Immortality And Resurrection: The Dichotomy Between Thought and Physicality.

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In religion the concept of life after death is discussed in great detail. In monotheistic religions, in particular the Christian theology, death is a place where the soul, the eternal spirit that is part of you, transcends or descends to depending on if you go to heaven or hell. The argument calls for a form of immortality of the soul and a lack of immortality of the body—the soul lives forever, the body perishes. John Hick in his excerpt from “Immortality and Resurrection” refutes the ideology that the spirit and body are dichotomous, one being everlasting and the other limited. In his view on the immortality of the human psyche, he claims that the spirit and body are connected; they are not too distinct entities. With this proclamation he attempts to prove the existence of life after death by analyzing resurrection from a psychological perspective and through thought experiments. Hick deconstructs the Platonic notion of the duality between the soul and the body. Plato, one of the most influential Greek philosophers who has affected the realm of philosophy and religion, argues that the spirit is eternal and the body a vessel. For him the spirit and the body belong to different worlds: the spirit to the “unchanging realities…or universals or eternal ideas.” and the body to the sensible world. In turn, the soul being related to a world of higher calling and truths exists the body after death and leaves the sensible world behind, proving the existence of the immortality of the soul. Also, Plato argues for the immortality of the soul by claiming that only composite things can be destroyed. The soul is not composite because it is simple—a concept that cannot be further broken down and examined. Hick shows how Plato's logic is flawed... ... middle of paper ... ...the body affect the way we interpret the world, but this does not stand in conflict with the existence of the indivisible notion of the soul. If the soul and body are two distinct entities, where the soul inhabits the physical shell, the body; then it is possible the body is just a device used to interpret the “sensible world”. Therefore, a complexity in the device interpreting the world does not correlate to the entity controlling the device being complex as well. Hick’s argument attempts to provoke a new understanding of a psychophysical person, rather than a person of two separate entities, the body and the soul. His work fails to provide convincing evidence of the proof of a psychophysical person; instead, it provides a basis for the belief in a divide between soul and body. Works Cited Hick, John. Immortality and Resurrection. Pearson Education, Inc. 1990.

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