The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 240 of 254
Bodily resurrection without dualism
If we reject dualism and believe that bodily resurrection is necessary for an afterlife, do we have any good reasons to think it will happen? The idea is clearly a hard sell in the contemporary world. You might well ask, ‘Is this not all completely absurd, quite contrary to our understanding of matter and its modes of behaviour, and therefore hopelessly mythological?’ If you’re Joseph Ratzinger, you have indeed asked just that, in exactly those words.8 It would seem to be good news for Christians if their religion didn’t commit them to a dualistic view of the mind, but fully embraced the necessity of embodiment. If you are going to believe in the life of the self after death, it’s a good idea to start with a conception of the self that is in step with our best knowledge about what people are.