Maverick Philosopher

A Theory of Hell

The 'pleasures' of hell explained over at Substack.

Combat Veterans

They descended into hell and some rose again from the dead. Who am I to ask them any questions? Do I have the right?

Craig was a housemate of mine in undergraduate days. When he was 18 he ran away from a troubled home and joined the Marine Corps. He ended up in Vietnam. One day I asked him what it was like. Distraught, he ran from the room. Later he told me the story. His platoon entered a village.  After the fire fight, he alone was unscathed. Everyone else was either killed or badly wounded. Craig told me that as he walked toward what he thought would be certain death, he was overcome with a feeling of deep love for everybody and everything. In that Grenzsituation, that boundary or limit situation, my friend perhaps glimpsed the world's ultimate depth dimension, a peace surpassing all understanding in the eye of the storm of war.

To encroach with curiosity upon the liminality of such experiences shows a lack of respect.  So now I ask no questions.

What the Hell?

Just as Biden and his supporters are disasters for the USA, Bergoglio and his supporters are disasters for the RCC. 'Twould appear that all of the institutions of the West are in dire need of fumigation. See here:

But Pope Francis appears to have scotched that possibility. “No one can exclude themselves from the Church,” he insisted, “we are all saved sinners.” Even those, he adds, “who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism.  

Yes, these too. All of them. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven…the saints, the sinners, all.

What are we to make of this? Surely, one asks, he cannot have meant to include unrepentant sinners in the Kingdom of Heaven? That those who deliberately take themselves to Hell, choosing an eternity of loss rather than the joys of Heaven, are nevertheless still members of the Communion of Saints? This is not Catholic doctrine, and no one, not even the Pope of Rome, can make it so by saying so.

Would it be Heaven for a Mother Whose Child is in Hell?

Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question.

This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death.  My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises from my pondering the question of the doctrine of immutability in relation to those of salvation, either immediate (Heaven) or eventual (Purgatory) or damnation (Hell) as these concern the loved ones of departed persons. Specifically, I am thinking, for example, of the deep love of a mother for her children. If it is the case that the soul of a loving mother finds, through the meritorious life that she has led, immediate salvation in Heaven after death, but that of her child, lacking in such virtue, ends up in Hell, is it rational to belief that the former soul is happy or at peace? In following up this question, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has an entry on “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” which, assuming the inclusive nature of love, “especially in the form of wishing the best for another” (Section 4.1), poses the question in the following way: “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever”? (Section 5.2)  More generally, how is it just to allow souls to become embodied and to form loving relationships if such an end awaits so many of those who are loved?

One answer could be along the lines of what I say in Soteriology for Brutes? which ends as follows:

[Edward] Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

One might speculate that the saintly loving mother who goes straight to heaven upon death will be so swept up in the ecstasy of the Beatific Vision as to give her children no thought at all.  All sublunary concerns will fall away in the presence of the infinite reality of the divine life.  She will no more think of her children than I will think of my cats after I have served my 'time' in purgatory.  Ed Feser, however, would not and could not give this answer given his strict Thomism. Thomas famously states that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” So we get the curious and indeed horrifying result that the saintly loving mother who loved her child in time will experience schadenfreude at the child's unending torment in eternity.

Part of the problem here is that we quite naturally tend to waffle between two very different conceptions of the afterlife. I call them Life 2.0 and Beatific Vision.  I explore the difference in considerable detail in  Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Thomas himself may be waffling. If the souls of the blessed in heaven are wholly absorbed in the infinitely rich and endlessly variegated, and thus not possibly boring, absolute life of the Supreme Reality, how could they continue to be distracted by finite concerns? How could they continue to care about other finite persons, whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or on earth? How could the blessed take satisfaction in the torment of the damned? But insofar as we think of survival of bodily death as personal survival, as opposed to an absorption into the Absolute that effaces personal individuality, we will tend to think of finite persons as preserved in their individuality together with their sublunary interests. 

This sort of attitude which disallows a clean break with the finite and an ascent to the Absolute is reflected in the popular song from 1941,  I Remember You. The version I remember from my boyhood is Frank Ifield's 1962 effort which features the lines (written by Johnny Mercer):

When my life is through
And the angels ask me 
To recall the thrill of them all
Then I will tell them I remember you.

The singer goes on to remember two distant bells and stars that fell like the rain from the blue. So the singer in heaven, presumably in the divine presence, is thinking about bells, shooting stars, and a woman! Now a woman for a (heterosexual) man is the highest finite object, but still a rather paltry bit of finitude as compared to to the stupendous transcendent reality that is the Godhead.  The things of finitude and flesh are next-to-nothing in comparison, and one's ultimate felicity could not possibly be thought of as attainable by way of loving and being loved by a mere mortal.  One wants to love and be loved by eternal Love Itself.  This is the sort of attitude one finds in Aquinas and such first-rate expositors as Pierre Rousselot and Etienne Gilson. I quote Gilson in World + God = God? See also Again on 'God + World = God.'

The sort of heavenly retrospective on one's earthly tenure found in the sentimental old tune from the '40s can also be found in serious religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See the latter's Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society, 1983, pp. 38-39:

When the righteous sit in the world to come, where there is neither eating nor drinking, with their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the divine presence . . . they occupy themselves with the study of the Torah, which treats of bodily life in our lowly world.

[. . .]

The creator of worlds, revealed and unrevealed, the heavenly hosts, the souls of the righteous all grapple with halakhic problems that are bound up with the empirical world -- the red cow, the heifer whose neck is to be broken, leprosy, and similar issues. They do not concern themselves with transcendence, with questions that are above space and time, but with the problems of earthly life in all its details and particulars.

[. . .]

The universal homo religiosus proclaims: The lower yearns for the higher. But halakhic man, with his unique mode of understanding, declares: The higher longs and pines for the lower. 

