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MOST RELIGIONS have taught in one form or another that the "soul" or "spirit" of
the individual does not perish when his body dies, but goes on living in another
world where it meets conditions appropriate to its particular nature and
deserts. Hence, before we turn to an exposition of the grounds on which
contemporary natural science bases the case against the possibility of survival
of man's consciousness after death, it will be well for us to consider the
relation between religion and the belief in survival, and the grounds on which
theologians - or more particularly Judaeo-Christian theologians - have affirmed
that the belief is true.
1. The belief in survival after death not inherently religious
Although, as
just noted, belief that the human personality survives bodily death has been
inculcated by most religions, it is not in itself religious. If the survival
hypothesis is purged of vagueness, is defined in a manner not involving
contradictions or other demonstrable impossibilities, and is dissociated from
the additional supposition commonly coupled with it that survival will be such
as to bring reward or punishment to the surviving personalities according as
they lived on earth virtuously or wickedly, then it is no more religious than
would be the hypothesis that conscious beings live on Mars. In both cases alike
the question is simply one of fact - however difficult it may be to get evidence
adequate to settle it one way or the other.
If human personalities survive the body's death and do so discarnate,
then-although their continued existence is normally as imperceptible to us as
were bacteria before we had microscopes and as still are the subatomic entities
of theoretical physics - those discarnate personalities are just another part of
the population of the world; and their abode - if the word still has
significance in relation to them - is just another region or dimension of the
universe, not as yet commonly accessible to us.
The supposition that there is an immaterial, or anyway a normally imperceptible
realm of existence peopled by discarnate human consciousnesses is, moreover,
quite independent logically of the supposition that a God or gods exist - as
independent of it logically as is the fact that incarnate human consciousnesses
now inhabit the earth: No contradiction at all would be involved either in
supposing that one or more gods exist but that there is no post mortem human
life, or in supposing that there is a life after death but no God or gods.
But although the belief in a life after death is thus not inherently religious,
nevertheless a close connection between it and religion has obtained throughout
the history of man. What I shall now attempt is to make clear the nature of this
connection; that is, what it presupposes with regard to man's personality, and
with regard to the relation between his life on earth and the post mortem life
which the religions have taught he will have. For this purpose, what religion
itself essentially is must first be considered briefly.
2. Religion and religious beliefs
Even a sketchy acquaintance with the history
of religion suffices to show that the beliefs and practices which have been
taught by the religions of mankind have been very diverse and in many cases
irreconcilable. This entails that no possibility exists of conceiving the
essence of religion in terms of some core of beliefs or/and practices common to
all the religions - to the non-theistic as well as to the monotheistic, the
polytheistic, and the pantheistic, and to the religions of primitive as well as
of highly civilized peoples - for there is no such common core. Nor, of course,
can the essence of religion be conceived responsibly as consisting of the
teachings of some one particular religion, held to be the only "true" religion
on the ground that its teachings are divine revelations; for the question would
then remain as to whether the belief that its teachings are, and alone are,
divine revelations is demonstrably true, or on the contrary is itself but one
among other pious but groundless beliefs.
It follows that only a
functional
conception of religion can be comprehensive enough to apply to all the
religions; a conception, that is to say, according to which religion is
essentially a psychological instrument for the performance of certain functions
ubiquitously important to human welfare, which are not otherwise performed
adequately in any but a few exceptional cases and which even religion has often
performed none too well.
More specifically, this conception is that a religion is any set of beliefs that
are matters of faith - together the observances, attitudes, injunctions, and
feelings tied up with the beliefs which, in so far as dominant in a person, tend
to perform two functions, one social and the other personal.
The social function is to provide, for conduct held to be socially beneficial, a
sanction that will operate on occasions where conflict exists between the
private interest of the individual and the (real or fancied) social interest,
and where neither the legal sanctions, nor those of public opinion, nor the
individual's own moral impulses, would by themselves be enough to cause him to
behave morally. In such cases, an additional and sometimes sufficient motivation
for moral conduct is provided by religious beliefs, and in particular by a
belief in a life after death if this belief is conjoined, as usually it has
been, with a belief that, in that life, immoral conduct that escaped punishment
on earth and moral conduct that went unrewarded each gets its just deserts
through the inescapable operation of some personal or impersonal agency of
cosmic justice.
