The problem of the resurrection
There are three claims about the afterlife that are (or should be) affirmed by nearly all Christians, and which have very strong Scriptural support:
1. The bodily resurrection is our primary hope for life after death.
2. Some people have immediate, post-mortem, paradisiacal existence.
3. The person who dies is (numerically) the person who is resurrected.
The first claim is clearly seen throughout the writings of Paul, who repeatedly emphasizes the importance of resurrection (Rom. 8:9-23; 1 Cor. 15; 2 Cor. 4:17-5:8; 1 Thess. 4:13-18). It’s also found all across the New Testament. For example, Jesus himself emphasized that the bodily resurrection of the Israelite patriarchs is necessary for them to be “living” (Matt. 22:29-32; Mk. 12:24-27; Lk. 20:34-38). Furthermore, if bodily resurrection were merely a superfluous add-on to our post-mortem existence, and not central to life after death, then the bodily resurrection of Christ would also be merely superfluous – but Jesus’ resurrection is central to the Christian faith, so our resurrection is central to our hope. (This is Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15:1-19.)
The second claim also finds much Scriptural support. To the rebel who was crucified beside him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43). (Admittedly, if this sentence were punctuated differently – which is a subjective translation decision – it would have a different meaning.) Paul told one of his congregations that his death, for him, would be “gain” because he would “depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:21-23). Christians may reasonably disagree on who exactly will immediately enter a paradisiacal existence after death, whether this is true of just martyrs, or of all Christians, or even (in the extreme case of Hosea Ballou) all people. But I’m unaware of any Christian group that denies that anyone will immediately enter paradise after death.
The third claim follows from the first claim. If the person who is resurrected isn’t the same as the person who died, then the resurrection isn’t really our hope, but the hope of someone else who doesn’t exist yet. Even if someone with my exact memories is created at the resurrection, that means nothing to me if that person isn’t numerically identical to me.
However, these three claims might be inconsistent. Let’s see why. Claim 2 could be interpreted in two ways:
Intermediate State Thesis (IST): at least some people exist in a disembodied, paradisiacal state between death and the resurrection.
Non-Existence Thesis (NET): at least some people don’t exist between death and resurrection, so that this interval is immediate for them.
IST has been the most common view throughout Christian history, but it undercuts claim 1: if our disembodied state is paradisiacal, then bodily resurrection appears superfluous. This tension was recognized by at least some early church writers, including Irenaeus and Augustine (Turner 2015, 37-46), and it was also recognized by Aquinas, who denied IST for this reason (In Sent. IV.43.1.1; Super 1 Cor. 15.2.924). On the other hand, NET undercuts claim 3 due to a widely accepted philosophical axiom that we’ll call No Gappy Existence (NGE): it isn’t possible for one and the same thing to come into existence more than once. If a fire is started, stopped, and then started again, the second fire isn’t numerically identical to the first. It’s also impossible for a person to cease to exist altogether and then come into existence as the same person.
Therefore, the bodily resurrection poses a philosophical problem for Christians. It’s difficult to hold IST and claim 1 (the centrality of bodily resurrection) at the same time. But it’s also difficult to hold NET and claim 3 (the numerical identity of the dead and resurrected person) at the same time, given the widely accepted axiom NGE. How, then, can we interpret claims 1-3 to be self-consistent?
Substance dualism
In modern metaphysical anthropology, views about human persons are divided between dualism and physicalism. Dualism says that people are (in some sense) partially corporeal and partially incorporeal, whereas physicalism says that people are entirely corporeal and physical. The most common dualist view is called substance dualism: this is the view that the mind and body are two substances, an incorporeal one and a corporeal one. A substance is an object with independent ontological reality, so that properties (like color, shape, and size) inhere in substances, but substances don’t inhere in anything else. Substance dualism can be interpreted in two ways: either a person simply is her mind, or she is the composite of her mind and body.
Substance dualism and the resurrection
Let’s take the first interpretation. If a person is her mind, then it’s obvious how claim 2 (immediate paradisiacal existence) could be true, since she (i.e., her mind) can exist independently of a body after death. But this makes claim 2 even harder to reconcile with claim 1 (the centrality of bodily resurrection), since the body is totally superfluous to the flourishing existence of any person. In fact, two of the most historically prominent substance dualists, Plato and Descartes, both saw the body as a sort of prison for the mind/person. This view is completely foreign to the New Testament, as N. T. Wright argues strongly in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, and it’s contrary to claim 1.
