An Excerpt* from
There is Life After Death:
By
Roy Abraham Varghese
Our review of the scientific data shows that science erects no barrier to the affirmation of the soul. But, in the light of modern science, is it possible for us to affirm the reality of a life after death? And is this a question for the philosophers? To start with, let me say that it is senseless to ask a certain class of philosophers if there is a life after death. This is because, as we have seen in the previous chapter, they do not admit there is a life before death (in the sense of continuous subsistence as a person)! Not only do they not believe in the existence of God, but they don't believe in their own existence!
Now any study of the possibility of an after-life must include an intelligible account of our life-before-death. An obvious starting-point is the stuff "of" which we are made. We know that there is a transphysical dimension to our nature. But is it entirely dependent on the physical and consequently doomed to perish with the body? And what is the nature of the human person?
Here we move beyond the tangible and the scientific since understanding, willing, and the self cannot even be physically described. Nevertheless we know that our acting in the world, our identity as persons cannot be understood without the physical. We are unified in thought and intention, sensation and action, to such an extent that it simply does not sound plausible to talk of a "mind" instructing a "body." Just as clearly we cannot (like the physicalists) talk of the brain instructing the body. The "I" is a unity that neither dualism nor physicalism can separate. So what is this "I"? Above all, can we give any sense to the idea of the posthumous existence of the human person?
In this book, we are exploring what we have called a cumulative case for the existence of an after-life. On the one hand, we consider the kind of information that comes to us from "external" data sources be they near-death experiences, primordial universal beliefs, or after-life visitations. On the other, we review what everyday experience and (if relevant) empirical science tell us about the nature of the human person. Our focus in this final chapter is on what we know about "survival" just from knowing ourselves.
Historically, there have been four basic kinds of answers given to the question of whether there is a life after death.
We will consider these views briefly, but study them in more detail as we proceed.
Claims of divine revelation, in any case, do not simply concern the resurrection of the body. Just as important is the proclamation that there are one of two final states that will be chosen by every human person: a state of unending happiness or one of endless suffering. Heaven or Hell. This is an idea that goes beyond Judaism or Christianity, and is implicitly or explicitly taught in all the ancient religions. It is interestingly also a feature of today's after-life experiences.
Any coherent idea of an after-life requires us to speak of the soul surviving the death of the body. But what exactly do we mean by soul? And how do we know that it not only exists, but continues in existence after the death of the body?
There are three ways in which we can answer the question:
Let us explore the holist answer further. Without the principle of life that is the soul there is no body. But without the body there is no soul, because the human soul (as opposed to a pure spirit) is intrinsically oriented to a body. Nevertheless, it is the soul that brings a body into being: it has its own act of existing into which it brings the body. The human soul does perform certain fundamental operations, such as understanding and willing that are intrinsically non-physical. Therefore, its act of existing is not only non-physical, but one which does not depend on the body for continued subsistence. But such an existence without a body is unnatural, because a human person is essentially embodied and ensouled. It is not you in your fullness and integrity who continue in being, but your soul.
Hence, at the very same time, we can "be" after death, but "not be" in the fullness of our nature.
This might seem to be a distinction without a difference, but it goes to the heart of how we go about our inquiry. Do we want to be true to our experience? If so, as previously shown, we have to admit the existence of the transphysical. And this means physicalism is a non-starter. But it also means that hard-core dualism doesn't do the job (although it is far superior to physicalism). We are not two entities. Every one of my actions is the action of the embodied person that I am, and these actions are almost always simultaneously physical and transphysical. I say "almost" because intellectual acts such as your understanding of the arguments I am laying out here have no physical correlate or structure: it is purely a transphysical act; it is an act of the transphysical soul. Nevertheless it is "your" act: it is you the person who thinks through the arguments using your soul just as it is you who go for a walk using your body. Thus, to be true to our experience is to see things holistically.
This was recognized by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, his most influential successor, as also by the modern phenomenologists and (to some extent) such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle. "Aquinas contends that the capacities of a human being must be attributed to the human being itself," writes David Braine. "And not to any of his parts. A human being's soul is the source of his capacities; a human being's body is the material support for such capacities. However a human being is that which has the capacities."
The three options cited here, dualism, physicalism, and holism, were articulated by the Greeks. Epicurus represented physicalism, Plato dualism, and Aristotle holism. These were the three fundamental views of personhood -- the human person as physical, as non-physical, and as a unique composite of animal and spirit. It can be argued that the major religious traditions have opted for an Aristotelian approach. Thus Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam proclaimed a life after death that revolved around the resurrection of the body.
Paradoxically the post-Vedic Hindu view of reincarnation is, in its own way, an affirmation of the resurrection of the body. Intuitively, the reincarnationists recognize that the human person is somehow incomplete without a body. I shall be arguing that the doctrine of reincarnation is incoherent for various reasons, but primarily because it flies in the face of immediate experience (the enduring identity of this particular "I," for instance); furthermore, it is not to be found in primordial Hinduism. But, curiously, its popularity highlights the human mind's inability to rest in the idea of a disembodied soul. A soul needs a body to be a complete person. Thus, in the reincarnationist scenario, it has to move from body to body -- when it stops reincarnating it "dissolves." To be a human being you need body and soul.
The immortality of the soul, in short, is not one of those ideas that can be universally embraced with religious fervor. It is a philosopher's dream. This is not because the idea of a pure spirit is foreign to the human mind. As a matter of fact, most of the major religions do believe in pure spirits who are active in the world, spirits good and bad. But the same religions recognize that a human being is different from an angel.
The holist view is the one that accords best with our immediate experience, because it does not try to explain away the physical and transphysical dimensions that are fundamental to our being. A study of the holist approach is simultaneously a review of the competing physicalist and dualist positions.
A lot more needs to be said, of course. The first priority is reaching a resolution on the nature of the human person. From there we move on to the grounds from immediate experience for believing that humans survive physical death. Finally, we address the questions of reincarnation, resurrection, and separated souls.
The Human Person -- A Psychophysical Organism Capable of Thinking and Willing
It has often been said that English is a language divided by two countries. We might well say that "soul" is an idea divided by two philosophies. What Plato and Descartes meant by soul was entirely different from what Aristotle and Aquinas had in mind.
Plato thought of the soul as the essence of the person. It is made up of mind, emotion, and desire. It "uses" the body temporarily, but the body is regarded as a prison or tomb from which the soul needs to be liberated.
Aristotle held that all life-forms had souls, although the kind of soul varied with the kind of being we were speaking about. Essentially the Aristotelian soul is a principle of organization that gives matter a specific unity, identity, and agency whether as plant or animal. We do not have two substances but one reality, one being -- matter that is "informed" or organized by a principle of life into a particular kind of being. We call it a particular life-form (tree or mammal) depending on the kind of "form" into which the living matter is organized. The idea of separating soul and body makes no sense, because without the soul there is no body, and without the body there is no soul.
"One way to understand the notion of a human soul, as a substantial form, in contemporary terms is to think of it as a principle of organization for material particles," writes Jason Eberle. "A human body is an organic construct. It has a variety of parts that operate both independently and collectively to support the existence and activity of a living, sensing, moving and thinking thing. Both the independent operation of one of a body's organs and its functional unity with the body's other organs, are governed by the formal unity of the organism itself."
