At a 2011 meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, N. T. Wright offered four reasons for rejecting the existence of soul. This was surprising, as many Christian philosophers had previously taken Wright's defense of a disembodied intermediate state as a defense of a substance dualist view of the soul. In this paper, I offer responses to each of Wright's objections, demonstrating that Wright's arguments fail to undermine substance dualism. In so doing, I expose how popular arguments against dualism fail, (...) such as dualism is merely an unwarranted influence of Greek culture on Christianity, and substance dualism is merely a soul-of-the-gaps hypothesis. Moreover, I demonstrate that Wright himself has offered a powerful reason for adopting substance dualism in his previous works. In conclusion I offer a view that explains why the human soul needs a resurrected body. (shrink)

Personal time, as opposed to external time, has a certain role to play in the correct account of death and immortality. But saying exactly what that role is, and what role remains for external time, is not straightforward. I formulate and defend accounts of death and immortality that specify these roles precisely.

It is widely held that the classic reassembly model of resurrection faces intractable problems. What happens to someone if God assembles two individuals at the resurrection which are equally good candidates for being the original person? If two or more people, such as a cannibal and the cannibal’s victim, were composed of the same particles at their respective deaths, can they both be resurrected? If they can, who gets the shared particles? And would an attempt to reassemble a long-gone individual (...) result in a genuine resurrection, or merely an intrinsic duplicate of the original person? In this paper, I argue that the first of these problems has, in effect, been solved by defenders of a rival view; I propose a novel solution to the second problem; and I show that the third can be solved by upgrading the naïve reassembly model to a novel variety of reassembly model. (shrink)

According to the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection, human persons will have an embodied existence in eternity. Many Christian materialists, especially Lynne Rudder Baker, Trenton Merricks, and Kevin Corcoran, argue that the doctrine of bodily resurrection creates serious problems for substance dualism (dualism). These critiques argued that bodily resurrection is made trivial by dualism, that dualism makes it difficult if not impossible to explain why we need to be embodied, or that dualism should be rejected as bodily resurrection is better (...) accounted for by a materialist view. As of yet, there has been no systematic analysis of these arguments in the literature. This paper fills that gap and argues that each of these objections to dualism fail. In making these arguments I make use of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics to provide a theory of embodiment for substance dualism. Accordingly, the body is a complex structural mode of the soul. The essence of the soul is the internal efficient cause and teleological guide of the functions and structure of the body. As such, the body is an ensouled physical structure, not a mere physical machine, but has both physical and non-physical aspects. (shrink)

Physicalist Christology is the view that God the Son, in the Incarnation, became identical with the body of Jesus. The goal of this paper is to defend PC from two recent objections. One is that if GS is a physical object, then he cannot have properties had by God. Then, by Leibniz’s law, the incarnate GS cannot be identical with the second Person of the Trinity. The other objection is that PC implies that the incarnate GS did not exist in (...) the interim period between his death and resurrection. PC then leads to the theologically absurd consequence that one of the three Persons of the Trinity did not exist during this period. I argue that the first objection fails because the very same argumentative strategy applies to the Incarnation on any view. As for the second objection, I endorse an animalist theory of death and argue that the incarnate GS continues to exist as a dead person from his death to resurrection. This shows that there is still continuing Trinity of GS during this period. (shrink)

In this article, the physicalism of Trenton Merricks is examined in relation to the Christian doctrine of the future resurrection of the body. Merricks' position is found to have serious issues relating to how a person can maintain numerical identity through a process of death and being brought back into existence at the resurrection. Merricks never provides any way of understanding how this is possible. Further, his argument seems to presuppose that human beings are merely physical beings without sufficiently grounding (...) this point. The article concludes that Merricks' physicalism cannot account for the numerical identity which is necessary for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body. (shrink)

Modal Arguments in the philosophy of mind purport to show that the body is not necessary for a human person’s existence. The key premise in these arguments are generally supported with thought experiments. I argue that Christians endorsing the Doctrine of the Resurrection have good reason to deny this key premise. Traditional Christianity affirms that eschatological human existence is an embodied existence in the very bodies we inhabited while alive. The raises the Resurrection Question: why would God go through the (...) trouble of resurrecting those bodies? I argue that adequately answering this question requires give up on Modal Arguments within the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The book offers a novel approach to the idea of divinity in guise of a philosophical doctrine called 'Logical Pantheism', according to which the only way to establish the existence of God undeniably is by equating God with Logical Space.

This paper examines whether biblical descriptions of the intermediate state imply dualism of the sort that rules out physicalism. Certain passages in the Bible seem to describe persons or souls existing without their bodies in an intermediate state between death and resurrection. For this reason, these passages appear to imply a form of dualism. Some Christian physicalists have countered that the passages in question are in fact compatible with physicalism. For it is compatible with physicalism that, although we are necessarily (...) constituted by physical bodies, we can continue to exist without our current bodies in the intermediate state by being constituted by replacement bodies. I argue that broadly Gricean considerations significantly weaken this response. In its place, I propose a new, linguistic objection to the biblical argument for dualism. The linguistic objection says that biblical descriptions of an intermediate state cannot imply dualism in the sense that contradicts physicalism because physicalism is defined by a concept of the physical derived from modern physics, and no term in the biblical languages expresses that concept. I argue that the linguistic objection is less vulnerable to Gricean considerations than the constitution objection. On the other hand the linguistic objection also makes concessions to dualism that some Christian physicalists will find unacceptable. And it may be possible to reinforce the biblical argument for dualism by appeal to recent research on ‘common-sense dualism’. The upshot for Christian physicalists who wish to remain open to the biblical case for an intermediate state is therefore partly good, partly bad. The prospects for a Biblical argument for dualism in the sense that contradicts physicalism are limited but remain open. (shrink)

I argue that ensouled animalism—the view that we are identical to animals that have immaterial souls as parts—has a pair of advantages over its two nearest rivals, materialistic animalism and pure dualism. Contra pure dualism, ensouled animalism can explain how physical predications can be literally true of us. Contra materialistic animalism, ensouled animalism can explain how animals can survive death. Furthermore, ensouled animalism has these advantages without creating any problems beyond those already faced by animalism and by belief in souls. (...) However, some animalists, including Eric Olson, think that animals cannot have immaterial parts. I present a sufficient condition for animal parthood that implies animals can have immaterial parts. Ensouled animalism is not only possible, but also doubly attractive. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, I argue that Christians should incorporate the theory of reincarnation into their belief system. The problem of the apparent disproportion between finite human sin and infinite punishment in Hell becomes far more tractable against the background of reincarnation. In the second part of the paper, I address and answer three objections that may be raised against a Christian theory of reincarnation. The first objection is based on the role of memory in identity, the (...) second points to the essential unity of body and soul, and the third revolves around the suggestion that living multiple lives may more easily lead to damnation than to salvation. (shrink)