Thus the waffling may be inevitable, even for the doctor angelicus, given the ineluctably discursive nature of finite mind.  We think in opposites and cannot do otherwise. So we think: either the individual soul is extinguished in the Godhead thereby losing its individuality -- which would make hash of the notion of personal immortality -- or individuality is retained together with finite concerns for other persons and things from one's sublunary tenure.  

Back to Vito's question. He asked how it could be rational to view the saintly mother in heaven as happy or at peace given the mother's loving concern for her child who she knows is in hell. The problem is exacerbated by the Aquinate asseveration, “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.”  My suggested answer was that the blessed, wholly absorbed by the visio beata, will have lost all memory of the finite, including the persons they loved in the sublunary. The trouble with this suggestion is that it does not comport well with the orthodox view that individual souls are never wholly absorbed into the Godhead, but retain their individuality. But if so, the deepest sublunary loves could nor be wholly effaced or forgotten in the way the old man forgets the toys he fooled with as a young boy. So I have no good answer for Vito.

One again we see that the philosopher's forte is not the answering of questions but the questioning of answers. 

An Atheological Argument from the Evil of Radical Skepticism

Bradley Schneider sends this argument of his devising:

Premise 1: If God exists, God has the power to eliminate/overcome/defeat any evil in reality without creating more evil (i.e., God and evil can coexist but God should prevail over evil in the end).

Premise 2: Radical skepticism about the world is an evil (NOT that radical skeptics are evil; rather, our inability to counter radical skepticism and to be sure about our knowledge of reality is an evil).

Premise 3: God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will (creating another evil) -- e.g., a skeptic who dies and goes to heaven may still not be convinced that he or she is not under an illusion created by a Cartesian demon; heaven could be part of the illusion.

Conclusion: God does not exist.

I accept the first two premises. With respect to the second, I have long believed that our deep and irremediable ignorance on matters of great importance to us is a major evil and germane both to the case for God's nonexistence, but also to the anti-natalist case.  (Atheists who argue to the nonexistence of God from evil ought to consider whether the manifold evils of this world don't also put paid to the notion that human life is worth living and propagating.)

I balk, however, at the third premise. Schneider seems to be assuming that the origin of radical skepticism is in a free decision not to accept some putative givenness.  There is, I admit, the willful refusal on the part of certain perverse individuals to accept the evident, and even the self-evident; as I see it, however, the origin of radical skepticism is not in a free refusal to accept what is evident or self-evident, but in a set of considerations that the skeptic finds compelling.  A skeptic is not a willful denier, but a doubter, and indeed one whose doubt is in the service of cognition. He doesn't doubt for the sake of doubting, but for the sake of knowing. The skeptic wants to know, but he has high standards: he wants objective certainty, not mere subjective conviction. He doubts whatever can be doubted in order to arrive at epistemic bedrock.  This is what motivates the hyperbolic doubt of the Dream Argument and the considerations anent the evil genius.

I therefore reject the claim that "God cannot eliminate radical skepticism without overriding free will . . . ."  Free will doesn't come into it. Heaven is the Beatific Vision, and in that vision there will be such a perfect coalescence of finite knower and Infinite Object that no doubt can arise. In the visio beata, radical skepticism will not be possible.  A mundane analog is supplied by the experience of a sensory quale such as a felt pain, or rather pleasure.  In the moment that one feels it, one cannot doubt it, so long as one attends to its phenomenal features alone and brackets (in Husserl's sense) all external considerations as to causes, effects, etc.  The phenomenology is indubitable whatever may be the case with the etiology.

So if heaven is the Beatific Vision, heaven cannot be illusory.  But this highly refined, highly Platonic, Thomist take on heaven is not for everyone. It is not for Protestants whose conception is cruder.  I call that conception Life 2.0 and I contrast in with the Thomist conception in Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision ?  On a crude conception, according to which Jethro will be united after death with his faithful hound 'Blue,' drink home brew, and hunt rabbits, there is room for illusion.  It could be that there is a whole series of quasi-material 'spiritual' heavens above the sublunary but shy of the ultimate heaven of the Beatific Vision, but I won't pursue that speculation here.

It just so happens that I am now reading Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence (Marquette UP, 1999), which is a translation of L'Intellectualisme de Saint Thomas. On p. 35, we read:

By a profoundly logical coincidence the beatific vision, which is the final cause of the world and ultimate perfection of the created spirit, is also, according to Thomas, the only example of a created knowledge other than the intuitions of personal consciousness which seizes and possesses being such as it is, directly, not only without abstraction but with no mediation whatever. The beatific vision is perfect intellection with regard both to its object and to its mode of operation; on this account we must study it here; otherwise it would be impossible to have an exact idea of what intellection is in itself.

This text supports my analogy above. "The intuitions of personal consciousness" are the felt qualia I referred to.  These are "created knowledges" Writ Very Small, paltry sublunary analogs (e.g., the smell of burnt toast) of the ultimate coalescence of subject and object in the visio beata. But in both the sublunary and beatific cases, Being (esse) is seized and possessed directly, not via abstract concepts and without the mediation of epistemic deputies and mediators.  Being is grasped itself and not via representations. The little mysticisms of sensation prefigure the Big Mysticism of Ultimate Beatitude.

My prose is starting to 'flow French,' but I trust you catch my drift.

 

Why There Has to be Hell

Here is an amateur theological speculation.

Suppose a rebellious nature such as Bertrand Russell or Jean-Paul Sartre or Christopher Hitchens finds himself in the divine presence and yet continues to refuse to acknowledge reality, which includes the rebel's creature status.  Hitchens, or whoever, continues to assert himself madly with Luciferian pride and egomania against the Source of all being, truth, intelligibility, personhood, and value, making of himself an absolute when there can be only one Absolute.

How could such a rebel be admitted into divine fellowship, or even into a purgatorial condition preparatory to divine fellowship? No God worth his salt could allow such a thing.

