How To Be An Agnostic
among the ‘matter atoms’ in living creatures. Death is the dis-
persal of these soul atoms, a process that actually begins before
death, which explains why the older an organism becomes the
more decrepit it becomes too.
Christianity, in the theology of Thomas Aquinas, borrows
from Aristotle’s idea that the body and soul are intimately con-
nected. However, Christianity throws in its particular take on
the question of immortality: the issue becomes how Aristotle’s
affi rmation that the soul must be embodied might be reconciled
with the Christian conviction in life after bodily death. The res-
olution of this conundrum is found in the doctrine of the resur-
rection of the body. For Christians, resurrection is not conceived
of as the soul leaving the body behind, but rather as some kind
of remaking of the body and soul in eternity.
This again shifts the focus of attention, away from the nature
of the soul and to the nature of the resurrected body. It cannot
be identical with the physical body, which is clearly subject
to death. Neither is the resurrected body a kind of reproduc-
tion physical body with immortal properties, perhaps as some
contemporary transhumanists may imagine immortality as a
‘downloading’ of human identity onto a supercomputer-driven
humanoid robot. (It’s amazing how the story of resurrection
refuses to die.) Instead, Christian theology teaches that the res-
urrected body is a complete transformation of the old physical
body, though the nature of that transformation remains some-
thing of a mystery. As St Paul put it, ‘We shall all be changed, in
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’
The next big shift comes with Descartes, along with the
responses of Spinoza and Locke, the two who proposed that the
soul is in at least one sense material. That, in turn, was fi ercely
contested by Leibniz, who argued for the soul’s immateriality,
on the grounds that a material soul would deny humankind the
possibility of immortality.
A new and important strand in more recent modern philoso-
phy makes another shift in this discourse. It aligns the soul
with the person, in the abstract sense of who we are. It makes a