Exploring the idea of the soul in relation to human life-forms we ask:
It is this principle, this source and root of our life, unity, and actions that we call the soul.
We do not talk of soul plus body because the very nature of a soul is to be that which makes a body a body: the soul and the body come to be simultaneously forming a single being, the I or self. Starting with Boethius's definition of the human person, "an individual substance of a rational nature," Aquinas went on to describe the person as "a substance, complete, subsisting per se, existing apart from others."
The person/I/self is agent -- the source and center of all its actions. The person is subject -- the observer with subjective consciousness. The kind of being I am is a body animated by a transphysical soul. But what happens to the I/self when the body ceases to function? My soul -- the soul of any human -- does not simply animate and organize the body. It also performs actions that are entirely non-physical.
The answers to all these questions is yes. The operations of the soul and the very nature of the self indicate that there is something here independent of matter. This something can survive separation from the physical albeit in an unnatural and impoverished state.
Before turning to the matter-independent powers of the human soul, we should grasp something more fundamental. This is the fact that the soul, in a sense, creates the body.
As we shall see, a study of the operations of the human soul will show that it has capacities that are non-bodily in origin and nature. Important as this is for the question of survival, the relation of soul to body is even more fundamental. As Aquinas saw it, the most relevant issue is how the human being comes into existence: "Although the soul and the body of man have one and the same act of existing in common, nevertheless that act of existing is communicated to the body by the soul. Thus the human soul communicates to the body that very act of existing by which the soul itself subsists."
In short, the human soul shares its act of existing with the body and this single act of existing is the human person. And if the soul's act of existing is intrinsically immaterial then the death of the body does not preclude the survival of the soul. Talk of the act of existing may sound somewhat esoteric, but it is germane to the question of survival and needs elucidation.
To exist is an act. There is a distinction between the attributes of a being (humans or trees or unicorns), and its act of existing. It is the act of existing that makes that being real and actual. The existence of a being is the act of existing of its essence, of what it is. Now a human being, a composite of body and soul, has one act of existing. This act comes from the soul, which communicates it to the body thus bringing about a single person. Although your act of existing is yours alone, the attributes of your being are common to all humans. But each person is unique, because each is a person through a unique act of existing and a unique history.
It is the body that shares the soul's act of existing and not the other way round. In the case of other animals, the death of the body is also the cessation of the soul, because the soul's operations are entirely dependent on the physical. But cannot the same be said of the human soul given the vital role played by the brain? The answer here, for reasons given below, is no.
We know that the operation of sensory organs and networks are essential to our knowledge of the world. Of course these operations are dependent on the physical, although the resultant conscious states are transphysical. But are there any powers of the soul that establish it as independent of the physical? Previously we spoke of 10 hard facts that establish the reality of the transphysical. But just because something is transphysical there is no reason to believe that it can exist independently without some link with matter. Nevertheless, we have said that the human soul is not simply transphysical, but capable of independent existence. We will now consider the four hard facts that point to the physically independent reality of human thought. These facts have been highlighted by some of the most sophisticated logicians and thinkers of our time.
These facts are:
Concepts and universals, which are an integral part of all our thinking, cannot be understood in terms of the physical. It should be said that several of the physicalists we reviewed earlier, such as Stephen Pinker and Gerald Edelman, have marveled at the infinite reach of language. But it is the philosophers and logicians who have taken such observations to their logical conclusion.
Peter Geach, a noted logician, holds that thinking is a basic activity in the sense that there is no activity underlying thinking that is more fundamental. Also, thinking is not something that can be correlated with the physical time-series. This is because it is not possible to correlate specific thoughts to specific periods. Consequently, physicalism cannot work because "the basic activities of any bodily part must be clockable in physical time in a way that thinking is not."
Another prominent philosopher, James Ross, argues in a paper titled "Immaterial Aspects of Thought" that. we cannot do logic or pure mathematics or thinking in general if our judgments are physical processes. "In principle," writes Ross, "truth-carrying thoughts cannot be wholly physical (though they might have a physical medium) because they have features that no physical thing or process can have at all." The human person can understand any arithmetical theorem or any well-formed utterance in any language given appropriate circumstances. But if understanding was a matter of brain-states this would not be possible because no physical object can be in an infinity of states.
Because our thinking occurs with an immaterial medium we have the selective infinite capacity that is required for our normal operations of theoretical and practical reason. Our brain is capable of being in a finite number of electrochemical states. But even if all of these states were realized, for instance 10140 different thoughts, we still could not understand "an infinity of mathematical theorems," because there would not be brain states or functions among brain states to realize these. Humans, however, "are able to be in an infinity of states of understanding, not successively but qualitatively. That is, we have the active ability to understand anything (accidents of presentation of intelligence quotient being ignored for now). Thus, there is no arithmetical theorem we cannot understand."
The magnum opus in this domain is clearly David Braine's The Human Person -- Animal and Spirit. In a book of some 555 pages, Braine seeks to show that linguistic understanding is a complete act of its own that has no bodily organ and excludes any bodily activity from being internal to it. Understanding and thinking in the medium of words "are 'operations' of the human being which have no inner neural realization: they have a bodily expression in speech, and are typically directed towards bodily objects (bodily things as real or intentional objects), but are not operations of any bodily organ."
Braine's major point is that thought expressed in language and the understanding of language "cannot have any physical process internal to them as physical processes are internal to perception, imagining, emotion, and intentional action." He gives four reasons for this position.
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It is the person who speaks and understands |
In thinking expressed in words whether in writing or speech, "it is the person or human who understands, speaks, hears, and thinks, and these are not operations of some inner part of him or her, but of the person him or herself."
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The power of conceptual thinking |
The use of general concepts cannot be emulated by any material process or state, because what is required is "a capacity or principle of operation making it possible for the human being to grasp the essence of the likeness" between different instances of the same concept, for example, knowing what are the features common to different humans. Physical structures in the brain or images of various humans will not do the job since we have to stand back from all humans and make a judgment on what is alike about them using our understanding.
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Use of language involves indefinite number of ways of using words |
Linguistic expression and understanding require us "to use words in an indefinite number of logically distinguishable types of use." This cannot be correlated with any physical organ or process, "because any supposed correlate would lack the flexibility, or extensibility in type of relation to different types of case, which is required." "The fact that understanding explains something, without there being a deterministic mechanical process involved, is shown by the impossibility of calculating rather than 'seeing' meaning."
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Language requires a subject capable of self-reflection |
The capacity for language or linguistic understanding or for thought in the medium of words requires "a judging subject and within it structures of self-reflection and of reflection on procedures of coming to judgements." This structure has to be unitary while incorporating these sub-systems. No mechanically operating system can emulate these structures. Also the ability to critically reflect cannot be tied to any physical process internal to it. |
In sum, writes Braine, "there can be no neural correlate or other inner physical embodiment of the understanding expressed in linguistic activities. This understanding has a public expression, physical in its way, but the understanding which underlies it, of which it is the expression and ergon, has no organ, no inner voice waiting to be inwardly heard. In brief, there are no mechanisms of any kind, non-physical or physical, digital or analog, internal to linguistic understanding and thinking in the medium of words."
