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Immortality Defended
Might we be parts of a divine mind? Could anything like an afterlife make sense? Starting with a Platonic answer to why the world exists, Immortality Defended suggests we could well be immortal in all of three separate ways.
- GenresPhilosophy
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
5 people are currently reading
70 people want to read
About the author
John A. Leslie
9 books16 followersJohn Andrew Leslie (born August 2, 1940) is a Canadian philosopher. He was educated at Wadham College, Oxford, earning his B.A. in English Literature in 1962 and his M.Litt. in Classics in 1968. He is currently Professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.
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May 21, 2019
Creating by Thinking
This book considers a pantheistic universe, in the sense that everything exists within a divine mind. This seems very bizarre but, as this author shows, remarkable foundations for it may be found in traditional religion and science.
The author points out that things are analyzed by mirroring them in thought and constructing them mentally. To understand this, try to imagine a television and then watch an imagined movie upon it. Or, imagine a radio playing beautiful music. If you’re struggling, it’ll be easier to simply consider a blank painter’s canvas and then imagine art upon it. Once you do this, it is impossible for you to say that imagined art has not been seen because you’ve witnessed it for yourself. Indeed, everything is seen in the mind’s eye, in the same way that dreams are seen.
If mental states can’t contain structures, then how could such mental feats be possible? How is it that through imagination we can cause mental worlds to spring into being by mere decrees or acts of will? And just how different are such mental structures from physical structures? Certainly, psychotic people or people on hallucinogenic drugs see things that are very physical to them. Are these merely cerebral holograms or something more substantive?
We observe physical things deteriorating over time, rusting or rotting, melting away as does a faint memory. Like thoughts, physical things can cease to endure. This author suggests that all of our surroundings consist of intricately structured patterns of divine thinking. This is not disputed by the Genesis account of creation, as it conveys that God simply “spoke” the world into existence. Our omnipotent and omnipresent characterizations of God do not preclude God from thinking of everything thinkable.
Creating Creators That Think
Assume for a moment that God is a cosmic mind that thinks our universe into existence. If this is true, then it must be possible for God to think of things, like persons, that themselves have thoughts. In fact, even we do this, when we interact with others in dream states.
To think of yourself as a thought in the mind of a divine being is mind boggling (pun intended). But what similarities are there between a thinking human and a passing thought? How different is an aging human, becoming more and more decrepit with the passage of years, from a passing thought, first conceived, then achieving its apex and then slowly deteriorating into a memory that is ultimately forgotten, or perhaps remembered indefinitely?
Perhaps the only thing that makes a memory endure indefinitely is a memory that we love, particularly when we fall madly in love with someone. Even if we can’t be with the one we love, if we really love them, we keep their memory alive, thinking of them often and replaying our experiences with them in our minds eye. We preserve the experiences of those we love because they are worthy of retention and fill us with emotion.
To think of yourself as a thought in a divine mind is bizarre, but to wonder how you might optimize your existence as a “thought” is even more so. Are you a “thought” worthy enough and good enough for retaining in divine memory or in the memories of others? Or are you something best forgotten?
The Necessity For Creative Goodness
One can only entertain a good thought when they are free to do so. If we lived in a world of constant divine interference, with God immediately punishing evil deeds with lightening strokes, our thoughts would not be creative, but merely instinctual responses. Under such overwhelming domination, we’d not be thinking but reacting; we’d never be able to birth goodness creatively of our own accord. Conversely, within an environment of freewill, some folks become virtuous agents, contributing to the grandeur of the universe by expanding its qualities of goodness.
There is an on-going benefit that occurs from this sort of creative ethical growth because it can bring forth its own fulfillment. Doesn’t the contemplation of morality keep the cosmos from undiluted misery? Certainly, if everyone persisted continually in substance abuse, murder, war and the like, the human species would quickly perish. Is it not then the prevalence of basic goodness that sustains us?
And is it not the persistence of evil that restrains us? Greater awareness comes only with responsible choices. Just as a child may one day learn to cross the street by itself, so we can only receive the extent of freedom that we can handle. Sudden repentances can instigate great earthly transformations.
Creation As The Process of Transitioning Matter Into Goodness
The concept of a mutable or growing God, moving forward in the progressive embodiment of Goodness would involve the purposeful annihilation of evil thoughts or actions. This might be envisioned as an on-going process for the refinement of goodness out of matter.