There has to be hell for rebels who freely choose it.  Allowance must be made for the rebels and their shouting of the eternal No!

A Theory of Hell

The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the Sky. This will lead either to a childish form of theism (God as Big Daddy, supplier of material needs, wish-fulfiller) or to a form of atheism of the Edward Abbey 'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon' variety.

Something similar is true of conceptions of heaven and hell. The materially minded will develop crass conceptions. Popular Islam's notion of paradise as an endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins, as a doing there all the carnal things one is forbidden here, is as theologically hopeless as is a Christian fundamentalist's notion of hell as fire and brimstone.

I suggest the following as closer to the theological reality of hell where hell is permanent separation, recognized as such, from one's absolute good, recognized as such.

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell not as a state of pain but of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise --  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas -- in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. The fire of desire endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists.

Metaphysical Joy and Sadness

There is a rare form of joy that some of us have experienced, a joy that suggests that at the back of this life is something marvellous and that one day this life may open out onto it.  It goes together with a kind of sadness, call it metaphysical nostalgia, a sort of longing for a lost homeland, so far back in time that it is outside of time. This is the joy that C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, and that Nietzsche may have had in mind when he had his Zarathustra exclaim, "All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity!"

The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart

Here (HT: Karl White):

Let me, however, add one more observa­tion that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Chris­tianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails to persuade is one who has failed to understand its argument fully. In order to reject it, one must also reject one or another crucial tenet of the faith. The exits have all been sealed. I suppose I could be wrong about that, but I do not believe it likely.

Hart seems not to have noticed that he embraces a logical contradiction when he says that the argument he has given is irrefutable AND that he could be wrong about that.  For if an argument is irrefutable, then it cannot be refuted; if, on the other hand, the producer of an argument can be wrong about whether it is irrefutable, then the argument can be refuted. Hence the contradiction: the argument cannot be refuted AND the argument can be refuted.

But a man can be a pompous ass and a blowhard and still have interesting things to say. If you are interested in the question of universal salvation, see Douglas Farrow, Harrowing Hart on Hell in First Things. (HT: Dave Lull)

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion.  We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife.  His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013.  I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of  any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect   while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example.   Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing.   That is my aim below.

 

.................................................

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones.   They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

 

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they  need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

This weekend I had the pleasure of a visit from Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion.  We discussed a number of topics at table and on trail including imago dei, the nature of forgiveness, the role of Platonism in Christianity, and death and afterlife.  His position on the latter topic I would characterize as 'Life 2.0,' the essentials of which I set forth below in a slightly revised version of an entry from 2013.  I see Dale as a sort of spiritual materialist whereas he probably sees me as a kind of gnostic or Platonizer whose conception of the afterlife is so hopelessly abstract as to be devoid of  any human meaning. I recently wrote in Soteriology for Brutes?

. . . the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, but I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

On our long ramble over desert trails on Saturday morning, Dale eloquently defended his view, one I respect   while respectfully rejecting. I have no illusions about dissuading him from it any more than I expect ever to get him to see that God cannot be a being among beings, a topic we have vigorously discussed on several occasions, see here, for example.   Agreement here as elsewhere is out of reach, and perhaps not even reasonably pursued; mutual clarification of differences, however, is well within reach, and worth pursuing.   That is my aim below.

 

.................................................

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, as I am sure Dale Tuggy does not, they think of it as a prolongation of the concerns of this life including the petty ones.   They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unlike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

 

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit? Why would you suddenly love there what you don't love here?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns, you would not get through to them. For what they  need are not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books; we read trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons; we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective.

These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Would Heaven be Boring?

Maybe not. (HT: V. Vohanka)

Related: Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

My post concludes as follows:

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring? 

Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

To Hell with Bergoglio

My title, not Buchanan's.

I'll have to check, but I don't believe that Canon Law allows for the ecclesiastical equivalent of impeachment and removal from office for popes. Perhaps it ought to.

As for hell, here is an amateur theological consideration. Suppose a rebellious nature such as Bertrand Russell or Jean-Paul Sartre or Christopher Hitchens finds himself in the divine presence and yet continues to refuse to acknowledge reality, which includes the rebel's creature status.  Hitch, or whoever, continues to assert himself madly with Luciferian pride and egomania against the Source of all being, truth, intelligibility, personhood, and value, making of himself an absolute when there can be only one Absolute.

How could such a rebel be admitted into divine fellowship, or even into a purgatorial condition preparatory to divine fellowship? No God worth his salt could allow such a thing.

There has to be hell for rebels who freely choose it.  Allowance must be made for the rebels and their shouting of the eternal No!

 

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences: Do They Prove Anything?

A repost from 16 December 2012 with minor edits.

...............................................

The personable Dr. Neal recounts her experiences during this 13 and a half minute video clip.  The following from an interview with her:

The easy explanations—dreams or hallucinations—I could discount quickly, because my experience—and the experience described by anyone who's had a near death experience or other experiences that involve God directly—is different in quality and memory from a dream or hallucination. It's just entirely different. The memory is as precise and accurate now, years later, as it is when it's happening.

So then I thought it must be due to chemical changes or chemical releases in a dying brain. I did a lot of reading about that. If my experience had lasted five, six, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes, I am sure that no matter how real it seemed to me, I would have said that's a reasonable explanation. But the people who resuscitated me would say that I was without oxygen for up to thirty minutes.

It took them ten or fifteen minutes to figure out, first, that I and my boat were both missing. Then once they identified where they thought I was, they started their watch. They're used to doing this—you have to know the timing so you can recognize whether you're trying to rescue someone or you're trying to go for body recovery. So on the watch it was fifteen minutes, but about thirty minutes in all. I tend to stick with the fifteen minutes, because that's an absolute timing. But even at fifteen minutes, that is way longer than can be explained by a dying brain. The human brain can hang on to oxygen for maybe five or six minutes, and so even if you give it another four minutes to go through its dying process, that still doesn't add up to fifteen minutes. And so after I looked at all that, my conclusion was that my experience was real and absolute.

