Personal Identity and Resurrection

How Do We Survive Our Death?

Georg Gasser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781032243320
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317081906
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What happens to us when we die? According to Christian faith, we will rise again bodily from the dead. This claim raises a series of philosophical and theological conundrums: is it rational to hope for life after death in bodily form? Will it truly be we who are raised again or will it be post-mortem duplicates of us? How can personal identity be secured? What is God's role in resurrection and everlasting life? In response to these conundrums, this book presents the first ever joint work of leading philosophers and theologians on life after death. This is an impressive demonstration of interdisciplinary cooperation between philosophy and theology. Various models are offered which depict what resurrection into an incorruptible post-mortem body might look like. Therefore this book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the doctrine of bodily resurrection - be they philosophers, theologians, scholars in religious studies, or believers interested in examining their faith.

Chapter 1
Resurrection, Personal Identity, and the Will of God

Stephen T. Davis

“And how could a thing remain, unless you willed it;
or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?…
O Lord and lover of life.”

(Wisdom 11:25)

“He himself is before all things, and in him all things consist.”

(Col. 1:17)

“…he sustains all things by his powerful word.”

(Hebrews 1:3)

Introduction

In the present paper, I will follow a line of argument that some people will doubtless consider strange. I want to think about the traditional Christian notion that God is not just the creator but the sustainer of life. I will ask whether that idea might have relevance to some of the deep and puzzling problems about personal identity that philosophers wrestle with in resurrection cases. Indeed, I will argue that the notion of God as preserving and conserving things in existence is helpful in such cases. At the end I will briefly address the question whether such a methodology—using a theological point to solve a philosophical problem—can be considered legitimate.¹

God, Creation, and Conservation

To begin, let us suppose that the God of the Christian tradition exists. So at a bare minimum, we can say that God is the unique, all-powerful, all-knowing, and loving creator of the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1–2; Nehemiah 9:6; Psalm 33:6–9; 148:1–6). We are supposing, then, that God is the creator of all contingent things (things that can either exist or not exist, things that come into existence and pass out of existence). But suppose there are also necessary beings, that is, things that cannot not exist, that exist in all possible worlds, and thus depend for their existence on nothing else. If there are any necessary beings beside God (for example, the number six) they were not created by God but are, let’s say, aspects or reflections of God’s nature (in this case, of God’s mathematical nature) rather than things that exist separately from God. So creation means that God brought all the contingent things into existence. That is what I will mean by saying that God created them.

But in Christian theology, God not only created the contingent things but sustains or upholds them in being as long as they exist (Acts 17:28; Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3). Created things do not, so to speak, automatically or naturally endure in being. Aquinas stressed that both creation and conservation are free acts on the part of God:

God created things of His own free will … Therefore that God gives existence to a creature depends on His will; nor does He preserve things in existence otherwise than by continually pouring out existence into them … so after they have been made, He is free not to continue their existence; and thus they would cease to exist.²

The point is that God is not merely an Aristotelian prime mover or the absent creator envisioned by the eighteenth-century Deists. Apart from the constant preserving activity on God’s part, the claim is that contingent beings, which have no inherent power to preserve their existence, would lapse back into nonexistence. God’s act of creation, then, was a one-time occurrence; God’s act of preservation is ongoing. In other words, contingent things continue to exist, and continue to exist as the things that they are (with all their attributes and powers) only so long as God wills that they continue to exist. Everything is what it is because God wills it to be what it is.³ The world would be radically Heraclitean apart from the divine intention that it be stable and enduring. The will of God holds the world together, makes of it a cosmos rather than a churning chaos or even nothingness. This radical claim may be put in a metaphorical way: the will of God is the glue of the world.

The Problem of Personal Identity

But how is all of this related to what philosophers call the problem of personal identity? What exactly is the problem of personal identity?

