Why people believe in life after death
- Inequality in this one
- Unfairness of this life
- Purpose of just one life?
- ‘evidence’ of past lives / memories
- religious teachings
- can’t believe death is the end
- potential fulfilled
- reward
- punishment
- gift from God for faith
What evidence?
- Past lives
- Memories
- Jesus’ own resurrection
- Stories in the Bible of people being raised from the dead
- Logic – pain and suffering in this life – conclusion there must be another
Why others do not
- lack of believable evidence
- makes us irresponsible
- body dies – what could live on?
- Not every body does so why should anybody (Sadducees)
- Seems preferential
- What is the soul? Is there one?
- No evidence for any part of us which is ‘apart’ from the body.
What is the soul?
- Dualism – body and soul separate
- Soul is seat of consciousness
- Source of voluntary actions
- Seat of conscience
- Immortal
- Eternal
- Unchanging (according to Plato the soul becomes trapped in the body at birth only to be released on death.)
- Can be improved (according to Irenaeus and Hick)
- Gilbert Ryle ‘ghost in the machine.’
- David Hume concluded ‘we only know ourselves as a bundle of different perceptions.’
-
Rene Descartes
‘I think therefore I am.’He argued that our essential selves must be more than just matter in space;
Res cogitans (the thinking thing) res extensa (the extended thing – the body)
What kind of life after death
Reincarnation – Eastern philosophy
- soul is eternal and immortal
- so soul lives on after death
- gains new body
- when in human form it can be perfected
- attain moksha – release, dissolution – reunification with Brahman
- nirvana in buddhism
- atman
- karma
- judgment
- no memory of previous lives
Resurrection
- raising to new life of the soul
- dualism – soul and body two separate things
- Rene Descartes: res cogitans and res
extensa the thinking thing and the extended thing - Aquinas borrowed Greek idea
- St Paul: the soul is ‘raised in incorruption’
- new body in Christianity but not physical
- eternal life in heaven with God,
- place of perfection and equality
- or hell
- in Islam raising of body and soul on judgment day
- Jews no concept of life after death until the exile
- John Hick’s idea of replicas
- Lazarus and Jesus
- memory of life should be complete – because memory essential to identity