What about the second interpretation? If a person is the composite of her mind and body, then claim 2 could still be true in virtue of an incorporeal part of her (i.e., her mind) that survives after death. It might also be easier to reconcile with claim 1: bodily resurrection is important because the body is a proper part of a person. But this view seems to run into insuperable difficulties about personal identity, because it means that the person isn’t a thinker or a knower, her mind is. Nor does the person do anything corporeal, her body does. Since she isn’t a substance, but merely the aggregate of two substances (mind and body), the person doesn’t actually do anything. It follows that persons, like other mere aggregates of substances (such as a table with a banana on it), are merely mental constructs. I don’t think it’s even possible to coherently accept this view, since someone who accepts it is denying that they exist. This is also contrary to claim 3 (the numerical identity of the dead and resurrected person), since that claim relies on a concept of real personal identity.
Finally, the view of the intermediate state that substance dualism implies isn’t Scriptural. Paul looked forward to the resurrection body, but didn’t want to be “unclothed,” that is, without a body (2 Cor. 5:3-4). The Hebrew Bible consistently describes those who are dead as being “no more” (Gen. 37:30; 42:13, 36; Job 27:19; Ps. 37:10, 36; 39:13; 104:35; Isa. 17:14; Jer. 31:15; Lam. 5:7; Ezek. 26:21; 27:36; 28:19; cf. Matt. 2:18), and its wisdom literature repeatedly insists that the dead cannot praise or know God (Ps. 6:4-5; 30:8-10; 88:9-12; 115:17; Isa. 38:17-19), and that their perceptual and cognitive abilities are at the very least severely impaired (Ps. 146:3-4; Ecc. 9:5-10). Both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament writers use sleep as a metaphor for death, which suggests that death impairs a person’s knowledge of the external world and her cognitive abilities. All this is contrary to substance dualism, which entails that embodiment is irrelevant to mental activity.
Substance dualism and philosophy of mind
In addition to the theological problems with substance dualism (it seems to contradict claims 1 and/or 3), there are a number of philosophical problems. The interaction problem argues that it’s impossible for a corporeal substance (the body) and an incorporeal substance (the mind) to interact with each other. Christians have good reason to accept that incorporeal substances can affect corporeal ones, since we already believe that an incorporeal God can affect the corporeal world. But the reverse is harder to affirm. Why is it the case that damage to the brain can damage a person’s perceptive and cognitive abilities, if they are attributes of a distinct substance? Why does stimulating the brain in a particular way have predictable effects on a person’s conscious experience? Why, for that matter, is the incorporeal mind connected to this particular body and not any other corporeal thing?
This leads to another problem, which is the fundamentally embodied nature of perception and cognition. If our conscious experiences are mere representations of actual things, projected on a Cartesian theater in our minds, then we can never know the corporeal world as it is. My conscious experience could be exactly the same even if the world were completely different, or didn’t exist at all. To avoid radical epistemic skepticism, there can’t be an infinite regress of representations; at some point, there must be direct perception of the external world, which implies that the mind isn’t wholly incorporeal.
Likewise, cognition is essentially embodied, since our concepts are set in a (largely subconscious) network of assumptions about the external world. To use an example given by Ed Feser (2024, chap. 7), if I go to a restaurant and say, “Bring me a steak,” I’m employing at least the concepts of steak and bringing. But this comes with background assumptions about the external world, like that the waiter is actually predisposed to bring me a steak, that she will do so on a plate, that she will put it on the table and not in my pocket, etc. Furthermore, the use of language presupposes common experience, that our words can really (and not merely seem to) refer to the same things. But if substance dualism is true, then there is no common environment, just the way things seem to each of us. Therefore, since arguments for substance dualism rely on such shared concepts, it’s self-defeating.
Physicalism
The non-dualist view of human persons is physicalism, which says that people are wholly corporeal with no incorporeal parts or properties. This comes in two flavors: reductive, which says that the mind exists but is reducible to the physical, and eliminativist, which says that mental states really don’t exist at all. I think that eliminativism is self-defeating, because to accept eliminativism requires things like concepts, beliefs, and truth, which the eliminativist denies are real things. (Eliminativist philosopher Patricia Churchland says that we need a “successor concept to truth,” that has not yet been found, which would mean that statements like “eliminativism is true” have no determinable meaning.) Even if this doesn’t mean that eliminativism itself is necessarily false, it does show that no one can coherently accept eliminativism as true.
Physicalism and the resurrection
Physicalism fails to make claims 1-3 consistent. If a person simply is, or is reducible to, her body, then she ceases to exist when the physical processes that constitute her life stop. But according to the axiom No Gappy Existence, that same person can’t begin to exist again at the resurrection; at best, a precise copy of her will begin to exist, which is contrary to claim 3.
