Let me put this argument into another form, one which might shed some light. I’ll use the same form as your argument above and parody it.
Authors believe that a “story” is made of a soul – the ideas (theme, plot, characters, setting, etc.,) – and matter – the book (the paper, ink and cardboard that embodies the ideas.) The ideas, however, are immaterial things, yet they are the “form” of the story. If the ideas get separated from the physical, material book, say, when a story is written in a foreign language and that language dies or no one is around who can translate it, then the story could be said to be “dead.” Form is separated from the matter.
The ideas, however, cannot occupy any room since they are immaterial. This means that the story cannot be located by anyone. In fact, if your logic holds, then not even God can “locate” the story since it is immaterial and cannot occupy any room. Hence the concept of resurrecting a story is false.
Furthermore, when anyone reads the story, they are essentially breathing life into the cold, dead text (ink on paper,) by collecting together ideas and meaning which are neither found in space or take up room. In essence, a reader “resurrects” a story after it has been written. You would say that is “logically impossible” since the meaning or “form” of the story is not locatable in space or does it “take up room.” How, then, do readers breathe meaning into the materials of ink and paper when they read?
Unfortunately, you also forget a few other things.
- God is the original author of the “story” – the body with its form, the soul. Ergo, he can rewrite it, just like the original human author of a story could reconstitute it, especially easy if the physical book (the body of the story) remains.
- God is all-knowing (and presumably never forgets anything because he would know what he forgot,) ergo resurrecting a human being – re-assembling the body and soul into a human being would be as easy for God as it would be easy for an author with perfect memory to re-write a story – putting the same ideas into the same words embodied into book form even if all the extant copies were destroyed. The fact that those ideas are not locatable nor “take up room” in space is irrelevant as to whether the author with perfect memory could re-write (resurrect) the story.
If a human author with perfect memory could re-write the story, then an all-knowing, all-powerful God could reconstruct (resurrect) a human being.
- Resurrection does not, in Catholic theology, mean that God places the soul in the same worn out body. It means that God places the perfected soul in a glorified body. That would be like writing an improved version of the story on brand new paper using even better expressions of words to convey a more perfect meaning.
- Even human beings (who are not the original authors) can re-assemble a story when the form (meaning) is separated from the body (textual material) and the “story” is essentially dead. Egyptologists have “resurrected” a great deal of the Egyptian “story” using the decoded “dead” scripts (hieroglyphics and demotics) found on the Rosetta Stone. If humans can do that, it would seem God ought to be able to do something analogous with regard to the form of human beings.
We are talking about all-knowing and all-powerful not just any being limited to time and space, correct?
