Fundamental to most religions is the doctrine of life after death. Certainly, if it can be shown that there is life after death then this would help count towards any argument for the existence of God. At the very least, it would raise questions concerning natural empirical laws or the view that there is nothing ‘out there’. Coupled with the belief in life after death is the question of what it is that continues after death? Talk is often of the continuance of the ‘soul’ and even many who are not religious intuitively feel that they have a ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ of some kind and are not mere machines.

How can we survive death? The mind–body problem

Dualism

The dualist approach is that there exist both a body and a mind that are distinct from each other, but also in some way interlinked.