Why There Must Be a Soul

By "soul" I mean our consciousnesses of a self separate from but in positive relationship with our minds, bodies, the world and our fellow creatures, stemming from an immaterial quintessence of coalescent, materially animating energy. Hard science people find life to be a minor, peripheral, even freakish aberration of the normal and main purposes of the universe. In fact, they see life as an excrescence of matter in a state of senility. So what do such people mean by the "truly real"? Well they tend to focus on the life, death and afterlife of stars and their galactic communities, which surely is stupendous stuff. They are also interested in the in the dynamics of the various kinds of natural satellites attached to these stars. For them, the matrix of the real includes only the chemical, gravitational, electromagnetic and quantum processes in the space-time continuum. However, all that which lives (i.e., that which exerts autonomous behaviors outside the random dynamics of purely natural law), should therefore act in complete acceptance of the trials and consequences, however negative, of the environment for which it evolved. But this is not the case. Life resists and strives to overcome the negative forces of the heedless universe, rather than functioning seamlessly within it. For all the grandeur of stars and planets, you will never find one of these heavenly bodies singing an elegy because the planet is about to be swallowed up by a star in its Red Giant Phase (or perhaps sucked into a black hole), or that the star senses it is about to go supernova. But let's just take the case of higher forms of life, of which humans are only one. These sentient species express all sorts of unnecessary behaviors, including grief, joy, compassion, sentimentality, pride, serenity, playfulness and humor. If they were mere biological machines, their attitude toward their environment and their fellows with whom they share it would include none of these functionally extraneous behaviors. Now let's talk about humans specifically. If we were merely suffering under the delusion that we have souls because our brain chemistry had synthesized such a projection of materially transcendent identity, emotion would seem to have no practical utility. Our unavoidable feelings of attachment and sense of meaning would seem at odds with the presumption of our being mere accidents of senile organic-chemical traditions. The only emotions that would have any purpose if life were merely soul-less would be desire and competitiveness (and the violent expressions of such primitive yet practical motivating instincts). So is life a decadent phenomenon of matter? Or is there something about life (however small in proportion to things like stellar nurseries, dark matter, binary star systems, nebulae and spiral galaxies), which makes it something rather miraculous by comparison to all the other mightier things that roam infinite space?