The unrelenting search of man for Goodness is evident in the myriad diversification of religious cultures that have manifested throughout history, which can clearly be seen to evolve and progress. This fervent seeking by mere creatures of the dust is itself evidence for God tangibly manifesting in the human species. Even though we stumble toward God incoherently, we nevertheless know God is there and we struggle toward God, grasping and reaching, just as we do for water, food, warmth or other essentials of life.
Plato told us, in his Republic, that “The Good” is what gives existence to things. When you think of the universe as comprised of divine thought you have to ask yourself why such a thinker would ever contemplate anything except the total of all that is worth contemplating. But what if one considers a population of minds, all influencing one another intricately, like transistors in a computer. Could it be that, inside an all-knowing divine mind, there are countless lesser minds, like yours or mine, each knowing very little, but as a whole knowing all? Could there be lesser ephemeral minds, living briefly and constantly replaced, in the same manner as human brain cells? The cells of our bodies are constantly being replaced by new ones. Or, more broadly, how can any physical entity be more real than imagined if it rusts, dies or deteriorates after only a short while? Some scientists contend the existence of rudimentary mind-like qualities even at the level of particle physics.
Plato insisted that our senses deceive us rather badly, feeding us with illusions; and yet, we wield creative power. It is as if we are partially enmeshed within a quagmire of materialism from which we must transition ourselves. Our best creative efforts facilitate a Goodness that is emerging into tangible existence. The divine mind becomes tangible through our bodies, but our bodies struggle to fully extricate from materialistic matter and to fully embody and execute divine thinking. We are slowly fashioned from clay and dust into something sublime. This sense of God as divine mind, manifesting tangibly through the creation, is not maligned with the Christian concept of God becoming man in Christ and so bearing forth the essence of righteousness in human form.
Conclusion
The Divine manifests as creative energy and we struggle persistently to hone our senses to better see the perfect form that Plato envisioned. We create telescopes, microscopes, spectrometers, wave synthesizers, radio receivers, amplifiers, night vision goggles, hallucinogenic drugs and all sorts of contrivances to enhance sensory experience. But we get nowhere when we rely only upon material from the streams of our senses. We ultimately learn that we discover God within ourselves and we understand that if God can contemplate lives that begin inside a physical universe, He can certainly envision lives that can stretch outside of it. We have the opportunity to progress from dust to human to spirit, spurred along by contemplation. In the process, our thinking affects the material world well or badly.
What do you dwell upon? Are you bringing forth the focus of your blessings or dwelling constantly upon the one spot where the shoe pinches? If your thoughts are composing an inner creation, what does that world look like? In contemplation, we can go where we please. Heaven is not a cage but instead immense freedom. Heaven is for those who wish to think upon blissfulness and hell for those who insist on contriving horror.
It is not absurd to think that our thought structures continue beyond our physical bodies in dimensions we can’t yet see. At death, a persons organized energy may simply bubble out into a new dimension. God is everything: energy modeling itself in infinite manifestations, the apex of which is Love.
-End-
This book considers a pantheistic universe, in the sense that everything exists within a divine mind. This seems very bizarre but, as this author shows, remarkable foundations for it may be found in traditional religion and science.
The author points out that things are analyzed by mirroring them in thought and constructing them mentally. To understand this, try to imagine a television and then watch an imagined movie upon it. Or, imagine a radio playing beautiful music. If you’re struggling, it’ll be easier to simply consider a blank painter’s canvas and then imagine art upon it. Once you do this, it is impossible for you to say that imagined art has not been seen because you’ve witnessed it for yourself. Indeed, everything is seen in the mind’s eye, in the same way that dreams are seen.
If mental states can’t contain structures, then how could such mental feats be possible? How is it that through imagination we can cause mental worlds to spring into being by mere decrees or acts of will? And just how different are such mental structures from physical structures? Certainly, psychotic people or people on hallucinogenic drugs see things that are very physical to them. Are these merely cerebral holograms or something more substantive?
We observe physical things deteriorating over time, rusting or rotting, melting away as does a faint memory. Like thoughts, physical things can cease to endure. This author suggests that all of our surroundings consist of intricately structured patterns of divine thinking. This is not disputed by the Genesis account of creation, as it conveys that God simply “spoke” the world into existence. Our omnipotent and omnipresent characterizations of God do not preclude God from thinking of everything thinkable.