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, there is light enough for those who want to see and darkness enough for those who don't.  Atheists and mortalists will of course not be convinced by Neal's report.  Consider her first paragraph.  She underscores the unique phenomenological quality of OBEs.  Granting that they are phenomenologically different from dreams and ordinary memories, there is nonetheless a logical gap between the undeniable reality of the experiencing and the reality of its intentional object.  Into that gap the skeptic will insert his wedge, and with justification.  No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object. 

Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics.  Everything I am perceiving right now, computer, cup, cat, the Superstition ridgeline and the clouds floating above it (logically) might have a merely intentional existence.  How do I know I am not brain in a vat?  If I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, how can I know (in that tough sense in which knowledge entails objective certainty)  that cat, cup, etc. are extramentally real?  The skeptic can always go hyperbolic on you. How are you going to stop him?

The other consideration Dr. Neal adduces will also leave the skeptic cold.  Her point is that her brain had to have been 'off-line' given the amount of time that elapsed, and that therefore her experiences could not be the product of a (mal)functioning brain.  We saw in an earlier post  that Dr. Eben Alexander employed similar reasoning.  The skeptic will undoubtedly now give a little a speech about how much more there is yet to know about the brain and that Neal is in no position confidently to assert what she asserts, etc.

The mortalist starts and ends with an assumption that he cannot give up while remaining a mortalist, namely, that there just cannot be mental functioning without underlying brain activity, and that therefore no OBEs can be credited if they are interpreted in a manner to support the claim that consciousness can exist without a physical substratum. How does the mortalist/materialist know this?  He doesn't. It's a framework assumption. He certainly doesn't know it from any natural-scientific investigation.  It is clear that some brain changes are followed by mental changes. That shows that embodied consciousness is dependent on the brain. But it says nothing about consciousness in its disembodied state. 

In the grip of that materialist framework assumption,  the mortalist will do anything to discount the veridicality of OBEs.  Push him to the wall and he will question the moral integrity of the reporters.  "They are just out to exploit human credulousness to turn a buck."  Or they will question the veridicality of the memories of the OBEs.  The human mind can be extremely inventive in cooking up justifications for what it wants to believe.  That is as true of mortalists as it is of anyone.  To paraphrase Pascal again, there is enough darkness and murk in these precincts to allow these skeptical maneuvers.

Our life here below is a chiaroscuro.

There is no proof of the afterlife.  But there is evidence.  Is the evidence sufficient?  Suppose we agree that evidence for p is sufficient just in case it makes it more likely than not that p.  Well, I don't know if paranormal and mystical  experience is sufficient because I don't know how to evaluate likelihood in cases like these.

So let's assume that the evidence is not sufficient.  Would I be flouting any epistemic duties were I to believe on insufficient evidence?  But surely most of what we believe we believe on insufficient evidence.  See Belief and Reason categories for more on this.)

Those who believe that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficient evidence believe that very proposition on insufficient evidence, indeed on no evidence at all. 

Is a Thinking Person's Afterlife Conceivable?

A repost from over five years ago. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once, do you?  No you don't. The savoring of the riches therein contained requires many viewings. Same with what follows, mutatis mutandis.  Resurrected due to its relevance to a recent thread on anti-natalism.

............................................

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' You get to do there, in a quasi-physical world behind the scenes, what you are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, is a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

     . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into
     which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own
     personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the
     'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely
     extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the
     Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be
     something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now
     is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan
     1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamor, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated, conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they  need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City.  We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

A Hell of (a) Pleasure

If hell is separation from God, why wouldn't a body held in thrall by sensuous pleasure do as well as a body wracked with pain?  Absorbed in sensuous pleasure, one is arguably farther from God than when in pain.

Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life.  They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they  need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult
entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

Related articles

Afterlife Again

The Mortalist's Hope

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

As far as I can tell, the popular Islamic conception of the afterlife is unbelievably crass, a form of what might be called 'spiritual materialism.' Muslims get to do there, in a quasi-physical hinterworld, what they are forbidden to do here, for example, disport with virgins, in quantity and at length. And presumably they are not wrapped up, head-to-foot, like the nuns of the 1950s. You can play the satyr with their nubility for all eternity without ever being sated. But first you have to pilot some jumbo jets into some skyscrapers for the greater glory of Allah the Merciful.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, strikes me as a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life.  They think of it, in other words, as Life 2.0, an improved version of life here below.  This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

 . . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely  extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be  something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now  is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

A. E. Taylor is no longer much read, but he is 'old school' in the depth of his erudition, unike most contemporary academics, and is thus well-worth reading. In the passage quoted he makes a penetrating observation: the true Christian is not only unworldly in this world, but also unworldly in his expectations of the next.  This by contrast with one who is worldly in this world and desires his worldliness prolonged into the next.

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.  Do you really desire direct contact with the divine Spirit?

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of   course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I  explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't  get one very far." (Mortalism, Prometheus 2003, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive, at least schematically, of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is  impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that  their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than  adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they  need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it:  it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish  things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult
entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We  are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is  'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make  minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition  cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or  collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them,  then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming  that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond  what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think  it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says is impossible, I am able, employing analogies such as  the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from  the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are  genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is  no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is  conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said,  it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine  initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage.  Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider  integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation  and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one  has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,'  the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the  foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though  it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable  difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable  to entertain the hope of eternal life.

But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."

If Everyone Goes Straight to Heaven . . .

. . . then heaven is a joke, and so is this life, and there is no ultimate justice, hence no God.

Mobster Frank Calabrese Sr. has died in prison.  Good riddance.  I read the book by his son, Frank Jr. and came away impressed by him for courageously  'ratting out' his father: family loyalty is a value, but there are higher loyalties.

