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Write-up₁ (as at 30/08/2026 09:30:14): Resurrection

Discussion

• Thesis Text:
  1. Many people hope for some form of post-mortem survival, preferably some sort of continuation of their earthly life. Even if not a life of bliss, they hope that it will be an unending positive experience wherein they can renew acquaintance with their friends and loved ones and carry on their projects.
  2. Plato hoped for the escape of the soul from the prison of the body, but in the Abrahamic religions the hope has been for some form of Resurrection – the provision of a renewed physical existence, though the details of where this new life will be enjoyed, and the qualities of the new body, are somewhat vague.
  3. The hope of a resurrection to paradise has occasionally pernicious effects – topically these days in Shia Islam, but there have been many less destructive Christian and Jewish martyrs – where people are willing – sometimes eager – to sacrifice their earthly lives in the hope of a ‘better resurrection’.
  4. Consequently, the metaphysical² possibility³ of the resurrection of beings like us⁴ is very important.
  5. "Olson (Eric) - Life After Death and the Devastation of the Grave" - taking the resurrection body to be the pre-mortem one reconstituted in some way – claims that resurrection is metaphysically impossible. I have some sympathy for this view, but it is far from clear-cut. Historically, the possibility of the resurrection of the very same individual has been facilitated by the continuity of an immaterial soul, at one time clothed in an earthly body, later by a heavenly one. If resurrection requires substance dualism⁵ it would seem to be a long shot given the well-known objections to the physics and metaphysics thereof.
  6. It is important to understand just what is believed by intellectually-respectable Jews, Christians and Muslims. Some discussion will be had about the orthodox Christian view being that there is no continuity of matter⁶ (the conundrum about the person consumed by cannibals was early recognised), and that the resurrection body⁷ is said to be in some sense a “spiritual” body.
  7. The locus classicus for the canonical Christian account of resurrection is in St. Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, on which I’ve prepared a verse-by-verse commentary₈.
  8. A good place to start for an understanding of what resurrection meant to Christians prior to the modern era is "Bynum (Caroline) - Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200 - 1336".
  9. As for contemporary Christian understanding, "Bacchiocchi (Samuele) - Immortality or Resurrection? A Biblical Study on Human Nature and Destiny" may be a good place to start, together with "Klett (Leah MarieAnn) - NT Wright: Western Christians have misread Heaven, the End Times, spiritual warfare".
  10. One thing that strikes me is that the resurrection of Christ, taken to be the guarantee of the Christian’s own resurrection, is no such thing in the sense of “showing it can be done”. The physical⁹ and metaphysical issues in resurrecting Jesus (or Lazarus, or Jairus’s daughter, or any recently-deceased¹⁰ person whose body¹¹ is substantially intact) are much less than in the case of those whose bodies have been destroyed. Indeed, it might one day be possible¹² to resurrect the recently-deceased¹³ by way of microscopic repair; at least this seems conceivable, whereas the resurrection of a human being whose body has become dispersed and whose parts have been recycled doesn’t even seem to make sense (on a materialist¹⁴ account of what we human persons¹⁵ are).
  11. The best place to start evaluating contemporary philosophical views on the metaphysical possibility of resurrection is "Gasser (Georg), Ed. - Personal Identity and Resurrection: How Do We Survive Our Death?". This includes "Olson (Eric) - Immanent Causation and Life After Death", a more balanced account than the one cited above.
  12. The early modern concern with the topic ‘took off’ in in 1694 when John Locke (1632–1704) added the chapter (Book 2, Chapter 27) – in which he treats of persons and their persistence conditions – to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. See "Thompson (Jon W.) - Personal Identity and Resurrection: Early Modern Philosophical Perspectives".
  13. Locke’s motivation was to provide an account of resurrection that was not open to sceptical objections. At the time, when the scientific revolution was in its early days, there was a division amongst ‘natural philosophers’ as to whether ‘thinking matter’ was coherent – could ‘mere matter’ think and be conscious or was an immaterial soul needed? Locke claimed to be agnostic on the question, but his intuition was that God could have enabled things so that matter could think, and he wanted an account of personal identity in which resurrection – in the absence of a soul that would provide the link between the pre- and post-mortem individual – made sense. The important issue in resurrection – or any other survival of death – is that the survivor should be the very same individual that died, even though that individual might have changed many of his properties.
  14. Locke made the seminal distinction between the ‘person’ and the ‘human being’ – a person is – he claims – “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places”.
  15. The important point – for Locke – is that it is mental states – in particular memory – that define the person, who – he claims – can ‘hop’ from one body to another. If a prince’s consciousness ‘informs’ the body of a cobbler ‘all’ would allow that the cobbler is the prince, Locke claims. Likewise, if the resurrected individual inherits enough of the mental states of the person who died, it is the same individual for Locke and his modern followers. Locke was particularly concerned to ensure the right individual got the right judgement in the great post-mortem assize.
  16. Most contemporary philosophers – and most people, most likely – are neo-Lockeans in adopting a ‘psychological view’ of personal identity. Those holding the minority view, to which I belong, are known as ‘animalists’. They hold that human beings are essentially human animals. We survive as long as the human animal – an organism – does, irrespective of its mental states. While our mental states are – for the most part – what matter to us – we don’t cease to exist if those mental states change radically or cease altogether. My view is that personhood is a ‘phase sortal’ like being a teacher. A human being doesn’t cease to be when they lose their job or become a different individual if they change it. Similarly, a human being doesn’t literally become ‘a different person’ if they suffer a radical personality change. Neo-Lockeans worry their heads about just how much of a change of personality an individual can undergo before they become a ‘different person’. Animalists will have none of this.
