Ever wonder what it is like to be in the next life, that is, to be dead? (I thought it best to leave the word “dead” out of the title of this essay.) Since this is something we all must face sooner or later, I thought it might be of interest to engage in some rational speculation about what a human being experiences, if anything, after he becomes unconscious for the last time.

This is not a theological enquiry. So, depictions of hellfire and eternal bliss, though they may be apologetically defensible, are not where this essay is going. Rather, I shall explore what natural reason might tell us about afterlife possibilities.

Now one can make the rather impertinent observation some have offered about the curious situation of the atheist at his own funeral: “All dressed up and nowhere to go.” That is, after all, the ultimate implication of most forms of skepticism, materialism, and atheism.

Reincarnation, or, Getting Another Bite at the Apple

On the other hand, we have the doctrine of metempsychosis or reincarnation offered by both the Vedic tradition in the east and Plato in the west. In that view, dying is followed by birth into another life. Plato, in his dialogue, the Timaeus, expresses his own version of metempsychosis, when he postulates that the form of life we reenter depends on how we live this present life.

“He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state.”¹

Prescinding from Plato’s speculation about moving down and back up the ladder of living things and since we presently know what it is to experience our own human life, it is not all that difficult to imagine reentering the same kind of life we presently have.

Death Without Continuous Reincarnation

Far more intriguing is the prospect of trying to imagine what it is like to experience life after death when no immediate or proximate reincarnation occurs. Since (1) death entails the loss or corruption of the entire human body and (2) it appears that all we know in this life comes to us through the senses and brain, which are material organs of the human body, what would life after death be like? What could or would we know or experience either intellectually or sensitively in such a hypothetically disembodied state of being?

This last view is doubtless of greatest interest to the majority of those who share some form of the Christian religion, which dominates in Western Civilization. Now, I am not presuming the revealed content of that religious worldview, but merely am noting that its central doctrines entail the notion of death and some form of afterlife for the spiritual soul – but without any notion of proximate reincarnation. The Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection pertains to something that happens for most all men, not at their immediate time of death, but at the end of the world at some point in the future. Until that indeterminate span of time has elapsed, the spiritual soul must exist without a corporeal body. It is that purely spiritual condition of temporally extended human existence upon which I now focus my attention.

Indeed, among leading Christian figures we have, in the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, the beautiful truth expressed that “…it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” One cannot but wonder exactly what this statement might mean to us, the living, who have no direct experience of what it appears to affirm.

What Reason Can Say About the Separated Soul's Experience

Certainly, most human beings admit to having no direct evidence of what it is like to be dead before we are actually dead. But we do have some (1) speculative philosophical arguments about what the separated soul can know and (2) possibly analogous experiences which some have reported to us about this condition of continued immaterial existence.

St. Thomas Aquinas offers a rather complete speculative explanation of what man’s spiritual soul can know after the soul’s separation from the body.²

St. Thomas affirms that the separated soul can no longer operate using sense powers or sense organs, since they belong to the body and the soul of the deceased is no longer the actuating form of the body, Thus, such acts as forming and understanding universal concepts abstracted from phantasms, which themselves are formed from physical sense experience, are no longer possible when we are dead. Still, he insists that “... the soul in that [separated] state understands by means of participated species resulting from the influence of the divine light ….”³ In other words, while the soul no longer can perform such acts by its own natural bodily powers, God can infuse such knowledge into it.

For the same reason, the separated soul can have knowledge of some singulars to which it is related in some fashion. This is not accomplished by abstraction from phantasms, but “… by the infusion of species by God, and in that way it is possible for the intellect to know singulars.”⁴ Such knowledge would naturally entail formation of judgments and self-reflective awareness of one’s own existence in the act of making of such judgments.

However, St, Thomas maintains that “… by natural knowledge [that is, unless God directly infuses such knowledge], … the dead do not know what passes on earth.”⁵ The notable exception is the state of the blessed in heaven, who see God, and who, through Him who sees all things, are infused with knowledge of things that take place on earth.⁶

But, What is it Really Like to be Dead?

While the preceding speculative musings may be of great interest to the philosopher or theologian, they do little to help us ordinary mortals to imagine what it is really like to be dead. The unfortunate fact is that we simply cannot imagine the spiritual experiences described above for the simple reason that imagining entails the use of the imagination, which is a sense power whose function depends on bodily organs, and thus, completely terminates at the time of passing into the next life. We need something that will help us to grasp precisely what it would be like to be a disembodied spirit that is still, in a meaningful sense, having a real life experience. How would it “feel” to be living, but without a body and without the body’s sense organs that we need for sense experience in this life?

I do not herein propose to demonstrate the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. Those are proper topics for other venues and I have addressed them myself elsewhere, including on this Strange Notions site. Rather, I propose here simply to give two examples of reported human experience that depicts the content of “disembodied existence,” namely, (1) those drawn from near death experiences and (2) those drawn from our own experience of dreams.

Near Death Experiences

I do not intend to give a broad analysis of NDE here, but merely want to show that those who claim such experiences often claim out-of-body events, some of which appear to be verified by others. For example, we have the rather common NDE claim of people feeling themselves “floating” up out of their bodies, say, on an operating table, and then “seeing and hearing” the doctors and nurses – being able correctly to report what they were wearing and actually saying and doing – all while being unconscious from anesthesia.

Perhaps, a case some readers may have seen reported is that of a migrant worker named Maria, who had a severe heart attack and was in cardiac arrest. She was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. “At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building … [and] … was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn.” Her observations were later confirmed in exact detail!

Such experiences of being “out of the body,” and yet having accurate sense knowledge of objects and people which the patient cannot possibly perceive in their “medically dead” state, attest to the possibility of actual sensory experience of someone while in a seemingly disembodied state, that is, someone whose consciousness has actually separated from his body and yet is able to have continued and verifiable sense experience.

Such NDE experiences tend to confirm the possibility of “disembodied spiritual experience.” I do not claim that the people involved are actually dead, since clearly their consciousness subsequently returns to their bodies. But they do meet the criteria for some form of disembodied sense experience.

“Disembodied Dreams”

My final example of a “disembodied experience” can easily be verified by all of us, namely, as experienced in a dream. I suspect that most of us have had the experience of sitting in a theatre and watching a movie in which we become so engrossed that we literally “forget ourselves” and, as it were, start “living” on the screen in front of us. We lose consciousness of ourselves as having separate and distinct bodies sitting in seats, which are not part of what is taking place on the screen before us.

Similarly, we have probably all had dreams in which we were victims of some sort of bodily attack (as in a good nightmare!) and well aware of a sense of being in a body. In deep dreams, we can sometimes experience things as if we were in a body even though the experiences are not those of our sleeping body.

Moreover, I have certainly had many a dream myself in which it was like the theatre experience. I was watching often very vivid scenes of events, things, and persons engaged in various activities of which I was simply an observer, having no self-reflective bodily experience at all.

Nothing prevents God from giving us similar experiences of sensible reality, since anything our natural powers can do to actuate our subjective experience, God can do as well. Call it miraculous or merely how things work in the afterlife. Either way, the experience is that of a disembodied spirit and it can be fully as real, or more so, than any experience we have in this life – only in a disembodied form like that of a vivid dream -- one whose objective reality cannot be epistemically doubted.

I am not trying to offer a speculative defense of the reality of a spiritual afterlife in this essay. My sole purpose has been to show what it might be like to be alive and fully engaged in both intellectual and sensitive experiences in a spiritual afterlife, while awaiting what Christians believe to be a later resurrection of the body. Indeed, we might have to adjust the impertinent observation about an atheist at his funeral that I offered at the beginning of this essay. What if it turns out that the atheist is all dressed up and then shocked to discover that he does have somewhere to go?