To provide the motivation called for, the second of these two beliefs is of
course necessary in addition to the first; for belief in a future life whose
particular content were in no way dependent on the manner - virtuous or vicious
- in which the individual lived on earth would exert no psychological leverage
on him for virtuous conduct now. To exert this leverage is the function of the
pictures of hells, heavens, paradises, purgatories, and other forms of reward or
punishment, painted by the religions.
It is to be noted that, insofar as those two beliefs, acting jointly, cause the
individual to behave morally, i.e., justly or altruistically, in cases where he
otherwise would behave selfishly or maliciously, those beliefs foster in him the
development of moral feelings and impulses; for as a person acts, so does he
tend to feel and, on later occasions, tend to feel impelled from within to act
again. The long-run effect of the harboring of beliefs religious in the sense
stated could therefore be described as "education of the heart," - arousal and
cultivation in the individual of the feelings and impulses out of which, even at
cost to himself, issues conduct beneficial or assumed beneficial to his fellows.
The individual, however, is likely to be much more directly aware of the value
his religious beliefs have for him personally than of the value they have for
society through the personal sacrifices they require of him for the social
benefit. And what the individual's religious beliefs do for him personally in
proportion to their depth and firmness and to the faithfulness with which he
lives up to them is to give him a certain equanimity in the ups and downs of
life - a certain freedom from anxiety in times of trouble, and from
self-complacency in times of worldly good fortune. To the religious man, his
religious beliefs can bring courage in adversity, hope in times of despair, and
dignity in times of obloquy or frustration. Also, humility on occasions of
pride, prudence in times of success, moderation and a sense of responsibility in
the exercise of power; in brief, a degree of abiding serenity based on a
conception of man's destiny and on the corresponding scale of values.
The belief in a life after death, in future compensation there for the
injustices of earth, in future reunion with loved ones who have died, and in
future opportunities for growth and happiness, undoubtedly operates to give
persons who have it a measure of the equanimity they need wherewith to face the
trials of this world, the death of those dear to them, and the prospect, near or
distant, of their own death. But in order to operate psychologically in this way
for the individual, and through him for the welfare of society in the way
described before, the belief in survival and the other beliefs the religions
have taught do not at all need to be in fact true, but only to be firmly
believed. Nor do their contents need to be conceived clearly, but only
believably. Indeed, the vagueness which commonly characterizes them is often a
condition of their believability, for it insulates from detection the
absurdities in some of them which would be evident if the beliefs were clear
instead of vague. In order that the beliefs should function, what needs to be
clear is only the sort of conduct and attitude they dictate.
The fact, then, that belief in a life after death has prominently figured in
most religions and has with varying degrees of efficacy participated in
performance there of the social and personal functions described above,
constitutes no evidence at all that there is really for the individual some kind
of life after death.
On the other hand, the psychological fact that what has operated towards
performance of those functions is not truth of, but simply belief of, the idea
of survival, constitutes no evidence at all that that idea is untrue. For here
as elsewhere it is imperative to distinguish sharply between the question as to
whether a given belief is true - which is a question ad rem; and questions as to
how the given belief affects the persons who hold it, or as to how they came to
hold it - which are questions ad hominem, i.e., biographical questions. That a
given person came to believe or to disbelieve a given proposition does not
entail anything concerning the truth or falsity of the proposition unless what
caused him to believe or to disbelieve it consisted of evidence adequate to
prove, or at least to make objectively probable, that the proposition is true,
or as the case may be, that it is false. But if what induced the belief or
disbelief did not consist of such evidence, then it leaves wholly open the
question of truth or falsity of the proposition concerned.
3. Grounds on which belief in survival is based in Christian theology
The
grounds on which Christian theologians have contended that the human personality
survives after death are chiefly of two kinds- empirical, and moral.
