Baker's "Death and the Afterlife"

Baker’s constitution view states that personal identity depends on mental property of the First Person Perspective. This is the ability to conceive oneself as oneself, or as a referent to the first person pronoun. This is not to say it is a being with a point of view, as mere animals do, but mere animals cannot conceive of themselves as the subject of such thoughts. Having a point of view is necessary but not alone sufficient for being a person. Having a FPP is sufficient for being a person. Further, human persons are constituted by human bodies. Now constitution is a relation between different primary kinds, which entails that they are not identical. A statue may be constituted by copper, but the statue is not identical to the statue because they have different persistence conditions. For example, a bronze statue may be flattened to make copper wire, and though the copper persists, the statue does not. On the other side of the coin, a statue may be made of marble or cheese, and the statue may persist, but the bronze does not. So the bronze constitutes the statue, but they are not identical. Likewise, if the relation between a person and his body is constitution, then a person is not identical to his body. However, the conceptual distinction between them does not imply separability. There is a real unity. So what then explains the differences between the two? According to Baker, if X constitutes Y, then some of X’s properties have their source in Y and vice-versa. So for example, I can have toenails derivatively, or the body can have moral responsibility derivatively, but I moral responsibility non-derivatively and my body has toenails non-derivatively. So, in this way, I, the human person, am constitutes by the FPP and a human body. 

Baker’s constitution view is compatible with the resurrection on three key aspects. First, the resurrection of the person states that it is bodily resurrection, and Baker’s view states that the human person is essentially bodily. Second, it allows for the identity of the pre and post resurrection human persons, since what is more central to human identity is the FPP. So long as the same FPP is embodied, the same person persists. Third, it still maintains that the resurrection is a miraculous act or gift from God, since such reconstitutions cannot be natural. Lastly, it allows for gaps of existence.

Animalism is the view that the human person is identical to a human organism. What this means for the resurrection is that since to be the same person in the future resurrection, you must have the same body in the past pre resurrection. This means either you must have the same constituent particles or the same spatiotemporal continuity of ever changing constituent cells. Both of these options makes resurrection difficult to cohere. If I must have the same constituent particles, then how do I get my particles back if some of my particles became part of another human being, as in some cannibal cases, for example? Ownership of some particles would be contested. If I need the same spatiotemporal property, then how does one explain the spatiotemporal gap between death and resurrection? It seems like you can’t. These are the challenges of animalism to resurrection.