John H. Hick, Philosophy of Religion (3d edition), 1983.
CHAPTER NINE
Human Destiny: Immortality and Resurrection
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
Some kind of distinction between physical body and immaterial or semi-material soul seems to be as old as human culture; the existence of such a distinction has been indicated by the manner of burial of the earliest human skeletons yet discovered. Anthropologists offer various conjectures about the origin of the distinction: perhaps it was first suggested by memories of dead persons, by dreams of them, by the sight of reflections of oneself in water and on other bright surfaces, or by meditation upon the significance of religious rites which grew up spontaneously in face of the fact of death.
It was Plato (428/7-348/7 B.C.), the philosopher who has most deeply and lastingly influenced western culture, who systematically developed the body-mind dichotomy and first attempted to prove the immortality of the soul.1
Plato argues that although the body belongs to the sensible world2 and shares its changing and impermanent nature, the intellect is related to the unchanging realities of which we are aware when we think not of particular good things but of Goodness itself, not of specific just acts but of Justice itself, and of the other "universals" or eternal Ideas by participation in which physical things and events have their own specific characteristics. Being related to this higher and abiding realm rather than to the evanescent world of sense, the soul is immortal. Hence, one who devotes one's life to the contemplation of eternal realities rather than to the gratification of the fleeting desires of the body will find at death that whereas one's body turns to dust, one's soul gravitates to the realm of the unchanging, there to live forever. Plato painted an awe-inspiring picture, of haunting beauty and persuasiveness, which has moved and elevated the minds of men and women in many different centuries and lands. Nevertheless, it is not today (as it was during the first centuries of the Christian era) the common philosophy of the west; and a demonstration of immortality which presupposes Plato's metaphysical system cannot claim to constitute a^proof for a twentieth-century person.
Plato used the further argument that the only things that can suffer destruction are those which are composite, since to destroy something means to disintegrate it into its constituent parts. All material bodies are composite; the soul, however, is simple and therefore imperishable. This argument was adopted by Aquinas and became standard in Roman Catholic theology, as in the following passage from the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain:
A spiritual soul cannot be corrupted, since it possesses no matter: it cannot be disintegrated, since it has no substantial parts; it cannot lose its individual unity, since it is self-subsisting, nor its internal energy, since it contains within itself all the sources of its energies. The human soul cannot die. Once it exists, it cannot disappear; it will necessarily exist for ever, endure without end. Thus, philosophic reason, put to work by a great metaphysician Thomas Aquinas, is able to prove the immortality of the human soul in a demonstrative manner.3This type of reasoning has been criticized on several grounds. Kant pointed out that although it is true that a simple substance cannot disintegrate, consciousness may nevertheless cease to exist through the diminution of ite intensity to zero.4 Modern psychology has also questioned the basic premise that the mind is a simple entity It seems instead to be a structure of only relative unity, normally fairly stable and tightly integrated but capable under stress of various degrees of division and dissolution. This comment from psychology makes it clear that the assumption that the soul is a simple substance is not an empirical observation but a nietarjhysical theory. As such, it cannot provide the basis for a general proof of imrnortality.
The body-soul distinction, first formulated as a philosophical doctrine in ancient Greece, was baptized into Christianity, ran through the medieval period, and entered the modern world with the public status of a self-evident truth when it was redefined in the seventeenth century by Descartes. Since World War II, however, the Cartesian mind-matter dualism, having been taken for granted for many centuries, has been strongly criticized by philosophers of the contemporary analytical school.5 It is argued that the words that describe mental characteristics and operations -- such as "intelligent," "thoughtful," "carefree," "happy," "calculating," and the like -- apply in practice to types of human behavior and to behavioral dispositions. They refer to the empirical individual, the observable human being who is born and grows and acts and feels and dies, and not to the shadowy proceedings of a mysterious "ghost in the machine." An individual is thus very much what he or she appears to be -- a creature of flesh and blood, who behaves and is capable of behaving in a characteristic range of ways -- rather than a nonphysical soul incomprehensibly interacting with a physical body.