The empirical argument consists in pointing at the resurrection of Jesus: That
Jesus, having died, rose bodily from the dead proves, it is argued, that the
human personality is not destroyed by death and that the human body admits of
being resurrected after it has died. This proof of "immortality" has been
accepted by millions of Christians and has been regarded as one of the most
precious assurances brought to mankind by Jesus.
Yet the logic of the inference by which human immortality is deduced from the
resurrection of Jesus is so fallacious that the argument has been characterized
by Professor C. D. Broad as one of the world's worst. "In the first place," he
writes, "if Christianity be true, though Jesus was human, He was also divine. No
other human being resembles Him in this respect." Hence the resurrection of one
so radically different from mere men is no evidence that they too survive the
death of their bodies.
The fallacy of the reasoning which would infer the second from the first becomes
glaring if one considers a reasoning of exactly the same form, but the
particular terms of which are free from the biasing religious commitments that
obtain for orthodox Christians in the case of the Resurrection: Obviously, from
the fact that Tom Jones, who falls out of an airplane and has a parachute,
survives the fall, it does not follow that John Smith, who falls out of the same
plane but has no parachute, will also survive.
Moreover, Broad points out that the case of man is unlike that of Jesus in
another respect also: "the body of Jesus did not decay in the tomb, but was
transformed; whilst the body of every ordinary man rots and disintegrates soon
after his death. Therefore, if men do survive the death of their bodies, the
process must be utterly unlike that which took place when Jesus survived His
death on the cross. Thus the analogy breaks down in every relevant respect, and
so an argument from the resurrection of Jesus to the survival of bodily death by
ordinary men is utterly worthless."(1)
(1) Religion, Philosophy, and Psychical Research, Harcourt N. Y. 1953, pp. 236-7.
But anyway, the facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus taken as premise in
that argument - are not known to us exactly, or in detail, or with certainty.
The men to whom the passages of the New Testament bearing on the subject are
(rightly or wrongly) ascribed, and the men who passed on from one generation to
another their own account of what they had heard about the life, the death, and
the resurrection of Jesus, were not dispassionate historians careful to check
the objectivity of the reports which came to them and to record them accurately.
Rather, they were essentially zealous propagandists of an inspiring message,
bent on spreading it and getting it accepted. As H. L. Willett points out, "the
friends of Jesus were not interested in the writing of books. They were not
writers, they were preachers. The Master himself was not a writer. He left no
document from his own hand. The first disciples were too busy with the new
problems and activities of the Christian society to give thought to the making
of records."(2) The text of the Gospels was in process of getting formulated for
several generations. Most of it did not reach the form in which we have it until
some time near the middle of the second century A.D. Indeed, "the very oldest
manuscript of the New Testament is as late as the fourth century A.D. All the
originals, the autographs, perished at a very early date-even the first copies
of the originals are utterly gone."(3)
(2) The Bible through the Centuries. Willett, Clark & Colby, Chicago 1929, p.
220.
(3) Ernest R. Trattner: Unravelling the Book of Books, Ch. Scribner's Sons, N.Y.
1929, p. 244. Cf. Alfred Loisy: The Birth of the Christian Religion, preface by
Gilbert Murray, Allen & Unwin, London 1948, pp. 41.53.
These facts easily account for the discrepancies we find, for instance, between
the several statements in the Gospels concerning the discovery of the empty
tomb. Also, for the scantiness of the descriptions of the appearances of the
"risen" Jesus during the weeks following his death. At the first of these
appearances - to Mary Magdalene at the tomb - he is unaccountably mistaken by her,
who had known him well, for the gardener (John 20 - 15); and later is similarly
unrecognized at first by the disciples fishing in the sea of Tiberias (John 21 -
4). Nor is there any clear-cut statement that his appearances were touched as
well as seen. For, at the tomb, he enjoins Mary not to touch him; and Thomas,
when Jesus appeared to him and to the other disciples, apparently then felt no
need to avail himself of the opportunity he had desired earlier to verify by
touch the material reality of the visible appearance. And the statement in
Matthew 28 - 9 that the two women, being met by Jesus on their way from the
tomb, "took hold of his feet" may well mean only that, in reverence, they
prostrated themselves at his feet.
