Life After Death by Terence Penelhum Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Life After Death by Terence Penelhum - Essay ExampleThe article opens with a brief history of the touch sensation in immortality. Immortality of the somebody predates Christianity, and on that pointfore Christianitys belief in life after death. Plato first describes the immortal soul in Phaedo, which details the death of Socrates. out front Socrates dies, he contemplates whether or non the soul can live without the be and if death is something to be feared. Socrates arrives to the conclusion that not only does the soul live on, only if death should be embraced as it means that the soul is released from the prison of the body. Through moral reflection, people are able to tend to their soul, gradually releasing it from its visible form, but death ultimately completes this release. The aforementioned belief of death being embraced is what separates Platos belief of immortality with Christianitys belief. Plato believes that death should be embraced, but Christianity, when using de liverer agonizing death as an example, suggests that death should be feared. Christianity perceives death as the most horrifying experience that someone can face because it is the destruction of a person. This goes against Platos theory that death is a release Socrates did not fear death, but Jesus did. This concept is elaborated set ahead when the Christian belief of resurrection is considered, which too goes against Platos theory of the immortal soul. Christians hope that God will completely re-create what he has permitted death to destroy. Penelhum focuses less attention on the soul and resurrection. He points out the fact that if the new body is drastically transformed from the original body, the concept of survival is defeated. The soul may be the same, but if the new body is significantly different from the old body, resurrection is not as much of a success as people are led to believe. Ones soul cannot be identified by someone else, and if a transformed body cannot be recog nized, the person did not necessarily survive. The soul living on without a body has sparked more controversy and speculation. Human intelligence, such as seeing, hearing, and being emotionally expressive, are all physical aspects and cannot be accessed with a body. If this is the case, survival is blunt and the soul would just simply exist. It is considered that unbodied survivors might have mental lives, that their thoughts can materialize in the world, but they would still lack the ability to perceive, which further points to a pointless existence. A disembodied soul may not even know if there are others nearby, nor would it be able to perceive a living human being. Self-identity of a disembodied soul is an even more difficult concept to grasp. Without physical characteristics, it becomes almost impossible to recognize a disembodied soul. There would have to be substitute for the feature that establishes an identity. We would have to use mental features instead of physical to i dentify someone, which may or may not be a possibility. Hume believes that humans retain some form of identity in terms of mental factors, as opposed to physical factors, which would be usable in the possibility of resurrection. He looks to memory as a method to identify a soul. Unfortunately, unless a person has concrete memories, nobody could survive a disembodied form. People are capable of remembering events that they were never part of or witnessed, which makes memory as a means of identity an uncertain method. For it to work, there would have to be something more stable beneath the thoughts, images, and feelings. Penelhum concludes that all of the theories of life