evaluation of christian resurrection

STRENGTH: geach 

• Resurrection only meaningful way in which one can speak of life after death 

• Person cannot be meaningfully identified with a spiritual existence after death 

• Because people are a unity of body and soul, only meaningful way to talk about survival after death is to say that souls can be reunited ‘to such a body as would reconstitute a man identifiable with the man who died’ 

COUNTER to geach: swinburne

• As a substance dualist, Swinburne (in The Evolution of the Soul) argues that personal identity is primarily located in the non-material soul rather than the body. For Swinburne, the soul is capable of existing without the body, making concepts like near-death experiences or disembodied survival plausible 

• Geach's insistence on bodily continuity limits meaningful talk of life after death to an event (bodily resurrection) that lies entirely in the future and outside empirical possibility. 

• Swinburne would argue that if the soul can preserve memory, character, and consciousness, then it is philosophically coherent to suppose survival without a body. 

COUNTER to swinburne

• Geach might reply that personal identity without public recognisability or material continuity collapses into solipsism—how would one know that a disembodied soul is the same person? Memory alone may be unreliable. 

• He would stress that Christian eschatology is embodied—to live again means to live as a person-in-the-world, not a floating consciousness. 

WEAKNESS: metaphysical naturalism + empiricism 

• Criticism: From an empiricist or materialist standpoint (e.g., David Hume or Richard Dawkins), any talk of life after death—resurrection included—is meaningless because it makes unverifiable metaphysical claims.  

• Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion warned against speculative metaphysics, and Dawkins sees resurrection stories as mythological constructs. 

• Anthony Flew (in “The Presumption of Atheism”) would argue that unless one can empirically verify a resurrection, the concept lacks cognitive meaning 

COUNTER to empiricism

John Polkinghorne (physicist and theologian) argue that resurrection is not a scientific claim but a theological one rooted in relational trust in God’s nature. Verification is not the only measure of meaningfulness—coherence, explanatory power, and lived experience also matter. 

WEAKNESS: HICK 

• Argues against existence of permanent hell  

• Argues that if soul making theodicy is correct, punishment should be transformative + constructive and therefore cannot be permanent 

• HOWEVER: 

• Undermines god’s justice