  17. This distinction is important when it comes to resurrection. If we are essentially human animals, there’s a problem if we claim that the resurrected individual is the very same individual that died. Normally, we would deny that if something is totally destroyed that it – that very same thing – could be recreated. If a bicycle is dismantled, cleaned up and repaired most would agree it’s the same bicycle. But if it’s mulched up and remanufactured we might doubt it was the same one. It might be just as good, but not the very same thing any more than two exactly similar bicycles coming off the production line are identical. Atheistic animalists deny that resurrection of the very same individual makes any sort of sense₁₆.
  18. There is still – for the neo-Lockean who focuses on our psychology – something of a problem with the Christian view of resurrection. We are – presumably – not resurrected with exactly the same personalities – with all their sinful inclinations – as when we died, especially if we died in a demented state. So, just what is it that defines us – in the absence of an immaterial soul – if it is neither our bodies nor our mental states?
  19. A point that’s worth stressing – and which aligns well with the Christian view of resurrection as the means of post-mortem survival – is that we are ‘concrete particulars’ – in contemporary terms we are bits of hardware. There’s a view around amongst today’s technologists and transhumanists that we are ‘software’, ‘patterns in information space’ and that ‘we’ – that is our mental states as stored in our brain’s ‘connectome’ – might – in principle at least – be uploaded to a digital computer where we might live on indefinitely. Were this to be possible – which I very much doubt – and if a digital computer could be conscious – which I also doubt – it would be the computer (or a partition there of) that would be the new ‘us’, not the program or data.
  20. A final point has to do with first person experience – it may seem convincing but may not give the true situation. In multiple-realisation version of the teletransportation thought experiment, each ‘clone’ of you would have your memories, character, exactly similar body and so on, and would think itself ‘you’. But it would be deceived. It would only know the truth from the testimony of others or from a consideration of logic. I like to say that there is a distinction between forward and backward psychological continuity. My clone has backward psychological continuity with me – all his memories convince him he’s me. But in this case, I would have no forward psychological continuity – I just die and that’s it (or maybe I die and am resurrected somewhere completely different, taking the Christian view; but for the sake of the thought experiment, we assume secular materialism; what I don’t do is wake up on Mars).
  21. The notion of sleep is interesting. How do I know, after a peaceful night, that it’s me that wakes up in my bed? If it was not me, but some clone with my memories and so on, how would I ever know, from the inside? For all I know, yesterday’s ‘me’ went into oblivion and a new me was substituted. This new ‘me’ would think of himself as me unless someone successfully convinced him otherwise. Would this strange state of affairs really make any difference? Well, it would, in that it is we ourselves who want to survive and not some imposter just like us. It might also make an awful practical difference. Maybe in some ‘slasher movie’ version of the Truman Show there’s a big conspiracy. Each night the then ‘me’ is carted off, subjected to unspeakable tortures in order to create a clone of me that – with the willing compliance of those around me – is plopped back in my bed to awake none the wiser. That is not a good state of affairs – certainly not one conducive to a good night’s sleep should I get to know about it.
  22. Christian Philosophical Views on Personal Identity: There are three that I know of.
      1. Dualists: Relatively rare amongst contemporary philosophers, but the traditional Christian view. We are – basically – souls that ‘have’ bodies – an earthly one and later a heavenly one. The reason this is now doubted by philosophers is that there’s no scientific evidence for the existence of souls and – given the closure of physics – how could they interact with matter? Some Christian philosophers hold the view that the existence of the immaterial souls is a Christian doctrine they must believe and tough it out. I might just note that the same problem arises for ‘spirit’ if it’s taken to be some extra ‘fizz’.
      2. Materialists: Our current persistence conditions are basically those of animals. How they deal with resurrection is covered in the next session. Most Christian materialists seem to hold view the Constitution View below.
      3. Constitution View: We ‘are’ animals in the sense that we are – currently – constituted by them but are not identical to them. The analogy is with a statue and the marble of which it is made. Actually, it’s easier to explain the distinction if the statue is made of squishy clay. The statue cannot survive being squished into a ball, but the lump of clay can, so they cannot be identical (it is said; identical things have to have identical properties, including ‘modal’ ones – possible situations and all that). We are – it is claimed – essentially persons, who have a ‘first person perspective₁₇’ on the world. We are essentially embodied, but not necessarily by the same body. This ‘first person perspective’ is reified and it is claimed that it can hop from one body to another, as at the resurrection. Note that this first person perspective isn’t an immaterial soul but is something ‘had’ by the body that currently constitutes the person. I have my doubts about this. If the first person perspective is a property of a body, then can that property really hop from one body to another. And couldn’t it hop onto multiple bodies, causing the logical difficulties we’ve seen before.
         