As a result of this development, much mid-twentieth-century philosophy has come to see the human being as in the biblical writings, not as an eternal soul temporarily attached to a mortal body, but as a form of finite, mortal, psychophysical life. Thus, the Old Testament scholar J. Pedersen said of the Hebrews that for them "the body is the soul in its outward form."6 This way of thinking has led to quite a different conception of death from that found in Plato and the Neoplatonic strand in European thought.
1 Phaedo.
2 The world known to us through our physical senses.
3 Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd , and New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p 60.
4 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Dialectic, "Refutation of Mendelssohn's Proof of the Permanence of the Soul."
5 Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1949 and New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975) is a classic statement of this critique.
6 Israel (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), I, 170.
THE RE-CREATION OF THE PSYCHOPHYSICAL PERSON
Only toward the end of the Old Testament period did afterlife beliefs come to have any real importance within Judaism. Previously, Hebrew religious insight had focused so fully upon God's covenant with the nation, as an organism that continued through the centuries while successive generations lived and died, that the thought of a divine purpose for the individual, a purpose transcending this present life, developed only when the breakdown of the nation as a political entity threw into prominence the individual and the problem of the individual's destiny.
When a positive conviction arose of God's purpose holding each man and woman in being beyond the crisis of death, this conviction took the non-Platonic form of belief in the resurrection pf the body. By the turn of the eras, this had become an article of faith for one Jewish sect, the Pharisees, although it was still rejected as an innovation by the more conservative Sadducees.
The religious difference between the Platonic belief in the immortality of the soul, and the Judaic-Christian belief in the resurrection of the bodv is that the latter postulates a special divine re-creation. This produces a sense of utter dependence upon God in the hour of death, a feeling that is in accordance with the biblical understanding of the human being as having been formed out of "the dust of the earth,"7 a product (as we say today) of the slow evolution of life from its lowly beginnings in the primeval slime. Hence, in the Jewish and Christian conception, death is something real and fearful. It is not thought to be like walking from one room to another, or like taking off an old coat and putting on a new one. It means sheer unqualified extinction -- passing out from the lighted circle of life into "death's dateless night." Only through the sovereign creative love of God can there be a new existence beyond the grave.
What does "the resurrection of the dead" mean? Saint Paul's discussion provides the basic Christian answer to this question.8 His conception of the general resurrection (distinguished from the unique resurrection of Jesus) has nothing to do with the resuscitation of corpses in a cemetery. It concerns God's re-creation or reconstitution of the human psychophysical individual, not as the organism that has died but as a soma pneumatikon, a "spiritual body," inhabiting a spiritual world as the physical body inhabits our present material world.
A major problem confronting any such doctrine is that of providing criteria of personal identity to link the earthly life and the resurrection life. Paul does not specifically consider this question, but one may perhaps develop his thought along lines such as the following.9
Suppose, first, that someone -- John Smith -- living in the United States were suddenly and inexplicably to disappear before the eyes of his friends, and that at the same moment an exact replica of him were inexplicably to appear in India. The person who appears in India is exactly similar in both physical and mental characteristics to the person who disappeared in America. There is continuity of memory, complete similarly of bodily features including fingerprints, hair and eye coloration, and stomach contents, and also of beliefs, habits, emotions, and mental dispositions. Further, the "John Smith" replica thinks of himself as being the John Smith who disappeared in the United States. After all possible tests have been made and have proved positive, the factors leading his friends to accept "John Smith" as John Smith would surely prevail and would cause them to overlook even his mysterious transference from one continent to another, rather than treat "John Smith," with all of John Smith's memories and other characteristics, as someone other than John Smith.
Suppose, second, that our John Smith, instead of inexplicably disappearing, dies but that at the moment of his death a "John Smith" replica, again complete with memories and all other characteristics, appears in India. Even with the corpse on our hands, would, I think, still have to accept this "John Smith" as the John Smith who had died. We would just have to say that he had been miraculously re-created in another place.