The proposed solutions to this problem aren’t very convincing. The “simulacrum” model suggests that God transports a person’s body away at the moment of death, replacing it with a simulacrum, and keeping it in stasis until the resurrection. The “falling elevator” model suggests that a person’s body undergoes some kind of metaphysical fission at death, and one part remains on earth while the other is taken by God and kept in stasis until the resurrection. Both of these models are just strange, and rely on controversial metaphysics. The “simulacrum” model implies that God is actively deceiving us about where a person’s body is after death, and the “falling elevator” model has to say that the corpse and the body in stasis are somehow both numerically identical to the dead person’s body.
On the other hand, a physicalist could deny NGE and say that a person just ceases to exist after death and comes back into existence at the resurrection when God creates an identical body. But this also leads to strange conclusions. If all that is required for personal identity is for there to be an identical body with identical neurological states, then God could theoretically create two or more of the one and the same person by duplicating their body. Therefore, physicalism can only deny NGE at the expense of losing a robust account of numerical personal identity.
Physicalism and philosophy of mind
There are also philosophical problems with reductive physicalism. For one thing, conceptual thinking is determinate, but physical processes aren’t determinate, which entails that conceptual thinking isn’t wholly reducible to physical processes (Ross 1992; Feser 2013). One example is given by Kripke (1982, 7-54). Suppose that you have never added numbers higher than 56, and you’re asked to add 60 + 61. You answer “121,” but a skeptic asks you how you know this. Perhaps what was meant by “+” wasn’t addition, but “quaddition”:
x quus y = x + y if x, y < 57; = 5 otherwise.
The correct answer, therefore, might be 5 and not 121. This seems absurd, but the physical facts don’t militate in favor of one answer over the other; you’ve never added numbers higher than 56, so what you meant in the past by “plus” could have been addition or quaddition. Even if you consciously think, “What I mean by ‘plus’ is addition and not quaddition,” this only pushes the issue a step back. The physical facts about the words “plus” and “addition” and your neurological states when you think those words have no determinate meaning other than what we give them.
Another example is given by Quine (1960). Suppose you’re a field anthropologist following a native person who points at a rabbit and says, “Gavagai!” You might take “gavagai” to mean “rabbit,” but none of the physical facts about the situation require this; it could also mean “undetached rabbit part” or “landscape that includes at least one rabbit” or any number of other things. Even if you knew every physical fact about the native’s neurological state and the surrounding environment, you wouldn’t be able to tell which of these things he meant by “gavagai.” Surely, though, he did mean something determinate when he said “gavagai.” This implies that his concept “gavagai” isn’t reducible to physical facts.
The fact is, there can’t be an infinite regress of things that merely have meaning because of other things (which are called instrumental signs). In order for anything to have determinate meaning, the regress must stop at things that not only have meaning but are meaning (formal signs), and are therefore irreducible to physical processes. If we deny that concepts and formal functions (like addition and modus ponens) have no determinate meaning, then we deny that our own arguments are logically valid, which is self-defeating.
A related argument for the incorporeality of the intellect is that our concepts are abstract universals, but nothing physical is an abstract universal. For example, our concept “triangle” doesn’t correspond to any physical triangle, but to that which is common to all triangles (being a closed polygon with three sides). For a triangle to be physical means that it instantiates a certain way that triangles can be, and not triangularity itself. The fact that we can conceive of universals like triangularity and redness, abstracted from any concrete instantiation of those universals, implies that at least some of our concepts aren’t reducible to physical facts.
Furthermore, there are a larger number of possible concepts than possible physical configurations, which also implies that at least some concepts aren’t reducible to physical facts. In fact, there’s a potential infinity of concepts! For example, there is a possible concept for each natural number (which is an infinite set). Josh Rasmussen (2015; w/ Bailey 2020) has advanced a formal mathematical argument, based on Cantor’s Theorem, that the number of possible thoughts must in principle be larger than the number of possible physical configurations.
In summary, physicalism suffers from quite a few metaphysical problems (and the ones I mentioned here aren’t the only ones). Our conceptual abilities can’t be corporeal because concepts have determinate meaning, whereas physical processes have no inherent meaning, and concepts are abstract universals, whereas physical things are concrete particulars. Furthermore, the number of possible concepts must be larger than the number of possibly physical configurations. These facts show that our conceptual abilities (our rational intellect) must be at least partly incorporeal. (However, our perceptual abilities could be wholly corporeal.)
Next week: A solution to the problem
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