A tragic story has been circulating around the Internet in the last few days about a Canadian man who allegedly murdered three of his relatives and then posted a confession about it on Facebook. According to NBCnews.com:

"A father in Canada appears to have admitted on his Facebook page to killing his daughter, then wife, then sister before taking his own life. 'Over the last 10 days I have done some of the worst things I could have ever imagined a person doing,' read a post on Randy Janzen's Facebook page on Thursday afternoon. In the apparent confession, the British Columbia man says that his 19-year-old daughter Emily had been plagued since elementary school by migraines, which had gotten so debilitating that she had missed two years of college.
 

'I just could not see my little girl hurt for one more second,' the post, which was not verified by NBC News, read. 'I took a gun and shot her in the head and now she is migraine free and floating in the clouds on a sunny afternoon, her long beautiful brown hair flowing in the breeze, a true angel.' The post goes on to say that he then shot his wife, Laurel, because a mother should never have to 'hear the news her baby has died.' A couple days after that, Janzen allegedly killed his sister, Shelly, 'because I did not want her to have to live with this shame.'"

This is of course very sad, but what I find surprising about this story are atheist bloggers who use this as evidence against religious beliefs (no doubt because of the man’s quote about heaven I’ve bolded above). Patheos atheist blogger J.T. Eberhard even said that, “The culpability for this is, at least in part, on the people who filled Janzen’s head with promises of heaven – even if, like Janzen, they did it out of love.”

Now, to say that people like me are culpable for a triple-murder is quite an accusation. Does this charge stand up to scrutiny? No, it doesn’t. Arguments like Eberhard’s essentially they boil down to this, “If Mr. Janzen hadn’t believed in heaven, then he would not have killed his relatives in order to send them there. Therefore, heaven is a bad thing to believe in.”¹

But there’s a huge problem with this argument – it commits a logical fallacy called “the appeal to consequences.”

The Fallacy Explained

The fallacy of “the appeal to consequences” goes like this:

• Belief X causes negative consequence Y.
• Therefore belief X is false.

Or

• Belief X causes positive consequence Y.
• Therefore belief X is true.

When it’s phrased this way it’s easy to see the fallacy. True beliefs can cause seemingly bad consequences and false beliefs can cause good consequences. Whether a belief is true or false cannot be determined solely by looking at the consequences of affirming (or rejecting) that belief.

For example, the truth of atheism, be it strong atheism (there are no gods or God) or weak atheism (there is no evidence for gods or God), can’t be determined by looking at the consequences of being an atheist. The actions of Stalin, Pol Pot, and totalitarian atheistic governments don’t disprove atheism while the actions of Thomas Edison, Stephen Hawking, and pleasant, marginally religious Scandinavian countries don’t prove it either.

This kind of argument against belief in heaven can also be turned on its head against atheism. For example, it’s not unheard of for people who lose a child to commit suicide because they think they will never see their child again. A Christian could argue that if some of these people had known they could see their child again in heaven they would not have killed themselves. Or, what about non-believers who kill because of they don’t believe in an afterlife? Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer once said in a TV interview that:

“If a person doesn’t think there is a God to be accountable to, then—then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That’s how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we, when we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing.”²

Does the fact that not believing in heaven might motivate some people to commit murder or suicide prove that heaven exists? Of course not.

Most atheists would say that just because some atheists make poor decisions in light of the apparent finality of death it does not follow that atheism is false or that Christianity is true. But if that’s the case, then it also follows that just because some religious people make poor decisions based on their knowledge of heaven it does not follow that there is no heaven or that we should not believe in heaven.³

LGBT Issues and the Appeal to Consequences

I’ve also seen this appeal to consequences crop us with other issues that divide Christians and atheists. For example, some atheists argue that it is wrong to say homosexual behavior is disordered because that can cause LGBT teens to commit suicide. But once again, that’s a fallacious appeal to consequences.

Such an argument is on par with claiming that we should not say a certain war was unjust because some veterans of that war might commit suicide. Of course, how the veterans react to the truth about such a war is irrelevant to the war’s moral status, just as how the practitioners of a certain sexual behavior react to the truth about that behavior is irrelevant to the behavior’s moral status.

So what does this mean for LGBT issues? If homosexual behavior is not disordered, then of course it’s wrong to spread such a destructive falsehood. Spreading the falsehood would be wrong in and of itself since it is an offense against truth, but it would become even worse because of the falsehoods fatal consequences.

However, if homosexual behavior is disordered, then we just have to learn how to compassionately present this truth to other people. We can’t ban or rebuke that belief, or any belief for that matter, just because we dislike it. There are many truths related to issues like climate change, factory farming, foreign labor, atheism, and religion we may not like, but that doesn’t justify ignoring or ridiculing those truths.

Instead, whether we are an atheist or a Christian, we should examine a contested belief primarily in light of the evidence for or against that belief. The consequences of that belief might motivate our investigation in the first place, and they might even give us a clue about whether the belief is true or false, but they should not be our primary litmus test for deciding whether or not we will incorporate this belief into our worldview.

NOTE: Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday and Easter last week, which commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Thus we began a six-part series on these events by Dr. Peter Kreeft in which he examines each of the plausible theories attempting to explain what happened to Jesus at the end of his life, particularly whether he rose from the dead.

Part 1 - 5 Possible Theories that Explain the Resurrection of Jesus
Part 2 - Rejecting the Swoon Theory: 9 Reasons Why Jesus Did Not Faint on the Cross
Part 3 - Debunking the Conspiracy Theory: 7 Arguments Why Jesus’ Disciples Did Not Lie
Part 4 - Refuting the Myth Theory: 6 Reasons Why the Resurrection Accounts are True
Part 5 - Real Visions: 13 Reasons the Disciples Did Not Hallucinate
Part 6 - Answering 5 More Common Objections to the Resurrection
 

 
No alternative to a real resurrection has yet explained six key facts: the existence of the Gospels, the origin of the Christian faith, the failure of Christ's enemies to produce his corpse, the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the accounts of the post-resurrection appearances. Swoon, conspiracy, hallucination, and myth have been shown to be the only alternatives to a real resurrection, and each has been refuted.

What reasons could be given at this point for anyone who still would refuse to believe? At this point, general rather than specific objections are usually given. For instance:

Objection 1: History is not an exact science. It does not yield absolute certainty like mathematics.

Reply: This is true, but why would you note that fact now and not when you speak of Caesar or Luther or George Washington? History is not exact, but it is sufficient. No one doubts that Caesar crossed the Rubicon; why do many doubt that Jesus rose from the dead? The evidence for the latter is much better than for the former.

Objection 2: You can't trust documents. Paper proves nothing. Anything can be forged.

Reply: This is simply ignorance. Not trusting documents is like not trusting telescopes. Paper evidence suffices for most of what we believe; why should it suddenly become suspect here?

Objection 3: Because the resurrection is miraculous. It's the content of the idea rather than the documentary evidence for it that makes it incredible.

Reply: Now we finally have a straightforward objection—not to the documentary evidence but to miracles. This is a philosophical question, not a scientific, historical or textual question.

Objection 4: It's not only miracles in general but this miracle in particular that is objectionable. The resurrection of a corpse is crass, crude, vulgar, literalistic, and materialistic. Religion should be more spiritual, inward, ethical.

Reply: If religion is what we invent, we can make it whatever we like. If it is what God invented, then we have to take it as we find it, just as we have to take the universe as we find it, rather than as we'd like it to be. Death is crass, crude, vulgar, literal, and material. The resurrection meets death where it is and conquers it, rather than merely spouting some harmless, vaporous abstractions about spirituality. The resurrection is as vulgar as the God who did it. He also made mud and bugs and toenails.