Now suppose, third, that on John Smith's death the "John Smith" replica appears, not in India, but as a resurrection replica in a different world altogether, a resurrection world inhabited only by resurrected persons. This world occupies its own space distinct from that with which we are now familiar. That is to say, an object in the resurrection world is 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.
This supposition provides a model by which one may begin to conceive of the divine re-creation of the embodied human personality. In this model, the element of the strange and mysterious has been reduced to a minimum by one's following the view of some of the early Church Fathers that the resurrection body has the same shape as the physical body.10 and ignoring Paul's own hint that it may be as unlike the physical body as a full grain of wheat differs from the wheat seed.11
What is the basis for this Judaic-Christian belief in the divine re-creation or reconstitution of the human personality after death? There is, of course, an argument frorn authority, in that lite after death is taught throughout the New Testament (although very rarely in the Old Testament). More basically, though, belief in the resurrection arises as a corollary of faith in the sovereign purpose of God, which is not restricted by death and which holds us in being beyond our natural mortality. In a similar vein it is argued that if it be the divine plan to create finite persons to exist in fellowship with God, then it contradicts both that intention and God's love for the human creatures if God allows men and women to pass out of existence when the divine purpose for them still remains largely unfulfilled.
It is this promised fulfillment of God's purpose for the individual, in which the full possibilities of human nature will be realized, that constitutes the "heaven" symbolized in the New Testament as a joyous banquet in which all and sundry rejoice together. As we saw when discussing the problem of evil, it is questionable whether any theodicy can succeed without drawing into itself this eschatological12 faith in an eternal, and therefore infinite, good which thus outweighs all the pains and sorrows that have been endured on the way to it.
Balancing the idea of heaven in Christian tradition is the idea of hell. This, too, is relevant to the problem of theodicy. Just as the reconciling of God's goodness and power with the fact of evil requires that out of the travail of history there shall come in the end an eternal good for humanity, so likewise it would seem to preclude eternal human misery. The only kind of evil that is finally incompatible with God's unlimited power and love would be utterly pointless and wasted suffering, pain which is never redeemed and worked into the fulfilling of God's good purpose. Unending torment would constitute precisely such suffering; for being eternal, it could never lead to a good end beyond itself. Thus, hell as conceived by its enthusiasts, such as Augustine or Calvin, is a major part of the problem of evil! If hell is construed as eternal torment, the theological motive behind the idea is directly at variance with the urge to seek a theodicy. However, it is by no means clear that the doctrine of eternal punishment can claim a secure New Testament basis.13 If, on the other hand, "hell" means a continuation of the purgatorial suffering often experienced in this life, and leading eventually to the high good of heaven, it no longer stands in conflict with the needs of theodicy. Again, the idea of hell may be deliteralized and valued as a powerful and pregnant symbol of the grave responsibility inherent in our human freedom in relation to our Maker.
7 Genesis 2:7; Psalm 103:14.
8 I Corinthians 15.
9 The following paragraphs are adapted, with permission, from a section of my article, "Theology and Verification," published in Theology Today (April 1960) and reprinted in The Existence of God (New Vork: The Macmillan Company, 1964) and elsewhere.
10 For example, Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book II, Chap. 34, para. 1.
11 I Corinthians 15:37.
12 From the Greek eschaton, end.
13 The Greek word aionios, which is used in the New Testament and which is usually translated as "eternal" or "everlasting," can bear either this meaning or the more limited meaning of "for the aeon, or age."
DOES PARAPSYCHOLOGY HELP?
The spiritual movement claims that life after death has been proved by well-attested cases of communication between the living and the "dead." During the closing quarter of the nineteenth century and the decades of the present century this claim has been made the subject of careful and prolonged study by a number of responsible and competent persons. This work, which may be approximately dated from tne founding in London of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, is known either by the name adopted by that society or in the United States by the name "parapsychology."
