collection of cells.  Other creatures on the Earth are also wonderful collections of cells but human beings are different in many important ways.

Your human body is not the whole of you, it is only a part of you.  Much more important is the spiritual part no one can see which we call your soul – the real you and the part that will live for ever.  Our soul is what makes us different from animals and, indeed, from all other creatures.  Here are some of the ways in which human beings are different:

Reason

You may not always get the right answers when you multiply two numbers using mental arithmetic.  But a dog couldn’t work out the problem however hard anyone tried to teach him.  This is because animals can’t reason things out like human beings can.

Conscience

Linked with this is the fact that, unlike humans, animals don’t have a sense of right and wrong.  For example, if a dog finds a bag of shopping in the kitchen that contains a packet of jam doughnuts he may very well eat the lot.  He may learn from his owner’s reaction that the behaviour is unacceptable but he won’t understand why.  In contrast if you ate the bag of doughnuts you would know that it was wrong; you would know that it was a mean thing to do and that you had deprived the rest of the family of a treat.  Our conscience tells us what is right and wrong.

Free will

Human beings also have free will which means they are free to choose to do right or wrong.  So if you saw that bag of doughnuts in the kitchen you might like to eat them all but you can choose not to.

Knowing and loving God

There’s another big difference between us and animals.  Animals are not able to come to know and to love God as we can. 

So we human beings are the only creatures on earth who:

• have the ability to think things out – the power of reason;
• know right from wrong – conscience;
• are free to choose right or wrong – free will
• have the ability to know and love God.

All these mean that we human beings are very special creatures.  It also means that we have very important responsibilities.  This wonderful planet, Earth, belongs to God; we human beings are stewards of God’s creation (5) which means we must do our best to look after it as well as we can.