That the body which the disciples and others repeatedly saw appearing and
disappearing suddenly indoors irrespective of walls and closed doors, and
likewise out of doors, was not the material body of Jesus is further suggested
by the accounts of his final disappearance; for the statement that he then "was
taken up; and a cloud received him" out of the disciples' sight (Acts 1 - 9), or
that, while blessing them, he "was carried up into heaven" (Luke 25 - 51) could
be taken literally only in times when astronomical knowledge was so lacking as
to permit the supposition that the earth is the center of the universe, and that
heaven is some distance above the blue vault of the sky.
In the light of these considerations, and of the complete lack of facts as to
what became of the material body of Jesus, the statements in the New Testament
concerning the several appearances of Jesus after his death make sense only if
interpreted as reports of what are commonly called "apparitions" or "phantasms"
of the dead-an interpretation which, incidentally, is consonant with Paul's
statement (I Corinthians 15 - 40/44) that the resurrection of the dead, which
"is sown in a natural body; ... is raised in a spiritual body. If there is a
natural body, there is also a spiritual body," which Paul, in verse 44, calls
also a "celestial" body and distinguishes from the "terrestrial."(4)
(4) That the post mortem appearances of Jesus were not his physical body, but
were "apparitions" in the sense of hallucinations telepathically induced by the
then discarnate Jesus, is ably contended by the Rev. Michael C. Perry in a
scholarly work, The Easter Enigma, Faber & Faber, London 1959, published since
the present chapter was written.
It is appropriate in this connection to note that apparitions of the dead (and
occasionally of the living) are a type of phenomenon of which numerous
well-attested and far more recent instances are on record;(5) and it is
interesting to compare the earliest testimony we have for the post mortem
appearances of Jesus which was first reduced to writing some twenty-five years
after the events; which reaches us through copies of copies of the original
written record; and which concerns events dating back nearly two thousand years
- with, for example, the testimony we have for the numerous appearances in Maine
in the year 1800 of a woman, the first wife of a Captain Butler, after her
death.
(5) See for example G. N. M. Tyrrell: Apparitions, with a preface by Prof. H. H.
Price, London, Duckworth & Co. Ltd., Rev. ed., 1953.
It is contained in a pamphlet now very rare, but of which there is an original
in the New York Public Library and a photostat copy now before me. It was
published in 1826 by the Rev. Abraham Cummings (1755-1827) A.B., A.M., Brown
University, 1776. He was an itinerant Baptist minister who visited and preached
in the small villages on the coast of Maine. The pamphlet, of 77 pages, is
entitled Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense. It relates the
apparitions of the deceased Mrs. George Butler at a village near Machiasport.
"The Specter," as the Rev. Cummings terms her apparition, manifested itself not,
as in most reports of apparitions, just once and to but one person, but many
times over a period of some months and to groups numbering as many as forty
persons together, both in and out of doors; and to Cummings himself in a field,
on the occasion when, having been notified of its appearance, he was on his way
to expose what he had thought must be a delusion or a fraud.
The "Specter" was both seen and heard; it delivered lengthy discourses to the
persons present, and moved among them; it predicted births and deaths which came
to pass; and on several occasions sharply intervened in the affairs of the
village. Moreover, the Rev. Cummings had the rare good sense to obtain at the
time over thirty affidavits - reproduced in the pamphlet - from some of the
hundred or more persons who had heard and/or seen the "Specter."(6)
(6) A readily accessible, detailed account of this extraordinary affair can be
found in William Oliver Stevens' Unbidden Guests, N.Y. 1945, Dodd, Mead & Co.
pp. 261-9 where the essential facts recorded in the pamphlet are presented in
more orderly manner than by Cummings, whose literary ability was low, and whose
recital of the facts is encumbered by tedious theological reflections.