Objection 5: But a literalistic interpretation of the resurrection ignores the profound dimensions of meaning found in the symbolic, spiritual, and mythic realms that have been deeply explored by other religions. Why are Christians so narrow and exclusive? Why can't they see the profound symbolism in the idea of resurrection?

Reply: They can. It's not either-or. Christianity does not invalidate the myths, it validates them, by incarnating them. It is "myth become fact," to use the title of a germane essay by C.S. Lewis (in God in the Dock). Why prefer a one-layer cake to a two-layer cake? Why refuse either the literal-historical or the mythic-symbolic aspects of the resurrection? The Fundamentalist refuses the mythic-symbolic aspects because he has seen what the Modernist has done with it: used it to exclude the literal-historical aspects. Why have the Modernists done that? What terrible fate awaits them if they follow the multifarious and weighty evidence and argument that naturally emerges from the data, as we have summarized it here in this series of posts?

The answer is not obscure: traditional Christianity awaits them, complete with adoration of Christ as God, obedience to Christ as Lord, dependence on Christ as Savior, humble confession of sin, and a serious effort to live Christ's life of self-sacrifice, detachment from the world, righteousness, holiness, and purity of thought, word, and deed. The historical evidence is massive enough to convince the open-minded inquirer. By analogy with any other historical event, the resurrection has eminently credible evidence behind it. To disbelieve it, you must deliberately make an exception to the rules you use everywhere else in history. Now why would someone want to do that?

Ask yourself that question if you dare, and take an honest look into your heart before you answer.
 
 
Excerpted from “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics", copyright 1994, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, published 2009 Ignatius Press, used with permission of the publisher. Text reproduced from PeterKreeft.com.

(Image credit: Unsplash)

Materialism has always had a difficult time dealing with death, because it has to claim that death is not a big deal. If there is nothing more to life than the matter of the body, once the body dies there is nothing left to “experience” death.

The ancient atomists were explicit in this claim, with Epicurus stating:

"Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not."

While it is debatable how palatable this line of argument can really be when facing one’s own death, it is particularly impotent for comforting those who mourn a deceased loved one. If death truly is the end, then the loss that is felt is not imagined, but complete and final.

For those who espouse a strictly materialist worldview, any attempt to comfort the mourning must be scientific; this is exactly what Aaron Freeman proposes in a segment for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He argues that the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, provides a context to give grieving family members the knowledge that their loved one is not completely gone but that his energy is a permanent part of the cosmos, or that her impact on them is not over but that the energy of those interactions carries on in our lives. Most importantly, this is something that those grieving need not simply have faith in. The conservation of energy can be and has been experimentally tested across all ranges of physics, so mourners can examine the evidence for themselves and find how sound it is.

Originally aired almost ten years ago, this little reflection bubbles up every once in a while on blogs or on Facebook. Freeman is right to point out the beauty and interconnectedness of the material world and how we can have an impact on it. It can be astounding to realize that the atoms that make up our bodies were originally formed in the heart of stars that have long since died, or that the breath you just took probably shared some air molecules with the dying breath of Socrates, Julius Ceasar, or even Jesus Christ. Physics can give us an amazing picture of the universe and of our place in it. But to claim that this is all we need for true comfort in the face of death is simply unreasonable.

What Freeman presents about the conservation of energy and about the fact that the energy that animated us in our lifetimes will never fully be lost is true. Nevertheless, just as we do not mourn the loss of nail clippings or hair trimmings, it is not the body or energy as such that we miss, but a human person. We long for the whole person, both the body and that intangible principle that made that body the unique person we so loved, their soul. In death there is a stark change, a true loss, for the body that was once given a unity and a purpose by the soul is now simply a collection of parts that are each going their own way. Freeman admits this but tries to put a positive spin on it in his closing line:

"According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen."

But no one can honestly deny that something real truly is gone, namely the very order that makes you a person. The energy that suffused our loved one in life and that they used to make us laugh and cry and love, though not completely gone, has lost that unity and purpose, that order, that we so prized in their life.

The image that we somehow “merge” with the universe in death as the energy that we expended in life and the molecules that made up our bodies carry on an independent existence can only be comforting if we convince ourselves that all we are when alive is a particular collection of molecules with a particular pattern of energy. It is only by cheapening our understanding of and value for human life that this image can hope to comfort.

True comfort in mourning cannot rely simply on the material, on talk of the persistence of energy and physical parts. It must include reference to the soul, that principle of life that, by its very nature, orders us to something beyond the physical.

Catholics look to the promise that death is not a loss of the soul, that they can still be united to their loved ones in the Body of Christ and that they will one day be restored to the fullness of their personhood, body and soul, in the new creation.
 
 
This article first appeared on DominicanaBlog.com, an online publication of the Dominican Students of the Province of St. Joseph who live and study at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. It was written by Br. Thomas Davenport, O.P., who entered the Order of Preachers in 2010. He graduated from Stanford University with a PhD in Physics.
 
(Image credit: Turner)

NOTE: Today we begin a four-part series by philosopher Fr. Robert Spitzer addressing the question, "Why Would God Allow Suffering Caused by Nature?" Instead of focusing on the existence of moral evil, or suffering caused by the free choice of humans, he examines why an apparently good God would create an imperfect world replete with natural disasters, physical disabilities, and unavoidable heartache. The series will continue on each of the next three Fridays.
 

 
It is somewhat easier to understand why God would allow suffering to occur through human agents than it is to understand why He would allow suffering to occur through natural causation. After all, it would seem that if God creates the natural order, He could have created it perfectly – so perfectly that there would be no possibility of human suffering. He could have created each human being in a perfectly self-sufficient way, so that we would have no need. Or, if we had need, He could have created us with a perfect capacity to fulfill those needs within a world of perfectly abundant resources.

So why did God create an imperfect natural order? Why did He create a natural order which would allow for scarcity? Why did He create a natural order that would give rise to earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis? Why did He create a natural order which would permit vulnerabilities within the human genome that allow for blindness, deafness, or muscular degeneration? Why did He create a natural order which would permit debilitating diseases?

The brief answer lies in the fact that a perfect natural order would leave no room for weakness and vulnerability; yet weakness and vulnerability induce many positive human characteristics, perhaps the most important human characteristics, such as (1) identity transformation, (2) stoic virtues, (3) agape, and (4) interdependence and human community. This list of characteristics represents the most noble of human strivings, the propensity toward greater civility and civilization, and glimpses of a perfection which is unconditional and even eternal. Though weakness and vulnerability seem to delimit and even undermine human potential, they very frequently detach us from what is base and superficial so that we might freely see and move toward what is truly worthy of ourselves, what will truly have a lasting effect, what is truly destined in its intrinsic perfection to last forever.

A perfect world might leave us content with pure autonomy and superficiality, and would deprive us of the help we might need to deepen our virtue, relationships, community, compassion, and noble striving for the common good. The “perfect world” might deprive us of the impetus toward real perfection, the perfection of love, the perfection which is destined to last forever. We will now discuss each of the above four positive characteristics of weakness and vulnerability induced by an imperfect world.

Human beings tend to move through four levels of happiness or purpose:

(1) happiness arising out of external physical and material stimuli;

(2) happiness arising out of ego-satisfaction and comparative advantage (such as status, admiration, popularity, winning, power, and control);

(3) happiness arising out of making an optimal positive difference and legacy to the people and world around me; and

(4) happiness arising out of being connected with and immersed in what is perfect, ultimate, and eternal in Truth, Love, Goodness, Beauty, and Being (for those with faith, God).