The problem is understood by some philosophers as an epistemological one, namely, how we could know that, say, a given person before us is the same person as, or is numerically identical with, someone whom we once knew? But I think the real problem is an ontological one, namely, establishing the criteria that can sensibly be used for identifying and re-identifying persons or explaining what numerical identity between some X and some Y involves or consists in. As it applies to resurrection or indeed to any other life after death scenario (for example, immortality of the soul or reincarnation), the question is this: what conditions must be satisfied for it to be true that a person who exists in the afterlife is numerically identical with someone who once lived on earth? The real question has to do with what is in fact the case rather than how we know that it is the case.

Looked at in either way, the problem of personal identity is difficult and can be frustrating. For good or ill, much of the discussion of the problem in the history of philosophy has revolved around “test cases”. These are imagined stories that often read like science fiction. John Locke began the trend when he told his story of the soul of a prince entering the body of a cobbler.⁴ Contemporary test cases often involve imagined cases of body exchange, brain fusion, brain fission, teletransportation, and the like.

Simplifying greatly, there appear to be three main approaches to this problem:

1. Some emphasize what is called the “memory criterion” (which includes not just memory but other mental states and characteristics such as personality, opinions, dispositions, and so on.). They argue that a given person X is identical to (is the same person as) a later person Y if and only if X and Y have the same mind (and thus the same memories, personality traits, and so on.). And of course we do sometimes identify people on the basis of the memory criterion alone. For example, when we receive an e-mail message, we believe that the message was indeed written by the person it purports to be from if the message seems to show that its author has the memories, personality traits, concerns, and interests that we associate with the person by whom the letter claims to have been written.

2. Others emphasize what is called the “bodily criterion”. They claim that X is identical to Y if and only if they have the same body (at different times). And of course we do frequently identify people on this basis too—I might well recognize someone walking down the hall as the chair of my department by his physiognomy, attire, voice, and so on. So the deepest issues here concern such questions as: is either criterion a necessary or sufficient condition (or both) of personal identity? And: does one criterion take precedence over the other?

3. But a third position has emerged in recent years. Some philosophers who discuss the problem have given up on the task of trying to establish necessary and sufficient conditions of personal identity. There seem to be two main reasons for this stance: first, some philosophers hold that there are certain objections that cannot be answered on any account of personal identity, for example, the so-called “duplication objection” (to which we will return below). Second, some philosophers argue that in certain imagined but logically possible test cases, personal identity seems either undecidable (there may be an answer but we cannot know it) or indeterminate (there simply is no answer) apart from arbitrary stipulation.

Derek Parfit discusses several such cases,⁵ of which I will mention two (and which I will change slightly):

1. Teletransportation: suppose that future science is able to move a person (whom we will call Jones) from, say, the earth to the moon by recording the exact state of all the cells or molecules or atoms of Jones’s body on earth, destroying Jones’s earthly body, sending the recorded information at the speed of light to the moon, and recreating Jones’s body on the moon out of new material. Of course it can be asked initially whether the Jones- like person on the moon really is Jones, but suppose we grant as much. But then suppose something on earth goes wrong; the Jones-like person on the moon appears all right, but Jones on earth exits the machine still alive but badly wounded. He lives for a few minutes and then dies. But then would we want to ask: Which person (if anybody) is Jones? Has Jones survived the teletransportation?

2. Brain transfer. Timmy and Tommy, two friends, are in a car crash. Timmy’s body is destroyed but his brain is fine. Tommy’s brain (or much of it) is destroyed but his body is fine. Surgeons are able to transplant brains. Suppose that Timmy’s brain is successfully transplanted into Tommy’s body. Is the resulting person Timmy, Tommy, or some new person? Or suppose that only 52 percent of Timmy’s brain is implanted into Tommy skull. Or 48 percent. At what point will the resulting person be Timmy or Tommy or someone else? How do we decide?⁶

The point is that there seems to be no principled way to decide such cases. And so the philosophers like Parfit who defend this third position no longer talk about personal identity in cases of survival of death. Instead of asking whether some Y who will live in the afterlife will be identical to some X who lives now, they instead ask whether Y will be X’s “closest continuer” or has “psychological continuity” with X.