It is safe to say that most readers of the above summary account of the
apparitions of the deceased Mrs. Butler will receive it with considerable
skepticism. How much more skepticism, then, would on purely objective grounds be
justified about a series of apparitions dating back nearly twenty centuries
instead of only a hundred and fifty years, and concerning which we have none but
remotely indirect evidence; whereas in the more recent series we have as
evidence over thirty verbatim statements from as many of the very persons who
observed the apparitions. judging both cases objectively - in terms of the
criteria applied in court to the weight of testimony - there is no doubt that the
case for the historicity of the appearances of Jesus is far weaker than that for
the historicity of the appearances of Mrs. Butler. And yet, although we find the
latter dubious and perhaps dismiss the account of it as "a mere ghost story," we
- or anyway millions of Christians accept on the contrary as literally true the
traditional account of the appearances of Jesus.
The explanation of this irresponsibility is, of course, to be found in the great
differences between the personalities concerned and between the historical
setting and emotional import of the lives and deaths of the two. For the
personality, the life, and the death of Mrs. Butler were commonplace and
attracted no wide attention. The only thing that did so in her case was the
series of her apparitions after death. On the contrary, the personality and the
life and the death of Jesus were heroic and spectacular; and this, together with
the inspiring nature of his message, gives great emotional interest to
everything connected with him. This interest, the hunger to believe it begets,
the implanting of the traditional stories in childhood, and the fact that it is
easy to accept but hard to doubt what is believed and valued by everybody in
one's environment-these are the psychological causes which account for the fact
that most Christians to-day find it easy and natural to believe in the
"resurrection," i.e., in the reappearance of Jesus after death, even when the
weakness of the evidence for it is pointed out to them; but on the contrary find
the reappearance of Mrs. Butler after her death difficult to believe even when
the much greater strength of the evidence for it is brought to their attention.
4. The moral arguments for the reality of a future life
From the contention
that the resurrection of Jesus assures man of life beyond death, we now turn to
the so-called moral arguments also appealed to in support of the belief in
personal survival.
The premise of these arguments is the goodness, justice, and might ascribed to
God. Summarily put, the reasoning is that "if God is good and God is
sufficiently powerful, how can such a God allow the values (potential or actual)
bound up with individuals to become forever lost? ... The world would be
irrational if, after having brought into being human beings who aspire against
so many almost overwhelming odds to achieve higher values, it should dash them
into nothingness."(7)
(7) Vergilius Ferm: First Chapters in Religious Philosophy, Round Table Press,
N.Y. 1937, p. 279.
Again, divine justice assures a future life to man, for, without one, the
innumerable injustices of the present life would never be redressed. The wicked
whose wickedness went unpunished on earth or perhaps even prospered them would
at death be escaping punishment altogether; and the virtuous who made sacrifices
in obedience to duty or out of regard for the welfare of others would at death
be going finally unrewarded. If moral persons were not eventually to gain
happiness, then morality, in the many cases where it brings no recompense on
earth, would be just stupidity.
Such, in substance, are the moral arguments. Do they prove, or at least make
probable, that there is for man a life after death?
Let us examine first the contention that it would be irrational to behave
morally at present cost to oneself if such behavior is not eventually rewarded
by happiness.
So to contend is tacitly to equate rationality in moral decisions with fostering
of one's own distant welfare. The truth is, however, that to behave rationally
is simply to behave in ways which one believes best promote attainment of one's
ends, such as these may be. And the fact is that men do have not only egoistic
but also altruistic ends: most men do genuinely care, in varying degrees, about
the welfare of other human beings, or of certain ones among these, as well as
about their own personal welfare. Hence, behavior designed to promote the
welfare of another person whose welfare one happens to desire - and perhaps to
desire more than one's own - is quite as rational as behavior intended and shaped
to promote one's personal welfare. Thus, if a man's behavior towards others is
motivated on the one hand by belief that the particular forms of behavior termed
moral make for the welfare of such of his fellow beings as are affected by them,
and on the other by the fact that he does desire their welfare enough to
subordinate his own to theirs, then his behaving in the ways termed moral is
perfectly rational. Indeed, so behaving is the essence of genuine love; that is,
of love that prompts to action for the beloved's welfare; as distinguished from
love merely sentimental which sees the loved one essentially as object that
arouses beautiful love-feeling and which therefore uses the beloved as emotional
candy, crippling him in the process if need be.
