God always creates souls at conception

Thank you, Lucky10279, for participating in this Debate. I'll start this Round with some remarks about the Biblical verse Pro quoted in Round 1. Whatever John the Baptist's mother felt that is claimed to have been a "leap for joy" --the mere claim doesn't mean that is what actually happened. There are other types of belly-spasms, after all. Also, no soul is necessary for an unborn mammal to "kick". htt.....ww.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DZ2H2nmrs5Jw Keep in mind that humans wrote the Bible, not God, and humans are known to lie to achieve a reward. The many claims that preachers made, thousands of years ago, have rewarded preachers ever since. Of course preachers object to having their lies exposed: htt.....ww.miltontimmons.com/ChruchesVsLightningRod.html Therefore, even if some things in the Bible are Absolute Truth, they can't be trusted without other supporting evidence. Which doesn't exist regarding the "leap for joy". Pro also wrote: "... He first creates us, at conception." --That is a mere unsupported claim. There is no evidence whatsoever that God is required for a sperm and an egg to merge. It is even a ludicrous claim, because if God is perfect, why does God make so many mistakes during those God-controlled conception events, that "up to 50 percent of human conceptions fail to survive"? htt.../ucdavismagazine.ucdavis.edu/issues/su96/Feature/Feature-The_Facts_of_Life.html Then there is this evidence, that the ovum doesn't need God's help at all: htt.../discovermagazine.com/1992/jun/theaggressiveegg55 At the more general level, molecular biology and organic chemistry reactions have been observed to work just fine without external assistance; laboratories have been studying such phenomena for decades. So, since both logic and evidence indicates that God need not be involved in the process of conception, then that means conception is not an inherently superior moment, over any other time during pregnancy, for God to come along and create an associated soul. My Round 2 post explored some particular reasons why God might not create souls at conception. One of those reasons involved predictable inevitable very-early death. IF God ignores those conceptions, then where does God draw the line, and begin to create souls for conceptions that will die later on? Consider this situation: htt.....ww.orato.com/health-science/babies-born-without-brain It is Dogma that the soul is associated with the Free Will of a person. A human that lacks a brain is totally unable to exercise Free Will, so what does it need a soul for? And God will know that. Note that, logically, waiting for an ordinary birth to occur means that God need not be concerned about any fatality mode that might doom a brand-new conception. My next argument starts by recognizing the simple fact that the entire process of growth in a womb is totally automatic, controlled by DNA, and Free Will is utterly useless in that situation. And God knows it, so again it would be logical to wait for birth, before creating a soul. My next argument is a variant of the preceding. Consider a factory that makes automobiles. Sometimes a human body is called "a vehicle for the soul", and of course during pregnancy that vehicle is under construction, albeit in a different manner than found in an automobile factory. Well, we humans are smart enough to not install a driver before a vehicle is ready to be driven --and God is supposed to be even smarter. My final argument involves a research topic known as "sensory deprivation experiments." htt.../findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2699/is_0003/ai_2699000310/ Imagine a just-created soul stuffed into just-conceived zygote. It has no sense of hearing or sight or taste or smell. It is exactly a sensory deprivation environment. And it is utterly alone, unable to interact with any other soul. Note that loneliness is a nonphysical thing; it might very well be able to negatively affect a soul (perhaps even to destruction?). A just-created soul certainly qualifies as "innocent". Is God going inflict months of sensory deprivation upon it, by putting it into a brand-new zygote, when God most certainly knows how a mere week of sensory deprivation can cause an adult human to start going insane? Since God is supposed to be a Loving God, the most logical answer that the preceding Question is a resounding NO! And now I can return to what I wrote near the end of my Round 2 post. An unborn human won't have a soul until God creates one for it, and there are reasons why God might wait until birth to do so. Meanwhile, what of a pregnant woman's soul, and the Love of God? God is going to know exactly what the probability is, that that woman might seek an abortion. Is a Loving God going to create a soul for the unborn human she carries just so the woman can be condemned for actually getting an abortion? In Pro's Round 2 post, she wrote: "... twinning ... He would create 2 souls at conception." I won't say it is silly to stuff 2 souls into 1 living cell, but I will point out that, afterward, there is nothing to ensure that the souls go separate ways when the cell starts dividing (or, days later, when the blastocyst splits). What if they like each other? "...chimerism ... God would create two souls at conception, and when the one twin absorbed the other than the one absorbed would die." Pro must have missed what I previously wrote: "... neither blastocyst dies when they merge." (I'm stressing it now.) What happens during chimerism is that each blastocyst yields different parts of the overall single human body. One might yield the brain; the other might yield the spinal column. One might yield the blood system; the other might yield the ovaries --this is what happened in that "I Am My Own Twin" case, and that's why the woman's blood-DNA didn't match the DNA of her children. A chimera is a "cooperative multi-organism". Actually, every human walking around is exactly such an organism, with bacterial cells outnumbering human cells 10-to-1. htt.....ww.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ultimate-social-network-bacteria-protects-health A chimera merely goes a step farther, with 2 cooperative multi-organisms cooperating as a larger multi-organism. So, there is nothing to cause one soul to "leave the scene" when two human blastocysts merge. And, therefore, either a human chimera has two souls, or God only made one soul when the two conceptions occurred. "... we have to simply trust God, that He knows best." I agree. However, what God knows and does is not necessarily what preachers claim God knows and does. Especially when preachers have been proved to be liars multiple times in History: 1. The Galileo incident. 2. The lightning rod incident. 3. The "primary purpose of human sex is reproduction" incident. The actual primary purpose is pair-bonding. htt.....ww.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep01138154.pdf It is not so widely known as the other incidents, but, nevertheless, the preachers were proved to be liars. 4. Lots of occasions when preachers disagree with each other, such that a schism occurs. They can't all be telling the truth! I've offered good reasons why this thing the preachers claim, regarding soul-creation at conception, is sheer irrational stupidity at best, and just another lie at worst. Meanwhile, God is extremely far from being either stupid or irrational!