Life After Death by Terence Penelhum - Essay Example

The article opens with a brief history of the belief in immortality. Immortality of the soul predates Christianity, and therefore Christianity’s belief in life after death. Plato first describes the immortal soul in Phaedo, which details the death of Socrates. Before Socrates dies, he contemplates whether or not the soul can live without the body and if death is something to be feared. Socrates arrives to the conclusion that not only does the soul live on, but death should be embraced as it means that the soul is released from the prison of the body.

Through moral reflection, people are able to tend to their soul, gradually releasing it from its physical form, but death ultimately completes this release. The aforementioned belief of death being embraced is what separates Plato’s belief of immortality with Christianity’s belief. Plato believes that death should be embraced, but Christianity, when using Jesus’ agonizing death as an example, suggests that death should be feared. Christianity perceives death as the most horrifying experience that someone can face because it is the destruction of a person.

This goes against Plato’s theory that death is a release; Socrates did not fear death, but Jesus did. This concept is elaborated further when the Christian belief of resurrection is considered, which also goes against Plato’s theory of the immortal soul. Christians hope that God will completely re-create what he has permitted death to destroy. Penelhum focuses less attention on the soul and resurrection. He points out the fact that if the new body is drastically transformed from the original body, the concept of survival is defeated.

The soul may be the same, but if the new body is significantly different from the old body, resurrection is not as much of a success as people are led to believe. One’s soul cannot be identified by someone else, and if a transformed body cannot be recognized, the person did not necessarily survive. The soul living on without a body has sparked more controversy and speculation. Human intelligence, such as seeing, hearing, and being emotionally expressive, are all physical aspects and cannot be accessed with a body.

If this is the case, survival is pointless and the soul would just simply exist. It is considered that disembodied survivors might have mental lives, that their thoughts can materialize in the world, but they would still lack the ability to perceive, which further points to a pointless existence. A disembodied soul may not even know if there are others nearby, nor would it be able to perceive a living human being. Self-identity of a disembodied soul is an even more difficult concept to grasp.

Without physical characteristics, it becomes almost impossible to recognize a disembodied soul. There would have to be substitute for the feature that establishes an identity. We would have to use mental features instead of physical to identify someone, which may or may not be a possibility. Hume believes that humans retain some form of identity in terms of mental factors, as opposed to physical factors, which would be useful in the possibility of resurrection. He looks to memory as a method to identify a soul.

Unfortunately, unless a person has concrete memories, nobody could survive a disembodied form. People are capable of remembering events that they were never part of or witnessed, which makes memory as a means of identity an uncertain method. For it to work, there would have to be something more stable beneath the thoughts, images, and feelings. Penelhum concludes that all of the theories of life