Approaching the subject from the standpoint of our interest in this chapter, we may initially divide the phenomena studied by the parapsychologist into two groups. There are those that involve no reference to the idea of a life after death, chief among these being psychokinesis (PK) and extrasensory perception (ESP) in its various forms (such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition). There are also those phenomena that raise the question of personal survival after death, such as the apparitions and other sensory manifestations of dead persons and the "spirit messages" received through mediums. This division is, however, only of preliminary use, for ESP has emerged as a clue to the understanding of much that occurs in the second group. We shall begin with a brief outline of the reasons that have induced the majority of workers in this field to be willing to postulate so strange an occurrence as telepathy.
Telepathy is a name for the mysterious fact that sometimes a thought in the mind of one person apparently causes a similar or associated thought to occur to someone else when there are no normal means of communication between them, and under circumstances such that mere coincidence seems to be excluded.
For example, one person may draw a series of pictures or diagrams on paper and somehow transmit an impression of these to someone else in another room who then draws recognizable reproductions of them. This might well be a coincidence in the case of a single successful reproduction; but can a series_consist entirely of coincidences,?
Experiments have been devised to measure the probability of chance coincidence in supposed cases of telepathy. In the simplest of these, cards printed in turn with five different symbols are used. A pack of fifty, consisting often bearing each symbol, is then thoroughly shuffled, and the sender concentrates on the cards one at a time while the receiver (who of course can see neither sender nor cards) tries to write down the correct order of symbols. This procedure is repeated, with constant reshuffling, hundreds or thousands of times. Since there are only five different symbols, a random guess would stand one chance in five of being correct. Consequently, on the assumption that only "chance" is operating, the receiver should be right in about 20 percent of his or her tries and wrong in about 80 percent; the longer the series, the closer should be the approach to this proportion. However, good telepathic subjects are right in a far larger number of cases than can be reconciled with random guessing. The deviation from chance expectation can be converted mathematically into "odds against chance" (increasing as the proportion of hits is maintained over a longer and longer series of tries). In this way, odds of over a million to one have been recorded. J. B. Rhine (Duke University) has reported results showing "anti- chance" values ranging from seven (which equals odds against chance of 100,000 to one) to eighty-two (which converts the odds against chance to billions).15 S. G. Soal (London University) has reported positive results for precognitive telepathy with odds against chance of 1035 x 5, or of billions to one.16 The work of both these researchers has been criticized, and a complex controversy surrounds them; on the other hand, other researchers have recorded similar results.17 In the light of these reports, it is difficult to deny that some positive factor, and not merely "chance," is operating. "Telepathy" is simply a name for this unknown positive factor.
How does telepathy operate? Only negative conclusions seem to be justified to date. It can, for example, be said with reasonable certainty that telepathy does not consist of any kind of physical radiation analogous to radio waves. First, telepathy is not delayed or weakened in proportion to distance, as are all known forms of radiation; second, there is no organ in the brain or elsewhere that can plausibly be regarded as its sending or receiving center. Telepathy appears to be a purely mental occurrence.
It is not, however, a matter of transferring or transporting a thought out of one mind into another -- if, indeed, such an idea makes sense at all. The telepathized thought does not leave the sender's consciousness in order to enter that of the receiver. What happens would be better described by saying that the sender's thought gives rise to a mental "echo" in the mind of the receiver. This "echo" occurs at the unconscious level, and consequently the version of it that rises into the receiver's consciousness may be only fragmentary and may be distorted or symbolized in various ways, as in dreams.
According to one theory that has been tentatively suggested to explain telepathy, our minds are separate and mutually insulated only at the conscious (and preconscious) level, but at the deepest level of the unconscious we are constantly influencing one another, and it is at this leyel that telepathy takes place.18
How is a telepathized thought directed to one particular receiver among so many? Apparently the thoughts are directed by some link of emotion or common interest. For example, two friends are sometimes telepathically aware of any grave crisis or shock experienced by the other, even though they are at opposite ends of the earth.
