Friday, September 9, 2016

On the Soul and the Afterlife

Dear friend and former student Miranda always thanks me for responding to her comments.  The debt is all mine.  No one else comments here.  She not only leaves comments, but poses the best kind of questions.  In a recent post I stated this:
I find it difficult to see evolutionary theory as anything but beautiful. I don't think that understanding the evolutionary roots of the beautiful and noble things detracts in any way from their beauty, any more than understanding the science of optics detracts from the beauty of a Canaletto perspective. I have to try hard to see why it seems otherwise to so many people.

So far, I cannot think of a single cherished idea that I held before I began to take Darwinism seriously that I had to give up. On the other hand, I can't think of one that seems exactly the same to me as it did before. I hope that means that my idea are richer. 
Miranda had mentioned the allegory of the cave from Plato in her first comment.  She responded to the above:
If [Plato’s] cave is only full of shadows and there is only light outside, it is easy to see why someone on the outside would have trouble understanding what people in the shadows saw in being inside. But suppose that, inside the cave, there were shadows of all the people you had once loved, who had died and that this was all you had left of them. Suppose there was a good chance that you might never see them again if you were to step into the light. Wouldn’t you be more reluctant to step out of the cave? I would be.

Those of us who grew up believing that the soul was a ghost in the machine, that could survive apart from the body and live forever - and that this meant that perhaps we could reunite with the souls of those we had loved, but who had died - have a difficult time seeing the idea of the soul as a set of nutritive processes, dependent on the body.

To believe that the soul depends on the body, which is clearly not eternal, means having to consider the idea that the soul is not eternal. It may mean having to accept that the dead are dead and that there is no chance of seeing them again. Whether this is true or not, I think it is a less beautiful idea than the idea of eternal life and the chance to see those you have lost again. That is not to say that something is truer just because it more beautiful, but I don’t think it is hard to see why someone might be reluctant to leave such an idea behind.
I have been blogging for decades and I cannot remember ever receiving so powerful and beautiful a response.  I will try to do it justice. 
Yes, I can imagine that it would be hard to move from a world of shadows to a world of real things, visible in the light, if one is in love with shadows.  I am well acquainted with the longing that Miranda skillfully presents here.  I lost my father a few years ago and I would pay dearly to see him again.  I am not, however, the least bit interested in seeing his shadow. 
The shadows in Plato’s [or Socrates’] cave are two dimensional representations of things that may or may not exist in the real world.  The shadows may be comforting but you can’t hug them or converse with them.  That is the problem with the “ghost in the machine” view of the soul: all it can offer you is vapor, intangible and anything but warm. 
I am pretty certain that the notion of a disembodied soul is incoherent.  If you want evidence, consider how ghosts are represented in movies.  They are more or less transparent, but they have arms and legs and are usually wearing clothes.  As Bierce put in his Devil’s Dictionary, it’s one thing to believe in the survival of a human being after death; but textile fabrics
It is evidence of the weakness of the Christian churches that they have allowed this Cartesian dualism, the Gospel According to Disney as I like to put it, to displace the doctrine of all the major churches for the last thousand years.  I remember repeating that doctrine in the church of my youth.  Here is the 3rd stanza of the Apostles’ Creed:
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
 the holy Catholic Church,
 the communion of saints,
 the forgiveness of sins,
 the resurrection of the body,
 and the life everlasting. Amen.
The resurrection of the body is the promise of the Gospel.  No vaporous floating or shadowy flickering; I will get my body back.  Hopefully, I will be taller.  This is consistent with the emphasis in the wee books of the New Testament on Christ coming in the flesh.  He didn’t float out of the tomb.  He swung his legs off the slab and walked out. 
Human souls are not conceivable apart from human bodies.  That doesn’t mean that there can’t be an afterlife.  It just means that if there is, we have to get a body back.  There is nothing incoherent about that.  If the original tapes of Jesus Christ Superstar were destroyed, I would still have the rock opera on my IPod.  Information is always embodied. 


