Is Disney’s “Soul” Good for Yours? (A Bible-based, Christian Movie Review)

 

When I saw that Disney was bringing out a movie called “Soul” that was about human souls and showed their idea of what happens to them when they die, I thought, “This is probably not going to be good.” Concerned about the impact it could have, I watched it. I was right. It’s not good.

I’m not one of those people who are against all Disney movies (see my mostly positive review of Frozen 2 here). And sometimes something I don’t think I’m going to like, I end up liking (see my review of Hamilton here). But in the case of the Disney movie “Soul,” I suspected ahead of time that I might not like it, and watching it confirmed my suspicion.

First, and this is very subjective, I didn’t find the story and storytelling nearly as captivating as most Pixar movies I have watched. It just wasn’t that good or interesting. Still, I suspect that many people will watch it. It was released on Disney Plus on Christmas day. Many families are eager for new stuff to watch because of the reduced entertainment output during the pandemic. Disney/Pixar films have consistently been well made and loved by many, so my guess is that while this will not be as popular as Frozen, a lot of people are going to watch it. And many people who are not on guard will likely be at least a little bit influenced by Soul’s worldview. And that concerns me.

Four concerning issues with Disney’s Soul

Disney’s “Soul” is not set in a make believe world like the world of “Cars” or “Frozen” or “Toy Story.” It is set in the real world, but also shows human souls before and after people die. That makes this movie theological by nature. Also, while practically nobody believes that the types of things that happen in movies like the Harry Potter series are real, and people know that Stars Wars is in a make believe galaxy, many people do believe in things that are roughly similar to what is shown in “Soul.” In fact, if the goal of Soul was to put common, popular, street level spiritual beliefs consistent with pantheism and some new age views into a Disney film, I would say they succeeded. Here are 4 specific examples:

1. Soul is wrong about what happens before you are conceived

A major premise of Soul is that our souls exist in some type of heavenly realm (they call it “the great before”) before we are born. When we are born (or conceived, Soul does not get into that much detail), supposedly our souls leave this realm and enter our bodies for life on earth. According to Soul, some of our attributes and personality traits are determined by things that happen to our souls before they come to earth.

The idea of pre-existent souls is popular, but completely unbiblical. God’s Word never indicates that our souls existed before we were conceived. In fact, the Bible indicates that the ONLY person who existed in Heaven before He was born was Jesus:

CSB17 John 3:13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven-- the Son of Man.

Only “the one,” who is Jesus, “the Son of Man,” descended from heaven. The rest of us begin life on earth.

Also, Jesus points out that He existed before Abraham. This means Jesus is claiming the He existed before He was born. His Jewish opponents correctly interpret that as meaning that Jesus is claiming to be God. No one else besides Jesus existed before being born. Jesus’ statement would not make as much sense if EVERYBODY, including Abraham, existed before they were born:

CSB17 John 8:58 Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am." 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him. But Jesus was hidden and went out of the temple.

Does it matter if someone believes that their soul existed in some spiritual realm before they were conceived? Yes, because such belief can easily lead to other wrong beliefs. An example is believing that things that happened to your soul before you were conceived are impacting your character and life today. That in turn leads to unbiblical and unhelpful (even dangerous and sinful) ways of trying to deal with our problems. This belief can also erode the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in our hearts in minds.

2. Soul is wrong about what happens after you die

In the movie Soul, it appears that all souls after they die ascend a staircase towards a big glowing ball of light. At some point they float into the light, but they also seem to lose their individual personhood as they turn into round balls of light and get absorbed into the big ball of light. There is no judgment for how each person lived their lives. Everyone gets the same fate. There is no need to have faith in Jesus for salvation. This worldview may be appealing to people who don’t want to face judgment, but it gives a false hope that is contrary to the Bible.

The Bible teaches very little about what happens to our souls in between death and resurrection (I have a post on the intermediate state here). Instead, the Bible focuses our hope on the resurrection and life on a New Earth with God and with all who have been saved through faith in Christ. We do not lose our individual personhood and get absorbed into a ball of light. We will live forever with bodies meant to enjoy a perfect earth without anymore disease, suffering, death, or evil. That’s way better than Soul’s vision of the afterlife. More importantly, it is true.