But Christians cannot go this third route. They must argue that the objections to robust notions of personal identity can be answered. This is for the obvious reason that Christian afterlife claims are based on the biblical promise that we, that is, the very persons whom we are, will live again. Moreover, it is also part of the Christian picture that people will be rewarded or punished in the next life. And it hardly seems just if God will, for example, send Jones to hell because of things that some other person did on earth, even if there is psychological continuity between this other person and Jones.

Resurrection

Resurrection can be defined as the doctrine that after death, my body disintegrates, but at some future time God will miraculously raise it from the ground and reconstitute me as a person. Accordingly, there are at least five basic assumptions or, perhaps, requirements of the Christian notion of resurrection. The first is the existence of a God who has the ability and the intention to raise the dead. The second, as just noted, is that we will live again after bodily death. The person who will claim to be me in the afterlife will be me, that is, his life will be a continuation of my life. He will not be a duplicate of me or a mere “closest continuel” of me, but rather me. The third is that our lives after death will be physical lives, embodied lives. It will not be an immaterial existence in a world of pure mind or spirit.⁷ Fourth, there will be both bodily continuity and bodily change (a point to which we will return below). Fifth, our surviving death will be due to an act of God, a miracle. It is not the case that human persons or human bodies naturally, so to speak, live after death. Apart from God’s intervention, death would mean annihilation for persons.

In Christian thought, resurrection and the doctrine known as the immortality of the soul have a complicated relationship. Most theologians from the second century onward combined the two in a view that can be called temporary disembodiment. Based on mind-body dualism, the basic idea is this: when I die, my body disintegrates, but I continue to exist; for an interim time I exist in the presence of God as only a disembodied soul; then on one future day God will raise my body, reunite it with my soul, and reconstitute me as a whole and complete person. Temporary disembodiment was seen by many Christians as a way of reconciling Jesus’ statement to the good thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), with the Pauline notion that the general resurrection occurs only in the last days (1Cor 15:20–26).⁸ The idea, of course, is that the good thief would exist with Christ that very day as a disembodied soul, only to be reunited with his body much later in the eschaton.

Despite this point, resurrection and immortality are different notions. (1) Resurrection does not have to be based on dualism, although as we have just seen it often is; resurrection based on a physicalist notion of human beings is quite possible.⁹ (2) Immortality holds that survival of death is a natural property of souls, while resurrection (at least in its Christian version) entails as noted that death would mean permanent annihilation for human persons but for a miraculous intervention of God that allows life after bodily death for them.

Let me return briefly to the third condition of resurrection. The limits of acceptable views on the question of continuity and change can be said to be set by Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 15:51: “We shall all be changed.” The phrase, “shall be changed” implies that resurrected persons will change qualitatively. This reflects the traditional Christian insistence—based in part on the strange new properties of the resurrected Jesus in the Gospel stories—that resurrection is not resuscitation. No resurrected person will have precisely the same bodily properties as before.¹⁰ But since Paul says that it is “we” who will be changed, this implies that it will still be us after the transformation. The perso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Resurrection, Personal Identity, and the Will of God
• 2 Bodily Resurrection: The Falling Elevator Model Revisited
• 3 Immanent Causation and Life after Death
• 4 3.5-Dimensionalism and Survival: A Process Ontological Approach
• 5 Multiple Location and Single Location Resurrection
• 6 Bodily Resurrection: When Metaphysics Needs Phenomenology
• 7 Personhood, Bodily Self-Ascription, and Resurrection: A Kantian Approach
• 8 The Same Body Again? Thomas Aquinas on the Numerical Identity of the Resurrected Body
• 9 Persons and the Metaphysics of Resurrection
• 10 Hylomorphism and the Constitution View
• 11 Constitution, Resurrection, and Relationality
• 12 Joseph Ratzinger on Resurrection Identity
• 13 The Rationale behind Purgatory
• 14 Scientific Insights into the Problem of Personal Identity in the Context of a Christian Theology of Resurrection and Eschatology
• Bibliography
• Index