It so happens that the lower levels of happiness/identity are more surface-apparent, immediately gratifying, and intense than the higher levels. They tend to more easily attract us and hold our attention from without (instead of requiring discipline from within), so we more easily gravitate toward them. However, they are much less pervasive, enduring, and deep than the higher levels of happiness/identity. For example, making an optimal positive difference to others and the world with my time, talent, and energy (Level 3) can have effects far beyond my ego-gratification (Level 2), so it is more pervasive than Level 2. These effects can last much longer than the acquisition of a new car, the enjoyment of an ice cream cone, and the enjoyment of status and power – so they are more enduring than Levels 1 and 2. Finally, they are deeper than Levels 1 and 2, because they involve my highest creative and psychological powers (i.e., my powers of intellection, moral reasoning, ideal formation, love, spiritual engagement, etc.).

The difficulty is that only one of these levels of happiness/identity can be dominant. The others will become recessive. Thus, if the desire for physical pleasure and material goods is dominant, the desire for ego-satisfaction, optimal contribution, and spiritual connection will be recessive. We will therefore live for what is most surface-apparent and immediately gratifying, but neglect what is most pervasive, enduring, and deep (and therefore, what could express our most noble purpose in life). Alternatively, if we want to move toward what is most pervasive, enduring and deep, we will have to allow Levels 1 and 2 to become recessive; we will have to let go of them (enticing as they are); and this is where suffering frequently comes in.

We cannot say that human beings require suffering in order to move from the more superficial levels of happiness/identity to the higher (most pervasive, enduring, and deep) ones, for human beings can see the intrinsic goodness and beauty of making an optimal positive difference to family, friends, community, organization, culture, and even, for Christians, the kingdom of God. They can be attracted to this noble, beautiful, and even transcendent identity as a fulfillment of their higher selves, or even their transcendent eternal selves. However, this more positive impetus to move toward the more pervasive, enduring, and deep identity can be assisted by suffering, weakness, and vulnerability; for it is precisely these negative conditions which can break the spell of the lower levels of identity.

Physical pleasures (Level 1) can be so riveting that they can produce addiction. The same holds true for status, esteem, control, and power. In my own life, I have seen how powerful (and even addictive) these lower levels of identity can be. Yet, I truly desired (and saw the beauty and nobility of) the higher levels of happiness/identity. Though this vision was quite powerful in me, I found myself transfixed by the lower levels – almost unable to move myself beyond them. This is where the “power of weakness and vulnerability” came into my life.

Experiences of physical limitation and the failure of “my best laid plans” broke the spell of unmitigated pursuit of ego, status, and power. I had a genuine Pauline experience of having to look at life anew – to look for more pervasive purpose in the face of a loss of power – to reexamine what I was living for in light of a loss of control. I became thankful for my weaknesses and the imperfect natural order which gave rise to them. Without them, I would have been unqualifiedly locked into my addiction to ego, status, and power – even though I saw the beauty and nobility of optimal contribution and love. I would have been addicted to the superficial amidst the appreciation of the noble – what an emptiness, what a frustration, what unhappiness – until weakness broke the spell. The irony is, weakness and suffering gave me the freedom to overcome the far greater suffering of living beneath myself, of avoiding noble purpose, of consciously wasting my life.

As noted above, there are probably people who do not need suffering to make a move from, say, Level 2 to Level 3 and 4. I was not one of them. Suffering was my liberation, my vehicle, my pathway to what was most worthy of my life, and what was most noble and perduring in me. I suspect that there are others like me who can use a dose of suffering, weakness, and vulnerability every now and then to call them to their most noble, perduring, and true selves. For these, the imperfect world is indispensable. Being left to the so-called perfect world would have led to superficiality and spiritual deprivation (a deeper pain).

This liberating power of suffering is not restricted to physical or psychological weakness. It applies most poignantly to the anticipation of death. I once had a student who asked, “Why do we need to die? If God is perfect and He intended to give us eternal life, why does He make us die in order to get there? Why not just allow us to continue living without all the mystery about the beyond?” I initially responded that eternal life is not merely a continuation of this current earthly life, and that death provided the transition from this life to the “new” life.

She responded, “Well, why isn’t the ‘new’ life a continuation of this one? Why wouldn’t God create us immediately in the ‘new’ life?” I indicated to her that the goodness, joy, and beauty of the “new” life did not essentially consist in a perfect, natural order (although this would be part of it), but rather in the perfect love that would exist between God and us, and between all of us in God. I further indicated that this “love” would consist in a perfect act of empathy with another whereby doing the good for the other would be just as easy, if not easier, than doing the good for oneself – where empathy would take over the desire for ego-satisfaction and autonomy – where communion and community would not immolate the individual personality, but bring it to its completion through others and God.

The student almost intuitively agreed that this would be perfect joy, which led her to re-ask the question, “Well, why didn’t God just create us in a situation of perfect love?” My answer revolved around the fact that love is our free choice. God cannot create us into a “world of perfect love;” we have to create the condition of love for ourselves and others by our free decisions. As noted immediately above, our decision to love (to live for a contributive identity) can be assisted considerably by weakness and vulnerability; but even more importantly, it can be assisted by the anticipation of death.

As many philosophers have noted (both those coming from a transcendental perspective, such as Karl Rahner and Edith Stein, or a merely immanent perspective, such as Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre), death produces a psychological finality which compels us to make a decision about what truly matters to us, what truly defines our lives, sooner rather than later. It really does not matter whether we have a strong belief in an afterlife or not; the finality of death incites us to make a statement about the “pre-death” meaning of our lives.

Most of us view an interminable deferral of fundamental options (such as, to live for love or not to live for love; to live for integrity or not to live for integrity; to live for truth or not to live for truth; etc.) to be unacceptable because death calls us to give authentic definition to our lives – the finality of death says to our innermost being that we must express our true selves prior to the termination of the life we know.

Death might be the best gift we have been given because it calls us to our deepest life-definition and self-definition, and in the words of Jean Paul Sartre, to the creation of our essence. If we believe in an afterlife, we take this authentic self-definition (say, love) with us into our eternity. But even if we do not believe in an afterlife, death still constitutes an indispensable gift of life, for it prevents us from interminably delaying the creation of our essence. It calls us to proclaim who we truly are and what we really stand for – sooner rather than later. We cannot interminably waste our lives in indecision.

In light of death, the choice of one’s fundamental essence (say, love) becomes transformative and “life-giving.” Death gives life – an authentic, reflective, and free life through a more pervasive, enduring, and deep purpose in life.

Next week, Fr. Spitzer will explore why the attainment of virtues requires an imperfect world.
 
 
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The day after my son Joshua died, after the necessary funeral and burial arrangements had been made, I got into my car, drove aimlessly some distance, and finally parked in a relatively desolate place away from traffic, noise, and people. I turned the car off and began to talk out loud to God, but at a volume more accurately described with the term 'yell.' "Why? Why him? He had done absolutely nothing wrong. He most certainly didn't deserve this. He suffered so much over these last two years. How could you let this happen? How could you just watch this happen, right in front of your omniscient view? How could you have just watched all this happen this whole time, silently, as from a distance, and done absolutely nothing? Nobody I know with even a shred of moral decency would do such a thing! Why didn't you do something to help him, to heal him? Why even bring him into the world, only to allow him to suffer so much, and then give him no chance to grow up, not even a chance to enjoy childhood? Why? How could you possibly be good and just, and allow an innocent child to suffer and die in this way?" In my anger and grief, as I hurled these questions at God I was repeatedly pounding my fist on the center of the steering wheel.

