Does it make sense to believe in life after death? Essay

In this essay I will be arguing that you can almost make no sense to believe in life before and after death and that there is no humanly logical way of proving either side of the argument. Plato acts on the words of his teacher, Socrates, and how he considered the soul to be separate from the body but linked until death. He says that the soul influences how we behave and tries to sway us from bodily desires. He says that the soul moves from one body to another when death occurs and to be born into subsequent bodies. This is a good indication from Plato to show life after death because he says the life of the soul is everlasting like an infinite line or a circle. Plato said that the soul is made up from three parts: the Logos, which is the mind and allows logic to prevail. Thymos is emotion and drives us to do heroic acts of bravery and courage. Eros equates to the appetite that drives humankind to seek out its basic bodily needs. There is no scientific way of proving life after death with this theory is correct and no way of proving it incorrect so it would be false to say that Plato’s theory is wrong because it made sense for Plato because they were his ethics, it would be bad to say that someone’s ethics were wrong because they aren’t like yours. Aristotle’s view however is quite similar in the characteristics but the concept of an everlasting soul to him makes no sense because he believed in the soul being created at birth and dying at death. This doesn’t correspond with Plato because he said that the souls come from the Forms (which is space-less and timeless) so the soul must also last forever. Aristotle believed that the soul wasn’t made from physical tissue but of powers or skill, so therefore pointless talk about separation from the body because it just wasn’t logical. The flaw in this statement is that it is impossible to connect meta-physics with logic so there is no way to measure, see, touch or knowing what the answer is. Thomas Aquinas once said that the soul has the appetite for knowledge because he said, â€Å"since the intellectual soul is capable of knowing all material things, and since in order to know a material thing there must be no material thing within it, the soul was definitely not connected and that it was an individual spiritual substance and that it could survive on its own†. Aquinas said that the soul is subsistant and therefore can’t die with the body and cant be born with it. This is like saying the soul doesn’t even exist in this form of life properly and only exists partly with your body and outside it. John Hick, a 20th century philosopher said that life after death is no where near provable but he said that a rational person would be able to accept it. John Hick discussed a theory he had that when you die, your separated soul and body will resurrect and be re-united in a new and glorified form. The example he uses is that he is giving a lecture in London at 2:00pm and died at that exact moment, his living tissue and soul were transported to New York in a new and glorified form at 2:00.0000001pm (London time) giving the exact same speech as he was in London. Once again there is no rational way of explaining life before and after death because the soul isn’t a rational thing. A philosopher, Derek Parfit created a scenario where in the future and teleportation device was created to transport a person from one place to another without any physical movement from the person or anyone or anything around that person. The teleportation device copied your living tissue and you’re DNA and even your thoughts and memories. Once the copying stage is complete, the machine will disintegrate your body and a machine at the receiving end will create an exact replica of you with everything perfectly the same (a clone). If you had done this 100 times and then one time it didn’t work to plan and it would take 30 minutes to incinerate you, you would see an exact replica of you at the other teleportation receiver. Which one are you another person would ask, but the answer would be neither of them because the real person would be the very first incinerated person because only clones were created afterwards. I think this is one of the most valid arguments because he uses knowledge and common sense in his story but doesn’t explain where the soul went. I think that there is no logical way of making sense of life after death because to have sense, you must have proof and because there is no proof of and sides of the arguments aren’t logical there is no way of making sense of them. I think that it is still rational be open to the concept of life after death.