Is a human being a soul that can survive death, or simply a body whose mind ends when the brain does?
The body and soul distinction, dualism (Plato and Descartes) and materialism (Dawkins), and the possibility of disembodied existence, reincarnation, rebirth and resurrection.
An AQA A-Level Religious Studies answer to the self, death and the afterlife, covering Plato's and Descartes's dualism, Dawkins's materialism, and the coherence of disembodied existence, reincarnation, rebirth and resurrection.
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What this dot point is asking
AQA wants you to explain the body and soul distinction, contrast dualism (Plato and Descartes) with materialism (Dawkins), and evaluate the coherence of life after death in its main forms: disembodied existence, reincarnation, rebirth and bodily resurrection.
Dualism
Plato supports immortality with several arguments in the Phaedo, including the argument from opposites (life and death generate each other in a cycle) and the argument from recollection (we recognise the Forms, such as perfect equality, which we never met in this world, so the soul must have known them before birth). Dualism in either form allows the soul to survive bodily death, but it faces the interaction problem: if mind and body are utterly different substances, how does an immaterial mind move a material body, and how does an injury to the body produce pain in the mind? Gilbert Ryle presses the further charge that dualism rests on a category mistake, the "ghost in the machine": to look for a separate mind behind the behaving body is like watching a parade of regiments and then asking where the "division" is, as though it were an extra item rather than the regiments organised. For Ryle, mental terms describe patterns of behaviour and dispositions, not a hidden inner substance.
Materialism
Richard Dawkins treats the self as the product of genes and brain, a "survival machine" for replicating DNA, with no immortal soul, so death is the simple end of the person. Soft materialism (non-reductive views) accepts the person is physical but treats consciousness as more than the firing of neurons, while hard materialism identifies mental states with brain states outright. Critics argue materialism struggles with the hard problem of consciousness (why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience at all) and with the felt unity and continuity of the self over time, which a purely physical account seems to leave out.
Life after death
- Disembodied existence: survival as a pure mind or spirit; coherent for dualists but hard to individuate and impossible to verify.
- Reincarnation and rebirth: Hindu reincarnation of an enduring atman across lives shaped by karma; Buddhist rebirth without a permanent self, a causal continuity rather than an identical soul.
- Resurrection: the Christian claim that God recreates the whole embodied person (1 Corinthians 15, the "spiritual body"). John Hick's replica theory argues a recreated replica in another world could count as the same person, addressing the identity problem.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of AQA exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
AQA 20185 marksExplain Descartes's argument that the mind and body are distinct substances.Show worked answer →
A 5-mark Paper 1 AO1 question. Markers want the substance-dualist argument set out accurately, not a general essay on the soul.
Descartes argues from the different essential properties of mind and body. The body is an extended, divisible thing (res extensa) occupying space; the mind is a thinking, indivisible thing (res cogitans). Because they have contradictory essential properties (one divisible, one not), they cannot be the same substance, so the self is essentially mind. He reinforces this with the certainty argument: I can doubt that I have a body, but I cannot doubt that I am thinking ("I think therefore I am"), so my essence is to be a thinking thing. Strong answers note this makes the soul separable from the body and so capable in principle of surviving death.
AQA 202120 marks'There can be no life after death because the self is purely physical.' Assess this view.Show worked answer →
A 20-mark Paper 1 essay, mainly AO2. Reward a balanced argument across dualism, materialism and the forms of survival.
Present the materialist case (Dawkins, and reductive views): mental states are brain states, so when the brain dies the person ends; this fits neuroscience and the dependence of mind on brain. Then give the dualist replies (Plato, Descartes): the indivisibility and certainty arguments, and the "hard problem" of consciousness that materialism struggles to explain. Evaluate the survival options: disembodied existence (coherent for dualists but hard to individuate), reincarnation and rebirth, and Christian bodily resurrection with Hick's replica theory answering the identity problem. Note Ryle's "ghost in the machine" objection to dualism. Judge, for example, that materialism is the simpler theory but leaves consciousness unexplained, so the question turns on the mind-body problem. Top-band work weighs the identity problem rather than just listing views.
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Sources & how we know this
- AQA A-level Religious Studies (7062) specification — AQA (2016)