The concept of the afterlife is incoherent
The concept of the afterlife is incoherent. Discuss.
The concepts of the afterlife held by philosophers are varied, due to the different forms to which people believe it takes. For example, there are disputes as to whether it is a physical or material world, in the form of body and/or soul, which raises both dualist and monist views.
Resurrection is a monist theory that there will be a post-mortem experience in a recreated, perfect physical human body. This is traditionally a Christian concept, and the eschatological belief entails that God will raise the dead back to life at the end of time on Judgement Day, where he will decide the fate of all individual humans – whether one should go to the eternal Kingdom of God from which sinners will be excluded - based on their morality during their earthly existence. Therefore, to Christians, the notion of an afterlife should be coherent as it is consistent with their beliefs. For example, St Paul argued that since Jesus was resurrected, Christians should also hope to go through the same experience; and that due to God having the role of creator, humans should believe that he is able to make human bodies perfect in the afterlife, as he has created many types of bodies in nature, within our current reality. It is also derived from Biblical passages, such as Ezekiel 37, where God shows Ezekiel a valley of dry bones and states that he will be able to ‘make these live again’. However, there are also other philosophers who find the idea of a bodily resurrection incoherent, as resurrection is a difficult idea to justify rationally and philosophically, and can be more easily claimed as an article of faith. For example, David Jenkins interpreted Jesus’ resurrection to have a deeper significance, rather than taking it literally at face value – “it is not a conjuring trick with bones”. It is also ambiguous what an resurrected body would look like due to the overwhelming amount of interpretations. Early Christians believed that
The concepts of the afterlife held by philosophers are varied, due to the different forms to which people believe it takes. For example, there are disputes as to whether it is a physical or material world, in the form of body and/or soul, which raises both dualist and monist views.
Resurrection is a monist theory that there will be a post-mortem experience in a recreated, perfect physical human body. This is traditionally a Christian concept, and the eschatological belief entails that God will raise the dead back to life at the end of time on Judgement Day, where he will decide the fate of all individual humans – whether one should go to the eternal Kingdom of God from which sinners will be excluded - based on their morality during their earthly existence. Therefore, to Christians, the notion of an afterlife should be coherent as it is consistent with their beliefs. For example, St Paul argued that since Jesus was resurrected, Christians should also hope to go through the same experience; and that due to God having the role of creator, humans should believe that he is able to make human bodies perfect in the afterlife, as he has created many types of bodies in nature, within our current reality. It is also derived from Biblical passages, such as Ezekiel 37, where God shows Ezekiel a valley of dry bones and states that he will be able to ‘make these live again’. However, there are also other philosophers who find the idea of a bodily resurrection incoherent, as resurrection is a difficult idea to justify rationally and philosophically, and can be more easily claimed as an article of faith. For example, David Jenkins interpreted Jesus’ resurrection to have a deeper significance, rather than taking it literally at face value – “it is not a conjuring trick with bones”. It is also ambiguous what an resurrected body would look like due to the overwhelming amount of interpretations. Early Christians believed that