Then at some point while still pounding on the wheel and repeatedly interrogating God with no reply forthcoming, a kind of trilemma began to form in my mind, and I gradually realized that under each of its three horns what I was doing was silly and pointless. Either God did not exist, or God was evil, or God was good. In what I had witnessed in Joshua's suffering, any God who was morally indifferent or 'neutral' or apathetic was just evil. If God did not exist, my complaining was silly and pointless, because in that case nobody was listening. And if God were evil, then my complaints were also silly and pointless, because there would be no point complaining to an evil deity about ill treatment, since if he were evil he wouldn't care about failing to be good. I realized by this process of reasoning that my act of complaining to God about an injustice could only make sense if God is good. But then, of course, if God, being God, is good not by participation in goodness or by derived goodness, but as Goodness itself (ipsum bonum), then my act of complaining to Him also did not make sense because in that case He certainly has a good reason for allowing my son's suffering and death to happen, a reason I cannot presently see. I would be complaining to Goodness itself about its behavior, as though I know Goodness better than Goodness knows Goodness, and as though I know better than Goodness how Goodness ought to run things. And that too would be silly and pointless (and arrogant), because one can't show up Goodness by appealing to Goodness. Any attempt to do so only shows up one's own insufficient understanding of Goodness, and is thus self-refuting. The proper response, if God is Goodness, would not be to rail against Him but instead to trust Him, even if I never found out the good, justifying reason for Joshua's death, even if for the rest of eternity I never could find out that reason because it was so far above my finite comprehension.

I realized further that if God did not exist, or if God were evil, not only was my complaining pointless, I would never see Joshua again. My only hope to see him again lay under that third option, namely, that God is good. If in my anguish I were to turn against God, or deny His existence, I would cut myself off spiritually, mentally, emotionally, ontologically, and eschatologically, from the only possible way I could see Joshua again, and the only possible condition under which his life and suffering had been meaningful, worthwhile, and ultimately redeemable as truly good and not ultimately pointless or his suffering gratuitous. Of course that logical truth did not entail that God exists and is good. But I knew that I was not the ultimate source of the goodness and justice to which I was appealing in my complaint to whichever higher being was in charge. The only intelligible option of the three was that the goodness I longed for, and which inasmuch as I was aware of it was the fire behind the anger driving me to pummel the center of my steering wheel, was the very goodness at the heart of all things, the goodness by which I lived and breathed at that moment, and by which Joshua had lived and breathed, and breathed his last breath by my side the day before. And then the great inversion grew clearer to me. I had been yelling and railing at Goodness for His alleged lack of goodness, and all along Goodness had been giving me life, breath by which to yell, and even a little glimpse of itself such that I could make my complaint by appeal to what I knew of it by that glimpse. He who is Goodness itself all along had been looking me in the eyes, reaching into the center of my grieving soul, and embracing me with the gift of infinite love.

Then I rested my head on the steering wheel, and the tears began to pour down. I decided to trust God regarding Joshua's death, to trust that He had a justifying reason, such that Joshua's life and suffering were entirely worthwhile, even though I may never be able fully to understand that reason, either in this life or the next. This act of trust was based entirely on the thesis that the underlying source of all things is not evil, not indifferent, but is rather bonitas pura (i.e. pure goodness), the very source of the goodness I knew, and the ultimate object of the goodness for which I hoped. This thesis alone, of the three, made intellectual room for my tears, and made sense of my grief and anger, even while calling me to trust. The other two theses of the trilemma held me aloft above all reality, like Descartes's mind aloft above his body, forcing me to 'discover' what didn't exist before and under me, and thus destroying that very law by which I made my case against God on behalf of Joshua's suffering and death. Here, however, in the embrace of bonitas pura, my case against God could fail delightfully, not by knocking out its fundamental principle, but by the principle's perfection overflowing beyond the present limits of my perception and beyond the limits of what I could conceive in my present condition. If bonitas pura is the source behind and beneath all things, then Joshua's life, his suffering, and his death, all have genuine justifying and redeeming worth; they were worth it. His life was not in vain. His life was still ultimately a great gift to him, to my wife and me, and to the world. I could not out-wish or out-hope or out-plan bonitas pura. If my wishes, hopes, and plans for Joshua were good, a fortiori those of bonitas pura for my son were far better.

This conclusion sank deeply into my soul, like a ship scuttled, sinking slowly and silently onto the ocean floor, never again to be moved. After the debris had settled some time later, I raised my head, wiped my eyes, started my car, drove home, and prepared to receive visitors and family from out-of-town for the funeral. But this conclusion resting on the sea floor of my soul did not shelter me from grief in the days to come. At the cemetery, as his small casket was being lowered into the ground, the pain of grief, loss, and separation, so overwhelmed me that I passed out. The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the driver's seat of my car, the seat reclined. My grandfather was standing beside the open car door. He looked at me and said, "Don't feel bad about passing out. Your great-grandfather passed out at the cemetery when my brother was being buried." Even though it did not keep grief from me, the truth that God is pure goodness allowed me to recover slowly through the grief over the weeks and months that followed. Grief did not crush me, because in every shadow of bereavement I found comfort in the truth that death is not the last word, that in my flesh I shall see the God who is bonitas pura.

Awareness that bonitas pura underlies all things changes one's stance toward reality. Faith then is not a blind leap, but a trust in One who is utterly and infinitely trustworthy. It stands in contrast to the stance of fear and despair that follow from a metaphysic in which indifference or evil is thought to be the source of all. Ultimately, is bonitas pura behind and under and surrounding all things, such that I can rest everything on it and let go in peaceful trust when death comes to me, or is reality indifferent or out to get me, such that I must fight against nature's blood-thirsty hunger game as long as I can, even though ultimately my fight is a losing and meaningless battle? On that day after my son's death, as I sat in the car struggling to make sense of what had just happened, I found within myself a kind of language of goodness, justice, and hope, a language not merely of words, but intelligible only as an ontological resonance with the bonitas pura at the center of all things, and unintelligible apart from it. As this bonitas pura so exceeds our comprehension, so by resting in its embrace through faith we can possess what the Apostle Paul referred to as a peace that surpasses all our understanding (Philippians 4:7), and what the Apostle Peter called an "unspeakable joy" (1 Peter 1:8).
 

"Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air, amply spread around everywhere, question the beauty of the sky, question the serried ranks of the stars, question the sun making the day glorious with its bright beams, question the moon tempering the darkness of the following night with its shining rays, question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on dry land, that fly in the air; ... question all these things. All respond, "See, we are beautiful." Their beauty is their confession. Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not unchangeable Beauty?" (St. Augustine, Sermon 241)

 

 
Happy twenty-first birthday, son.
 
 
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Can you prove life after death?

 
Whenever we argue about whether a thing can be proved, we should distinguish five different questions about that thing:

1. Does it really exist or not? "To be or not to be, that is the question."
2. If it does exist, do we know that it exists? A thing can obviously exist without our knowing it.
3. If we know that it exists, can we be certain of this knowledge? Our knowledge might be true but uncertain; it might be "right opinion."
4. If it is certain, is there a logical proof, a demonstration of why we have a right to be certain? There may be some certainties that are not logically demonstrable (e.g. my own existence, or the law of non-contradiction).
5. If there is a proof, is it a scientific one in the modern sense of 'scientific'? Is it publicly verifiable by formal logic and/or empirical observation? There may be other valid kinds of proof besides proofs by the scientific method.

The fifth point is especially important when asking whether you can prove life after death. I think it depends on what kinds of proof you will accept. It cannot be proved like a theorem in Euclidean geometry; nor can it be observed, like a virus. For the existence of life after death is not on the one hand a logical tautology: its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, as a Euclidean theorem does. On the other hand, it cannot be empirically proved or disproved (at least before death) simply because by definition all experience before death is experience of life before death, not life after death.

