In a post yesterday on the possibility of technological immortality and resurrection, I promised to share some thoughts on the nature of the body and soul. What follows are some random musings on the topic. They're purely speculative of course, but who knows, some of them may be right.
First, I think it very likely that whatever body we have in the next life, and I do believe we will be embodied, it won't be like this one. The bodies we currently enjoy, or are cursed with, are, or appear to be, three dimensional, but it's possible that the next world is more than three dimensional. If so, then we'll look completely different to each other there than we do here, assuming we will be able to perceive the additional dimensions.
To illustrate this imagine what a sphere would look like to inhabitants of a two-dimensional world. In a world in which there is no up or down a sphere would appear to be a straight line, like looking at a sheet of paper edge-on. Of course, this is not at all what a sphere looks like in a three-dimensional world. Likewise, even if we had the same body in eternity that we have now (a terrible prospect for some of us)it probably would not look at all the same.
If such a world does exist then perhaps death is like a character in a movie stepping off the two-dimensional screen to join the people in the three-dimensional theater much like Jeff Daniels does in The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Further, in this body we have five senses but there's no reason to believe that everything that exists is apprehensible with those five senses or that those senses could not be more acute than they are. There could be all sorts of phenomena in our world to which we are totally oblivious because either our senses lack the necessary acuity to perceive them or we simply lack the requisite senses to perceive them.
Consider what the world would look like if we could see radio waves, for example. What colors would they be? What if we had the same powers of smell as a dog? How much different would the world be?
Or imagine a man born blind and deaf walking along a city street. How would he imagine his world? He would be aware of the pavement at his feet the breeze, perhaps, in his face, the smells of the city, but that would be about it. Every now and then he'd be jostled but he would have a very limited notion of what the cause of the jostling looked like. Now imagine that suddenly he acquires both of the missing senses. I think the torrent of sensations that would pour over him would knock him to his knees in wonder and astonishment.
Maybe we are like the man with only three senses, except we have five. Even so, the world may exhibit all sorts of phenomena that we simply cannot experience because our five senses are not adequate to apprehend them all. Perhaps when we die we take on a new body, like the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and that new body enables us to experience things we could never experience before. Indeed, the bodies we have now may by comparison be no more real or substantial than the shifting arrays of phosphor dots that make up the image of a person on a television screen are like the person watching the TV.
So much for the body. What about the soul? What is soul? I prefer to think of the soul not as a ghost-like thing that resides in our bodies but rather as the totality of information comprising an exhaustive description of who we are. It's every true fact about us - our genealogy, our personal biography, our personality, our infirmities, our vices and virtues, our appearance at every moment of our life - everything. This information is our essence and it's held or stored in the mind of God which makes it eternal, or potentially so.
When we die perhaps God downloads it, or selected parts of it, into some other body, some other vessel, and thus we are reinstantiated. Because our soul is information in the mind of God, it never ceases to exist. It's always in His database, as it were, ready to be downloaded at the next iteration of our bodily existence, and to give us continuity from life to death to life.
Of course, some individuals may never have their essence reinstantiated, or God may even choose to delete it, in which case the person is annihilated. That may be what many religious traditions interpret as hell.
At any rate, because each of us is potentially eternal, each of our lives is infinitely important and meaningful. Because bodily death isn't the end of our existence we have a basis for hope that justice, meaning, and moral value exist and we have a reason for believing that the choices we make in this life really do matter. After all, our eternal destiny may hinge upon them.
RLC