semantics, death-afterlifeThis is the only question I encounter from believers that I just don’t have a good answer for. Energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred, right? So where does the energy in our body go when we die?
I usually end up saying “this is something we just don’t understand yet,” but I’d sure like a better answer.
Actually the scientific community has a pretty good understanding of this.
Most of the energy one’s body receives via food, oxygen and sun is used up in the course of life. Moving muscles uses energy. Maintaining a body temperature uses energy. Constructing new tissue uses energy. Eating and breathing maintains chemical reactions that construct certain elements that the body has evolved to be able to quickly utilise whenever energy is required - such as glucose, ATP, the adipose tissue (fat).
The body is not hugely efficient at using energy. For example, a contracting muscle converts chemical energy stored in ATP into movement and heat - most of it into heat, some of it into movement. Heat dissipates into the surrounding - the body becomes colder, the surroundings warmer.
When someone dies, the body contains energy in the form of heat and various chemical elements. The heat dissipates fairly quickly - the body cools, the surroundings get warmer. The chemical energy would stay in the body, except that various other organisms try to take advantage of the large amount of defenseless energy available in one place. The carcass of an animal that has died in the wild will be quickly consumed - by other animals, by insects and by bacteria. The same thing happens to humans. The energy is simply reused by other organisms.
Of course if one takes special precautions to prevent such reuse, the energy will simply stay in the body. There is absolutely nothing unusual about this. The energy has no requirement to “go” somewhere. For example, a flask of gasoline stores a large amount of energy, which stays there for as long as it isn’t exposed to oxygen and heat. Similarly, a thermos flask prevents the dissipation of heat into the surrounding (although some dissipation still occurs, so the drink eventually cools anyway).
There you go, @Dreg2010. Energy is a physical construct that describes how work occurs, so the energy would simply dissipate back into the environment. Heat would leave the body and go back into the surroundings… the chemical energy of our bodies would break down and leech into the ground or feed bacteria, et cetera.
The body’s energy takes the forms of heat and chemically-stored energy. The heat dissipates as a dead body cools, and the chemically-stored energy dissipates as soon as you decompose, are cremated, or are otherwise destroyed. As far as I know, that’s all the energy there is to account for—I don’t believe in the soul.
The reason this question seems difficult is because there is some equivocation going on in the use of the word “energy”:
Just noticing this type of equivocation hidden in a question can make it easier to answer. It is a common type of stumbling block.
What makes it difficult is:
Not sure how you are defining energy, but it would be the same thing that happens to the energy of a deceased animal. And they don’t believe an animal has an afterlife right?
The matter that makes up your body decays via chemical process that either rebind molecules in different patterns, or is released as radiation in the form of heat. Thoughts, feelings, and such (the soul) are responses to electrochemical stimuli, sending messages via electrical impulses which also, eventually disperse as radiation, probably as a function of 1/t**3 (that’s a wild guess on the functional relationship wrt time).
As I sit here my ‘energy’ is doing exactly the same as it will at the time of my death. My heat will slowly drop till I go cold (bacteria will give off some heat as my body is consumed by them). The ‘energy’ in my muscle etc will used by the same bacteria which then will be eaten in turn until my energy is spread back into the world. Nice.
depends on how you define energy, there has been no soul or spirit proven through science. if you are talking about calories they just get burned and dissapear
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