If life after death cannot be proved scientifically, is it then intellectually irresponsible to accept it? Only if you assume that it is intellectually irresponsible to accept anything that cannot be proved scientifically. But that premise is self-contradictory (and therefore intellectually irresponsible)! You cannot scientifically prove that the only acceptable proofs are scientific proofs. You cannot prove logically or empirically that only logical or empirical proofs are acceptable as proofs. You cannot prove it logically because its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, and you cannot prove it empirically because neither a proof nor the criterion of acceptability are empirical entities. Thus scientism (the premise that only scientific proofs count as proofs) is not scientific; it is a dogma of faith, a religion.

1. No Reasonable Objection

 
The first reason for believing in life after death is simply that there is no compelling reason not to, no objection to it that cannot be answered. The two most frequent objections are as follows:

(a) Since there is no conclusive evidence for life after death, it is as irresponsible to believe it as to believe in UFOs, or alchemy. Perhaps we cannot disprove it; a universal negative always is difficult if not impossible to disprove. But if we cannot prove it either, it is wishful thinking, not evidence, that makes us believe it.

Now this objector either means by 'evidence' merely empirical evidence, or else any kind of evidence. If he means the latter, he ignores all the following proofs for life after death. There is a lot of evidence. If he means the former, he falls victim to the self-contradiction argument just mentioned. There is no empirical evidence that the only kind of evidence we should accept is empirical evidence.

In most supposedly scientific objections of this type, an impossible demand is made, overtly or covertly—a demand for scientific proof—and then the belief is faulted for not satisfying that demand. This is like arguing against the existence of God on the grounds that "I have not found Him in my test tube," or like the first Soviet cosmonauts' "argument" that they had found no God in outer space. Ex hypothesi, if God exists He is not found in a test tube or in space. That would make Him a chemical or a meteor. A taxi trip through Cleveland disproves quasars as well as a laboratory experiment disproves God, or brain chemistry disproves the soul or its immortality. The demand that non-empirical entities submit to empirical verification is a self-contradictory demand. The belief that something exists outside a system cannot be disproved by observing the behavior of that system. Goldfish cannot disprove the existence of their human owners by observing water currents in the bowl.

(b) The strongest positive argument against life after death is the observation of spirit at the mercy of matter. We see no more mental life when the brain dies. Even when it is alive, a blow to the head impairs thought. Consciousness seems related to matter as the light of a candle to the candle: once the fuel is used up, the light goes out. The body and its nervous system seem like the fuel, the cause; and immaterial activity, consciousness, seems like the effect. Remove the cause and you remove the effect. Consciousness, in other words, seems to be an epiphenomenon, an effect but not a cause, like the heat generated by the electricity running along a wire to an appliance, or the exhaust fumes from an engine's tailpipe.

What does the observed dependence of mind upon matter prove, if not the mortality of the soul? Wait. First, just what do we observe? We observe the physical manifestations of consciousness (e.g. speech) cease when the body dies. We do not observe the spirit cease to exist, because we do not observe the spirit at all, only its manifestations in the body. Observations of the body do not decide whether that body is an instrument of an independent spirit which continues to exist after its body-instrument dies, or whether the body is the cause of a dependent spirit which dies when its cause dies. Both hypotheses account for the observed facts.

When a body is paralyzed, the mind and will are still operative, though deprived of expression. Bodily death may be simply total paralysis. When you take a microphone away from a speaker, he can no longer be heard by the audience. But he is still a speaker. Body could be the soul's microphone. The dependence of soul on a body may be somewhat like the dependence of a ship on a dry-dock. Ships are not built on the open sea, but on dry-dock; but once they leave the dry-dock, they do not sink but become free floating ships. The body may be the soul's dry-dock, or (an even better metaphor) the soul's womb, and its death may be the soul's emergence from its womb.

What about the analogy of the candle? Even in the analogy, the light does not go out; it goes up. It is still traveling through space, observable from other planets. It 'goes out' as a child goes out to play; it is liberated.

But what of the need for a brain to think? The brain may not be the cause of thought but the stopping down, the 'reducing valve' for thought, as Bergson, James and Huxley suppose: an organ of forgetting rather than remembering, eliminating from the total field of consciousness all that serves no present purpose. Thus when the brain dies, more rather than less consciousness occurs: the floodgates come down. This would account for the familiar fact that dying people remember the whole of their past life in an instant with intense clarity, detail, and understanding.

In short, the evidence, even the empirical evidence, seems at least as compatible with soul immortality as with soul-mortality.

2. Argument From Authority

 
According to the medievals, the most logical of philosophers, "the argument from authority is the weakest of arguments." Nevertheless, it is an argument, a probability, a piece of evidence. Forty million Frenchmen can be wrong, but it is less likely than four Frenchmen being wrong.

1. The first argument from authority for life after death is simply quantitative: "the democracy of the dead" votes for it. Almost all cultures before our own have strongly, even officially, believed in some form of it. Children naturally and spontaneously believe in it unless conditioned out of it.
2. A second argument from authority is stronger because it is qualitative rather than quantitative: nearly all the sages have believed in it. We must not, of course, answer the challenge 'How do you know they were sages?' by saying 'Because they believed'; that would be begging the question pure and simple. But thinkers considered wise for other reasons have believed; why should this one belief of theirs be an exception to their wisdom?
3. Finally, we have the supreme authority of the teachings of Jesus. Belief in life after death is central to His entire message, "the Kingdom of Heaven." Even if you do not believe He is the incarnate God, can you believe He is a naive fool?

3. Conservation of Energy

 
Arguments from reason are logically stronger than arguments from authority. The premises, or evidence, for arguments from reason can be taken from three sources, three levels of reality what is less than ourselves (Nature), ourselves (human life), or what is more than ourselves (God). Again, we move from the weaker to the stronger argument.

We could argue from the principle of the conservation of energy. We never observe any form of energy either created or destroyed, only transformed. The immortality of the soul seems to be the spiritual equivalent of the conservation of energy. If even matter is immortal, why not spirit?

4. The Nature of Man

 
The next class of arguments is taken from the nature of Man. What in us survives death depends on what is in us now. Death is like menopause. If a woman has in her identity nothing but her motherhood, then her identity has trouble surviving menopause. Life after menopause is a little like life after death.

4a. The simplest and most obvious of these arguments may be called Primitive Man's Argument from Dead Cow. Primitive Man has two cows. One dies. What is the difference between Dead Cow and Live Cow? Primitive man looks. (He's really quite bright.) There appears no material difference in size or weight immediately upon death. Yet there is an enormous difference; something is missing. What? Life, of course. And what is that? The answer is obvious to any intelligent observer whose head is not clouded with theories: life is what makes Live Cow breathe. Life is breath. (The word for 'soul', or 'life', and 'breath' is the same in many ancient languages.) Soul is not air, which is still in Dead Cow's lungs, but the power to move it.

Life, it is seen, is not a material thing, like an organ. It is the life of the organs, of the body; not that which lives but that by which we live. Now this source of life cannot die as the body dies: by the removal of the soul. Soul cannot have soul taken from it. What can die has life on loan; life does not have life on loan.

The 'catch' in this argument is that this 'soul' may in turn have its life on loan from a higher source, and transmit it to the body only after having been given life first. This is in fact the Biblical teaching, contrary to the Greek view of the soul's inherent, necessary and eternal immortality. God gives souls life, and souls can die if they refuse it. But in any case the soul survives the body's death.

4b. Another quite simple piece of evidence for the presence of an immaterial reality (soul) in us which is not subject to the laws of matter and its death, is the daily experience of real magic: the power of mind over matter. Every time I deliberately move my arm, I do magic. If there were no mind and will commanding the arm, only muscles; if there were muscles and a nervous system and even a brain but no conscious mind commanding them; then the arm could not rise unless it were lighter than air. When the body dies, its arms no longer move; the body reverts to obedience to merely material laws, like a sword dropped by a swordsman.