5 comments:

  1. Dr. Blanchard: I always thank you because I am always grateful for your answers. How many professors still answer questions from students more than a decade after they have graduated? I am particularly grateful for this answer, which largely resolves an issue that has troubled me for some time.

    I still have some questions. For instance, Christianity holds, not that our original bodies are resurrected, but that we get new, better bodies after we die (2 Corinthians 5).

    If the soul isn’t a floating spirit, which exists apart from body long enough to be transferred to a new body, how does one body obtain the soul of the other? On what is “soul data” imprinted while the first body is rotting?

    No doubt a God capable of creating people from dirt, breath and ribs could figure this process out. I am not sure that I can. Still, it is nice to think Darwinian evolution allows for the possibility of the eternal. I had always suspected the idea of Christianity and Darwinism being compatible might be a noble lie. Maybe it isn’t.

    On the main issue here, I agree with you. If evolutionary theory does not require the rejection of the possibility of an afterlife, then it probably can be as beautiful or even more beautiful than other theories of creation and development.

    I am very sorry about your father's passing. I feel the same way about my grandfathers. While I believe that I would still choose to visit their shadows (if it were an option and if that was the only thing I could see of them again), I concede that the experience would be very empty and that it would be a mistake to ignore life outside the cave in order to pursue vapor.

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  2. Miranda: what happens when you and I have conversed on this blog is philosophy. It is nothing more nor less than this. For that, I hope that we can both be grateful.

    I will have to consider more carefully the term "resurrected." It looks as though it promises that we get our bodies back, even if they are substantially improved. I think that the possibility of life after death is beyond the reach of philosophy; however, we can speculate.

    If a sand castle is destroyed by the waves, how can we get it back? Only if someone sees it and remembers it in all its details and then reconstructs it according to the original plan. It is not that the sand castle floats in the ether, waiting to be reborn. It is that its form is maintained in some other medium and then is re-embodied.

    The point here is that one cannot imagine a human being apart from a physical human body (restored or replaced). It may be, of course, that the promise of the Gospel will be realized in a way that is beyond human reason; but that is the same thing as to say that the promise is incoherent.

    Darwinism is part and parcel of a wide range of sciences. If Darwinism and Christianity are incompatible, then geology and biology and organic chemmistry are incompatible with Christianity. I hope that is not the case. In any event, if there is a noble lie involved here, I am not telling it. Who is?

    Evolutionary theory can tell you how we get from the UR organism to human beings. It cannot tell you how we got the Ur organism. It cannot tell you why there is something rather than nothing. It cannot tell you whether or not or when or how you might survive your death.

    I already have shadows. I remember my father's smile. The bald spot on his head. What I want back are his shoulders over which I can spread my arms. No imagined realm of shadows can give me that.

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  3. Miranda: what happens when you and I have conversed on this blog is philosophy. It is nothing more nor less than this. For that, I hope that we can both be grateful.

    I will have to consider more carefully the term "resurrected." It looks as though it promises that we get our bodies back, even if they are substantially improved. I think that the possibility of life after death is beyond the reach of philosophy; however, we can speculate.

    If a sand castle is destroyed by the waves, how can we get it back? Only if someone sees it and remembers it in all its details and then reconstructs it according to the original plan. It is not that the sand castle floats in the ether, waiting to be reborn. It is that its form is maintained in some other medium and then is re-embodied.

    The point here is that one cannot imagine a human being apart from a physical human body (restored or replaced). It may be, of course, that the promise of the Gospel will be realized in a way that is beyond human reason; but that is the same thing as to say that the promise is incoherent.

    Darwinism is part and parcel of a wide range of sciences. If Darwinism and Christianity are incompatible, then geology and biology and organic chemmistry are incompatible with Christianity. I hope that is not the case. In any event, if there is a noble lie involved here, I am not telling it. Who is?

