Key Words  - 

• Soul

• Immortality

• Rebirth

• Tripartite Soul 

• Substance Dualism 

• Cartesian Dualism 

• Malevolent Demon 

• ‘Cogito Ego Sum’ 

• Monism

• Materialism 

• Behaviourism 

Strengths

Descartes’ Malevolent demon analogy is convincing 

• ANALOGY: Imagine you are being tricked by a demon. The physical world (including your body) could be an illusion. However, your thoughts cannot be an illusion. Therefore, your mind is different to your body Numerous thought experiments support the idea that the mind can exist separately to the body 

• There are lots of body-swap movies which scholars have used to suggest that the idea of the mind is the real you and is separate from the body

  • EXAMPLE: Freaky Friday 

Weaknesses

Michael Lacewing: Perceiving things as separate doesn’t make them separate 

• Lacewing says that Descartes’ Dualism arguments basically come down to people saying they can imagine a mind without their body but this o 

  • ANALOGY: You might perceive Clark Kent and Superman as different but they aren’t Descartes fails to explain how the mental and physical interact 

• Dualism never really goes into how something mental can interact with the physical world The mind is really just a physical brain ▪ Another critique is that the idea of the mind is really just a physical brain and so is not a mental thing at all o 

  • COUNTER-RESPONSE: Property Dualism is a different version of Dualism which avoids this problem by arguing that the brain has both physical and mental properties 

Strengths

Richard Dawkins: There is lots of scientific evidence to support Monism 

• • MRI scans show different parts of the brain lighting up when people think about different things and this suggests that the mental is really just physical processes in the brain 

  • Furthermore, experiments on the brain have removed parts of the brain and found that it means people lose specific abilities such as communication and again this suggests the mental is really just a physical process 

Weaknesses

Materialism doesn’t recognise that we have personalities 

• Twins with the same DNA brought up by the same families have different personalities which implies that there must be something more to us than just our physical bodies Behaviourism ignores our internal thoughts 

• Behaviourists argue that saying you are happy is just a case of displaying happy behaviour 

• But this is clear wrong as people can act happy and feel sad 

Strengths

Past Lives Stories 

• • Stevensons work documentimng 1000s of stories of children especially remembering specefic past lives stories. 

Weaknesses

• Rejected by many religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) who teach about salvation, judgement and resurrection of the body – it is incompatible with many western religions

• Causes issues with personal identity – there is no reason to identify the person living now to someone who has died – it is impossible to for two individuals to be the same person

• Is Karma fair? Should you be punished for a past life crime? It is unjust for people to suffer for past faults they cannot remember

Strengths

Historical Arguments for the resurrection of Jesus  

• • Who moved the stone and other texts suggest the resuurection can be investigated 'proved'. e.g. eye witness testimony, failure of naturalistic explainations

Weaknesses

• Continuity - To resurrect this very body, God would need to ensure material continuity between the body that died and the one that is resurrected. 

• Body State - Whatever state our bodies are in when we die is what caused us to die, and so this problem would need to be fixed in order for us to continue to live. 

• You cannot resurrect a body in exactly the same state that caused it to die!

• Same Body – Same Person: If my perishable body is ‘changed in a flash’ into an imperishable body, how is it the same body at all? 

• What age will my body be resurrected as? 

Strengths

Offers a model consistent with 'materialism' and ife after death but does not claim to be true  

• • Hick did not claim his view was true only that he was trying to show that life after dath was not logically impossible.

Stupported by NDEs and past lives stories

Weaknesses

• Hicks pluralist view on life after death is rejected by Christians – they only accept salvation through Jesus

• There is no incentive to live a good life – you may as well be as sinful as you like if an afterlife in guaranteed

• Is a replica really identical to an original? Are you really the same person if you have a replica body?

• Conintuity of identity problem