Creating Creators That Think
Assume for a moment that God is a cosmic mind that thinks our universe into existence. If this is true, then it must be possible for God to think of things, like persons, that themselves have thoughts. In fact, even we do this, when we interact with others in dream states.
To think of yourself as a thought in the mind of a divine being is mind boggling (pun intended). But what similarities are there between a thinking human and a passing thought? How different is an aging human, becoming more and more decrepit with the passage of years, from a passing thought, first conceived, then achieving its apex and then slowly deteriorating into a memory that is ultimately forgotten, or perhaps remembered indefinitely?
Perhaps the only thing that makes a memory endure indefinitely is a memory that we love, particularly when we fall madly in love with someone. Even if we can’t be with the one we love, if we really love them, we keep their memory alive, thinking of them often and replaying our experiences with them in our minds eye. We preserve the experiences of those we love because they are worthy of retention and fill us with emotion.
To think of yourself as a thought in a divine mind is bizarre, but to wonder how you might optimize your existence as a “thought” is even more so. Are you a “thought” worthy enough and good enough for retaining in divine memory or in the memories of others? Or are you something best forgotten?
The Necessity For Creative Goodness
One can only entertain a good thought when they are free to do so. If we lived in a world of constant divine interference, with God immediately punishing evil deeds with lightening strokes, our thoughts would not be creative, but merely instinctual responses. Under such overwhelming domination, we’d not be thinking but reacting; we’d never be able to birth goodness creatively of our own accord. Conversely, within an environment of freewill, some folks become virtuous agents, contributing to the grandeur of the universe by expanding its qualities of goodness.
There is an on-going benefit that occurs from this sort of creative ethical growth because it can bring forth its own fulfillment. Doesn’t the contemplation of morality keep the cosmos from undiluted misery? Certainly, if everyone persisted continually in substance abuse, murder, war and the like, the human species would quickly perish. Is it not then the prevalence of basic goodness that sustains us?
And is it not the persistence of evil that restrains us? Greater awareness comes only with responsible choices. Just as a child may one day learn to cross the street by itself, so we can only receive the extent of freedom that we can handle. Sudden repentances can instigate great earthly transformations.
Creation As The Process of Transitioning Matter Into Goodness
The concept of a mutable or growing God, moving forward in the progressive embodiment of Goodness would involve the purposeful annihilation of evil thoughts or actions. This might be envisioned as an on-going process for the refinement of goodness out of matter.
The unrelenting search of man for Goodness is evident in the myriad diversification of religious cultures that have manifested throughout history, which can clearly be seen to evolve and progress. This fervent seeking by mere creatures of the dust is itself evidence for God tangibly manifesting in the human species. Even though we stumble toward God incoherently, we nevertheless know God is there and we struggle toward God, grasping and reaching, just as we do for water, food, warmth or other essentials of life.
Plato told us, in his Republic, that “The Good” is what gives existence to things. When you think of the universe as comprised of divine thought you have to ask yourself why such a thinker would ever contemplate anything except the total of all that is worth contemplating. But what if one considers a population of minds, all influencing one another intricately, like transistors in a computer. Could it be that, inside an all-knowing divine mind, there are countless lesser minds, like yours or mine, each knowing very little, but as a whole knowing all? Could there be lesser ephemeral minds, living briefly and constantly replaced, in the same manner as human brain cells? The cells of our bodies are constantly being replaced by new ones. Or, more broadly, how can any physical entity be more real than imagined if it rusts, dies or deteriorates after only a short while? Some scientists contend the existence of rudimentary mind-like qualities even at the level of particle physics.
Plato insisted that our senses deceive us rather badly, feeding us with illusions; and yet, we wield creative power. It is as if we are partially enmeshed within a quagmire of materialism from which we must transition ourselves. Our best creative efforts facilitate a Goodness that is emerging into tangible existence. The divine mind becomes tangible through our bodies, but our bodies struggle to fully extricate from materialistic matter and to fully embody and execute divine thinking. We are slowly fashioned from clay and dust into something sublime. This sense of God as divine mind, manifesting tangibly through the creation, is not maligned with the Christian concept of God becoming man in Christ and so bearing forth the essence of righteousness in human form.