We shall turn now to the other branch of parapsychology, which has more obvious bearing upon our subject. The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research contain a large number of carefully recorded and satisfactorily attested cases of the appearance of the figure of someone who has recently died to living people (in rare instances to more than one at a time) who were, in many cases, at a distance and unaware of the death. The S.P.R. reports also establish beyond reasonable doubt that the minds that operate in the mediumistic trance, purporting to be spirits of the departed, sometimes give personal information that the medium could not have acquired by normal means, and at times even give information, later verified, that had not been known to any living person.19
On the other hand, physical happenings such as the "materializations" of spirit forms in a visible and tangible form, are much more doubtful. However, even if we discount the entire range of physical phenomena, it remains true that the best cases of trance utterance are impressive and puzzling, and taken at face value are indicative of survival and communication after death. If, through a medium, one talks with an intelligence that gives a coherent impression of being an intimately known friend who has died and who establishes identity by a wealth of private information and indefinable personal characteristics -- as has occasionally happened -- then we cannot dismiss without careful trial the theorv that what is taking place is the return of a consciousness from the spirit world.
However, the advance of knowledge in the other branch of parapsychology, centering upon the study of extrasensory perception, has thrown unexpected light upon this apparent commerce with the departed, for it suggests that unconscious telepathic contact between the medium and his or her client is an important and possibly a sufficient explanatory factor. This was vividly illustrated by the experience of two women who decided to test the spirits by taking into their minds, over a period of weeks, the personality and atmosphere of an entirely imaginary character in an unpublished novel written by one of them. After thus filling their minds with the characteristics of this fictitious person, they went to a reputable medium, who proceeded to describe accurately their imaginary friend as a visitant from beyond the grave and to deliver appropriate messages from him.
An even more striking case is that of the "direct voice" medium (a medium in whose seances the voice of the communicating "spirit" is heard apparently speaking out of the air) who produced the spirit of one "Gordon Davis," who spoke in his own recognizable voice, displayed considerable knowledge about Gordon Davis, and remembered his death. This was extremely impressive until it was discovered that Gordon Davis was still alive; he was a real-estate agent and had been trying to sell a house at the time when the seance took place!20
Such cases suggest that genuine mediums are simply persons of exceptional telejaathic sensitiveness who unconsciously derive the "spirits" from their clients' minds.
In connection with "ghosts" in the sense of apparitions of the dead, it has been established that there can be "meaningful hallucinations," the source of which is almost certainly telepathic. To quote a classic and somewhat dramatic example: a woman sitting by a lake sees the figure of a man running toward the lake and throwing himself in. A few days later a man commits suicide by throwing himself into this same lake. Presumably, the explanation of the vision is that the man's thought while he was contemplating suicide had been telepathically projected onto the scene via the woman's mind.21
In many of the cases recorded there is delayed action. The telepathically projected thought lingers in the recipient's unconscious mind until a suitable state of inattention to the outside world enables it to appear to the conscious mind in a dramatized form -- for example, by a hallucinatory voice or vision -- by means of the same mechanism that operates in dreams.
If phantoms of the living can be created by previously experienced thoughts and emotions of the person whom they represent, the parallel possibility arises that phantoms of the dead are caused by thoughts and emotions that were experienced by the person represented when he or she was alive. In other words, ghosts may be "psychic footprints," a kind of mental trace left behind by the dead but not involving the presence or even the continued existence of those whom they represent.
l4 The list of past presidents of the Society for Psychical Research includes the philosophers Henri Bergson, William James, Hans Driesch, Henry Siddgwick, F. C. Schiller, C. D. Broad, and H. H. Price; the psychologists William McDougall, Gardner Murphy, Franklin Prince, and R. H. Thouless; the physicists Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Barrett and Lord Rayleigh; and the classicist Gilbert Murray.
15 J B. Rhine, Extrasensory Perception (Boston. Society for Psychical Research, 1935), Table XLIII, p 162. See also Rhme, New Frontiers of the Mind (New York Farrar and Rmehart, Inc , 1937), pp 69f
16 G. Soal, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, XLVI, 152-98 and XLVII, 21-150. See also Soal's The Experimental Situation in Psychical Research (London The Society for Psychical Research, 1947).