Unfortunately:

Frank Calabrese Jr. told the Sun-Times on Wednesday that that violent history made his father's death especially emotional.

"I believe he was taken on Christmas Day for a reason," he said. "I hope he made peace. I hope he's up above looking down on us. ... He's not suffering anymore. The people on the street aren't suffering anymore."

With all due respect to Frank Jr., this is just morally obtuse.  For it implies that how we live here below makes no difference to the ultimate outcome.  It makes no difference whether one lives the life of a brutal murderer or the life of an Edith Stein or a Simone  Weil.  But then there is no justice, and this life is even more absurd than it would be were there no God or afterlife at all.  The reality of the moral point of view cannot have the divine underpinning it needs unless God is the guarantor of justice.  The following exchange between Drury and Wittgenstein is apropos:

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford 1984, p. 161.)

What I like about Wittgenstein is that he was one serious man.

Eben Alexander: "We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains"

I am at the moment listening to Dennis Prager interview Dr. Eben Alexander. Prager asked him whether he now maintains, after his paranormal experiences, that consciousness is independent of the brain.  Alexander made a striking reply: "We are conscious in spite of our brains."  And then he made some remarks to the effect that the brain is a "reducing filter" or something like that.

That is to say much more than that consciousness can exist independently of the brain.  For the latter would be true if consciousness existed in an attenuated form after the dissolution of the body and brain. Alexander is saying that embodiment severely limits our awareness.

Well, why couldn't that be true? Why is it less plausible than a form of materialism that views consciousness as somehow dependent on brain functioning and impossible without it?

Let us assume you are not a dogmatist: you don't uncritically adhere to the unprovable materialist framework assumption according to which consciousness just has to be brain-based.  And let us assume that you don't have a quasi-religious faith that future science has wonderful revelations in store that will vindicate materialism/physicalism once and for all.   By the way, I have always found it passing strange that people would "pin their hopes on future science."  You mean to tell me that you hope you can be shown to be nothing more than a complex physical system slated for utter extinction!?  That's what you hope for?  It may in the end be true, but I for one cannot relate to the mentality of someone who would hope for such a thing.  "I hope I am just a bag of chemicals to be punctured in a few years.  Wouldn't it be awful if I had an higher destiny and that life actually had a meaning?"

But I digress.  Let's assume you are not a dogmatist and not a quasi-religious believer in future science.  Let's assume you are an open-minded inquirer like me.  You are skeptical in the best sense: inquisitive but critical.  Then I put the question to you: Can you show that the Alexander claim is less plausible that the materialist one?

I don't believe that there can be talk of proof either way, assuming you use 'proof' strictly.  You have to decide what you will believe and how you will live.  In the shadowlands of this life there is light enough and darkness enough to lend support to either answer, that of the mortalist and that of his opposite number.

So I advance to the consideration that for me clinches the matter.  Bring the theoretical question back down to your Existenz.  How will you live, starting right now and for the rest of your days?  Will you live as if you will be utterly extinguished in a few years or will you live as if what you do and leave undone right now matters, really matters? Will you live as if life is serious, or will you live as if it is some sort of cosmic joke?  Will you live as if something is at stake in this life, however dimly descried, or will you live as if nothing is ultimately at stake?  It is your life.  You decide.

Now suppose that when Drs. Mary Neal and Eben Alexander die the body's death, they become nothing.  Suppose that their phenomenologically vivid paranormal experiences were revelatory of nothing real, that their experiences were just the imaginings of malfunctioning brains at the outer limits of biological life.  What will they have lost by believing as they did?

Nothing! Nothing at all.  You could of course say that they were wrong and were living in illusion.  But no one will ever know one way or the other.  And if the body's death is the last word then nothing ultimately matters, and so it can't matter that they were wrong if turns out that they were.

If they were right, however, then the moral transformation that their taking seriously of their experiences has wrought in them can be expected to redound to their benefit when they pass from this sphere. 

Related articles

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

The Mortalist's Hope

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

The personable Dr. Neal recounts her experiences during this 13 and a half minute video clip.  The following from an interview with her:

The easy explanations—dreams or hallucinations—I could discount quickly, because my experience—and the experience described by anyone who's had a near death experience or other experiences that involve God directly—is different in quality and memory from a dream or hallucination. It's just entirely different. The memory is as precise and accurate now, years later, as it is when it's happening.

So then I thought it must be due to chemical changes or chemical releases in a dying brain. I did a lot of reading about that. If my experience had lasted five, six, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes, I am sure that no matter how real it seemed to me, I would have said that's a reasonable explanation. But the people who resuscitated me would say that I was without oxygen for up to thirty minutes.

It took them ten or fifteen minutes to figure out, first, that I and my boat were both missing. Then once they identified where they thought I was, they started their watch. They're used to doing this—you have to know the timing so you can recognize whether you're trying to rescue someone or you're trying to go for body recovery. So on the watch it was fifteen minutes, but about thirty minutes in all. I tend to stick with the fifteen minutes, because that's an absolute timing. But even at fifteen minutes, that is way longer than can be explained by a dying brain. The human brain can hang on to oxygen for maybe five or six minutes, and so even if you give it another four minutes to go through its dying process, that still doesn't add up to fifteen minutes. And so after I looked at all that, my conclusion was that my experience was real and absolute.

To paraphrase Pascal, there is light enough for those who want to see and darkness enough for those who don't.  Atheists and mortalists will of course not be convinced by Neal's report.  Consider her first paragraph.  She underscores the unique phenomenological quality of OBEs.  Granting that they are phenomenologically different from dreams and ordinary memories, there is nonetheless a logical gap between the undeniable reality of the experiencing and the reality of its intentional object.  Into that gap the skeptic will insert his wedge, and with justification.  No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.  Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics.  Everything I am perceiving right now, computer, cup, cat, the Superstition ridgeline and the clouds floating above it (logically) might have a merely intentional existence.  How do I know I am not brain in a vat?  If I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, how can I know (in that tough sense in which knowledge entails objective certainty)  that cat, cup, etc. are extramentally real?  The skeptic can always go hyperbolic on you. How are you going to stop him?