Conclusion
The Divine manifests as creative energy and we struggle persistently to hone our senses to better see the perfect form that Plato envisioned. We create telescopes, microscopes, spectrometers, wave synthesizers, radio receivers, amplifiers, night vision goggles, hallucinogenic drugs and all sorts of contrivances to enhance sensory experience. But we get nowhere when we rely only upon material from the streams of our senses. We ultimately learn that we discover God within ourselves and we understand that if God can contemplate lives that begin inside a physical universe, He can certainly envision lives that can stretch outside of it. We have the opportunity to progress from dust to human to spirit, spurred along by contemplation. In the process, our thinking affects the material world well or badly.
What do you dwell upon? Are you bringing forth the focus of your blessings or dwelling constantly upon the one spot where the shoe pinches? If your thoughts are composing an inner creation, what does that world look like? In contemplation, we can go where we please. Heaven is not a cage but instead immense freedom. Heaven is for those who wish to think upon blissfulness and hell for those who insist on contriving horror.
It is not absurd to think that our thought structures continue beyond our physical bodies in dimensions we can’t yet see. At death, a persons organized energy may simply bubble out into a new dimension. God is everything: energy modeling itself in infinite manifestations, the apex of which is Love.
-End-
June 18, 2024
A PERSPECTIVE ON THREE DIFFERENT TYPES OF IMMORTALITY
John Andrew Leslie (born 1940) is a Canadian philosopher, who is currently Professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.
He wrote in the Preface to this 2007 book, “A book about immortality? A book about GOD, therefore? Of the three varieties of immortality discussed here, only one has a firm link to any idea of God, and it alone has a clear right to be named ‘immortality.’ It is the immortality of an afterlife, of thoughts after bodies have died. Of the other two, the ‘Einsteinian’ variety---the immortality of your existing ‘back there along the fourth dimension’ when people called you dead---is accepted by most of today’s physicists, yet the majority of them … would hesitate about using the word ‘immortal.’ And the remaining variety---being part of a unified cosmic reality that, living the lives of conscious beings, will live new ones after yours has ended---would be classed by many folk as ‘not immortality at all.’”
In the introductory chapter on Pantheism, he asks, “If our universe in all its intricacy is intricate divine thinking, why are our lives to unsatisfactory? Why is God not thinking about something much better? A possible answer is that God truly is thinking about something much better. God is thinking about that ALSO. In addition to thinking of all the structure of our universe, God thinks of the structures of immensely many other universes… The divine mind contemplates everything worth contemplating. Our universe is among the things worth contemplating, but maybe it is far from the best of those things. The divine thoughts might well extend to many items NOT organized into universes… God could perhaps contemplate lives that began inside physical universes but stretched onwards OUTSIDE them, which is what many people have in mind when they talk of ‘surviving the deaths of their bodies.’” (Pg. 7)
Of Plato’s vision, he observes, “Plato’s basic point is sufficiently plain. No matter whether its temporal extent is finite or infinite, the world at every moment owes its reality to The Good. If we are to talk of God at all, then God can be identified as a creative factor, force, or principle. God, we could say, is the Platonic truth that the ethical requiredness of the world is itself responsible for the world’s existence. Or God is the world’s creative ethical requiredness, or perhaps a creatively powerful ethical requirement for the world to exist. These are simply alternative ways of phrasing the same point. The word ‘God’ may be defined slightly differently in each case, but the imagined situation is always the same.” (Pg. 19)
He suggests, “Given an ethical need for a cosmos of such and such a kind, nothing would ‘make’ this need able to bring about its own fulfillment, but neither would anything ‘make’ it UNABLE to bring about its own fulfillment.’ (Pg. 33)
He summarizes, “Where is the relevance of all this to pantheism? Well, suppose we agree that groups of photons or electrons show signs of existential unification: the kind of unification, remember, that many philosophers view as characterizing minds and nothing else. Might this not do a little towards persuading us that our universe exists inside a divine mind? Again, suppose we indeed find such unification in our conscious states. Couldn’t this nudge us a bit nearer to the same conclusion?” (Pg. 54)
Discussing the ‘Einsteinian’ view, he explains, “One way of viewing the mater could be this. Extending along a time dimension of a reality that exists four-dimensionally, humans may not be immortal in the sense that their earthly careers stretch indefinitely far beyond their births; however the four-dimensional reality, humans included, exists forever in time of another sort. The passage of this other kind of time, time in a somewhat different sense of the word ‘time,’ is not an affair of passing seconds, days, centuries. instead it consists in the fact that alterations COULD IN PRINCIPLE be occurring although they never in fact occur… Lack of all actual changes would not mean that … they couldn’t conceivably be occurring. Well, the time in which they could conceivably be occurring is a time in which you and I can exist eternally, of our world is a four-dimensional whole that never in fact alters.” (Pg. 60-61)
