I feel that every living being has a divine spark from the creator, humans simply call this our soul. This divine spark is what animates a body that is otherwise composed of basic elements. what makes you different from a rock, or an organically rich puddle of goo is this divine spark.

Atheists contend that life came out of the rich primordial soup of our early planet, perhaps by a lightning strike. However, the most brilliant scientists cannot "create life" out of basic elements, they can only manipulate the DNA and characteristics of organisms already given the divine spark. Furthermore, it is basically statistically impossible that a lightning strike or other fluke event would be able to arrange the delicate cell structures and internal organs of even the simplest bacteria. Furthermore, even if a single , most basic, bacteria could be created by a fluke event, that bacteria then would have to "learn" how to eat, digest, and secrete nutrition, then it would have to "learn" how to reproduce, in order to start a basic form of life that could then evolve, otherwise it would only create a single bacteria that would then simply die, and life could not gain a foothold. Taken as a whole it proves the existence of at least some sort of divine hand, and a spark of life that animates otherwise basic elements.

Now then, I believe that the soul lasts on after death, because the divine spark is essentially energy. According to the laws of physics, energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, it merely changes forms. What form we take after death is anyone's guess, because to quote Shakespeare, death is "that undiscovered country from whose borne no traveler returns".