Moral behavior, on the other hand, is irrational or rather non-rational, when it
consists only of uncomprehending, machinelike obedience to whatever code of
behavior happens to have been psychologically planted in the mind during
childhood years.
The bearing of these remarks on the contention that morality unrewarded on earth
is irrational if not rewarded after death is that true morality is rooted in
intelligent love and, for the person whose morality it is, constitutes
self-expression and is self-rewarding. Being not investment but generous gift,
it takes no thought of dividends whether on earth or in a future life.
As regards now the contention that if God is good and is sufficiently powerful,
he cannot allow the actual and potential values bound up with individuals to
become forever lost, its obvious weakness is that its premise is altogether
"iffy": if there is a God, if he is good, if he is powerful enough to preserve
the soul when the body dies, if the world is rational, if justice ultimately
obtains, then there is for man a life after death! It may be that these "ifs"
are true, but so long as they have not been proved true, neither has the reality
of the future life, which their being true would entail, been proved.
And the fact is that their truth has never yet been proved nor even shown to be
more probable than not. All the would-be proofs of the existence of an
omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good creator of the world, which
theologians and theologizing philosophers have elaborated in the course of the
centuries have, on critical examination, turned out to be only ingenious pieces
of wishful reasoning. Indeed, if a God of that description existed and had
created the world, there could be no evil in it; for the endless sophistries
which have been packed into the notion of "free will" for the purpose of eluding
this ineludible conclusion have patently failed to do so. Hence, if the world
was ever created, and if it was created by a God, then that God was finite
whether in power or in goodness or in knowledge, or in two or in all of these
respects. Even such a God, however, could be a powerful, wise and good friend,
and as such well worth having.
In any case, that annihilation of the personality at death would be an evil - and
hence that God would prevent it if he could - is far from evident. For there is
ultimately no such thing as evil that nobody experiences; hence, if the
individual is totally annihilated at death, the non-fulfilment of his desire for
a post mortem life is not an evil experienced by him since, ex hypothesi, he
then no longer exists and therefore does not experience disappointment or
anything else. But, if God does not desire that man's desire for a life after
death be fulfilled, and knows that it will not be, the non-fulfilment of man's
desire for it is not a disappointment to God either, and is therefore not an
evil at all. On the other hand, what is an evil - and this irrespective of whether
there is or is not a life after death - is the distress experienced by the living
due to doubt by them that they will, or that their deceased loved ones do,
survive after death.
The remarks in this chapter concerning the nature and functions of religion, the
alleged proofs of the existence of a God of the traditional kind, the nature of
evil, and the implications of the fact that there is a vast amount of evil on
earth, have perforce been much too brief to deal adequately with questions so
heavily loaded with biassing emotion.(8) If those remarks are sound, however,
they entail that neither religion nor theology really provides any evidence that
there is for man a life after death.
(8) Readers who might wish to see what more elaborate defense of them the writer
would give are referred to what he has written on the subject elsewhere. In
particular, to Chapts. 8, 15, 16, and 17, respectively on What Religion is,
Gods, The Problem of Evil, and Life after Death, of the author's A Philosophical
Scrutiny of Religion, Ronald Press, New York, 1953.
But even if there is not, believing that there is does affect the believer's
feelings, attitudes, and conduct; and to affect these in the valuable ways
described earlier is the function of religion, which it has performed with
varying degrees of success. The function, on the other hand, of the arguments on
which theology bases its affirmative answer to the question as to a life after
death, is to make the idea that there is such a life psychologically believable
by the vast numbers of human beings who, for obvious reasons, turn to religion
rather than to science or to philosophy for an answer to that momentous
question.
That these arguments achieve this but nothing more, i.e., convince many of the
persons to whom they are addressed notwithstanding that they really prove
nothing, does not mean that those who propound them are not sincere. It means
only that, except in the case of outstandingly rational persons, becoming
convinced and convincing others is, as pointed out earlier, mostly a matter of
rhetoric, of suggestion, of appeal to prejudices or to fears or hopes; whereas
proving or establishing probabilities is a matter of logic or of empirical
evidence.
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