What biblical evidence is there that our spirit only began in this life?
Upvote:-2
It is an almost universal view among biblical scholars that there are two distinct creation stories in Genesis, written by two different authors at different times. The first story is in Genesis 1:1-2:4a and was written by an anonymous author now known as the Priestly Source. The second is in Genesis 2:4b-25 and was written by the Yahwist, or 'J Source'. this explains the appearance of a "double creation."
Leon R. Kass says in The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, at page 55, that pious readers, believing that the text cannot contain contradictions, ignore the major disjunctions between the two creation stories and tend to treat the second story as the fuller, more detailed account of the creation of man (and woman) that the first story simply reported.
Those who do see these disjunctions but believe there is only one creation account in Genesis have to look for explanations consistent with this belief. This is where we find the concept that the first story only tells of a spiritual creation.
In the first story, God is all-powerful and simply speaks things into existence. The second is older and more primitive, and here God can not create living things out of nothing: he creates Adam and each of the animals out of moist earth, then Eve out of Adam's rib. This is not necessary for plants, as they are pre-existing as seeds in the ground, waiting for God to make it rain. This is not because God had only created seeds in the ground in Genesis 1:11 - after all, God said to "bring forth" grass, etc.
Kass says, "Once we recognise the independence of the two creation stories, we are compelled to adopt a critical principle of reading if we mean to understand each story on its own terms." This then means we can not use the first story to speculate that God created us (and presumably the animals also created on day 6) spiritually before creating us out of moist earth. Proving from the Bible that our spirits were not in existence before this life involves proving a negative, which is usually impossible, so we usually have to rely on proving probability. Genesis gives no reason to believe that God created humans as spirits before creating us physically.
Upvote:1
I don't know if there are any particular verses in the Bible that specify souls do not pre-exist. As Dick said, you are trying to prove a negative, which is difficult.
However, I did find a verse in the Orthodox Deutero-canonical text (referred to by others as the Apocrypha) that says there is no reincarnation:
A man indeed killeth through his malice: and the spirit, when it is gone forth, returneth not; neither the soul received up cometh again.
Wisdom of Solomon 16:14
It would stand to reason that if reincarnation is not true because a soul being in the place it goes to after life on earth does not come back to earth, then it follows that a soul simply does not come from there to here - it is a one way trip from here to there.
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