Conceptual Thinking Is Clearly Immaterial
The mystery of conceptual thinking is another testament to the soul's independence from the physical. Whatever we know about the world we know through concepts. We notice differences and similarities between things and generalize and universalize from this. Thomas Sullivan points out that all human thought revolves around our ability to effortlessly think of universal characteristics that can have local instances, for instance the ideas of hot and blue. This is clearly an immaterial activity, because these ideas are not linked to something physical (for instance, we do not have think of a blue object when we think of blueness). John Haldane has shown that concepts transcend material configurations in space-time because (a) here any property of a thing can be described in many non-equivalent ways of thinking; (b) this order of concepts is thus far more abstract than the natural order; (c) it's hard to see how the former then could spring from the latter.
We might ask at this stage, what does it mean to think "by virtue of the soul"? The soul is not a "thing" or a "part" that exists in parallel with the body. It is a reality without question, but one which is not in any sense physical. It does not occupy space, but operates in space. Now conceptual thought is not something that takes place with a specific mechanism. It is an action performed by me, but an action that has no sub-systems. So what is the relationship between such thought and the brain? Quite clearly the brain and the body are inextricably involved with our feelings, perceptions, emotions, sensations, and imaginings. I am the subject of all such "operations," but all of these are embedded in matter, impossible without the physical. Moreover, they furnish the raw data for our concepts and thoughts.
But conceptual thought itself does not have any of the accoutrements of matter. There are no photons or quarks involved in my thoughts about energy as the product of mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light. There are no images of plus signs in my use of the conjunction "and." Conceptual thought is an activity that is entirely independent of the physical, although it is expressed through physical media (symbols and sounds).
And to the extent that "I" am not divided into several subjects, one for seeing, another for feeling, and a third for thinking, it is the same "I" who performs all these actions some through the joint action of soul and body and some entirely by means of the soul. The soul is the seat of intellect and will, but, at the same time, it is the "organizer" of the body. Consequently, the intellectual and volitional acts that I perform via the soul are affected by the state of the body it animates. If I suffer from Alzheimer's or some disorder of the nervous system, I, the composite of body and soul, am affected at all levels of my normal functioning.
But both benefits and barriers issuing from the unity of soul and body are eliminated when they separate. The soul's operations of intellect and will are not helped or hampered by the body in this new state. There will be no more sensory images or bodily sensations, but thinking and willing will continue without the limitations of matter.
Am I Willing?
The other dimension of the human soul that entirely transcends the physical is the will. What is it that impels us to intend, choose, and act that instills us with a sense of obligation and responsibility? It is the will, a reality that determinist and physicalist accounts sweep under the rug, but which keeps popping up and pulling the rug from under them.
The "argument from the will" has been elegantly set out by John Coons. After reviewing Hume's vain efforts to "locate" his self by looking inward, Coons makes the point that our experience of responsibility is not just something we perceive, and its singular nature makes it a good candidate for the ground of the self. Coons clarifies that by the experience of responsibility he means the awareness that everyone has of being called to follow a correct choice of conduct. This is verified universally -- even among Humeans.
The content of our consciousness "caught" by Hume can be explained away as products of the senses and neural resources. Human responsibility, on the other hand, is experienced, "not because we 'catch' it, but -- to the contrary -- because it catches us." It is not an experience of perceiving something but of being perceived. This "experience cannot be explained descriptively as the product of mindless matter and neural energy."
The drive of the will is not dependent on memory. Even in cases of amnesia where a man forgets his place in the world, what "he retains is the experience of responsibility; he knows that there is correct conduct to be sought, and that he has the capacity to commit to its search."
The classic account of the will in modern times was laid out by Austin Farrer in his Finite and Infinite. In this work, he starts with himself self-disclosed as the subject of his acts. To exist is to be active and alive. The will is that which initiates acts and makes real what is conceived and intended. Its acts are unique and irreducible. Farrer notes that "in the nature of the case self and will must be indescribable, except by metaphors, which are always wrong." The structure of the self "can be described to some extent. We find that structure to be systematic and continuous, though not fixed; and it is filled and vivified by a will itself continuous, forming it and formed by it. This will, taken in its extension, we call the self; in its focused expression, the will."
The Subsistence of the Soul
Can the soul subsist on its own upon the death of the body? Our accounts of the non-physical operations of the soul and its own act of existing give us good reason to affirm that it can survive the death of the body. But more needs to be said on this if only for clarity's sake.
Aquinas' key point is the nature of intellectual understanding. His argument for the subsistence of the human soul is laid out in question 75, article 2 of the Prima Pars (as pointed out by Denis Bradley):
(1) Since only what subsists in itself apart from the body could operate apart from the body.
(2) Since the rational soul in intellectual understanding does per se operate apart from any organ of the human body.
(3) The human soul must be incorporeal, separable, and subsistent.
James Ross and David Braine develop this argument further. "The subsistent being of the soul is required by the fact that it has an activity independent of the body, namely understanding which it performs constantly on account of what it is for; for, as Aquinas says, activity follows upon being," writes Ross. "The nature of understanding requires such action; such action requires such being."
Braine on Why the Human Understander is Undivided and Indivisible
Braine considers another dimension: "Under the aspect under which the human being transcends the body as the subject of understanding and thinking, it is undivided and indivisible in a way in which no body is and many lower living things are not. Nonetheless, while it is essential to human nature that the subject of linguistic understanding and thought be also the subject of perception and imagination, it remains that distinction of bodily parts and bodily function are not internal to the operations of understanding and thought as they are internal to the operations of perceiving and imagining."
The intellectual nature of the human soul also indicates that the coming into being of each human soul can only be a direct divine creation: "Since intellective capacities surpass the limits of matter," writes Eberle, "No purely material process can be responsible for the generation of substantial forms with such capacities. All other substantial forms of material substances can be generated through purely material processes. Aquinas thus argues that a human soul must receive its being (esse) directly from God."
The neuroscientist Sir John Eccles came to the same conclusion from a different direction:
"Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced uniqueness, I am constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the psyche or soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. To give the explanation in theological terms: each soul is a new Divine creation … It is the certainty of the inner core of unique individuality that necessitates the 'Divine creation.' I submit that no other explanation is tenable; neither the genetic uniqueness with its fantastically impossible lottery nor the environmental differentiations which do not determine one's uniqueness, but merely modify it. This conclusion is of inestimable theological significance. It strongly reinforces our belief in the human soul and in its miraculous origin in a Divine creation. There is recognition not only of the Transcendent God, the Creator of the Cosmos, the God in which Einstein believed, but also the loving God to whom we owe our being."
The Contemporary Philosophical Case for Life After Death
The nature of the human soul as revealed in the immaterial and physically independent operations of knowing and willing points to its surviving the death of the body. Before further exploring these implications, we will consider what three contemporary philosophers and a prominent neuro-psychiatrist, taking entirely different routes, have said about life after death.
The first of these is Stephen Braude, the author of Immortal Remains -- The Evidence for Life After Death). Braude finds that a cumulative case approach to the evidence for a life after death is the most fruitful: "The totality of survival evidence has a kind of cumulative force, even if individual strands of evidence are less than convincing when considered on their own merits. Evidence taken collectively is stronger…because each of the kinds of evidence increases the antecedent probability of a survivalist interpretation of the others."