    Evolutionary theory can tell you how we get from the UR organism to human beings. It cannot tell you how we got the Ur organism. It cannot tell you why there is something rather than nothing. It cannot tell you whether or not or when or how you might survive your death.

    I already have shadows. I remember my father's smile. The bald spot on his head. What I want back are his shoulders over which I can spread my arms. No imagined realm of shadows can give me that.

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  4. Thanks, Dr. Blanchard:

    On the shadows, I agree with you. Shadows can't replace the physical. Most of the other concepts you bring up in your post make sense to me, but there are a couple of things that are puzzling.

    First: I had not realized that Darwinian theory was considered its own science. Rather, I thought it was a set of ideas about biology – many of which are probably right, but some of which are demonstrably wrong (pangenesis). Since Darwin was fallible, I think it is quite possible that Christianity could be incompatible with some of his theories without being incompatible with biology as a whole.

    Second: One of the most interesting things about your blog is that you offer biological explanations for many philosophical concepts. Even the soul, which has often been thought of as mystical and ethereal, has a biological explanation. But on many occasions you suggest that certain concepts are beyond the realm of science or certain parts of science.

    If even a soul has these biological roots, why would anything – including the origin of the UR organism - be beyond the reach of evolutionary theory? Why shouldn’t it be able to tell us why there is something rather than nothing? Or are you simply suggesting that evolutionary theory hasn’t found the answers to these things yet?

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  5. Apologies for the late reply. I was attending my daughter's wedding.
    My late master, Harry V. Jaffa, was once asked a series of questions such as you pose now (on more lofty topics such as monotheism). He replied "cancel the order for the pontoons." Dr. Jaffa couldn't walk on water and neither can I. I will try to answer your questions.
    I had not realized that Darwinian Theory was considered its own science. Rather, I thought it was a set of ideas about biology – many of which are probably right, but some of which are demonstrably wrong (pangenesis).
    Darwinian Theory is not its own science. It is the central theory in modern biology. However, when I speak of Darwinian Theory, I mean the theory in its current form; not the collection of Darwin’s writings. The fact that Darwin says X is no evidence for X. The fact that Darwinian’s theory of evolution by natural section makes sense of nearly everything in biology is evidence in favor of that theory.
    One of the most interesting things about your blog is that you offer biological explanations for many philosophical concepts. Even the soul, which has often been thought of as mystical and ethereal, has a biological explanation. But on many occasions you suggest that certain concepts are beyond the realm of science or certain parts of science.
    Here I defer to my master Aristotle. When we are doing biology, we take for granted the existence of living things. That is the whole point of dividing philosophy (and science) into distinct disciplines. We are trying to bite off no more than we can chew. When a physicist asks whether heavy things fall faster than light things (they don’t), he isn’t concerned with the concepts of heavy and light. He takes those things for granted.
    If even a soul has these biological roots, why would anything – including the origin of the UR organism - be beyond the reach of evolutionary theory? Why shouldn’t it be able to tell us why there is something rather than nothing? Or are you simply suggesting that evolutionary theory hasn’t found the answers to these things yet?
    Darwin began with what he could observe. Living organisms come in an astonishing variety of forms. These forms seem to be adapted to their environments in the sense that the form allows each organism to survive and reproduce. He proposed that this is the result of evolution by natural selection.
    It works like this: a given organism produces of a number of offspring. The offspring vary in their traits. Those that are better adapted flourish and reproduce again. Those that are not, do not. That is the theory in a nutshell.
    The theory assumes the existence of an organism, just as geometry assumes the existence of dimensions of space. Accordingly, just as geometry can’t be responsible for explaining how special dimensions are real, so Darwinian Theory can’t explain the UR organism, let alone why there is something rather than nothing.
    The origin of the Ur organism is a big mystery. It lies in the realm of physics and chemistry and, so far, they are at a loss. It’s a bit much to expect biologists to account for the existence of stars.

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