Even more simply stated, mind is not part of the system of matter, not measurable by material standards (How many inches long is your mind?) Therefore it need not die when the material body dies.

4c. A traditional Scholastic argument for an immortal soul is taken from the presence of two operations which are not operations of the body (1) abstract thinking, as distinct from external sensing and internal imagining; and (2) deliberate, rational willing, as distinct from instinctive desiring. My thought is not limited to sense images like pyramids; it can understand abstract universal principles like triangles. And my choices are not limited to my body's desires and instincts. I fast, therefore I am.

4d. Still another power of the soul which indicates that it is not a part or function of the body and therefore not subject to its laws and its mortality is the power to objectify its body. I can know a stone only because I am more than a stone. I can remember my past. (My present is alive; my past is dead.) I can know and love my body only because I am more than my body. As the projecting machine must be more than the images projected, the knower must be more than the objects known. Therefore I am more than my body.

4e. Still another argument from the nature of soul, or spirit, is that it does not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space. You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut.

Since soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed, as a body can. Whatever is composed (of parts) can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul. But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable. It could die only by being annihilated as a whole. But this would be contrary to a basic law of the universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply pops into existence with no cause.

But if the soul dies neither in parts (by decomposition) nor as a whole by annihilation, then it does not die.

4f. One last argument for immortality from the present experience of what soul is, comes from Plato. It is put so perfectly in the Republic that I quote it in its original form, adding only numbers to distinguish the steps of the argument:

1. Evil is all that which destroys and corrupts. . .
2. Each thing has its evil . . . for instance, ophthalmia for the eye, and disease for the whole body, mildew for corn and for wood, rust for iron . . .
3. The natural evil of each thing . . . destroys it, and if this does not destroy it, nothing else can . . .
   (a) for I don't suppose good can ever destroy anything,
   (b) nor can what is neither good nor evil,
   (c) and it is certainly unreasonable . . . that the evil of something else would destroy anything when its own evil does not.
4. Then if we find something in existence which has its own evil but which can only do it harm yet cannot dissolve or destroy it, we shall know at once that there is no destruction for such a nature. . . .
5. the soul has something which makes it evil . . . injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance. Now does any one of these dissolve and destroy it? . . .
6. Then, since it is not destroyed by any evil at all, neither its own evil nor foreign evil, it is clear that the soul must of necessity be . . . immortal.

5. The Nature of God

 
We turn now to a stronger class of arguments: not from the nature of Man but from the nature of God; not 'because of what I am, I must be immortal' but 'because of what God is, I am immortal.' A possible weakness of this type of argument, of course, is that it does not convince anyone not already convinced, because it presupposes the existence of God, and those who admit God usually admit life after death already, while those who deny the one usually deny the other as well. Yet, though apologetically weak, the argument is theoretically potent because it gives the real, the true reason or cause why we survive death: God wills it.

5a. We could first argue from God's justice. Since God by definition is just, His dealings with us must be just, at least in the long run, in the total picture. ("The long run" is the answer to the problem of evil, the apparently unjust distribution of suffering.) The innocent suffer and the wicked flourish here; therefore 'here' cannot be 'the long run,' the total picture. There must be justice after death to compensate for injustice before death. (This is the point of Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus.)

5b. The next argument, from God's love, is stronger than the one from His justice because love is more essential to God. Love is God's essence; justice is one of His attributes—one of Love's attributes.

Love is "the fulfillment of the whole law." Each of the Ten Commandments is a way of loving. "Thou shalt not kill" means "Love does not kill." If you love someone, you don't kill him. But God is love. Therefore God does not kill us. We want human life to triumph over death in the end because we love; is God less loving than we? Is He a hypocrite? Does He refuse to practice what He preaches?

Only if God does not love us or is impotent to do what He wills, do we die forever. That is, only if God is bad or weak—only if God is not God—is death the last word.

6. The Nature of the World

 
Whether the premises be taken from the nature of the world, of man, or of God, the last three arguments were all deductive, arguments by rational analysis. More convincing for most people are arguments from experience. These can be subdivided into two classes: arguments from experiences everyone, or nearly everyone, shares; and arguments from extraordinary or unusual experiences. The first class includes:

1. The argument from the demand for ultimate moral meaning, or long-range justice (similar to the argument from God's justice, except that this time we do not assume the existence of God, only the validity of our essential moral instinct)—this is essentially Kant's argument;
2. The argument from our demand for ultimate purpose, for a meaningful end, or adequate final cause—this argument is parallel, in the order of final causality and within the psychological area, to the traditional cosmological arguments for the existence of God from effect to a first, uncaused cause in the order of efficient causality and within the cosmological area;
3. The argument from the principle that every innate desire reveals the presence of its desired object (hunger indicates the existence of food, curiosity knowledge, etc.) coupled with the discovery of an innate desire for eternity, or something more than time can offer-this is C. S. Lewis' favorite argument.
4. The argument from the validity of love, which insists on the intrinsic, indispensable value of the other, the beloved—if love is sighted and not blind and if it is absurd that the indispensable is dispensed with, then death does not dispense with us, for love declares that we are indispensable;
5. Finally, the argument from the presence of a person, who is not a thing (object) and therefore need not be removed when the body-object is removed-the I detects a Thou not subject to the death of the It.

From one point of view, these five arguments are the weakest of all, for they presuppose an epistemological access to reality which can easily be denied as illusory. There is no purely formal or empirical proof, e.g., that love's instinctive perception of the intrinsic value of the beloved is true. Further, each concludes not with the simple proposition 'we are immortal' but with the disjunctive proposition 'either reality is absurd or we are immortal.' Finally, each is less a demonstration than an almost-immediate perception: in valuing, purposing, longing, loving, or presencing one sees the immortality of the person.

These are five spiritual senses, and when one looks along them rather than at them, when one uses them rather than scrutinizing them, when they are innocent until proven guilty rather than proven innocent, one sees. But when one does not take this attitude, when one begins with Occam's razor, or Descartes' methodic doubt, one simply does not see. They are less arguments from experience than experiences themselves of the immortal soul.

7. Extraordinary Experience

 
Three arguments from unusual or extraordinary experience are:

1. The argument from the experience of medically 'dead' and resuscitated patients, all of whom, even those formerly skeptical, are utterly convinced of the truth of their 'out-of-the-body' existence and their survival of bodily death. To outside observers there necessarily remains the possibility of doubt; to all who have had the experience, there is none. It is no more deceptive than waking up in the morning. You may dream that you are awake and in fact be dreaming, but once you are really awake you are in no doubt. Unfortunately, this waking sense of certainty can only be experienced, not publicly proved.
2. A similar sense of reality attaches to an experience apparently even more common than the out-of-the-body experience. Shortly after a loved one dies (most usually a spouse), the survivor often has a sudden, unexpected and utterly convincing sense of the real here-and-now presence of the dead one. It is not a memory, or a wish, or an image from the imagination. It is not usually accompanied by an image at all. But it is utterly convincing to the experiencer. Only to one who trusts the experiencer is the experience transferable as evidence, however. And that link can be denied without absurdity. Again, it is a very strong and convincing experience, but not a convincing proof.
3. What would be a convincing proof from experience? If we could only put our hands into the wounds of a dead man who had risen again! The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the skeptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along!"

 
 
Originally published at PeterKreeft.com. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Vine and Branch)

If some natural, secular purpose could be granted to the man suffering, then his pain would cease to be suffering and begin to be useful pain. The athlete can point to the material purpose of fitness and strength to answer the problem of his sore muscles. The old man who wakes up ever day with inexplicably sore muscles can point to no such thing. Though the pain experienced is the same — down to the last, aching twinge — the old man suffers, and the athlete does not. Suffering, to be suffering, requires the lack of a natural, secular answer.

