Abstract
If a person does not have an immaterial soul, then how can she be resurrected from the dead? Confining my discussion to the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, I shall try to answer this question in terms of my constitution view, according to which human persons are constituted by bodies, but are not identical to the bodies that constitute them. The view that I will advocate can be summarized like this: “Same person, different body, no soul.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
God’s relation to the world that He created is extremely complicated and involves (vexed and vexing) relations between time and eternity. Not only must God’s eternal actions have effects (perhaps empirically undetectable) in the world, but also there must be compatibility between God’s eternal actions and our temporal ones. This raises questions for a whole treatise, beyond the scope of this article.
- 3.
I use the terms ‘resurrection bodies’ and ‘resurrected persons’, because it is persons whom God resurrects, and, as I shall argue, in the resurrection, persons have different (imperishable) bodies.
- 4.
An object can have a primary-kind property that is not its primary-kind property contingently. I spell this out with the idea of ‘having properties derivatively’: A piece of marble can have the property of being a statue derivatively. See Chapter Eight of (Baker 2007) for details.
- 5.
As we shall see, the relation between a person and her body is constitution. A human person, is constituted at birth by a human organism.
- 6.
I take first-person perspectives to be nonCartesian; indeed, I am an ardent externalist in philosophy of mind. (Baker 2007)
- 7.
Robert Pasnau drew a useful distinction between an in-hand capacity and a remote capacity (a second-order capacity to acquire a capacity) in (Pasnau 2002, 115).
- 8.
Since a person has a first-person perspective (rudimentary or robust stage) essentially, she has it nonderivatively. Her body has a first-person perspective derivatively as well as contingently. Her body has a first-person perspective in virtue of constituting a person, who has a first-person perspective nonderivatively. A human body has a first-person perspective only at times that it constitutes a person. I take this distinction between having a property nonderivatively and having it derivatively to answer Eric Olson’s objecting that my view veers toward substance dualism. (Olson 2001)
- 9.
Since constitution is transitive, every concrete entity in the natural world is constituted ultimately by sums of physical particles, usually by different sums at different times If natural reality bottomed out in items that were not further constituted, we would have to countenance something like “simples.” Nevertheless, all the concrete entities in the world as we interact with are constituted.
- 10.
Since constitution is not composition, a constituted entity is not a candidate for “decomposition.”
- 11.
Appeal to souls would not help here. The identity of a soul depends on whose soul it is (pace Aquinas). (Baker 2005)
- 12.
In short, the property of being a person is the property of being an exemplifier of a first-person perspective essentially, where the first-person perspective either is or is almost certain to become robust. The property of being me (Lynne Baker) is the property of being this exemplifier of a first-person perspective. It is being this exemplifier of a first-person perspective that makes me me.
Peter van Inwagen has complained that I have given no noncircular informative meaning to the words ‘x and y have the same first-person perspective’. (Van Inwagen 2006) Of course. Having the same first-person perspective is too closely tied to being the same person to be characterized noncircularly.
- 13.
This is another reason to reject, as I emphatically have, a mereological approach to material objects, quite apart from any special considerations about persons. The identity of a material object does not always depend on the identity and relations of its parts. The identity of your passport depends on your identity, on whether the passport was properly authorized, etc., not on any (physical) parts. I may be what Zimmerman calls an “identity mystic,” but I believe that mereological supervenience is a nonstarter for understanding the material world. (Zimmerman 1999)
- 14.
I am putting aside the possibility of middle knowledge, which is not part of the traditional view.
- 15.
John Locke famously said that nothing could have two beginnings. Fine. In proposing the possibility of a temporal gap, I am not proposing that a person has two beginnings; when she exemplifies her first-person perspective, she is just resuming her existence; she is not starting over. (cf. the baseball game suspended for rain)
- 16.
John W. Cooper (1989) has argued that the existence of the notion of an “intermediate state” between death and resurrection, which the Bible supports, entails mind-body (or soul-body) dualism in order to account for the continuing existence of the deceased.
- 17.
This passage in I Cor. also seems to imply that there must be some kind of “intermediate state” that in which the person in existence between death and the last trumpet. If there is such an intermediate state, God could just as easily furnish an intermediate-state body of the person as He could furnish the imperishable resurrection body. (So I think that John W. Cooper was mistaken to argue that a intermediate state supports soul/body dualism.)
- 18.
Thought experiments like Parfit’s only show that there is indeterminacy; they do not call into question the existence of persons or bodies. (Baker 2007).
- 19.
Special thanks are due to Katherine Sonderegger (Sonderegger 2015) for commenting on a draft of this paper, and for lengthy discussions of the relations between God and the world.
References
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2000. Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2005. “Death and the Afterlife.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, edited by William J. Wainwright, 366–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2007. The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism. Cambridge: University Press.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2008. A Metaphysics of Ordinary Things and Why We Need It. Philosophy 81.3: 5–24.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2011. “Christian Materialism in an Age of Science.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 70: 47–59.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2013a. Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2013b. “Three-Dimensionalism Rescued: A Brief Reply to Michael Della Rocca.” Journal of Philosophy 110 (3): 166–70.
Della Rocca, Michael. 2011. “Primitive Persistence and the Impasse Between Three-Dimensionalism and Four-Dimensionalism.” Journal of Philosophy 108 (11): 591–616.
Johnston, Mark. 2010. Surviving Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Olson, Eric T. 2001. “Review of Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View.” Mind 110: 427–30.
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pasnau, Robert. 2002. Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scheffler, Samuel. 2013. Death and the Afterlife. New York: Oxford university Press.
Sonderegger, Katherine. 2015. Systematic Theology, Volume 1: TheDoctrine of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Van Inwagen, Peter. 1978. “The Possibility of Resurrection.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (2): 114–21.
Van Inwagen, Peter. 2006. “I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come.” unpublished–Online pdf. http://philosophy.nd.edu/people/all/profiles/van-inwagen-peter/documents/Resurrection.doc.
Zimmerman, Dean. 1999. “The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival.” Faith and Philosophy 16 (2): 194–212.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baker, L.R. (2017). Resurrecting Material Persons. In: Nagasawa, Y., Matheson, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-48608-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48609-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)