Neal Grossman's trenchant analyses have served as a powerful wake-up call to skeptics lost in their dogmatic slumbers. His great achievement has been that of calling their bluff. Here is one of many memorable contributions:
"If the fundamaterialist says that the hypothesis of an afterlife is so extraordinary that we should prefer any other hypothesis, so long that it is consistent with materialism and not self-contradictory, my reply is as follows: There is absolutely nothing extraordinary about the hypothesis of an afterlife. The overwhelming majority of people in the world believe it, and have always believed it. I grant, however, that there exists a rather peculiar subgroup of human beings for whom the survival hypothesis is extraordinary. This subgroup consists of people who have been university-educated into accepting materialist dogma on faith. We have been brainwashed by our university education into accepting that the hypothesis of an afterlife is extraordinary. It is perhaps time to acknowledge this, and to acknowledge that we are all suffering from what Gary Schwartz has called ''post-educational stress disorder'' (Schwartz and Simon, 2002, p. 224). Part of this ''disorder'' is that we have internalized the academy's materialist worldview, and we call anything that falls outside that worldview ''extraordinary.'' But it is the materialists' worldview that is truly extraordinary, especially when one considers the ridiculous hypotheses that that worldview advances in order to save itself, such as ''superpsi,'' alien abduction of children who appear to remember past lives, and nonfunctioning brains still somehow producing conscious experience. Survival researchers are under no obligation to refute every, or even any, logically possible alternative hypothesis. Such "hypotheses" are nothing more than the imaginings of the fundamaterialists; the burden is on them to provide non-ideological empirical support for their hypotheses before scientists should take them seriously. In the absence of empirical support, such hypotheses merely reflect the fantasy life of the debunkers, and science is not obliged to take unsupported imaginings and fantasies seriously."
David Lund has emerged as one of the premier American thinkers on the self and consciousness. In Death and Consciousness -- The Case for Life After Death he concluded, "On the basis of what we consider essential to our being persons, we found that survival of death is conceivable and that we can form a clear, detailed conception of a Next World in which we could continue to have experience in such a manner that personal identity is unambiguously preserved. Then we examined various kinds of phenomena which suggest that we do in fact survive death and found that many constitute impressive evidence for thinking that we survive."
In his recent work, The Conscious Self, Lund gives an update on the state of the discussion. Although physicalism may be dominant in certain circles, it has not "succeeded in providing an adequate account of persons and their experiences." Nor is it a view that has commended itself to humanity in general. "The widespread acceptance among philosophers and other thinkers of a thoroughgoing materialist view of persons -- the view that persons are entirely material beings -- is a recent and rather remarkable phenomenon. This view has been rejected, at least implicitly, by the great majority of people through the ages. In nearly every society of which we have any record we find the idea of an afterlife and the belief that the soul or essence of a person survives the death of the body."
We have already referred to the work on NDEs done by the internationally known neuro-psychiatrist Peter Fenwick. Dr. Fenwick addresses the question of what follows death with Elizabeth Fenwick in The Art of Dying. "The evidence points to the fact that we are more than brain function, more than just a speck in creation, and that something, whether we regard it as soul or consciousness, will continue in some form or another, making its journey to 'Elsewhere.' It suggests that when we enter the light we are coming home, that we do indeed touch the inner reaches of a universe that is composed of universal love." 25
The main competitor for belief in the post-mortem continuation of our identity as the persons we are today is reincarnation, which literally means "to be made flesh again." The essential claim of the reincarnationists is that the soul will enter some other physical being, be it plant, animal, human, or extra-terrestrial. Reincarnation has also been termed metempsychosis and transmigration. Now not all theories of survival can survive the tests of experience, evidence, and coherence. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of reincarnation.
In my view, the doctrine of reincarnation is not viable for three reasons:
Our criterion thus far has been to stick with what is consistent with and evident from our everyday experience. The idea that there is a transphysical dimension to our being, that our thoughts are intrinsically immaterial is certainly evident in our experience. But so is the idea that our body is integral to who we are -- as integral as its principle of life and organization, the soul. I am a unity of matter and spirit not an identity-less astral being who passes in and out of gross bodies.
Applying this approach to reincarnation, we ask:
In this investigation of reincarnation, I had the privilege of working with one of the leading scholars in the area, Dr. C.T. Krishnamachari, a devout Hindu who was inducted into the Indian Council of Philosophy by the Government of India. Chari (as he was popularly known) had occasion to interview many of the alleged recipients of past-life memories and also interacted extensively with the best-known Western proponent of reincarnation, Dr. Ian Stevenson. Chari's comprehensive case against the theory of reincarnation has yet to be addressed or answered (it should be remembered that Chari remained a devout Hindu throughout his career). His published critiques as well as excerpts from his interviews with me will be referenced here.
Another source referenced here is the philosopher Paul Edwards who authored a thorough and incisive refutation of all varieties of reincarnation titled Reincarnation: A Critical Examination.26 Edwards was a physicalist and denied not just a life after death, but any transphysical reality. But his short chapter in this book on the relation of the brain to consciousness really says nothing relevant to the primary grounds for affirming the survival of the soul: the intellectual and volitional operations of the human person that cannot be described or explained in physical terms. Our concern here is not with Edwards's philosophical views in general, but his analysis of the arguments for reincarnation.
The godfather of modern reincarnation studies was Dr. Ian Stevenson. But, as noted in a Washington Post story, Stevenson's prodigious efforts to assemble evidence for reincarnation never won acceptance from the scientific community: "With rare exception, mainstream scientists -- the only group Dr. Stevenson really cared to persuade -- tended to ignore or dismiss his decades in the field and his many publications. Of those who noticed him at all, some questioned Dr. Stevenson's objectivity; others claimed he was credulous." The article pointed out that "Stevenson himself recognized one glaring flaw in his case for reincarnation: the absence of any evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and transfer to another body."27
There are two paradoxes about reincarnation: In one sense it is ultimately no different from physicalism when it comes to the human self. The theory holds that there is no enduring identity of the self and that its ultimate destiny is to be dissolved into the universal Soul. In the long run, you cease to be. Secondly, it is also an implicit acknowledgement that the human mind cannot be satisfied with anything less than an embodied soul: as we noted, it is paradoxically an affirmation of resurrection-type views of the after-life.
There are two primary grounds that lead its proponents to affirm reincarnation, although the two are not necessarily related. One is religious belief and the other is the phenomenon of individuals who claim to "remember" their past lives. We consider both.
The roots of religious belief in reincarnation can be found primarily in the East though there are traces of the belief in some of the Greeks and the Druids. Historically it is a later-stage belief in Hinduism, a belief that is not part of the Vedic vision. The religion of the Vedas, the holiest books of Hinduism, did not teach reincarnation. It was only in some of the later Upanishads and Puranas that reincarnation emerged as a full-blown doctrine.
According to Swami Agehananda Bharati, reincarnation is "not as old as people hope it would be." In fact, "There is the first complete mention, though very brief, in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which is quite old. But the real assumptions having to do with reincarnation come in the Puranic age, at the time that the Puranas were composed, and then of course, through Buddhism. So you might say that it reached a state of common acceptance, I would think, around 300 B.C., but not earlier. So it is old, but in its highly articulated form it is not so old -- and the way it's talked about now, that's recent; that's 'Theosophical Society.'"
