There is no Reason to Assume I will exist after my Death.

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There is no Reason to Assume I will exist after my Death.

Introduction

The statement assumes that there is a standard belief in a life after death. The main issue when considering this assumption originates from the debate surrounding the mind and body argument.

Life can be defined as a being having both a conscious and physical functioning. Death is the cessation of the physical body functioning, yet not necessarily the cessation of existence. Can existence be dependent on the physical body (materialism) or can one exist in a disembodied state after death due to the soul (dualism)? There is still the difficulty in defining the soul as, assuming the soul exist then it is still impossible to define it with precision. The ‘concept’ of the soul can be defined as what gives life to humans; it is the immaterial or spiritual part of an individual.

Richard Dawkins would agree with this statement and I will build the main argument using his ideas.

Dawkins is a materialist and this means that he doesn’t believe in the existence of the soul. Therefore there is no chance in a life after death as there is nothing to exist after death, the mind dies with the physical body.

Dawkins sees the concept of the soul as an illusion caused by ignorance, superstition and irrational perception. He says that human consciousness is a ‘mysterious aspect of brain activity, which neither science or philosophy can understand’, it is this consciousness that is mistaken as a soul.

Dawkins connects this false belief of a soul to religion, stating that ‘the universe turns due to genetic replication and has nothing to do with a divine being’.

Plato would have disagreed with Dawkins ideas. He not only believed in the concept of the soul and its existence but also that the soul is immortal. Plato was a dualist, this means that he believed that the body and soul were separate and that therefore the soul could survive the physical death of the body in a disembodied state.

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Plato’s theory was really a discussion on the nature of the soul rather than its existence. Plato assumes the souls existence from the start and so did not consider the question of a life after death at all. Plato said the phenomenon of deju-vu was proof of the existence of the soul, the experience of deju-vu being the soul remembering or recollecting a previous existence. He reasoned that the soul has no specific evil to destroy it and therefore must be immortal, arguing that the immortality of the soul and the occurrence of deju-vu proved the existence of an afterlife. ...

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