Re: Does the soul have a physical meaning in Islam?
So if I understand you correctly, "ruh" is entirely in the spiritual domain, and "nufs" is the intermediary between them? What is the connection of the brain with the nufs, is the nufs effectively specific centers of the brain? After all, the nufs loses all capacity to act as intermediary between the ruh and whatever actions it wants to take, if specific parts of the brain are damaged.
No, but I dont see what that suggests. Copying someone is a very mundane action. There is a cycle beginning from perception, cognition to decision making and action involved, all involving different parts of the body/brain. That in itself does not suggest a non-corporeal source of action.
You extrapolate far too much from the Quranic verse. Whereas a deception could mean how people are deluded into thinking this world is all there is, or placing stock in a transient existence instead of thinking about the permanent one.
There is no basis for saying that cause and effect isnt real. Allah doesnt need cause and effect to be fake for Him to be the Sustainer, He is the Creator of cause and effect. Even if the knife is cutting the bread, the laws which enable a knife to cut bread were laid down and sustained by Allah. As for bark coming out of dogs, I can mimic the mechanism whereby the bark comes out, and make a machine that barks. If you say the soul is like the bark of the dog, you are saying the soul is a product of physical processes. The bark would not exist had the dog not opened its mouth!
It is an anti-scientific position to suggest that nothing is real. That if we werent looking the world wouldnt exist (who is the deception for in the depths of the universe where Man will never reach?). Furthermore it is a strawman, if cause and effect is a deception and Allah is motivating behind everything, that does not invalidate what we can learn about the "deception" that Allah has created for us to live in, understand, and manipulate. Therefore, it still begs the question, how in this deception, are souls engendered? What is it about hitting your head a certain way that damages your naf's capacity to make good moral decisions?
Peace bro ravage
The nufs itself cannot be given a physical meaning, but we know it reacts to the environment and our environment reacts to our actions. The deception is the thought that these things are directly caused by us rather than the process of making the decision then Allah (SWT) gives permission for that decision to become manifest. These are not my words either, this is the way I have read and heard students of knowledge explain the matter of such things to me.
About being anti-scientific ... I sort of have to agree. Science cannot explain what we cannot measure, but it would be wrong to assume that science cannot determine a path towards what we are trying to ascertain. For me the blood flowing is a sign that the spirit has entered the body
of the foetus, but at the same time it does not mean to me that the soul can be found by scientific methods. The measurable aspect is when the blood begins to flow, the conceptual aspect is the hadith that states the ruh is blown in at a given stage of development, the rest has to be reliant on belief that the soul has entered. So yes, science according to my understanding cannot explain everything, but with our other devices of perception we can obtain guidance/awareness/knowledge regarding a matter.
You see science and western thought tells us that consciousness originates in the brain, but religion tells us that consciousness originates in the heart. The jugular vein for instance connects the brain to the heart. Damage of either brain or heart is lethal, though recovery from heart damage in today's climate is easier than brain damage. Science cannot therefore elimiate the idea proposed by religion regarding consciousness from the heart, but at the same time religion does have a position for the mind where it connects it to the faculty of reason.
The nufs has three aspects:
Appetitive, Emotional and Reason
All three of these are found to have characteristic neural patterns in the brain when a person exhibits them, but appetitive nufs seems to penetrate the whole body, emotional seems to focus around the heart and reason in the mind. Perhaps the feeling comes first and the mind acknowledges the feeling, or perhaps the mind creates the feeling. Can science answer this question? I don't know.
The analogy of the bark was not supposed to be 100% transferrable, but I guess you understand what I mean.