The secular cannot answer the problem of suffering (as I’ve spoken in depth elsewhere), but suffering is still a problem we naturally want resolved. (If you don’t believe it is, develop leukemia, have a close family member die, and then try being content with not having any answers, meaning, or purpose.) We are obliged to ditch the secular and take up the religious, as a man cutting wood ditches the fork and picks up the saw. Which religion? I cannot speak for all of them, though the very existence of religion as a fundamental human institution does lend support to what I’ve just argued, that we must leave the purely secular if we want answers in this life. I can only speak for Christianity. Think of Christianity as some obscure, New Age cult — so as to judge her fairly — and I will give you her claims:

CLAIM 1: Suffering is the result of sin. If you are an atheist, freaketh not, for we know this on a purely experiential level. When we sin against others — when we steal from them, malign their names, or harm their bodies — we cause them suffering. When we sin against our nature — when we isolate ourselves, or demean our bodies — we cause our selves suffering. Suffering is the result of sin.

CLAIM 2: This verified reality is in fact the reality of the entire cosmos. The very state of human beings and the universe they inhabit is a sinful one.

Again, this is not a religious claim. The word sin is translated from the Hebrew ‘chattah’, which means ‘to miss the mark’. To say that the world is in a sinful state is to say that our world is not all it should be, that it misses the mark, that it is — in a word — imperfect. This is verifiable. We do not wish children to suffer and die, and yet we live in a world in which they do. It is entirely possible that we will have to at some point push spiky balls of calcium through our urethras. The experiences of these natural things as imperfect — to say the least — is a universal experience. We live in a world that “misses the mark” of perfection.

(OBJECTION 1: I suppose it could be argued to the contrary that the world is perfect, but we apply our human standard of perfection upon the world, and are disappointed when she doesn’t meet that standard. Both claims are statements of faith. One says, “I experience the universe as imperfect. I believe this experience corresponds to reality.” The other says, “I experience the universe as imperfect. I believe this experience does not correspond to reality.” Both are statements of belief based on a common experience — the experience of imperfection, found in kidney stones, dying children, 9/11, Katrina, etc.

The latter statement of faith — that the universe isn’t imperfect, we just believe it to be so — means human beings are far too strange to exercise rational thought. To say that what I experience as reality does not necessarily coincide with what reality actually is is to be unable to say anything at all. If what I experience as true does not necessarily coincide with what really is true, then I can hardly say “It is true that the universe is perfect.”
But this is obvious, and I digress going after the few who would argue that children dying is a matter of ultimate indifference, and that it is only our projections that make it seem otherwise.)

So the universe is imperfect. To be imperfect is to “miss the mark” of perfection. To be in a state of missing the mark is to be in a sinful state. The universe is therefore in a sinful state. As we’ve established, suffering is the natural result of sin. Thus suffering is inherent to our sinful universe.

CLAIM 3: As the universe is imperfect, God is perfect, the fullness of Perfection itself. This is first of all a simple matter of definition. If you have in your mind an imperfect God, then he is not God. But there is proof to this claim. As the philosopher Thomas Aquinas says:

“Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being.”

If God created all things, and all things are good in varying degrees, than God must be the standard of Perfection from which all things derive their relative goodness.

(Minor objection: Of course, this assumes the existence of God, which I do not aim to prove. Rather I aim to say, if there is a God, he is perfect. (I come dangerously close to bringing up St. Anselm.))

(OBJECTION 2: If the Christian sheeple (I’m joking) believe that God is the fullness of perfection, and that to say that our universe is sinful — or imperfect — is to say that our universe is lacking total union with God, why then, would Perfection allow our imperfection? If God is all-powerful, surely he could forever stop us from sinning, and thus from ever suffering? Is he so cruel as to allow us to suffer, children to die, etc.?

We are allowed to sin — and thus to suffer — because God loves us. If we could not refuse him, the fullness of perfection, we would be puppets attached to his celestial fingers. We could not not love God. But love, to be love, must be freely given. Perfection is meaningless if we have not the choice of imperfection. We are granted, in love, the opportunity to sin.)

CLAIM 4: Christianity answers the problem of suffering with the bizarre claim that a man who was God, the fullness of Perfection, known commonly as Jesus, “became sin”. We must listen attentively to her claim, and suspend at least a minutia of our disbelief, for we’ve already established the impossibility of an answer to the problem of suffering springing from a secular source.

(OBJECTION 3: I understand of course, that I’m not proving that God became Man. This would of course provide proving that there is a God, which is not my goal here. Rather, I beg the atheist to read this and understand that, if there is a Christ, then suffering is granted meaning, and then decide from there whether there in fact is a God, a Christ, etc.)

Jesus “became sin”. Sin is the act of missing the mark, of missing perfection. It follows that Jesus, in totally becoming sin, became totally absent from perfection, a claim verified by the words of Jesus on the cross: ”My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” By becoming imperfection, he is forsaken by Perfection.
We arrive at a paradox. If Jesus is God, and God is Perfection, how could Jesus “become sin” — the absence of Perfection — and thus become the absence of God? How could God become the absence of God?
He could not: He would die. If I were to become the total absence of myself, I would cease to exist. I would negate myself, as a negative number and the same positive number join to make an abyss and a zero.

CLAIM 5: God died.
 

 
All atheism has its ultimate source in Jesus Christ then, for by his death he negated the existence of God. And in his death, sin itself died, for he became sin itself. And if sin died, suffering died, for suffering is the result of sin. And if all suffering died, than death itself — the ultimate human suffering — dies.
But again, we arrive at a paradox. What happens to the man who by his death, destroys sin, and by destroying sin, destroys death? He certainly cannot die, or else he could not have destroyed death. He could not die: He would have to rise.

Claim 6:
 

 
(OBJECTION 4: Why then, if this is all true, do we still suffer, sin and die?

Time is a product of the universe, and if there is a Creator of the universe, he must exist outside of universe, and thus outside of time. The saving action of an infinite God cannot be limited to time.

It’d be a mistake to believe Christ killed death and suffering, freeing from suffering and death only those born after him. Such an expectation assumes that Christ’s sacrifice is limited to the laws of our time, that his action affects only the future, as a human action only affects the future. But his action was infinite, outside of time. He died once, for the entire world, for the past, present, and future, lifting all things to Perfection.

Thus the place without the suffering we are promised cannot be a part of earthly space and time. It must be part of the “time” of an infinite God, a time that contains all our past, present and future. Thus we are told that Christ died that we might have eternal life, life free from suffering outside of earthly time, a place Christianity has given the name Heaven.

But more than this, we suffer now for the precise reason we can sin. God will not force salvation upon us. He will not demand we claim his victory over sin and death. We are not his puppets. We must choose his salvation as we chose to sin.)

And this, finally, is the answer Christianity gives to suffering. Since Christ became all sin, and suffering is the result of sin, Christ took upon himself all suffering. Since his act was for all earthly time, this includes our current suffering. If this is true, no suffering is apart from the suffering of Christ. All is his. I am a Christian because I can acknowledge the reality that my suffering is in fact the suffering of Christ, and thereby “offer it up” with him, giving it meaning and the most glorious of purposes: The end of all suffering.

As Paul says: “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church.” Our suffering, because it is Christ’s, saves the world.

This changes everything: To see the child with leukemia is to see Christ suffering in that child, suffering to bring the world back to Perfection. To experience agony is to cry out with the strain of lifting this fallen world to Paradise. We are called to recognize this, and to actualize this. This is why I am a Christian.
 
 
Originally posted at Bad Catholic. Used with author's permission.