R.C. Zaehner, the great scholar of comparative religion, writes that "there is no trace [of reincarnation] in the Samhitas [the Vedas] or Brahmanas, and it is only when we come to the Upanishads that we first meet with this doctrine, which was to become central to all Hindu thought. In the Rig Veda the soul of the dead is carried aloft by the fire-god, Agni, who consumes the material body at cremation, to the heavenly worlds where it disports itself with the gods in perfect, carefree bliss. There will be eating and drinking of heavenly food and drink, reunion with father, mother, wife, and sons. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (6.2. 15-16), however, a distinction is made. Here for the first time we meet the doctrine of rebirth."
It should be understood that reincarnation is not portrayed as a desirable state even in those texts that propound it. It is by no means a cheerful view of life after death. Chari points out that "First of all, Hinduism is not committed absolutely to belief in reincarnation. It is not as if Hindu metaphysics condemns every soul to be reborn. In all the systems it is recognized that there are souls that are not reborn at all. Indeed the goal of Hindu metaphysics is not to be reborn. The cycle of rebirth is a fallen state. What the Western reincarnationist does not realize is that the cycle of births and rebirths is a fallen, sinful state. Redemption lies in going beyond the cycle. Even when there is belief in reincarnation in Hinduism it has a secondary place."
Buddhism, which rejected the teachings and practices of the Vedas, was founded in the sixth-century B.C. The Buddhist doctrine of rebirth has significant differences from reincarnation in Hinduism. Whereas Hinduism had the idea of unchanging jivatmans that went through numerous rebirths until merging with the Absolute, Buddhism was committed to the idea of anata or no-self. There is no self, only a compound of five skandhas or streams: bodily sensation, feeling, perception, moral dispositions, consciousness. At death the five streams separate and the flow of mental life continues in a cycle of rebirth until release in nirvana.
The historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston points out that there are changing mental states, but no self that has these states. He therefore finds it hard to make sense of the idea of rebirth: "It seems to me difficult to reconcile what is known as the doctrine of 'no-self' with Buddhist acceptance of belief in transmigration. If we suppose that in one terrestrial life x is a human being and in the next terrestrial life a lion, the two bodies are obviously different. What then provides the continuity entitling us to claim that x is the subject of both lives? Further, if x attains liberation from the succession of rebirth and enters Nirvana, and if entry into Nirvana is not interpreted as complete annihilation but as a permanent state, it is natural to ask, a state of what?"
But it is not religious belief alone that is responsible for belief in reincarnation. The modern phenomenon of spontaneous and induced "memories" of past lives in the case of certain individuals has spurred widespread acceptance of reincarnation. The allegedly spontaneous cases generally take place in areas where belief in reincarnation is already well entrenched, whereas the "memories" produced by hypnotic regressions are peculiar to the West.
We will consider the case for reincarnation from four standpoints:
The coherence factor concerns the question of how the theory fits in with the hard facts of experience and the established principles of modern science; with regard to evidence, we will consider the nature and reliability of the data that has been adduced in its favor; explanation concerns the possible interpretations of the data; and finally we will consider the kind of framework that has to be assumed for the theory to be true.
To give an example of how these kinds of tests would apply to a theory, let's look at a thesis of time-travel. Is the idea of going back-and-forth in time coherent? I would submit that the idea turns out to be incoherent once you understand the nature of time. As for evidence, we could look at a case of someone who claims to be from the past or the future. How could such a "traveler" prove the claim of traveling back and forth in time? It is hard to think of any kind of data that would be conclusive (short of our actually "traveling" to another era) and any data that is produced could be interpreted in several different ways. Finally, the background framework requires us to believe that there is some mechanism that enables people to go back and forth in time -- a tall order!
One question we should ask of any belief is whether it is coherent. Of course the coherence of a belief does not make it true. Neither does its apparent incoherence prove it to be untrue. Nevertheless, the question of coherence is one that should at least be addressed in considering the reincarnation hypothesis. As noted before, the very idea of life after death faces questions of coherence. These questions, I believe, can only be addressed if you take the human person as a unique union of body and soul, and the soul as the animating principle of a body.
When it comes to the coherence of reincarnation, several questions are critical:
Let's take the first issue. What I know from my experience is that I am a unique union of physical and transphysical whose identity springs from one act of being, the soul that individuates the body, and the body that individuates the soul. If we start with this hard fact, then it makes no sense to speak of me as an immaterial being that periodically takes over units of matter (plant, animal, human, extra-terrestrial) with no memory or consciousness of these hundreds of "invasions" and "occupations." Human nature and personhood as we experience it are inextricably linked to our bodies: the unique reality that I am is intrinsically embodied. Granted, after death, I can exist for a time by virtue of a separated soul. But that soul is mine, because it was the soul of my body, and it remains in an unnatural condition until it can animate a body which is truly mine (and by "mine" we mean the "I" that first came to be at the simultaneous inception of body, sou, and person). And the organic unity of body and soul -- whereby all my sensory experience comes through the body -- results in the emergence of a unique self that is marked forever by what it perceives, conceives, and does from womb to tomb. If the slate is wiped clean by the soul being reborn in a new body (whatever that means), we are talking of the annihilation of the "previous" person whose unique history and identity are simultaneously wiped out. This idea that a soul can be rebooted like a computer is incoherent from the standpoint of our actual experience of what it means to be human. Further, when we speak of reincarnation as a plant or lower animal, it is hard to imagine what is reincarnated: there is no question of a memory or imagination or disposition being passed on.
Braine points out:
Lewis points out that memories are treacherously unreliable. "While we would normally be inclined to take a sincere memory claim at its face value, we would require exceptionally clear evidence in respect to claims to remember a previous life. Though it is hard for those who have not had such an experience to envisage quite how closely it would have the feel and firmness of a normal memory, it would presumably be cut off from ordinary sequences and be more open to possibilities of delusion. It follows, in the light of these difficulties, that a claim to remember incidents of a past existence, or a continuous stretch of it, would require, even in one's own case, the support of overwhelming evidence."33
The conflict with what we know from biology is fatal in its implications. Paul Edwards reviews the response of Dr. Ian Stevenson: "Stevenson refers to the critics who think reincarnation cases must, 'accommodate to the current orthodoxy in biology.'" According to Stevenson, "cases of the reincarnation type, if accepted as authentic, challenge orthodox biology." According to B.N. Moore, a Stevenson critic, "If this is so, proof of reincarnation would require disproof of orthodox biology, and thus would require evidence even more vast than that which supports orthodox biology."
Chari goes to the heart of the biological case against reincarnation: "Reincarnation, if it occurs on anything like a major scale, is thinly disguised Lamarckism. The hypothesis demands that the habits, the memories, and even the scars on the bodies, which were acquired by individuals in historically earlier times, are transmitted to later generations by their 'surviving egos' being reborn in large numbers." But modern molecular biology leaves no room for "reincarnating egos to influence genetic information systems directly."35 If there is an astral body, the problem is, "how does that body carry the memories? How does it invade, at what point does it invade without contradicting biology?"