The other consideration Dr. Neal adduces will also leave the skeptic cold.  Her point is that her brain had to have been 'off-line' given the amount of time that elapsed, and that therefore her experiences could not be the product of a (mal)functioning brain.  We saw in an earlier post  that Dr. Eben Alexander employed similar reasoning.  The skeptic will undoubtedly now give a little a speech about how much more there is yet to know about the brain and that Neal is in no position confidently to assert what she asserts, etc.

The mortalist starts and ends with an assumption that he cannot give up while remaining a mortalist, namely, that there just cannot be mental functioning without underlying brain activity, and that therefore no OBEs can be credited.  In the grip of that materialist framework assumption,  he will do anything to discount the veridicality of OBEs.  Push him to the wall and he will question the moral integrity of the reporters.  "They are just out to exploit human credulousness to turn a buck."  Or they will question the veridicality of the memories of the OBEs.  The human mind can be extremely inventive in cooking up justifications for what it wants to believe.  That is as true of mortalists as it is of anyone.  To paraphrase Pascal again, there is enough darkness and murk in these precincts to allow these skeptical maneuvers.

Our life here below is a chiaroscuro.

There is no proof of the afterlife.  But there is evidence.  Is the evidence sufficient?  Suppose we agree that evidence for p is sufficient just in case it makes it more likely than not that p.  Well, I don't know if paranormal and mystical  experience is sufficient because I don't know how to evaluate likelihood in cases like these.

So let's assume that the evidence is not sufficient.  Would I be flouting any epistemic duties were I to believe on insufficient evidence?  But surely most of what we believe we believe on insufficient evidence.  See Belief and Reason categories for more on this.)

Those who believe that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficent evidence believe that very proposition on insufficient evidence, indeed on no evidence at all. 

Related articles

Is Death an Evil or Not?

Is a Thinking Man's Afterlife Conceivable?

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience

Mortalism

Is Neuroscience Relevant to Understanding Prayer and Meditation?

Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?

The Mortalist's Hope

Psychotropic Drugs, Veridicality, Criteria

Is Heaven Real? A Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience

Excerpt:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

Two questions arise.  Were Dr. Eben Alexander's experiences while in the coma state veridical?  This question must be asked since the mere having of an experience is no guarantee of the reality of its object.  The second question is whether the experiences, veridical or not, occurred wholly independently of brain functioning.  The two questions are connected.  If it could be shown that the experiences were generated by a minimally (mal)functioning brain, then then this would be  a reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences.  (Analogy: if I know that my unusual experiences are the result of the ingesting of LSD-25, then I have reason to doubt the veridicality of the experiences.)  The author deals with these connected worries in the following passage:

All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent.

Although I reject materialism about the mind and consider it reasonable to believe that conscious experiences do not require a physical substratum, and that it is possible to have such experiences in a disembodied state, I don't think the the author has proven that the possibility was actual in his case.  For how does he know that his cortex was "simply off"? Failure to detect the functioning of the cortex does not entail that the cortex was not functioning.  It might have been functioning below the detectability of the instruments and might have been generating the experiences all along.

A second concern of mine is this.  How does Dr Alexander know that his wonderful experiences didn't suddenly arise just as the cortex was coming back into action  just before his eyes popped open?  So even if his cortex was for a long time completely nonfunctional, the experience he remembers could have been simply a dream that arose while the cortex was coming back 'on line.'

My point is not the the doctor has not given us evidence that mental functioning occurs in the absence of brain activity; I believe he has.  My point is that the evidence is not compelling.

Our predicament in this life is such that we cannot prove such things as that God exists, that life has meaning, that the will is free, that morality is not an illusion, and that we survive our bodily deaths.  But we cannot prove the opposites either.  It is reasonable to maintain each of these views.  Many arguments and considerations can be adduced.  Among the evidence is a wide range of religious, mystical and paranormsl experiences including near-death and out-of-body experiences.  The cumulative case is impressive but not conclusive.  It rationalizes, but does not establish.  Philosophers. of course, are ever in quest of 'knock-down' arguments.  This is because you are no philosopher if you don't crave certainty.  Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben  nicht leben! Husserl once exclaimed.  But so far no 'knock-down' arguments have been found.

In the final analysis, lacking proof one way or the other,  you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. 

I would add that the 'living' is more important than the 'believing.'  It is far better to live in a manner to deserve immortality than to hold beliefs and give arguments about the matter.

Afterlife Again

Yesterday I wrote:

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamour, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life?

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

As a reader points out, something like this thought is already to be  found in John Henry Cardinal Newman, Heaven is Heaven Only for the Holy.  Excerpt:

If then a man without religion (supposing it possible) were admitted into heaven, doubtless he would sustain a great disappointment. Before, indeed, he fancied that he could be happy there; but when he arrived there, he would find no discourse but that which he had shunned on earth, no pursuits but those he had disliked or despised, nothing which bound him to aught else in the universe, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon.

One might even go so far as to say that heaven would be hell for the worldly person.  And what the worldly person imagines heaven to be might reveal itself as hell, as in the Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit.

I see that London Ed has some thoughts on the topic.  I agree with him that 'the objection from boredom' is no good.  I'm never bored here, why should I be bored there?  Never bored here, only tired.  But that's due to the bag of bones and guts that makes up my samsaric vehicle.  Free of crass embodiment, things might well be different on the far side.

You say I'm speculating?  True enough, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

Hell for Philosophers

Jean-Paul Sartre put the following into the mouth of a character in the play, No Exit:  "Hell is other people."   What then would hell be for philosophers?  To be locked in a room forever with a philosopher with whom one has little or no common ground. David Stove and Theodor Adorno, for example.  Or Sartre and Etienne Gilson.

