The concept of the soul, self-awareness, and consciousness are valid terms for describing aspects of how it feels to be an organism and what drives organisms, but they don't exist through metaphysical or magical means.
Do doubt all metaphysical inquiry? Is all metaphysics simply magic to you? In your line of thought how does the concept of number exist? Is number physical always,
id est,without 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 x10^100,000,000,000,000,00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 things, then does said number does not exist? Or, could a number exist which does not have enough physical things in the universe to represent it physically?
Further, how do you respond to the argument of appearance?
1)Two sticks can appear themselves to be both equal and unequal at the same time.
e.g.
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2)But in thought itself, equality never appears to be the same as inequality. That means that:
3) there need to be at least some universal idea, apart from matter, which is eternal and unchanging, right? The sorts of things I have in mind here are equality, length, largeness, smallness, etc...
-- The above argument is my abridged version of Plato's from his
Phaedo, regarding materialists like yourself.
Let's not think of God, soul, love, hate, or other "feeling" types of metaphysical terms just yet. Let's simply arrive at some consensus with
a priori metaphysical principles which drive the physical world (largeness, smallness, equality, etc.). From there we can move onto Goodness, justice, and the like, and then to God.
The major flaw of this thread is the Religious fervor which drives heated debates about ancient doctrines and misrepresented claims about religious intolerance by other religions. What this thread should be doing is carefully defending faith (or lack thereof) through well-reasoned logical arguments and rebuttals.
Response to Paper Luigi:
The water deceives us in that it makes us sense that the existence of the fish is other than it actually is, just as you might claim that religion makes us believe that the concept of heaven is other than it is (misplaced).
You say non-material things exist. Do you think that there is any order to these non-material things? For instance is the non-material concept of "good" better than the non-material concept of "bad"? I am interested to know how you handle gradation in the non-physical realm without God.
N.B. I am not yet talking about the Christian God. I am simply speaking of the highest being, or highest existence.