Christmas and Hanukkah are deeply religious holidays yet joyful as compared to say Lent and Yom Kippur which being thoughtful and
penitential involve some degree of bodily deprivation—particularly as it
relates to the ingestion of food. Both Christmas and Hanukkah also celebrate
miracles. In the case of Christmas, it’s the virgin birth and in the
case of Hanukkah, it's the miracle of the Menorah which only had enough oil to
burn for one night but still burned for 8. Believers and non-believers
enjoy these holidays, but they ultimately make the theological assertion,
if there are miracles, there must be a God. Miracle on 34 Street is a delight, yet it’s also an argument for divinity. And if there is a God, there must be a
soul. But there’s the rub. If we look at life in an evolutionary perspective
(and as a number of scientists have said, “evolution is not a theory, it’s a
fact), we would have to accord the existence of souls to the whole of Noah’s
Ark and even to lower forms, like one-celled amoebae. We may be acting a trifle
like the medieval scholastic asking how many angels can fit on the head of a
pin. However, is the soul of an amoeba the same as the soul of a man? Let’s say
there are 50 or l00 trillion cells in the human body, does the amoeba then have
a soul that is one l00 trillionith the size of man? Is the soul equatable to
consciousness, with creatures lower down on the evolutionary ladder, with only
vestiges of consciousness possessing fractional degrees of soul power? Children
wake up on Christmas and run to look at the presents under the tree and as they
excitedly unwrap the gifts that have been delivered from the North Pole by
Santa in his sled, their parents are left with the responsibility for finding
answers to the unanswerable.
