Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The concept of God
- 2 The cosmological argument
- 3 The teleological argument
- 4 The ontological argument
- 5 The moral argument
- 6 The argument from religious experience
- 7 Miracles
- 8 Faith and reason
- 9 Religious language
- 10 The problem of evil and the free-will defence
- 11 Life after death
- 12 The ‘origins’ of God and the new atheism
- Index
11 - Life after death
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The concept of God
- 2 The cosmological argument
- 3 The teleological argument
- 4 The ontological argument
- 5 The moral argument
- 6 The argument from religious experience
- 7 Miracles
- 8 Faith and reason
- 9 Religious language
- 10 The problem of evil and the free-will defence
- 11 Life after death
- 12 The ‘origins’ of God and the new atheism
- Index
Summary
Friends, I can't persuade Crito that I am Socrates here, the one who is now conversing and arranging each of the things being discussed; but he imagines I'm that dead body he'll see in a little while, so he goes and asks how he's to bury me! But as for the great case I've been arguing all this time, that when I drink the poison, I shall no longer remain with you, but shall go off and depart for some happy state of the blessed, this, I think, I'm putting to him in vain, while comforting you and myself alike.
(Plato, Phaedo)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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The God of PhilosophyAn Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, pp. 150 - 163Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011