Can a person have gaps in existence? To answer this the question of what a person is must also be answered. Many Platonists believe that a person is only a soul, and nothing more. If the body did not matter, then during the Resurrection any matter available could be used, and it would not even matter if the person was revived in a similar body or not. Although not exactly the case, the credit card fraud commercials with the voices paired up to an unlikely body springs to mind at the thought of this. A person is so intimately tied up with his body that it immediately seems wrong to think of a person being attached to a different body. The body obviously matters, and the personality must be influenced by it. The personality grows and changes overtime, so the soul must be changeable by something. It does not seem unreasonable that the body is able to influence the personality that inhabits it to some degree. The body is important to the soul. A personality could inhabit a different body for a short time and remain itself, but over time the soul would be influenced and change into something else—a new person would be formed. If a person is to come back during the Resurrection as the same person, how critical is it that the body be exactly the same?
A person is influenced by everything in his body to some degree. The things that have the greatest impact are those things that he notices most regularly, and would immediately notice if something had quickly changed. There are also things of medium influence, which might take longer to notice an immediate change to. The very individual molecules that make up his body are not something that is ever noticed by an individual. While this is the matter that makes up the parts of the body that a person recognizes, it is impossible to recognize these individual molecules without help from science. Even then, tracking the fate of individual molecules is such a daunting task that the fate of certain cells is normally used as a substitute. The matter matters, but individual atoms can be identical to each other and impossible to distinguish without somehow altering the atom. The exact atoms would not be necessary for a person to survive a gap in existence, but those atoms would need to reform in the same configuration as before. This avoids the problem with cannibals—nobody needs to worry about where the matter came from, only that it is reformed into the exact same configuration as before. Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle would throw a fit at such a thing, but God is omniscient and knows the exact location of every atom and its parts.
Of course, God, being omnipotent, has the ability to just give everyone the exact same atoms anyway—it is no problem for him to make identical copies of atoms for the cannibal and the person the cannibal ate. That would be something of a miracle, and while miracles may be important to allow showing of faith to believers, miracles may cause many non-believers to become more skeptical of the faith. It seems more plausible that God would try to follow the rules that He himself set up. After all—God is supposedly infallible, so a course of action following the natural laws that he himself set up would make a lot of sense. On the atomic level, all atoms of a particular class are identical and interchangeable. There is no need for God to create matter when the individual parts of the matter are not important. The body that is made up of new matter formed with the same interconnections (perhaps even down to the quantum level) is indistinguishable from the old to the person. It serves the same functions, and has all the same attributes despite technically not being the same matter.
What of matter that is replaced gradually over the course of a person’s lifetime? This matter is replaced by natural means, and is necessary for a person to grow and continue living. It does not need God to step in and fix the matter in such a way as to allow the person to not notice the difference. The matter is replaced so slowly and in such small amounts that it is not noticed by the person, and becomes a part of the person without struggle.
When a person is dead, the soul separates from the body to suffer its punishment or rewards (St. Thomas Aquinas, The Resurrection of Man, page 136). The body then decays and becomes energy for other organisms. Aquinas says that a person is a union of the body and soul, that the soul gives existence to the matter. So the person must stop existing while the two are separated. The body decays because the soul is no longer with it to give it form, to help it fight back against the entropy of the universe. This does not mean that life is the essence of the soul, as Plato felt. If life were to be the essence of the soul, then the person would be entirely his soul, since the personality would go with the soul and leave the body after death. Aquinas and Plato both agree that the soul is incorporeal, and incorporeal things do not change very easily without something acting on them. If the soul was entirely the person, then the body and the outside world would have nothing to do with the personality and the person would be unable to grow and change as he lives his life. As stated before, it is obvious that a person’s personality changes as he lives, so it cannot be the case that the soul is entirely the person. Claiming the soul is the essence of life also implies the ability to exist in anything and give it life. If a person could go on existing and interacting in the world without a body, then it seems likely that at least some people would prefer that over a non-corporeal existence. This does not seem to be the case with the world, so Plato’s claim that the soul is the essence of life does not conform with what it actually seen.
There is one aspect of Aquinas’s view on death and the soul that does not seem to be addressed in the short articles that were assigned. Aquinas states the that soul receives the punishment for what the person does with his time on Earth. The soul has only the ability “to understand, to consider, to will” and it is unclear if emotions are considered to fall under these categories. Emotions seem to be influenced on a large scale by the body. Thoughts alone do not necessarily contain any attached emotions. If emotions do not fall under those categories, how can a person accurately be rewarded or punished? What is punishment without feelings of remorse, guilt, and pain? What is reward without feelings of mirth, joy, and pleasure? The knowledge that yes, there is a god and that one is to be forever punished is heavy indeed. However, if there are no emotions, it is just facts that are being thought, and facts by themselves are not very much of a deterrent. It is emotions that give facts meaning.
Aquinas presents a detailed account of how the body and the soul combine to become a person, and how each component falls short of the task by itself. His view presents a well-thought explanation of things found in the Bible as well as observations about the world around him. Aquinas’s writings bolstered Christian philosophy and lent itself to the ages.