Life After Death Essay
‘The concept of life after death is incoherent’. Discuss. (35)
For millennia, humanity has been plagued by the issues surrounding life after death because the only way of truly knowing what happens is to actually experience it, by dying. This means that we can only theorise possible outcomes and discuss key issues such as personal identity or immortality of the soul. Theories about life after death are all interested in whether or not there is a part of the human body which survives the death of all the physical parts and where or when it goes.
Dualism states that there is a distinction between our body and our actual self, commonly referred to as our soul. Generally, in dualism, the soul is viewed as immortal, and therefore our existence in the afterlife is defined by our soul. Materialism is quite the opposite, and holds that we are our bodies, nothing more, and whilst it seems natural to think that there cannot therefore be any afterlife (we clearly see our bodies decay beyond repair after death) we must consider full body resurrection as a viable option. For if we are our bodies, and somehow our body was reconstructed after our death, then we would effectively be living again, in an afterlife.
Dualism was first found in the works of Plato. He believed that the soul was immortal both before and after death, and that the body was mortal and ceased to function after death. Plato believed that your soul has always existed and always will, and that your embodied life as a human is just a small part of your existence. Plato believed that the disembodied soul was the highest form of survival because the immaterial realm of the forms is the highest form of existence. In other words Plato suggests that your embodied existence is not nearly as ideal as your disembodied existence. While I may not totally agree with his concept of Forms, I would agree with the idea that our bodies our limited to this world. It wouldn’t make sense for our bodies to continue with us into an
For millennia, humanity has been plagued by the issues surrounding life after death because the only way of truly knowing what happens is to actually experience it, by dying. This means that we can only theorise possible outcomes and discuss key issues such as personal identity or immortality of the soul. Theories about life after death are all interested in whether or not there is a part of the human body which survives the death of all the physical parts and where or when it goes.
Dualism states that there is a distinction between our body and our actual self, commonly referred to as our soul. Generally, in dualism, the soul is viewed as immortal, and therefore our existence in the afterlife is defined by our soul. Materialism is quite the opposite, and holds that we are our bodies, nothing more, and whilst it seems natural to think that there cannot therefore be any afterlife (we clearly see our bodies decay beyond repair after death) we must consider full body resurrection as a viable option. For if we are our bodies, and somehow our body was reconstructed after our death, then we would effectively be living again, in an afterlife.
Dualism was first found in the works of Plato. He believed that the soul was immortal both before and after death, and that the body was mortal and ceased to function after death. Plato believed that your soul has always existed and always will, and that your embodied life as a human is just a small part of your existence. Plato believed that the disembodied soul was the highest form of survival because the immaterial realm of the forms is the highest form of existence. In other words Plato suggests that your embodied existence is not nearly as ideal as your disembodied existence. While I may not totally agree with his concept of Forms, I would agree with the idea that our bodies our limited to this world. It wouldn’t make sense for our bodies to continue with us into an