CSB17 2 Peter 3:13 But based on his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

3. Soul has quantum field spirit beings that fit in with pantheism

Very shortly after Joe’s soul falls into “the great before” (the spiritual realm where souls live before being sent to earth), he meets some type of spiritual being who oversees the souls. This being is not all-knowing. It is a little angel-like, yet it is not like the angels in the Bible. When Joe asks “Who are you?,” the being answers, “I am the coming together of all quantized fields in the universe.” And when one of the spirit beings catches up to Joe to bring him back to “the Great Beyond” he does not tell Joe that Joe broke any of God’s laws (there are no such things in Soul), but that he tried to “cheat the universe.”

While some of this is intended to by funny, it points to a pantheistic worldview as opposed to a biblical worldview. In the Bible, the universe and all angels and spiritual beings other than God Himself are created by God. But in Soul there is no God, and the spiritual beings that do exist are part of the universe. The idea that the universe itself is basically God, or that God exists in the form of the universe, is a pantheistic idea. This idea is not developed in Soul, but Soul is consistent with worldviews that fit under the broad umbrella of pantheism.

Although relatively few people may identify themselves as “pantheist,” this worldview, or at least significant elements of it is much more common than you might think. It is closely related to materialism, as both views don’t believe in anything or anyone (like the God of the Bible) as existing before, separate from, or outside of the universe itself. Pantheism is basically materialism with an often vague concept of the universe having something spiritual about it thrown in.

Pantheism is not at all consistent with what the Bible teaches about God. The Bible teaches that God created the universe and is a personal God who is intimately involved with, yet still distinguishable from, His creation. Pantheism is also not consistent with our current scientific understanding of the universe. There is a lot of evidence that scientists believe point to the fact that our universe had a beginning. That means that something (or Someone!) other than the universe had to be the cause of the universe coming into existence. This is why pantheistic ideas have often historically been connected with the idea of a universe that has always existed.

This fundamental issue is highlighted by the first verse of God’s Word:

CSB17 Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

4. In Disney’s Soul, “Salvation” comes though occult/new age practices

In Soul, there is no indication that we need to be saved from our sins. This is contrary to the Christian message, including the good news that we just celebrated at Christmas:

“She will give birth to a son, and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:21 CSB17)

Nevertheless, there is a type of salvation in Soul. When people become obsessed with something (like sales or sports or just about anything) and distracted from living life, their souls become lost and they need to be saved. Who saves them? In Soul, it is not Jesus. It is a group of self-proclaimed “mystics” who through some type of ceremonies have gained the ability to leave their bodies on earth and travel to the domain of lost souls. There they travel around in a ship with tie dye sails and a peace sign anchor rescuing souls. One of these mystics is from Tibet, one is a “shamanic healer meditating in Berkley, California,” one says his body is in a trance, and their leader is a weird guy standing on a street corner in New York who talks about astrology and leads them in what seems to be occult rituals. In Soul, there is no need for Jesus to save you, the New Age-ish mystics and occult practitioners take care of that.

Although Soul presents this stuff in a cartoon setting that is meant to be somewhat humorous, in real life participating in those type of rituals (and people really do) goes against strong warnings in Scripture. We lived in Indonesia for fourteen years where occult rituals and practices are far more common (or at least far more openly practiced). They consistently lead to demonic oppression. This stuff is not funny.

Conclusion

Disney’s Soul is not good for your soul, or for your children’s. It packages a non-biblical pantheistic worldview and support for mystical, occult-like practices into a movie made for families with children that was released on Christmas day. If you have already watched Soul with your family, I recommend discussing how it is different from what God reveals in the Bible. If you haven’t watched it, you’re not missing anything. May God give us discernment and strength in these dark days. If you focus on God’s truth in the Bible and trust Jesus, you will find peace and meaning. God bless you.

Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .

mRNA Vaccines, Intelligent Design, and the Glory of God

 

 

 

I thank God that the FDA has just approved a vaccine for the coronavirus. If things go well, they may approve a second vaccine next week. These are the first vaccines for humans that are based on mRNA. We should be praying that these vaccines will live up to their promise of being safe and effective. We should also thank God for enabling the hardworking scientists, doctors, and other people involved in the process who have produced an approved vaccine in record time.

In addition to having the potential to save many thousands of lives and help end the difficult shut down, these mRNA vaccines can give glory to God in another way. They can remind us of evidence that life had to be created by a great, super-intelligent, ancient Designer.

What is mRNA? (a very simple review of life and some cell biology)

One of the characteristics of living things is that they are designed so that normally they can reproduce other living things of the same kind. Living things are incredibly complex. So far people, despite being able to make spaceships and nuclear submarines, have not been able to make a self-replicating machine or a self-replicating factory that uses material in the environment to make copies of itself. Thus, every blade of grass and butterfly that flutters by can do something that no man-made object can do. Blades of grass produce seeds that grow into new blades of grass and butterflies lay eggs that grow into new butterflies. Your iPhone may be an amazing piece of technology, but it can’t make baby iPhones!

All living things are made of cells. That includes everything from dolphins to oak trees and from hummingbirds to bacteria. Your body is made up of approximately 30 trillion cells! Although cells are very tiny, they are filled with functioning molecular machines and encoded information that work together to enable the cell to live and multiply.

One of the important components found inside of every cell is DNA. DNA works like the hard drive on your computer. It contains much of the information that the cell needs to function. This information is encoded in the sequence of base pairs in DNA. DNA is an excellent molecule for the long term storage of biological information (the “blueprints” for building new cells). DNA can also pass this information down to the next generation of cells. But the information does not do any good if it stays in the DNA just like the information on your computer’s hard drive will not do any good if it stays there. In the case of your computer, the information on the hard drive gets copied into RAM where it can operate your computer and make it do things (like check your email or display a blog post). Likewise, the information stored in DNA gets copied onto RNA so that the RNA can do things in the cell. One of the main things the RNA does is provide the correct sequences for amino acids to be built together into proteins. The type of RNA that does this is called mRNA. So, basically, mRNA is used to build proteins.

Here is a relatively simple, animated video I found on YouTube that shows the role of mRNA in building proteins. A couple of notes: (1) The video correctly states that ribosomes are made from rRNA, but they also have protein parts in them and are incredible molecular machines that are much more complex than what the video shows (the video warns that it is a simplification), and (2) the video shows how cells in your body normally make mRNA from DNA, but the mRNA in the vaccine is made in a lab and injected so it does not involve your DNA.

 

 

How mRNA is used to make a vaccine

Like many other viruses, COVID 19 has some protein parts. One of these protein parts is the “spike proteins” that are seen sticking out of the ball in artist renditions of the protein. These “spike proteins” help the virus to get into the cells of the people the virus infects. God has given our bodies amazing immune systems that can identify foreign proteins and destroy them. But this takes some time to work when a foreign protein enters your body. During that time, the virus can multiply and do all kinds of damage, making people sick and in some cases even killing people.

While the spike protein is part of the virus, by itself it cannot multiply and is not a big threat. But it can be identified as part of the virus and then the whole virus can be destroyed.

Like all proteins, the spike proteins are produced in cells by using mRNA that codes for that particular protein. Usually, the mRNA comes from the virus itself (yes, some viruses have mRNA in them). The way the vaccine works is that it has mRNA that codes for the spike protein, but does NOT have the mRNA for the whole virus. So, when the vaccine mRNA is injected, it causes our cells to make the spike proteins, but not the whole virus. Then your body’s immune system learns to recognize and destroy the spike proteins. Later, if the actual virus enters your body, your body’s immune system very quickly recognizes the spike protein and destroys it along with the whole virus it is attached to before the virus can do a lot of harm. Pretty clever, isn’t it! (There are a lot more details, and I thank God for the smart scientists whom He enabled to figure this stuff out.)

What is Intelligent Design Theory?

Intelligent Design theory is a scientific theory based on seeing evidence in nature that indicates that the universe we live in, as well as specific parts of it (like living things), is best explained as being the product of a great, intelligent Creator as opposed to merely being the product of the laws of nature, matter, energy, and chance. Evidence for design can be seen at many levels, including:

1. The fact that our universe had a beginning

2. The fine tuning of physics to make a universe able to support life

3. Chemistry

4. Starlight

5. Our wonderful home, the planet earth

6. The origin of life

7. The diversity of life

mRNA provides evidence for design at levels 6 and 7 (also level 3, but I won’t be addressing that). I’ll include links to other blog posts on some of the other levels and on other evidence at levels 6 and 7 below, but in the rest of this blog post I will focus on evidence related to mRNA.

 

RNA and the Origin of Life

Cells are really, really complex and amazing. They have complex cell membranes that protect the cell and let the stuff out that needs to go out and let the stuff in that needs to come in. Cells are also full of functioning molecular machines (here’s a link to a cool video showing one of these machines). All cells contain a large amount of functional information. So it’s not realistic to think that a functioning, living cell could just pop into existence (unless you believe in God!). Scientists who are committed to materialism (explaining everything without God) don’t say that the first cell just popped into existence. They claim that prior to cells there must have been some type of chemical evolution (also referred to as abiogenesis) that involved increasingly cell-like replicating chemical systems.