17 The most comprehensive up-to-date account of the evidence for ESP, together with competent discussions of its significance, is to be found in Benjamin Wolman, ed , Handbook of Parapsychology (Van Nostrand, 1977) For the important Russian work see I. I. Vasiliev, Experiments in Distant Influence (previously Experiments in Mental Suggestion, 1963) (E. O. Dutton, 1976)
18 Carrington, Telepathy (London. Methuen, 1945) Chaps 6-8
19 A famous example is the Chaffin will case, recounted in many books, such as C. D. Broad, Lectures on Psychical Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and New York: Humanities Press, 1962), pp. 137-39. (This, incidentally, remains one of the best books on parapsychology.)
20 S. G. Soal, "A Report of Some Communications Received through Mrs. Blanche Cooper," Sec. 4, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, XXXV, 560-89.
21 F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1903 and New York: Arno Press, 1975), I, 270-71. This is a classic work, still of great interest.
RESUSCITATION CASES
Yet another range of phenomena that have recently attracted considerable interest consists of reports of the experiences of people who have been resuscitated after having been declared dead.22 The periods during which they were apparently dead vary from a few seconds to twenty minutes or even more. These reports include the following elements, though not usually all on the same occasion: an initial loud noise; a sensation as of being drawn through a dark tunnel-like space; emergence into a "world" of light and beauty; meeting with relatives and friends who had died; encounter with a "being of light" of immense moral or spiritual impressiveness, who is assumed by Christians to be Christ and by others to be an angel or a deity; an extremely vivid and almost instantaneous visual review of one's life; approach to a border, sensed to be the final division between this life and the next; and being sent or drawn back to the earthly body. Generally, those who have had this kind of experience are reluctant to speak about such hard-to-describe and hard-to-believe phenomena, but, characteristically, their attitude toward death has changed and they now think of their own future death without fear or even with positive anticipation.
Prior to such visual and auditory sequences there is also often an "out-of- the-body" experience, a consciousness of floating above one's own body and seeing it lying in bed or on the ground or the operating table. There is a growing literature concerning such "out-of-the-body" experiences, whether at the time of death or during life.23
Whether or not the resuscitation cases give us reports of the experiences of people who have actually died, and thus provide information about a life to come, it is at present impossible to determine. Do these accounts describe the first phase of another life, or perhaps a transitional stage before the connection between mind and body is finally broken; or do they describe only the last flickers of dream activity before the brain finally loses oxygen? It is to be hoped that further research may find a way to settle this question.
All these considerations suggest the need for caution in assessing the findings of parapsychology.24 However, this caution should lead to further investigations, not to a closing of the issues. In the meantime one would be careful not to confuse absence of knowledge with knowledge of absence.
22 The recent wave of interest began with the publication in 1975 of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (Atlanta: Mockingbird Books), and has been fed by a growing number of other books, including Raymond Moody, Reflections on Life after Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1977); Karlis Otis and Erlendur Haraldsson, At the Hour of Death (New York: Avon Books, 1977); Maurice Rawlings, Beyond Death's Door (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1978, and London: Sheldon Press, 1979).
23 For example, Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, The Phenomena of Astral Projection (London: Rider, 1951); Robert Crookall, The Study and Practice of Astral Projection (London: Aquarian Press, 1961); Celia Green, Out-of-the-Body Experiences (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968); Journeys out of the Body (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1971, and London: Souvenir Press, 1972); Benjamin Walker, Beyond the Body (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
24 Philosophical discussions of parapsychology can be found in: C. D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953); James Wheatley and Hoyt Edge, eds., Philosophical Dimensions of Parapsychology (Springfield, 111.; C. Thomas, 1976); Shivesh Thakur, ed., Philosophy and Psychical Research (New York: Humanities Press, 1976); Jan Ludwig, ed., Philosophy and Parapsychology (Prometheus, 1978); Stephen Braude, ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).