Prominent reincarnationists have espoused the scientifically discredited ideas of Lamarckianism. "Just as Lamarck believed that acquired characteristics can be inherited, so Radhakrishnan would have it that one's acquired character determines the gene pool of the body into which one is reincarnated. On theoretical and empirical grounds the suggestion appears inadmissible because the supposition would involve reversing the normal flow of biological information. We know that the information flows either irreversibly from DNA via RNA to protein, or from the DNA of one generation unchanged (except for chance mutation) to the DNA of the next generation. Reincarnation assumes that genetic information goes from the protein of one generation to the DNA of a later one, which involves formidable theoretical difficulties. If memories are carried by the 'astral body' even then it would contradict Crick's dogma, the central dogma of molecular biology: the flow of information is in one direction only." If reincarnation is true and there is "some tremendous kind of interaction" with the alleged astral body, then "practically all of biology is at a standstill."
Another reason for denying the reincarnationist thesis is the absolute and ultimate nature of our personal identity. Reincarnation is closely tied to pantheism, which holds that our sense of being individual persons is an illusion and that we are actually part of the universal mind. H.P. Owen has shown why this theory does not work:
"Pantheism fails to explain our awareness of distinctness and autonomy in things and persons. Our total experience of both personal and sub-personal entities is pervaded by the conviction that each is an independent form of existence. This conviction is immediately and uniquely present in each person's self-consciousness, whereby each is aware of himself as distinct from (and therefore capable of relating himself to) other persons. It is inconceivable how the Universal Self could include finite selves. A's thought, simply because it is A's, cannot include, though it may coincide with, B's thought." The idea that human selves are appearances or illusory faces two irrefutable challenges. "First, how could such an appearance or illusion of multiplicity be created by a unitary Absolute? Secondly, if our selfhood is illusory, or even if it is only semi-real, none of our individual statements can be true -- least of all our statements concerning a supposed Absolute."
For all these reasons, I do not believe that reincarnation as a theory of life after death can pass the coherence test: it does not cohere with what we know from our immediate experience of human nature and it flies in the face of modern biology.
We now consider the evidence offered in favor of reincarnation: it is almost exclusively based on supposed memories of past lives reported by certain individuals. But how good are the data and what viable interpretations are possible from any data that turns out to be reliable?
For our purposes, we will focus on claims of spontaneous recall of past lives. Ian Stevenson, for one, regarded induced recall, as in hypnotic regressions, to be worthless. "In my experience, nearly all so-called previous personalities evoked through hypnotism are entirely imaginary and a result of the patient's eagerness to obey the hypnotist's suggestion. It is no secret that we are all highly suggestible under hypnosis. This kind of investigation can actually be dangerous. Some people have been terribly frightened by their supposed memories, and in other cases the previous personality evoked has refused to go away for a long time." One major source of these kinds of "memories" is cryptoamnesia where in an altered state, like hypnosis, the brain releases stored memories of something that was read or discussed.
The relevant data for our purposes are the apparently spontaneous cases of recall of past lives in children. The primary investigator of such data has been Ian Stevenson. Without question, he was a painstaking researcher. But his whole case rests entirely on the quality of his data. According to his critics these are of dubious value.
"Stevenson's cases," writes Paul Edwards, "read much better in summary than when one examines them in detail. He has admitted that all his cases, even the strongest ones, possess some weaknesses. I think that this is a gross understatement. They all have big holes, and they do not even begin to add up to a significant counterweight to the initial presumption against reincarnation."
Edwards points to flaws in Stevenson's research methods: "Stevenson's cases then do not amount to even halfway decent evidence. In only 11 of the approximately 1,111 rebirth cases had there been no contact between the two families before investigation was begun. Of those 11, seven were seriously flawed in some respect. What this means is that in the great majority of cases, the two families had met years before a scientific investigation began, and that the likelihood of independent testimony was quite small. The rebirth cases are anecdotal evidence of the weakest sort."
Investigators of these cases have found that "In many cases, there was or easily could have been contact between the parents and persons connected with the 'previous personality' about whose life the child had accurate recollections." Edwards points out that an admirer of Stevenson's research noted "that only in seven of Stevenson's cases were the child's statements about a previous life recorded prior to the attempts at verification. Stevenson has himself admitted that where this is not done subsequent developments may lead to embellishments of what the child is supposed to have said. Yet, [even!] in all these seven cases, the child lived 'within the geographical or social circumference of the previous personality.' The 'close connection' between the children and the surviving friends and relatives of the previous personality 'raises questions of sensory cues.'"
Moreover, "Stevenson's 'frankly admitted ignorance of Asiatic languages' and the resulting dependence on translators and interpreters must weaken the scientific value of his reports."
Stevenson himself admitted that his research was not conclusive: "Essentially I say that the idea of reincarnation permits, but doesn't compel belief. All the cases I've investigated so far have shortcomings. Even taken together, they do not offer anything like proof. But as the body of evidence accumulates, it's more likely that more and more people will see its relevance." In point of fact, Stevenson never disclosed whether or not he personally believed in reincarnation.
Different interpretations are possible for the alleged reincarnation data. In the first place, clear cases of fraud and self-deception have been detected, and these can be discarded. Nevertheless some cases seem genuine. But here there are explanations, which are much more plausible if you accept a paranormal dimension (which you have to if you accept the possibility of reincarnation). These explanations -- offered by Hindu sages and others -- include possession by a spirit and communication from a deceased soul.
As a physicalist, Edwards considers all of the cases to be the result of fraud.
"As already noted, before very long, Stevenson's children forget all of their memories of their memories of a previous life. 'The children,' he writes, 'nearly always stop talking about their previous lives between the ages of five and eight.' There is surely something very strange about this universal forgetting. The children gradually stop 'remembering' their previous lives because they have become tired of the charade and now have better things to do. The parents, too, for that matter, have by now derived all the publicity and possible financial advantage from the commotion. It should be emphasized that there is no suggestion that the children who forgot their past lives suffered any general amnesia and were also unable to remember events of their current lives. That the child cases are charades is fully confirmed by the experience of Dr. D.R. Barker."
Barker, an anthropologist, investigated many of the same cases as Stevenson, but "could not find a single case in which there was convincing evidence of the presence of a paranormal process." The most thoroughly investigated case, he said, is "best interpreted as a result of Indian social psychology rather than parapsychology."
"Why is there this disparity in the number and the quality of Eastern and Western cases?" asks Edwards. "I don't believe that the answer is difficult to find, and it has nothing to do with suppression. In the West, we do not have a host of witnesses with an ardent belief in reincarnation who will manufacture the necessary 'proofs'; and if any such proofs were manufactured, we have numerous skeptics right on the spot who would subject them to a much more elaborate and searching scrutiny than any undertaken by Stevenson and his associates."
Chari has several explanations for the phenomenon:
"I shall now formulate some theoretical objections to reincarnation regarded as a working hypothesis of survival research. I am not aware that any reincarnationist has stated, in a scientifically testable form, just what it is that 'reincarnates' or just how it influences even genetic information transmission which is a kind of biological relay race particularly immune to individual habits, memories, accidents, vicissitudes. The oft-proposed popular reincarnationist hypothesis of 'two streams of heredity,' one 'physical' and the other 'psychical,' dismally fails to account for the curious birthmarks, scars, and the physiological idiosyncrasies of Stevenson's cases, assuming that they are 'carried over' from an 'earlier life.'