It should be noted that no one has ever found or made a somewhat-on-the-way-to-being-a-cell replicating chemical system. There’s no physical evidence such a thing has ever existed. In fact, there’s good evidence that such a thing cannot work (see this blog post on how viruses strengthen the scientific case for a Creator). But that hasn’t stopped origin of life researchers and those who follow their work from spinning stories about what they think might have existed. One of the most popular such stories is sometimes referred to as the RNA world. The RNA world is a theory that says that before there were replicating cells with DNA there were replicating molecular systems with RNA. Because RNA contains information and because it can work as a catalyst for some reactions, this seems like about the best guest possible if you begin by ruling out God (which is a really terrible way to begin). But there are many reasons the RNA world could never work, and the recent news about mRNA viruses reminds us of some of those reasons. I will briefly explain three of them.

1. mRNA cannot replicate on its own

One of the challenges of using mRNA in a vaccine is that it is not enough to inject it into your body, the mRNA must make it through the cell membrane into your cells. Why is this? By itself, mRNA cannot do anything. It cannot make spike proteins or any other type of proteins by itself. It contains information, but it needs other RNA molecules (specifically tRNA), complex cellular machinery (specifically ribosomes), and the metabolism of a living cell (a complex system for harnessing and using energy needed to run the cell) to create a protein. And many proteins are needed for self-replication of cells. In other words, even if an RNA molecule somehow formed on the early earth (which is basically impossible without intelligent intervention, but just for argument sake let’s say it did) it would be able to do nothing at all. It would be there without a ribosome, without cell metabolism, and without very specific tRNAs it needs to work.

2. mRNA is relatively unstable

Some people speculate that because there were millions of years potentially available for chemical evolution, you could get some of the parts you need (like RNA) and then eventually add other parts. But there’s a problem. Time doesn’t help, it hurts. The mRNA vaccines have to be kept frozen prior to use. This may be due to the well known fact that RNA is a relatively unstable molecule (see articles here and here that explain this). RNA usually does not stay around for long. So even if an RNA molecule somehow appeared, it could not wait around for millions of years (or usually not even for one year!) for a lucky encounter with some other molecule that could help it do something.

3. RNA needs functional information to work

You can’t just pump any mRNA into a person and expect it to vaccinate them against the coronavirus. We already have LOTS of mRNA constantly being produced in the 30 trillion cells in our bodies. None of that mRNA vaccinates us against the coronavirus. Why? Because the function of any particular strand of mRNA depends on the order of the nucleotides it contains. It works like this sentence I am typing. I cannot just type random letters and get a sentence that makes sense, much less a sentence that conveys the specific meaning I desire. Likewise, none of the mRNA in your body currently codes for COVID spike proteins (unless you have been infected). The chances of randomly assembling nucleotides into even one RNA sequence that would perform any useful function relative to self-replication are so remote as to be practically impossible, even if you had oceans full of RNA and millions of years. This situation is made worse because there is no known sequence of RNA anywhere (in any cell in any creature or in any virus or in any lab) that has the ability to self-replicate without using the resources of an already existing cell.

What Works

The mRNA vaccine was not created by purely material forces and chance. It was designed and manufactured by intelligent scientists. It is far more difficult to design a living cell. In fact, we are not even close to being able to design a living cell from material that does not come from already living cells. Not even close. So, it is reasonable to believe that the Creator of the first living cell is more intelligent than all our scientists today. This Creator also lived long before any human lived. And since the universe we live in has physical constants fine-tuned for life and the chemistry needed for life, it appears that this great Creator existed before the universe and made the universe and all the life that we see. Remind you of Anyone?

 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1 ESV)

 

To God be the glory!

Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .

Some of the Other Blog Posts I Have Written on Evidence for God Seen in Nature:

 

God Created the Earth to be Inhabited

How the Sun glorifies the Son

Seeing God in Creation Gives Me Courage to Keep Serving Him

Nuclear Submarines and Living Cells

Theistic Evolution Demagnifies God's Glory

Octopi from Outer Space

Behe’s Three Mighty Blows Against Darwinism

 

I also have blog posts on lots of other stuff. Here’s a small sample:

Sunflowers and Sonpeople

Mark’s Resources on Hell

Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God

What does Paul Mean by a “Spiritual Body”?

The Three Ways Jesus Saves Us from our Sins

A Model for Intercessory Prayer

Foot Theology

Practical Advice for Battles with Sin and Temptation

What’s so Great about the Great Commission?

Because the Days are Evil

Do we Kneel and Bow Down Enough?

The Book of Revelation is Practical and Applicable