#755 Resurrection and Reduplication

Dr. craig’s response

I address these important questions in my Defenders 3 lectures on Doctrine of Man, Petros, particularly lecture 9.

I do hold to mind (or soul)/body dualism, as taught by the New Testament. It seems to me that a human person just is a rational soul in a hominin body. When our body dies, our soul persists in a disembodied state until the eschatological resurrection and the reunion of our soul with a body.

In my lecture I point out that the denial of the reality of the soul is not only unbiblical but that it that it has theological consequences that are extremely serious and, indeed, undermine all of Christian theology. I mention four such consequences, the third of which is especially relevant to your question:

1. God is an unembodied mind or soul, just as we shall become disembodied souls when we die. If you do not believe that disembodied souls are possible, it's very difficult to see how you can believe in the existence of God because God is a soul without a body.

2. Free will seems to be impossible without the reality of the soul. If we are just physical, electrochemical machines, then there isn't any room for free agency.

3. Without an enduring soul, the resurrection of the body threatens to reduce to God's creating a replica of you rather than actually raising you from the dead. If you just are your body and you cease to exist when your body dies or is destroyed (say, vaporized in an atomic explosion), then when God raises the dead on the Judgment Day, why is that you rather than just a duplicate of you? What makes that you rather than a replica of you with all of your memories and other traits restored? To illustrate, typically materialists would say that what makes this podium the same podium that was here last Sunday is its material continuity. But suppose that we were to create out of nothing an exactly similar podium – a duplicate of it – not in the future but right now here on the platform next to it. Just being in a perfectly similar state wouldn’t make them the same podium, would it? So suppose that the podium were destroyed and God in the future were to make a podium that looks exactly like it. Why would it be this podium rather than a duplicate of this podium? Similarly, maybe it's not really you that is raised from the dead. You died and ceased to exist when your body died. But then at the resurrection God produces a duplicate of you. That is certainly not the biblical doctrine of the resurrection – that God is going to make clones of all of us on the Judgment Day. On the materialistic view, one has really got some explaining to do as to why God's production of the similar person on the resurrection day is really you rather than just a duplicate of you. By contrast, on dualism the soul persists through the death of the body and the intermediate state and thus ensures personal identity of the person who died with the person who then is raised on the Judgment Day.

4. The incarnation becomes very difficult if not impossible without a soul. If human beings are purely material entities, then how could the second person of the Trinity become a man? The doctrine of the incarnation is not the doctrine that the second person of the Trinity – the Logos – turned himself into a human being. I have proposed a model of the incarnation that presupposes that man has an immaterial constituent of his nature which the Logos can stand in for. But how the Logos could become flesh or have a human nature is very difficult to understand, I think, on a materialist anthropology.

In sum, it seems to me that we not only have good biblical grounds for affirming the reality of the soul and the body as distinct, but also that the denial of the soul’s reality has some very serious theological consequences which should make anyone reluctant to embrace such a monistic, materialistic anthropology.