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.

Last summer I had the pleasure of writing my first article for Strange Notions, on the topic of bodily resurrection. Some time later, I came across a discussion group on another blog that happened to be focused on my article! Naturally intrigued, I took a few minutes to look around and read what the readers there had to say. It was nothing good. Among the snarky remarks was this gem: "I had fish for lunch. I wonder which of us is going to get resurrected from our (now shared) atoms."

Today I'd like to address that topic. I mentioned it vaguely in my original article, when I noted that the bodies of the dry bones Ezekiel saw in his dream had been picked clean by the carrion birds, and that a human body's atoms might be dispersed by earthquakes, dynamite, or a hungry bears. But the question is a really intriguing one, and I think trying to answer it presents a rather daunting challenge. What follows is my attempt.

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce?

The problem here basically involves recycling. Dead bodies not only decompose but "spring to life" again in other forms. They are not raised up in their former forms, but their components are inevitably integrated into new living systems. Compost in the garden. A dead antelope feeding a lion (a lion whose body is composed, in part, of antelope meat). Imagine first century Romans feeding Christians to wild boars, and then feasting on the pigs themselves in a post-persecution barbecue. Thanks to the miracle of digestion, we could imagine someone's body becoming part of a pig's body, and then in turn becoming part of another person's body. As the particles composing the former pass on to nourish the latter, resurrection suddenly becomes a very messy business indeed.

My last article, again, suggested that quantum entanglement might (possibly) allow a continuity of experience to be preserved, maintaining one's identity beyond death and decomposition. But "recycling" makes things trickier; if the experiences of one body's parts were to become integrated into the experiences of some other body's parts, whose identity will be preserved when the day of resurrection comes?

Canadian Cannibals

In the eighteenth century Voltaire, cheeky as always, gleefully described such a problem when he proposed the following situation. He asked that we imagine a French soldier who has traveled to Quebec and finds himself lost in the woods far away from his station. Starving, he does the unthinkable: he kills and eats a native Iroquois whom he meets in the forest. One man has eaten another, but the problem is even greater than we realize. For Voltaire goes on to tell us, “The Iroquois had fed on Jesuits for two or three months, and a great part of his body [i.e., the Iroquois's body] had become Jesuit” (qtd. in Morley, 1901/2012, 5.2).

Because the Iroquois in Voltaire's example had been eating missionaries for such a long time, we can imagine our French soldier to have a body composed (in part) of the body of an Iroquois, whose own body had been composed (much more substantially) of Jesuit bodies (several of them!). Even if entanglement somehow preserves the subjective experiences of the dead Iroquois within the body of the French soldier (might we imagine two souls in one body?), what about the experiences and identities of those Jesuits whom the Iroquois had been eating? Are we to say that all these men live on in the French soldier’s body?

What a confusing mess!

An Old Question

But it turns out Voltaire’s question, as well as the one asked by the blog commentator whom I mentioned at the beginning, is nothing new. About 1,300 years before Voltaire wrote about his starving soldier, the question of "which is who?" had already been asked by St. Augustine in The City of God. Augustine suggested that if human flesh were ever eaten (directly via cannibalism or indirectly by an animal eaten by another human being), then that flesh would on the Day of Resurrection, “be restored to the man in whom it became human flesh” (Bk. XXII, Ch. 20). That is, whoever had it first will have it restored to him or herself when all the dead are raised up.

Not simply dismissing the question there, Augustine then goes on. He supposes that any recycled flesh “must be looked upon as borrowed by the other person, and, like a pecuniary loan, must be restored to the lender” (Ibid.). It is "owed" to him or her, in that case, and must be given back on the last day.

If this is correct, then even someone who was eaten, rather than buried, remains the true “owner” of the particles which had once composed his or her body!

A Closer Look

A second response to Voltaire comes from the seventeenth century, just twenty years before Voltaire’s birth.  In 1674, when the English scholar Humphrey Hody considered this recycling problem himself, he had another question to ask. How much of a living body actually becomes the body of the thing that eats it? According to Hody, the percentage of a body actually capable of nourishing the body of a cannibal (or other carnivore like a lion or bear) is negligible. Most of the structure comprising a human body is either inedible, or else not very nourishing. One cannot digest bones or tendons, for example, and these would not be part of the cannibal's meal even if he (or she!) were especially hungry. And if indeed none of these parts were eaten, even if by cannibals, then there is very little chance that one could ever have a body comprised entirely of someone else's body.

The dead may rest in peace, wherever their bits might be scattered.

Hody goes on to point out that there are a lot of examples of “indirect” cannibalism:  “from the bodies," he says, "of the dead springs up grass, this when eaten by the ox, is turned into flesh; this we eat, and the flesh of the ox becomes ours” (qtd. Kaufman, 2008, p. 202). Yet even when this happens, a very tiny bit of what was once "cow" (or "ox" ... only about 2% of the flesh that is actually eaten) makes it into the body of the person who eats it. Even if we were to imagine a carnivorous cow who was feeding directly on human bodies, this would make little difference. And especially since I have never heard of a carnivorous cow to begin with, I rest assured that little of such a cow would be formerly human, thus giving me little reason to worry about “second hand cannibalism” as preventing the bodies of the dead from being raised up.

Bringing the scattered parts back together is one thing (and a tall order for the skeptical!), but at least as far as the recycling problem is concerned, it would appear that Voltaire was exaggerating. When it comes to eternal life, we have nothing to fear from cannibals.

Sources

Augustine, The City of God from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 2. Philip Schaff, ed., M. Dods, trans. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight., First edition published in 1887.

Kaufman, D. 2008 “The Resurrection of the Same Body and the Ontological Status of Organisms: What Locke Should Have (and Could Have) Told Stillingfleet” in Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy., P. Hoffman, et al., ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press.

Morley, J. 2014. The Works of Voltaire, a Contemporary Version. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide Library. First published 1901.
 
 
(Image credit: Genealogy Religion)