Hick supports Irenean Theodicy. Unlike Plato, Hick suggests that the body and the soul are one. He rejects the idea that the soul survives the body at the point of death. What lives after death is a replica or a duplicate. The replica comes to life in heaven as an exact copy of the person who lived and died on earth. God creates this replica to live on after death. Hick uses the replica theory as a thought experiment – He DOES NOT actually believe this theory His idea is known as ‘The Replica Theory’:
Stage One Imagine that ‘John Smith’, who lives in America, suddenly disappears and an exact replica of John Smith appears in India. This replica is exact in every detail, including memory and emotion. The replica thinks of himself as being the John Smith who disappeared in the USA. His friends (who are naturally skeptical) carry out a series of tests, and are forced to conclude that this indeed is John Smith despite the problem of his mysterious disappearance. Stage Two Hick then asks us to imagine that instead of disappearing, John Smith dies, and at that exact moment a replica appears in India. Even with Smith’s body in the mortuary we would be forced to conclude that the replica is John Smith – we would have to admit that he had been miraculously recreated in another place. Stage Three Finally, Hick asks us to imagine that when John Smith dies, his replica is created on another world altogether. This world occupies its own separate space. It is a ‘Resurrection World’ populated by resurrected persons: “…not situated at any distance or in any direction from the objects in our present world, although each object in either world is spatially related to every other object in the same world.” John Hick Philosophy of Religion 1973 p101 Hick argued that if we can accept that these strange scenarios are in some way logically possible, then it is also logically possible for John Smith to die and a replica of him to appear in some place inhabited by resurrected beings, and therefore for life after death to be a meaningful concept. God is omnipotent, and so this is possible. Hick claims the support of orthodox Christianity for his theory: 
St Paul: “Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for human beings, another for animals, another for birds and another for fish. There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earth is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; indeed, star differs from star in glory. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.” 1 Corinthians 15:39-41 Revelation: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…” Revelation 21:1-2 In answer to the question as to whether any post-mortem existence can be verified, John Hick responds with the principle of eschatological verification: He envisages two travelers walking down a road, one of whom believes it leads to the Celestial City, and one who believes that there is no final 
destination. Which one of them is right will not be verified until they reach the end of the road, although their particular positions will have a vital influence on the manner in which they experience and interpret what happens to them along the way. Click on the picture on the right to take you to a site which is an interview which John Hick undertook covering his different views on life after death including his thoughts on the Replica Theory. Your task is to produce a story board showing the replica theory – be creative!
