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Sure there's life before birth. Your mother and father were alive; the gametes that formed you were alive at the moment they joined. But were you Napoleon or Cleopatra in a previous life? Were you hanging around in Heaven, waiting to make your big entrance? Not a chance.

The question presumes that there's a discrete consciousness - a soul, a spirit, call it what you will - that exists outside of our individual brains. And that consciousness simply cannot exist.

Every aspect of consciousness and personality is encoded in our nervous systems, the result of genetic inheritance and life experience. Prior to the formation of our brains there is nothing to have a consciousness or personality. So there is no life before birth in the sense in which that is usually meant. Those who wish to prove otherwise must point to some aspect of human consciousness that cannot be radically altered through drugs, surgery, disease or trauma. No one has managed to do so yet.

The idea of an immaterial soul that somehow encodes our central selves is logically incoherent. How can an immaterial entity be distinct from any other immaterial entity? How can an immaterial soul possibly have any kind of integrity? How could it be "me," in any meaningful sense? And how could this immaterial self possibly be imparted to the material body? Those who believe in pre-existence, immortality and reincarnation like to imagine these questions can have meaningful answers, although when it comes down to articulating them what they produce are contradictions and wishful thinking.

Learn more about this author, Scott Knickelbine.
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