  23. Resurrection Options for Materialists: There are three proposals by modern Christian philosophers who are (or – in Zimmerman’s, a dualist’s, case – can adopt the stance of) ‘materialists’ – in denying the existence of incorporeal souls – not put forward as ‘actual’ but to show the logical possibility of resurrection:-
      1. Body Snatching ("Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Possibility of Resurrection"): God miraculously swaps out our pre-mortem ‘corpse-to-be’ with a simulacrum and whisks away the original to the future world where it repaired and ‘spiritualised’.
      2. ‘Falling Elevator’ (think ‘Looney Tunes’ – the hero hops out of the falling elevator just before it crashes to the ground; Dean Zimmerman: "Zimmerman (Dean) - The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: The “Falling Elevator” Model", "Zimmerman (Dean) - Bodily Resurrection: The Falling Elevator Model Revisited" and "Zimmerman (Dean) - Personal Identity and the Survival of Death"): God sets up a miraculous mechanism that causes the dying body to connect to – and be continuous with – the future resurrection body in the next world. This is really a slightly less ludicrous version of the above.
      3. Luz Bone₁₈ ("Chisholm (Roderick) - Which Physical Thing Am I? An Excerpt from 'Is There a Mind-Body Problem?'"): there is some ‘atom’ or other small particle that survives corruption and is the ‘continuity particle’ on which the resurrection body is built (much like a pearl on a grain of sand). Some ancient Jews equated this, absurdly, with the Coccyx.
         

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  Further Remarks:
  1. This is a sub-topic of Life after death¹⁹, the others being:-
     1. Immortality²⁰, and
     2. Reincarnation²¹.
        
  2. To these historical options we can now add the various hopes of Transhumanism²².
  3. This topic – the subject of the projected 11th Chapter²³ of my Thesis²⁴ – will add interest, though hopefully some of the Islamist topicality (the promise of Paradise for Martyrs) will have gone by the time my Thesis is presented.
  4. I wrote various papers for an Open Bible Trust ‘away weekend’, as below. The relevant philosophical thoughts have been incorporated into this Note:-
     1. "Todman (Theo) - Resurrection",
     2. "Todman (Theo) - Thesis - 1 Corinthians: 15",
     3. "Penny (Sylvia) - The Resurrection Chapter: 1 Corinthians 15" (annotations), and
     4. "Ozanne (Charles) - If there is no resurrection of the dead … What then? An exposition of 1 Corinthians 15" (annotations)
        
  5. Currently, the categorised reading-list below includes a host of Biblical or theological discussions of resurrection of very variable quality which are irrelevant to my philosophical concerns. In the lists below, I’ve separated out what seems of value and segregated it into items that focus on philosophical matters on the one hand and those on the other that – while having some philosophical interest – are written from a religious perspective and anticipate religious motivation in the reader.
  6. There are numerous works that require serious engagement, and I need to ‘weed’ the lists so that this is clearer.