Hell

Over at The Constructive Curmudgeon I happened upon this quotation which is relevant to recent concerns:

The magnitude of the punishment matches the magnitude of the sin. Now a sin that is against God is infinite; the higher the person against whom it is committed, the graver the sin—it is more criminal to strike a head of state than a private citizen—and God is of infinite greatness. Therefore an infinite punishment is deserved for a sin committed against Him.
--Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia2ae. 87, 4.

 

How Could an Impassible God be Offended or Know Any Contingent Fact?

Earlier (here and here) I asked how an all-good God could sentence a human agent to sempiternal punishment, punishment that has a beginning but no end.  If the punishment must fit the crime, and the crimes of finite agents are themselves finite, then it would seem that no one, no matter what his crimes, would deserve sempiternal punishment.  To make this a bit more precise we ought to substitute 'sin' for 'crime.'  They are different concepts.  Sin, but not crime, implies an offense to God.  If there is no God then there cannot, strictly speaking, be any sin.  But there could still be crime relative to an accepted body of positive law.  And if there is no positive law, but there is a God, then there could be sin but no crime.  (Positive law is the law posited by human legislators.) 

So let us say that the punishment must fit the sin.  My claim, then, is that no sin or sins committed by a human agent is such as to merit sempiternal punishment.  To put the point more sharply, a God who would condemn a finite human agent to unending misery is a moral monster, and not God.  (I am assuming that the agent in question has come to admit the error of his ways and is truly sorry for them. I have no problem with the unending misery of a recalcitrant rebel.) 

In response, Leo Mollica said that the offense to God, as an offense to a being of infinite dignity, is itself infinite and so deserves sempiternal punishment.  This prompted me to ask how an impassible God could be offended, which is the topic of this post.

Impassibility.  To say that God is impassible is to say that nothing external to God can affect God.  As Brian Leftow points out in his SEP article, impassibility is not the same as immutability.  He gives two reasons, but all we need is one: a God who induces a change in himself is not immutable but still could be impassible.  Now if God is impassible, then he cannot be offended by the antics of the Israelites as when they fell to worshipping a golden calf, etc.  He cannot be offended by sin.  And if he cannot be offended by sin, then he cannot be 'infinitely' offended by it.  Or so I maintained.

In response Mollica made a clever move.  He pointed out, rightly, that a person could be offended (wronged, slandered, calumniated, etc.) without knowing that he is.  Such a person would be offended without being affected.  I took the suggestion to be that God too could be offended without being affected.  Thus impassibility does not rule out God's being offended.

To this my reply was that God is omniscient.  He knows everything there is to know. So although it is true that a finite person could be offended without knowing it, and so not affected by the injury that was done to him, God could not be offended without knowing it. Good Thomist that he is, Mollica came back at me with the notion that God is not affected by what he knows.  So when the creature sins, God is offended; but his being offended in no way affects him:  he is not affected 'cognitively' by his knowledge that he is being offended, nor is he affected or injured  'morally' by his being offended.

Very interesting, but very problematic, as problematic as the Thomist line on divine knowledge.  If God is God, then he must be a metaphysical absolute and the pressure is on to say that he is both impassible and immutable.  (An immutable being is one that cannot undergo 'real' as opposed to 'mere Cambridge' change.)  After all, a decent absolute is not the sort of thing that could change or be affected by other things. If it underwent change or affection it would be relativized. But how could such an unchanging  God know anything contingent?  If God is unchanging, then his knowledge is unchanging: it cannot vary over time, or from possible world to possible world.  Here is an argument adapted from  Hartshorne.

1.  If p entails q, and q is contingent, then p is contingent.
2. *Tom sins at time t* is contingent.
3. *God knows that Tom sins at t* entails *Tom sins at t*.
Therefore
4. *God knows that Tom sins at t* is contingent.
Therefore
5. The property of knowing that Tom sins at t is an accidental (not essential) property of God.
6. God has no accidental properties: it is no part of his unchangeable essence that he know any contingent fact, any fact that could have been otherwise.
7. (5) and (6) are contradictories.  So one of the premises must be rejected.  (6) is the premise most plausibly rejected; but then impassibility and immutability go by the boards.

The challenge for our resident Thomist is to explain how an impassible and immutable God can know any contingent fact.

From McTaggart to Rome

Peter Geach, Truth and Hope, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, p. 9:

Soaking myself in McTaggart, I imbibed a desire for Heaven and eternal life, which of course I had not to abandon on becoming Catholic; and meanwhile I was preserved from giving my heart with total devotion to some less worthy end, as I saw many contemporaries doing.  Even as regards the relation of time and eternity I had no need to find McTaggart wholly mistaken.  God's life, the life of the Blessed Trinity, really is the sort of Boethian eternity that McTaggart ascribed to all persons; and we have the great and precious promise that, in a way we cannot now begin to understand, we shall transcend all the delusion and misery and wickedness of this life and become sharers in that eternal life.

No Eternal Punishment? Then Why Eternal Reward?

Suppose God exists and there is an afterlife the quality of which depends on how one behaves here below.  Suppose that the justice which is largely absent here will be meted out there.  And suppose we take as a moral axiom that the punishment must fit the crime.  The question then arises: what crime or series of crimes would merit everlasting post-mortem punishment of the perpetrator?  I earlier opined that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment.  Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer.  (It may be otherwise with angelic evildoers such as Lucifer, so let's leave them out of the discussion.)  But I added a qualification  in my earlier post: unless the perpetrator wanted to maintain himself in a state of rebellion against God, in which case my moral sense would have no problem with God's granting the rebel his wish and maintaining him in a state of everlasting exclusion from the divine light and succor. 

