Yes indeed but when physicists speak of energy, they refer to a different thing from when spiritualists do so. Isn't English confusing using the same word for two completely different things? However it does it so often that that's a phrase for applying the logic associated with one definition to a thing that better fits the other definition: "The fallacy of equivocation"

For example

Since only man [human] is rational,
and no woman is a man [male],
Therefore, no woman is rational.

Clearly that's nonsense. The word "man" in the first sentence means a different thing from the same word in the second sentence.

The same goes for

We are Energy,
Energy cannot be created or destroyed
Therefore We cannot be created or destroyed.

So whilst I claim no expertise in the spiritualist definition I do understand physics. The sort of energy that doesn't get created or destroyed also exists within this cup of tea in front of me. And part of that energy will shortly exist within me. The individual atoms and molecules could theoretically be tracked. Maybe in my tea is a water molecule that was once drank by Einstien or peed by Hiltler. However some of the energy is fungible it's completely interchangeable and can't be tracked. Once the the heat I take in with that beverage is joined to the heat in my body, it cannot then be said to be the same bit of heat that I pass on to my children when I hug them or that imparted to my chair when I sit on it. Yes the energy exists and always has and always will but you'd need to do a lot more than quote thermodynamics to demonstrate a sense in which this energy is "me" either before or after it is in my body.

Then if I smash the cup, all the pottery still exists. The shattered remains would weigh the same as the cup before it but it's the potter that still exists. The cup doesn't exist any more now that it has been transformed into potsherds.

There is a certain type of magical thinking that asserts eating the dead allows you to incorporate their souls. But is that really their soul or is it just the physicist's definition of energy?

In fact it is said that we are renewed every 7 years. If so then in terms of energy I'm not the same accumulation of joules as I was 7 years ago yet most would agree that I am the same person even if I've changed and grown both physically and perhaps spiritually.

If I'd only eaten peanuts in those last 7 years and all the energy in my body came from that crop I'd still be considered to have more in common with my 38 year old self than Arachis hypogaea.

It is our form rather than our substance that defines us and our form is one that is constantly transforming energy from one form into another.

It is here that I think the concept of the spirit or soul could potentially be useful. I can say that I am the same person I was 7 years ago as we share memories. However memories only go part way to express identity. Philosophers have long discussed the Ship of Theseus or "My Grandfather's Axe". British Comedy fans of a certain age will similarly consider "Trigger's Broom" We do consider even objects to have some sort of continuity of existence even as their component parts are individually replaced. We seem to share an instinctual consensus on what is persisting where. Team spirit is perhaps a less controversial but equally intangible example. The Arsenal FC I watch today have little in common with the Arsenal of my youth but they are still Arsenal. We treat them as the same entity as when they were different players, under a different manager playing at a different ground. So what is it that persists? Call is spirit, call it a soul, you could even call it a name. It's what you hope can still be found somewhere when all else appears lost and maybe in some cases in some ways it could do.

Perhaps if you have an a priori belief that all things have a sense of cyclic permanence then some of the physical laws being expressed might seem illustrative of your existing beliefs. A worthwhile validation but that's not a two way street. I believe in the laws of physics in as much as they are precise and testable. I'm afraid I can't fall back on physics to provide support for that that wider belief.

For me, if the sense in which I will persist after death is the same as the sense that I existed before birth then that's not really the soul as advertised by the Abrahamic faiths and if it refers to a cycle of reincarnation it refers to some sort of "meta me" to which I don't really identify. I see no evidence that I did exist in any sense before birth and little use for the hypothesis. The same goes for after death.

Space and time is an illusion?

@gater "For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." -Einstein.

“I regard consciousness as fundamental and matter as derivative from consciousness." – Max Planck, theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics