Is a Thinking Person’s Afterlife Conceivable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mortalism

According to Peter Heinegg, mortalism is "the belief that the soul – or spark of life, or animating principle, or whatever — dies with the body. . . ." (Mortalism: Readings on the Meaning of Life,   Prometheus, 2003, p. 9). Heinegg was raised Catholic and indeed was a member of the Jesuit order for seven years. In an essay prefatory to his anthology, he explains why he is a mortalist. Suppose we examine some of his statements.

That anyone should be a mortalist does not surprise me, but it does surprise me that anyone should consider it an "obvious fact" that death is the "irrevocable end" of a person. But this is what Heinegg
holds: "Everybody knows that the soul dies with the body, but nobody likes to admit it." (11) Priests and metaphysicians may prate about immortality, but deep down in the bowels of the body we all know that we are mortal to the core:

     As surely as the body knows pain or delight, the onset of orgasm or
     vomiting, it knows that it (we) will die and disappear. We have a
     foretaste of this every time we fall asleep or suffer any
     diminution of consciousness from drugs, fatigue, sickness,
     accidents, aging, and so forth. The extrapolation from the fading
     of awareness to its total extinction is (ha) dead certain. (13, emphasis added)

This is as close as Heinegg comes to an argument in his personal statement, "Why I am a Mortalist." (11-14) The argument has but one premise:

   1. We experience the increase and diminution of our embodied
   consciousness in a variety of ways.

   Therefore

   2. Consciousness cannot exist disembodied.

But surely (2) does not follow from (1). If (2) followed from (1), then it would be impossible for (1) to be true and (2) false. But it is easy to conceive of (1) being true and (2) false. It might be like   this: as long as the soul is attached to the body, its experiences are deeply affected by bodily states, but after death the soul continues  to exist and have some experiences albeit experiences of a different sort than it has while embodied.

Consider near-death experiences. A man has a massive heart attack and has a profoundly blissful experience of a white light at the end of a tunnel. Would any mortalist take such an experience as proving that there is life after bodily death? Of course not. The mortalist would point out that the man was not fully dead, and would use this fact to argue that the experience was not veridical. The mortalist  would point out that no conclusions about what happens after death can be drawn from experiences one has while still alive. By the same token, however, a consistent mortalist should realize that this same principle applies to his experiences of the waxing and waning of his   consciousness: he cannot validily infer from these experiences that consciousness cannot exist disembodied.  For his experiences of the augmentation and diminution of of conscousness are enjoyed while the person's body is alive.

What puzzles me about Heinegg is not that he is a mortalist, but that he is so cocksure about it.  One can of course extrapolate from the fading of consciousness to its total extinction, and not unreasonably; but that the extrapolation is "dead certain" is simply a leap of faith — or unfaith.

Related post: Near-Death Experiences:  Do They Prove Anything?

Jonathan Haidt Awakens from his Dogmatic Liberal Slumbers

Conservatives have broader moral sense than liberals.  All praise to Haidt for having the openmindedness and courage to change his view, but I marvel at how incurious and bigoted he was before his metanoia.  What sort of person ignores whole swaths of the intellectual terrain without any desire to explore at first hand?  That sort of narrowness among supposed intellectuals has always amazed me.  Analytic philosophers are a particularly bigoted bunch.  Not all, of course, but far too many.  Some even  brag of their ignorance.  "I have never read Hegel and I have no intention  of reading him." 

Then get out of here you contemptible bigot!

Before stumbling across the Muller anthology, the popular former University of Virginia psychology professor thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,” he says — an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.

So without any first-hand acquaintance with conservative thought, Haidt bought into an ugly misrepresentation.  But, as I said, he has come around and ought to be praised for that.

At Yale, Mr. Haidt majored in philosophy to find some answers. Discovering that academic philosophy had abandoned the big questions of human nature, morality, and the good life, Mr. Haidt turned to psychology — and found his calling.

