Module Title: LH Topics in Philosophy of Religion (26825)

Module Level: LH
Student ID (SRN) 2136541
Essay/assignment title: Essay 2: 1500 words
Confirmed Word Count: 1499
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Explain the challenge for a materialist account of Christian life after death. What is the best
response?

In this essay, I outline the problem a materialistic account of Christian life after death faces. In

essence: if we are identical to our bodies and nothing more, then how can we be resurrected while

our bodies are rotting in a coffin (Van Inwagen 1978)? I introduce Baker’s effort to respond to the

challenge, who avoids this question by arguing that an identical body is not necessary for

resurrection (2000) However, I reveal that arguing to this end reveals problems itself. I then

introduce Zimmerman’s attempt to solve this problem (1999). He appeals to processes like nuclear

fission to argue that our body duplicates when we die, one of which stays on earth as a corpse while

the other goes to heaven. I find that cases where a person enters a vegetative state before dying

takes away from the plausibility of this account. Finally, I explore Van Inwagen’s own attempt to

solve this problem, who takes a brute force approach and suggests God creates a dummy corpse to

take the place of the one in the coffin (1978). I attempt to object against this by way of a thought

experiment but conclude that while I do weaken Van Inwagen’s argument, I do not defeat it.

Therefore, it is the most successful response.

Before I explain the challenge that faces philosophers who try to reconcile materialism with

the Christian afterlife, it is important to define materialism. In this context, materialism argues that

humans are physical beings only made up of matter. This might seem trivial, but the key to

understanding this definition is in the condition that it omits: the presence of a soul.

Next, we define Christian life after death. Although Christians do believe in resurrection into

heaven or hell, they do not believe in reincarnation into the body of another person on Earth.

With these definitions in mind, the question posed in the introduction becomes more

pressing. We cannot use the transfer of the soul into heaven as an explanation for resurrection if the

soul does not exist. Some might suggest God could recreate our bodies and send the new one to
heaven, but Van Inwagen argues that this is not enough for the continuation of personal identity. In

other words, that new person is not you, just someone who looks identical to you. He justifies this

with a thought experiment: Suppose a monastery claims to possess a manuscript by St. Augustine

that was famously burned hundreds of years before. They claim God recreated this manuscript and

gave it to them. Van Inwagen convincingly argues that this is not the true manuscript, but a phony

(1978; 116-117).

As a result, Van Inwagen believes the only way to preserve identity across resurrection is to

use the same particles that were used in the original body and to rearrange them in the same way as

before. This is a premise that Baker disagrees with.

In her view, the only thing that must be maintained across resurrection is our first-person

perspective. This is the ability to think of oneself as oneself and to ‘conceive of oneself as having a

perspective, or a subjective point of view’ (Baker 2000; 64). A person cannot exist without their first-

person perspective, but their body can exist with or without it. This is still a materialistic account of

the body, but Baker argues that we are constituted by and not identical to our bodies. What really

distinguishes us from one another is our first-person perspectives (2000).

Therefore, Baker argues that we do not need to have identical bodies with our resurrected

bodies, merely the same first-person perspective. Already her argument appears weak, as she has

not given any information as to how this transfer of first-person perspectives might be possible from

one body to another. Furthermore, her dismissal of the need to have an identical body with the

same particles after resurrection as before opens a much bigger problem for her argument.

According to Christian life after death, when you die, you may go to heaven. The question I

pose is this: when does this heaven exist? If we require that resurrected people are made up of the

exact same body they had during their life on Earth, it becomes impossible for heaven to exist at the

same time as that person’s life on Earth. Their body cannot be in two places at once and asking God

to do so is a logical impossibility akin to lifting an unliftable rock. So, heaven either exists at the end
of time or out of time. However, if you remove this condition, as Baker does, heaven can exist at any

time. To suggest otherwise would be to take away from God’s omnipotence – there is now no

physical constraint preventing someone from being alive on Earth and in heaven at the same time.

This is problematic for Baker’s argument. By her own definition, first-person perspectives are

unique: “I have the ability to think of myself in a unique way, there is no funny object that is myself-

as myself; there is no entity that is self other than the person who I am.” (2000; 68). So to have the

logical possibility of two versions of you existing at the same time with the same first-person

perspective is self-refuting. Therefore, I find this response unsuccessful.

Another response comes from Zimmerman, who accepts that our bodies on Earth must be

identical to the one in heaven (1999). However, he does not believe that it must be the exact same

body. Upon first impression, this may seem to encounter the same problems raised by Van

Inwagen’s thought experiment of St. Augustine’s manuscript (1978; 116-117). However, Van

Inwagen turns to naturally occurring phenomena such as fission and amoebas to justify his

argument. Just as things duplicate in nature, our bodies duplicate at the point of death. Our original

body stays on Earth, while our new body continues alive in heaven ( Zimmerman 1999). In this way,

Zimmerman steers clear of our initial concerns: there is now a causal relationship between our body

on earth and the one in heaven, even if they are not made of the same matter.

However, this response encounters a challenge of its own. My worry is how Zimmerman’s

theory holds in the face of people in vegetative states who never recover before death. The first

option is for the duplication to take place when the person enters the vegetative state, which is

nonsensical as this would require your body to predict the future. The second option is for the

duplication process to take place during the vegetative state, at the moment of death, as before.

This is an unconvincing conjecture: in all other cases in nature, processes like fission and amoebas

require some energy that a vegetative body would not be able to provide. One could argue that God
kickstarts the process of duplication, but in any case, such a process would surely be detectable in a

body that is otherwise completely inactive. Consequently, I find this argument unsuccessful as well.

The final argument to consider is Van Inwagen’s own response. He believes the only way to

overcome the challenge facing materialistic resurrection is to have the same body before and after

resurrection (1978). This is his way of doing so: when we die, God replaces our body with a decoy

and takes our original body to heaven. Although doing so does make God a body-snatcher, it is

logically possible. However, I have a thought experiment that weakens his response.

Suppose someone dies and is cryogenically frozen to be revived later. According to Van

Inwagen, the body being frozen is not the real me – just a decoy. So what happens at the point when

scientists discover a way to bring humans back to life? Again, we have two options. One is that he

cannot be revived; God has not placed some magical ingredient that allows life in the decoy.

However, remembering the decoy is physically identical to the original, to suggest so would be

embracing a dualistic view of the body: the idea there is a non-physical aspect of our body that

allows us to live. The other option is that he can be revived, but this person is not truly him.

Although this notion is unconvincing and weakens Van Inwagen’s argument, it does not take away

from its logical consistency. Certainly, it is possible that the revived frozen body is not truly him,

even if it would also seem strange to think so. Therefore, Van Inwagen’s response stands and

succeeds in addressing the challenge facing a materialist account of Christian life after death.

In conclusion, I find Van Inwagen’s response the most successful (1978). Although his

argument has its weaknesses, I find my objections to Baker’s (2000) and Zimmerman’s (1999)

responses more fierce. Baker falls to the possibility of existing in heaven at the same time as existing

on Earth, and Zimmerman falls to cases where the moment in between life and death is not so

obvious.
Bibliography:

Baker, L. R. (2000). Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Inwagen, P. (1978). The possibility of resurrection. International Journal for Philosophy of
Religion, 114-121.

Zimmerman, D. W. (1999). The compatibility of materialism and survival: the “falling elevator”
model. Faith and Philosophy, 16(2), 194-212.