Suppose that, after death, Stalin sees the errors of his ways and desires to come into right relation with God.  He must still be punished for his horrendous crimes. Surely justice demands that much.  What I fail to grasp, however, is how justice could demand that Stalin be punished everlastingly or eternally (if you care to distinguish eternity from everlastingness) for a finite series of finite crimes. 

Discussing my earlier post, Richard Hennessey raises an interesting counter-question:   ". . .  if justice demands an eternal or everlasting punishment for no finite sin or crime or finite set of finite sins or crimes, no matter how heinous, does justice demand an eternal or everlasting reward for no finite good deed or finite set of finite good deeds, no matter how virtuous?"  I think what Hennessey is asking here is better put as follows.  If justice rules out everlasting punishment for finite crimes, does it also rule out everlasting reward for finite good deeds? 

To sharpen the challenge, let's translate the interrogative into a declarative:  If no everlasting punishment is justified, then no everlasting reward is either.  If that is the point, then I could respond by saying that the Beatific Vision is not a reward  for good things we do here below, but the state intended for us all along.  It is something like a birthright or an inheritance.  One doesn't earn one's inheritance; it is a gift, not a reward.   But one can lose it.  Similarly with the Beatific Vision.  One cannot earn it, and one does not deserve it.  But one can lose it.

"But this is all speculation!"  Indeed, but if a philosopher can't speculate, who can?

Is Osama bin Laden in Hell?

Jeremy Lott, Osama bin Laden in Hell:

To keep Osama's purported martyrdom from inspiring others, the point needs to be made, loudly and repeatedly, that killing innocent people is not the path to heaven. This will put the US government, and Barack Obama in particular, in an an awkward spot. It is undoubtedly a theological statement and an uncomfortable one at that.

It is uncomfortable because to assert that Osama did not go to heaven is to suggest that he went to hell. That could be a problem, given the current state of America's religious ferment. As the controversy over Rev. Rob Bell's new book has shown us, a great number of religious Americans do not want to believe in eternal damnation.

1.  The notion that there is heaven but no hell smacks of the sort of namby-pamby feel-good liberalism that I feel it my duty to combat.  Of course there may  be none of the following: God, afterlife, post-mortem reward, post-mortem punishment.  But if you accept the first three, then you ought to accept them all. 

2. One reason to believe in some form of punishment after death is that without it, there is no final justice.  There is some justice here below, but not much.  One who "thirsts after justice and righteousness" cannot be satisfied with this world.  Whatever utopia the future may bring, this world's past suffices to condemn it as a vale of injustice.  (This is why leftist activism is no solution at all to the ultimate problems.)  Nothing that happens in the future can redeem the billions who have been raped and crucified and wronged in a thousand ways.  Of course, it may be that this world is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Life may just be absurd.  But if you do not accept that, if you hold that life has meaning and that moral distinctions have reality, then you may look to God and beyond this life.  Suppose you do.  Then how can you fail to see that justice demands that the evil be punished?  Consider this line of thought:

a. If there is no making-good of the injustices of this life, it is absurd.
b. There is no making-good of the injustices of this life in this life.
c.  Only if there is God and afterlife is there a making-good of the injustices of this life
d.  This life is not absurd.
Therefore
e.  There is a making-good of the injustices of this life in the afterlife, and this requires the punishment/purification of those who committed evil in this life and did not pay for their crimes in this life.

This is not a compelling argument by any means.  But if you are a theist and accept (a)-(d), then you ought to accept the conclusion.

3.  A second reason to believe in some sort of hellish state after death for some is because of free will.  God created man in his image and likeness, and part of what that means is that he created him an autonomous being possessing free will and sensitive to moral distinctions.  In so doing, God limits his own power: he cannot violate the autonomy of man.  So if Sartre or some other rebellious nature freely decides that he would rather exist in separation from God, then God must allow it.  But this separation is what hell is.  So God must allow hell.

4. Is hell eternal separation from God?  Well, if Sartre, say, or any other idolater of his own ego wants to be eternally separated from God, then God must allow it, right?  Like I said, man is free and autonomous, and God can't do anything about that.  But if Stalin, say, repents, how could a good God punish him eternally?   The punishment must fit the crime, and no crime that any human is capable of, even the murdering of millions, deserves eternal punishment.  How do I know that?  By consulting my moral sense, the same moral sense that tells me a god that commands me to murder my innocent son cannot be God.  See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

There is a response to this of course, and what I just asserted is by no means obvious; but this is a topic for a separate post.

I suppose I am a bit of a theological liberal. Theology must be rationally constrained and constrained by our God-given moral sense. Irrationalism is out.  Fideism is out. No fundamentalism.  No Bibliolatry.  No  inerrantism.  None of the excesses of Protestantism, if excesses they are.  No sola scriptura  or sola fide or, for that matter, extra ecclesiam salus non est.  The latter  is also a Roman Catholic principle.

5.  As I see it, then, justice does not demand an eternal or everlasting hell. (In this popular post I blur the distinction between eternity and everlastingness.)  But free will may.  Again, if Russell or Sartre or Hitchens refuse to submit any authority superior to their own egos, then their own free decision condemns them everlastingly.  Justice does demand, however, some sort of post-mortem purification/punishment.

6.  Will I go directly to heaven when I die?  Of course not (and the same goes for almost all of us.)  Almost all of us need more or less purgation, to even be in a state where we would unequivocally  want to be with God.  If your life has been mainly devoted to piling up pleasure and loot, how can you expect that death will reverse your priorities?   In fact, if you have solely devoted yourself to the pursuit and acquisition of the trinkets and baubles of this world, then punishment for you may well consist in getting them in spades, to your disgust.  If the female ass and the whiskey glass is your summum bonum here below, you may get your heart's desire on the far side.  I develop this idea in A Vision of Hell.

7.  Is Osama bin Laden in hell?  Anyone who claims to know the answer to this is a 'damned' fool.  But not even he (Osama or the fool) deserves eternal separation from God -- unless he wants it.  But it is good that the al-Qaeda head  is dead.