It is simply false to say that academic philosophy has abandoned the Big Questions.  That was true in the '30s, '40s, and '50s for the logical positivists and some of their successors and fellow travellers, but by the time Haidt went to college in the '80s the Big Questions were securely back in the saddle even in the mainstream.  To give but one example, consider Thomas Nagel 1979 collection of essays entitled Mortal Questions.

 

The Obama Administration’s Contempt for the Rule of Law

We are living in very dangerous times.  You need to inform yourself.

Krauthammer: Obama Intent on Not Enforcing Immigration Law

Charles Krauthammer, Obama's Naked Lawlessness

Thomas Lifson, Rule of Law Now an Election Issue

Diana West, Why Arizona Matters.  Excerpt:

I find it difficult to regard the Supreme Court decision on Arizona immigration law as just another controversial or disappointing highest court decision. There is something almost post-apocalyptic  and certainly pre-totalitarian when, to invoke Justice Scalia's dissent, the Court has ruled that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing it. Yes, as Scalia put it, it "boggles the mind." It also conjures up truly alarming comparisons with "justice" as meted out by kangaroo courts, show trials and other horrors of totalitarian dictatorships.

Did we defeat the Soviet empire so that we could become a totalitarian state like it?

Tobacco Insanity in Maricopa County and the Need for Smoke-Ins

SmokeinPeter and Mike teach in the Maricopa County Community College system.  One teaches at Scottsdale CC, the other at Glendale CC.  Over Sunday breakfast they reported that, starting 1 July (if I got the story straight), no smoking of tobacco products will be allowed anywhere on any CC campus in Maricopa County, Arizona.  And that includes parking lots and closed cars in parking lots.

Now I would like to believe that our liberal brethren possess a modicum of rationality.  But with every passing day I am further disembarrassed of this conceit of mine. The evidence is mounting that liberals really are as stupid and lacking in common sense as many on the Right say they are. 

What does common sense suggest in a case like this?  Well, that no smoking be allowed in classrooms, libraries, laboratories, restrooms, administrative offices, hallways, etc., and perhaps not even in individual faculty offices during consulation hours or if the smoke will make its way into occuppied public passageways.

This is a common sense position easily buttressed with various aesthetic, safety, and health-related arguments.  The underlying principle is that we ought to be considerate of our fellow mortals and their physical and psychological well-being.  It is debatable just how harmful are the effects of sidestream smoke.  What is not debatable is that many are offended by it.  So out of consideration for them, it is reasonable to ban smoking in the places I listed above.  But to ban it everywhere on campus is extreme and irrational.  For no one but Tom is affercted by Tom's smoking in his car and while striding across the wind-blown campus.

You say you caught a whiff of his cigaratte as he passed by?  Well, he heard you use the 'F' word while blasting some rap 'music' from your boom box.  If Tom is involved in air pollution, then you are involved in cultural and noise pollution.  You tolerate him and he'll tolerate you.

You say you smell the residual ciggy smoke on Peter's vest?  That's too bad.  He has to put up with your overpowering perfume/cologne or look at your tackle-box face and tattoo-defaced skin.  Or maybe you are a dumb no-nothing punk wearing a T-shirt depicting Che Guevara and you think that's cool.  We who are not dumb no-nothing punks have to put up with that affront to our sensibilities.

But there really is little point in being reasonable with people as unreasonable as liberty-bashing tobacco-wackos.  So I think Peter and Mike ought to think about organizing a smoke-in.  In the 'sixties we had love-ins and sit-ins, and they proved efficacious. Why not smoke-ins to protest blatantly extreme and irrational policies?

There must be plenty of faculty and staff and students on these campuses — and maybe even a few not-yet-brain-dead liberals — who would participate.  Hell, I'll even drive all the way from my hideout in the Superstitions to take part. We'll gather in some well-ventilated place way out in the open to manifest our solidarity, enjoy the noble weed, and reason – if such a thing is possible — with the Pee-Cee boneheads who oppose us.

By the way, that is a joint old Ben Franklin is smoking in the graphic.  In this post I take no position on the marijuana question.

Companion post:  Is Smoking Irrational? Other such posts are collected in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. 