We have to address 'little-understood influences coming from grandparents and even remote ancestors but also to discarnate possession of indeterminate range, duration and penetrance. My puzzlement as a Hindu parapsychologist arises from the lack of any adequate criterion which would distinguish 'reincarnation' from 'possession.'
My researches have uncovered another trap for the unwary in supposed cases of rebirth. Whether an Asian child's paranormal behavior suggests to the bystanders 'mediumistic possession' or 'reincarnation' depends very much on the kind of imaginative 'reaching out' exercised by the child, which in turn is a function of the cultural setting. There are, in fact, no infallible criteria for 'mediumistic possession' in the Asian area. The late Somasundara Gnanasambandha Desika Paramacharya, the former head of an important Saivite centre in Madurai, Tamilnadu, and the author of a popular book in Tamil on 'spirit communication' was firmly of the opinion that all of Stevenson's cases of the 'reincarnation-type' could be explained in terms of 'possession,' keeping well in view the uniformly violent termination of the 'former lives.'"
It should be noted that the possession hypothesis originated from within the Hindu framework where the violent end of a person's life is sometimes seen as the source of mischief caused by the wandering soul. Moreover, in an article titled "Anomalies of Consciousness: Indian perspectives and research," K. Ramakrishna Rao writes, "10 to 20 percent of women sampled in South India belonging to a subset of Brahmins were believed to have been possessed by a spirit at some time in their lives. The event of "spirit possession," it is observed, wins attention, prestige, and a deferential treatment that such a woman could not otherwise attain for herself."
Past Life Recall as Cultural and Psychical
Chari believes claims of past life recall spring from two sources: "One is cultural, the other is psychical. [Our] flickering, empirical consciousness is open to invasions. At an empirical level it is very much open to influences. Parental influences, social influences. It is open at another level as well, a psychic level: telepathy. It is open to psychic influences coming from the past. Other people's past, not our past. A person dies, but the memories can invade a soul in the present. It is open and the boundaries are not fixed. The empirical consciousness does not have fixed boundaries." Psychic openness to influences from the past, concludes Chari, successfully explains all cases of past-life recall. "Reincarnation is not a scientifically testable hypothesis. The cases of people who claim to 'remember' former lives are explicable by a combination of hidden and disguised normally-acquired memories, extra-sensory tapping of the memories of other people, and a strong empathetic identification with deceased persons. This explanation is not only feasible but actually illustrated by the empirical data of survival research."
NDE-ers and Reincarnation
It should be mentioned at this point that several people involved in NDE research favor the reincarnation hypothesis. But, as Michael Sabom points out, this belief does not originate in the actual NDE event. He cites Raymond Moody who wrote, "Not one of the cases I have looked into is in any way indicative to me that reincarnation occurred." Also Kenneth Ring: "There is no reason why an NDEr's openness toward reincarnation must stem directly from his NDE. In fact, I am quite convinced that in many cases it is more likely to be a response to an NDEr's reading and other life experiences following an NDE."
Sabom points to a sociological reason why many NDE survivors believe in reincarnation: "Amber Wells interviewed a group of IANDS' near-death experiencers and found that none 'claimed to have gained any direct understanding of the nature or process of reincarnation during his or her NDE.' Despite this finding, an incredible 70 percent of these near-death experiencers professed a 'strong belief in reincarnation, which tended to follow the standard view of reincarnation as expressed in much of the New Age literature.' Wells concluded that a belief in reincarnation following a near-death experience is a result of 'reading, discussions with others, and personal reflection,' not the NDE itself. This, it would seem, was the source for the belief in reincarnation, not the NDE."
The final variable to be analyzed is the background framework assumed by reincarnation. Is it plausible? Edwards, for one, is emphatic that the assumptions made by the theory of reincarnation are simply unacceptable.
Edwards's lays out the implications of astral bodies: "In a simplified form, the question before a rational person can be stated in the following words: which is more likely -- that there are astral bodies, that they invade the wombs of prospective mothers, and that the children can remember events from a previous life although the brains of the previous persons have long been dead, or that their very fallible memories and powers of observation have led them to make false statements and bogus identifications."
Edwards cites John Hick's objection that babies are not born with adult egos "as they would be if they were direct continuations of egos which had died at the end of a normal lifespan.' It is little less than scandalous that no reincarnationist has ever attempted to reply to this argument."
What about the billions of years in which there was no life in the Universe? "It is now generally accepted that for many billions of years after the Big Bang the universe contained no life at all. Reincarnation in all forms postulates a series of incarnations stretching back into the past without limit; and this is clearly inconsistent with the facts."
The population argument seems to Edwards to be quite conclusive against reincarnationism. In a 1981 issue of BioScience, Professor Arthur H. Westing of Amherst "estimated that the 1981 population of 4.4 billion amounted to 9 percent of all human beings who ever lived and that it was greater than the number of people who lived through the entire Paleolithic age, a period accounting for 86 percent of the duration of human life." Edwards notes that "these facts are incompatible with the less fanciful version of the reincarnation theory according to which human souls can occupy only human bodies." This is because the reincarnationist holds that "All souls have always existed. Every birth is a rebirth, the rebirth of a soul that has already existed. All this clearly rules out any population increase. It is noteworthy that this argument has hardly been explicitly discussed by any of the academically respectable reincarnationists." Of course, this has not stopped some reincarnationists from clutching at bizarre straws. While some have pointed to the possibility of there being other inhabitants planets in the universe, others have said that the same soul could occupy more than one soul at the same time!
H.D. Lewis asks, "How does it come about that another appropriate life is ready when the time comes for the rebirth? We have to remember that much in our dispositional nature and skills is settled through conception and the transmission of physical characteristics. How, then, can a soul come to an appropriate new birth without suspension of the normal course of natural events? Is there a miraculous modification each time, and how would that square with available evidence? And what, moreover, can we say of changes in the population? On what principle can t be thought that new souls are created?"
The conclusions to be drawn from this long journey into reincarnation are clear:
· The theory is incoherent as it stands.
· There is no substantial evidence in its favor.
· There are various far more plausible counter-explanations for the available data.
· The general framework that the theory has to assume does not work.
For all these reasons, reincarnation is not a viable account of life after death.
Resurrection
The other major account of the survival of the human person is the resurrection of the body. With regard to the evidence in its favor, at best we can say that the soul survives the death of the body, the soul is "formed" by its relation to the body, and the separated soul is oriented to animating a body if it is to subsist in a normal state. This animation of a glorified body called resurrection is entirely different from reincarnation. Here the person and the soul remain the same. All that is different is the matter, but the matter of our bodies keeps changing even in our earthly lives, and yet we remain the same person through all these changes. In reincarnation a new person supposedly comes into being each time the soul passes from body to body.
But whether or not there is a resurrection can only be known through divine revelation. It is also the only coherent account of how the human person can survive death and still retain the fullness of its nature.
A resurrection, if it is possible, is essential for integrity of the person. Peter Geach makes this clear. "The upshot of our whole argument is that unless a man comes to life again by resurrection, he does not live again after death. At best some mental remnant of him would survive death; and I should hold that the possibility even of such survival involves at least a permanent capacity for renewed human life; if reincarnation is excluded, this means: a capacity for resurrection."
