Afterlife

As science focuses exclusively on the physical, it seems to assume that the brain has a key role in the origin if not also the constitution of our consciousness; and thus the destruction of the brain, the nervous system, and the body makes it pointless or even absurd to think of any personal consciousness after death. But one need not be convinced by this. However, any effort to investigate a possible post-mortem life depends on forming a coherent conception of what such a life could be. Can we speak, without incoherence or contradiction, of a person continuing to exist after death in a disembodied state? Our concern in this study lies here. Based on Lund's view, we will present and defend an argument that one can conceive of a self who is fully embedded in the natural world and deeply embodied in a physical organism, and yet could have a rich variety of experiences in an afterworld encountered after death. In this theory, the close association of the mental and the physical is due to a causal connection - a connection that fails to establish that the physical brings the mental into existence and is compatible with theories that the source of consciousness is not in the brain (e.g., the transceiver or filter theory).

Traditionally, Christians and Muslims have held that a human person is (or has) an immaterial soul. Since there does not seem to be a place for immaterial souls in the natural world, I offer an alternative view that I call ‘Person-Body Constitutionalism’. Person-Body Constitutionalism holds that there are no (finite) immaterial entities like souls. Instead of distinguishing between souls and bodies, Constitutionalism distinguishes between whole persons and bodies. Human persons are essentially embodied, but do not essentially have the bodies that they in fact have at any given time. So, human persons, though spatially coincident with their bodies, are not identical to their bodies. Persons are distinguished from their bodies by having first-person perspectives essentially. I shall try to show that Constitutionalism is consistent with Christian doctrines. First, I set out Constitutionalism. Then, after critically discussing Thomas Aquinas’s view of Resurrection, I discuss the compatibility between Constitutionalism and the Resurrection, and an intermediate state between death and a general resurrection (e.g., Purgatory). Finally, I have a brief discussion of Constitutionalism and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The conclusion is that Person-Body Constitutionalism is congenial to these central Christian doctrines, and the existence of immaterial souls is not required for traditional Christianity.

Muslim philosophers and theologians have disputed over the animal afterlife. Most Muslim scholars hold that the Quran, Islamic narrations and rational arguments affirm the resurrection of animals in the afterlife, though there is a dispute concerning how they will be resurrected and whether they will be rewarded or punished as humans will. Beside the controversies and disputes, several reasons suggest that they have their own afterlife. To prove the animal afterlife, it is necessary to prove primarily that they have soul. Mulla Sadra has attempted to prove that animals have soul, based on the immateriality of the faculty of imagination ( al-Khayal ). Likewise, most of the reasons provided for the immateriality of human soul could be employed for the animal afterlife. The second stage is to explain the purpose of animal afterlife. Two goals could be mentioned regarding this issue: first, the compensation of evils harming them requires the afterlife. Second, some Quranic verses and Islamic narrations establish the fact that at least some animals have the intellectual faculty and thus have responsibly for their actions. Though these Quranic verses and Islamic narrations are not explicit, they can be a probable evidence for the animal afterlife. Finally, two points must be noted: first, though there are several arguments in favor of animal afterlife, there is no general agreement on it in the Islamic world. Second, the above arguments are not general, but they include merely those animals that have the faculty of sensation and have been inflicted by evils.