Arizona Can’t Do It; Washington Won’t

Debra Saunders' article begins:

President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.

Please note the difference between what the president is quoted as saying and what Saunders correctly reports the S.B. 1070 provision as requiring.  The law requires "that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration." President Obama of course knows this.  So Obama lied in his statement when he said that "the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

Obama's egregious misrepresentation has been repeated time and again by leftists over the last two years.  See my 1 June 2010 post, The Misrepresentations of Arizona S. B. 1070 Continue.  Other of my 1070 posts are to be found in the Arizona category.

Why are leftists so mendacious?  Because in their scheme the glorious end justifies the scurrilous means.

Don't forget to read the rest of Saunders' article.

Is Political Science Science?

The answer depends on what counts as science.  The so-called 'hard' sciences set the standard.  This useful article lists the following five characteristics of science in the strict and eminent sense:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

These characteristics set the bar for strict science very high.  For example, is climate science science according to these criteria?  I'll leave you to ponder that question.  There are branches of physics that cannot satisfy all five criteria.  But most of physics and chemistry meets the standard.

Is political science science according to these criteria?  Obviously not. Political Scientists are Lousy Forecasters.

Am I suggesting that the only real knowledge is rigorously scientific knowledge?  Of course not.  Consider the knowledge we find in the first article to which I linked.  There is no doubt in my mind that each of the five criteria the author mentions is a criterion of science in the strictest sense.  (I leave open the question whether there are other criteria).  Now how do we know that?  By performing repeatable experiments in highly controlled conditions?  No.  By making testable predictions? No. 

We know that (1)-(5) are criteria of genuine science by reflecting on  scientific practice and isolating its characteristics.  When we do that we engage in the philosophy of science.  Since some of the philosophy of science gives us genuine knowledge about natural science, knowledge that it not itself scientific knowledge, it cannot be the case that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.

That all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge is the thesis of (strong) scientism.  Therefore, (strong) scientism is false.

Related post:  What is Scientism? 

What is Scientism?

Alfred Centauri refers us to Scientism: Why Science is a Bad Philosopher, an article worth reading.  The definitions of 'scientism' the author approvingly quotes suggest that he would accept my characterization:

Scientism is a philosophical thesis that belongs to the sub-discipline of epistemology. It is not a thesis in science, but a thesis about science.  The thesis in its strongest form is that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, the knowledge generated by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, biology and their offshoots. The thesis in a weaker form allows some cognitive value to the social sciences, the humanities, and other subjects, but insists that scientific knowledge is vastly superior and authoritative and is as it were the 'gold standard' when it comes to knowledge. On either strong or weak scientism, there is no room for first philosophy, according to which philosophy is an autonomous discipline, independent of natural science, and authoritative in respect to it. So on scientism, natural science sets the standard in matters epistemic, and philosophy’s role is at best ancillary.  Not a handmaiden to theology in this day and age; a handmaiden to science.

The author appreciates that scientism enjoys no scientific support.  He appreciates that it is not a scientific thesis that can be verified or falsified by scientific procedures.  But he fails to give a sufficiently powerful argument against it. 

One problem with strong scientism is that it is self-vitiating, as the following argument demonstrates:

a. The philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge.
Therefore
b. If all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, then the philosophical thesis of strong scientism is not an item of genuine knowledge.

Hence one cannot claim to know that strong scientism is true if it is true.  For if it is true, then the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.  But strong scientism is not an item of scientific knowledge.  So scientism, if true, is not knowable as true by the only methods of knowledge there are.  How then could the proponent of strong scientism render rational his acceptance  of strong scientism?  Apparently, he can't, in which case his commitment to it is a matter of irrational ideology.

After all, he cannot appeal to rational insight as a source of knowledge.  For that is precisely ruled out as a source of knowledge by scientism.

Scientism falls short of the very standard it enshrines.  It is at most an optional philosophical belief unsupported by science. It also has unpalatable consequences which for many of us have the force of counterexamples.  So here are some positive considerations against it.