The Resurrected Body not the Pre-Death Body
It should be noted that the resurrection claim does not call for the rising of the pre-death body. "The identity of a body as a whole is safeguarded by the identity of its substantial form," notes Eberle. "Hence, at resurrection, any elementary particles would suffice for the recomposition of a human being's body. No matter from where such particles originate -- even if they never had composed that human being's body during his life -- they are made to compose his body due to their matter's being informed/configured by his soul."
To reiterate what has been said, the idea of resurrection clearly has to be considered in the context of a claim of divine revelation.
We have noted that, at the level of immediate experience, the case for survival flows directly from the nature of the intellectual and volitional acts of the soul. Once we have grasped the non-physical nature of these operations, we realize that their continuance is not necessarily dependent on any physical process (unlike visual consciousness that requires photons, neurons, the optic nerve, and so on). So what happens when a human dies? Clearly the body decomposes -- in fact, it ceases to be a body, because there is no soul or principle of life that organizes and animates it. If the soul's operations were entirely limited to physical processes (as is the case in an insect or a cat which also have principles of life), then there is no question of the continued existence of the soul. But in the case of humans, the non-physical nature of some of the soul's operations requires that the soul itself be non-physical and hence capable of independent existence. To be sure, in its essential identity the soul is the principle of life of a body, and so its survival without a body is survival in an unnatural state. The disembodied soul may be capable of intellectual operations, but it would be limited in its ability to perform tasks that require the senses.
Does this mean that the soul cannot "see" or "feel" after death? We have acknowledged that to be separated from the body is to be in an unnatural state. Religious traditions that talk of a resurrection of the body whereby the soul will animate a body -- a body that becomes your body because it is the same soul that does the animating -- have at least addressed this issue. Moreover, a soul in its separated state could, by an act of God, be infused with new capacities. This is what Aquinas held and what the after-life data including NDEs indicate. But the bottom line is that the soul survives the death of its body. Now we cannot possibly imagine what an existence of this kind is like, but our inability to imagine it does not mean that the soul cannot continue to exist.
At this stage, it would be useful to review the conclusions of thinkers who have specifically considered the nature of disembodied existence. The most important contribution comes from David Braine.
Because the act of existing or esse of the human person is not of the body but the soul, it will transcend the life of the body. "Since the operations of the human being are, in the case of some operations, not the operations of a bodily organ, the esse of the human being does not consist in the esse of the ensemble of its bodily organs." For instance, "understanding is not the operation of a bodily organ" but of the person. "If some of the activities, especially ones most nodal to life, transcend the body, then existence and life transcend the body."
After death, it is the person who knows and loves not the soul: "When one has died, one is not a nothing but one has no body. After death it is still the person qua person which primarily knows and loves, not the soul or person supposedly qua soul, just as before death." 55
Bradley points out that "Here and now the human soul acts spiritually because it has a spiritual act of existence which, postmortem, sustains it as a continuing spiritual substance." Its act of being and, consequently, the activity of the intellectual soul "transcends the whole genus of bodies."
Aquinas speculated that there could be a special divine infusion that would enable separated souls to "know" and "communicate" in the manner of the angels: "the human soul's postmortem mode of knowing can be analogized to that of the angelic separate intelligences, who at their creation are connaturally infused with intelligible species. Such infusion, by God via the superior separate intelligences, would also be in accordance with the disembodied human soul's mode of being."
Eberle points out that the separated soul will retain its intellective and sensory capabilities, although its ability to actualize these will depend on other factors. "A separated human soul has all the capacities proper to existence as a rational animal, namely intellective, sensitive, and vegetative capacities. Hence, though without his body a human being is unable to actualize many of his capacities, he remains a rational animal by virtue of his soul retaining all the capacities proper to such a nature." Again, "When it subsists apart from the body after a human being's death, each individual human soul retains knowledge, experiential memory, and the blueprint for a particular body."
To Be Continued
It's time now for a reality check. Let's recap the cumulative case outlined in this book:
Based on all of the above, it is eminently reasonable to conclude that there is a life after death. And, if the universal narrative is right, this after-life will be one of union with the divine or separation therefrom.
Has the present book succeeded in building a case for life after death? This is a question that can only be answered by each reader on an individual basis. But whether or not the arguments adduced here are viable, we know this for a fact: the overwhelming majority of human beings took it for granted that there is a life beyond death and that their choices and acts have a definite bearing on their destiny. They knew (without any help from the neuroscientists) that damage to the brain would impair their mental life and that the brain stops functioning at death. And yet they believed that the human person survives death.
At the very least, the dots we have connected indicate that there is a reasonable case to be made for an after-life. No scientific methodologies or technologies are even remotely relevant here (you might as well open a clock to understand the concept of "time"). What we can and do have is a paradigm, a picture that makes sense of the data at hand and all elements of our experience. It is a paradigm that takes seriously our unique identity as psychophysical organisms "organized" by an intellectual soul and oriented to a destiny beyond death. This is a paradigm that appropriates not simply our everyday experience, but also cross-fertilizes the resources available from contemporary NDEs, cross-cultural and inter-religious belief-systems, and even the narratives that emerge from purported visions of the after-life.
Now it must be admitted that some accounts of the after-life sound quite unattractive, even macabre. And this is true not simply of certain ancient texts. We are reminded of the clergyman who, when asked what he thought happened after death, replied, "I suppose we shall enjoy eternal bliss but please let us not discuss such a depressing subject."
Here let me speak personally and candidly. Let us set aside for a moment our philosophical and religious preconceptions. I speak to you as one human person to another, as a fellow traveler on the road to death. We have so little time for niceties and nuances, so little space for abstractions and cliches. We have to get right to the point. There is only one thing that matters to us, to any of us: is death the end or is it the entry-point to some other kind of existence? If an entry-point, how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?
My personal perspective is one of hope and joy tempered with caution. I believe in a God who loves us unconditionally and infinitely, who seeks union with each one of us. But I am aware that I am a free being and that God respects my freedom. It is here that the exhortations of the sages ring loud and clear: always seek to do God's will: if you turn against him (as we all do), you can always return: above all, never fear and trust totally. As a Christian, I believe that the innermost nature of God is Love, a beginningless, endless act of love of three Centers within the one divine Being, and that we are all called to enter into this Love. Beyond the door of death lies endless ecstasy.
All of us, at every moment of our being, hunger and thirst for love, for acceptance, recognition, security. It is this hunger and this thirst that manifest themselves in nameless longings -- "all that men ignored in me," said Browning -- which we can hardly comprehend or communicate. In our heart of hearts we know that nothing on earth can ease the pain, the sense of anonymity, the lingering loneliness, which are part and parcel of this seemingly unquenchable quest. And those who have surrendered themselves utterly to him know that, at bottom, this yearning of the inmost self is a call for and from the Source of our being. All who come to him will never hunger and never thirst. All our lives we are searching for him and yet running away from him. Immeasurably more important, He pursues us "down the night and down the days," and his love draws us from darkness to light, from death to life, from lesser goods to the Greatest Good.
*This excerpt Reprinted,
with permission of the publisher, from THERE IS LIFE AFTER
DEATH (c) 2010 Roy Varghese. Published by New Page Books a division of
Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.
**For the footnotes and references contained in this excerpt, see the hardcopy book itself.