If scientism is true, then none of the following can count as items of knowledge: That torturing children for fun is morally wrong; that setting afire  a sleeping bum is morally worse than picking his pockets; that raping a woman is morally worse than merely threatening to rape her; that verbally threatening to commit rape is morally worse than entertaining (with pleasure) the thought of committing rape; that 'ought' implies 'can'; that moral goodness is a higher value than physical strength; that might does not make right; that the punishment must fit the crime; that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true; that what is past was once present; that if A remembers B's experience, then A = B; and so on. 

In sum: if there are any purely rational insights into aesthetic, moral, logical, or metaphysical states of affairs, then scientism is false.  For the knowledge I get when I see (with the eye of the mind) that the punishment must fit the crime or that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true is not an item of scientific knowledge.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rodney King and Henry Hill

Tonight I permit myself a bit of Schadenfreude (or is it righteous satisfaction?) at the passing of the 'motorist' Rodney King and the 'businessman' Henry Hill.  Calling King a 'motorist' as so many knee-jerk liberal journalists did from 1991 on is like calling the mafioso Hill a 'business man.'  In 'honor' of these two sorry specimens of (in)humanity, I propose the following for your listening pleasure.

Rodney 'Can We All Just Get Along?' King

Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law and the Law Won

Andrew Sisters, Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar

Beatles, I'm a Loser

Roger Miller, Dang Me

Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln

Roger Miller, King of the Road

Jackie DeShannon, What the World Needs Now

Henry Hill

Sam Cooke, Fool's Paradise.  What a great song!  Unfortunately Cooke did not take his own advice, and died young in consequence.

Hank Williams, Lost Highway

Byrds, Life in Prison

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Derek and the Dominoes, Layla (Piano Exit)

Atheist Blogger Swims the Tiber

Formerly atheist blogger Leah Libresco reports that she has converted to Catholicism.

That's quite a shift.  Typically,  the terminus a quo of Tiber swimmers is either generic theism or mere Christianity (in C. S. Lewis' sense) or some Protestant sect.  Seismic is the shift from out-and-out God denial to acceptance of an extremely specific conception of God.

How specific? 

The God of Catholicism is of course a Trinity: one God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. (It was 'Holy Ghost' still in the 'fifties; the arguably ruinous Vatican II reforms of the 'sixties replaced 'Ghost' with 'Spirit.')  The Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, or Logos (Word), entered human history at a particular time in a particular place in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  This is the doctrine of the Incarnation.  God, or rather God the Son, became man.  "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  To do so, Jesus had to be born of a woman in that humble manner common to all of us, inter faeces et urinam, and yet without an earthly father.  Thus arises the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. But since the God-Man  is perfectly sinless, he canot be born of a woman bearing the taint of Original Sin.  Hence the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception:  Mary, the mother of God, was born without Original Sin.  So far, five dogmas that go beyond generic Western monotheism: Trinity, Incarnation, Virgin Birth, Original Sin, Immaculate Conception.  See Trinity and Incarnation  and Original Sin categories for some details.

I have gone only a about a third of the way into the specificity of the Catholic God-conception, but far enough for one to see how dogmatically rich it is.

Now the more dogmatically rich a religion, the more specific its claims, the harder it will be to accept.  To be an intellectually honest Roman Catholic, for example, one must accept not only the above dogmas but a number of others besides.  These extremely specific dogmas are stumbling blocks to many thinking people.  (Of course, the same problem arises with other doctrinally rich belief systems such as Communism.)

For some of us who were raised in the Roman church, the dogmas and their presuppositions beg give rise to questions that we simply must get clear about.  (We cannot merely go along to get along, or participate in rites and rituals the theological foundations of which are murky.  Example: to take communion when Transubstantiation beggars understanding.)  And so some of us become philosophers.  But any movement towards Athens is a movement away from Jerusalem . . . .

But it's Saturday night, time to punch the clock, time for my once-a-week ration of tequila, and time for Saturday Night at the Oldies.  Tomorrow's another day.