He continues, “Could we picture the structures of entire human bodies as continuing onwards in dimensions beyond those of the physical world, whereas in that world the bodies burned or rotted?... In an afterlife I’d not expect to fine my thoughts linked to anything like a human body. Nonetheless I might recognize the thoughts as MINE because, for one thing, they continued (at least at first) along the lines I had grown used to. I’d hope, as well, to recognize dead friends by becoming aware of their thoughts, finding that they shared various of my memories. My personal identity, I suspect, depends as little on my ever really having had a body as it does on my toenails.” (Pg. 62-63)
He states, “the persistence of something existentially unified that had carried one’s mental life is what many have chosen to mean by ‘surviving bodily death.’ The immaterial soul was pictured as just such a unified entity, and doubt was often thrown on any need for it to be free of abrupt personality changes… Clearly, the continued presence of intelligent life for many further centuries wouldn’t be sufficient, not even in an existentially unified cosmos, for ‘survival of one’s personality’ through all those centuries; but nonetheless, mightn’t it provide for something worth the name of ‘personal survival’? Personal identity strikes me as a concept nebulous enough to allow us to answer Yes just as much as No.” (Pg. 67)
He wonders, “Suppose… that after our bodies had died we really would be immortal in a sense, drawing benefits of a sort, through the continuance of something existentially unified (a divine mind, or at least an existentially unified cosmos) which carries our life-patterns at the present instant. Why hope for anything more than this? Would it not be enough by itself? The right reaction, presumably, is that an afterlife and the continuance of the existentially unified something would be fully compatible, and that there would be reason enough to wish for both of them together… The three possible forms of immortality are entirely distinct, so that any of them might be had while the other two were not. However, it looks as if we could well have all three conjointly.” (Pg. 68)
He asserts, “I recommend taking a Platonic route… Why are the world’s patterns orderly? Why, more particularly, do they have orderliness such as makes us speak of ‘laws of cause and effect’? It is because their orderliness is worth contemplating for a divine mind inside which they have their being. The divine mind itself exists because this is ethically required.” (Pg. 75)
He points out, “Such questions … have aroused more interest recently, thanks to what is described as cosmic ‘fine-tuning.’ Slight changes to basic cosmic parameters would have made life’s evolution impossible… In ‘Universes’ I looked at … such claims… What can look impressive, though, is that many of the claims appear defensible. It can seem more than a little odd to reject them one and all, perhaps adding that everything was firmly dictated by yet-to-be-discovered principles. (Imagine being invited to watch a computer as it calculates… the successive digits of pi… you suddenly see a long string of ones, twos, and zeros. Translated into Morse-code dots, dashes, and spaces, these spell out GOD WANTED INTELLIGENT LIFE TO EVOLVE. Which is more reasonable’(i) telling yourself that those ones, twos, and zeroes were… in no way fine-tunable, or (ii) suspecting the existence of a computer-programming prankster?” (Pg. 76-77)
He concludes, “It does seem that belief in God could find support in (a) the fact that ours is a life-permitting universe, (b) the fact that it has causal orderliness, and (c) the sheer truth that it is a case of there being ‘something rather than nothing’… Now, if things really could be explained on Platonic and Spinozistic lines then this might well mean… that intelligent living beings were immortal in three distinct ways. When God is not viewed as a Being whose own existence and power are utterly reasonless, even an afterlife can be plausible.” (Pg. 83-84)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying the question of life after death.
John Andrew Leslie (born 1940) is a Canadian philosopher, who is currently Professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada.
He wrote in the Preface to this 2007 book, “A book about immortality? A book about GOD, therefore? Of the three varieties of immortality discussed here, only one has a firm link to any idea of God, and it alone has a clear right to be named ‘immortality.’ It is the immortality of an afterlife, of thoughts after bodies have died. Of the other two, the ‘Einsteinian’ variety---the immortality of your existing ‘back there along the fourth dimension’ when people called you dead---is accepted by most of today’s physicists, yet the majority of them … would hesitate about using the word ‘immortal.’ And the remaining variety---being part of a unified cosmic reality that, living the lives of conscious beings, will live new ones after yours has ended---would be classed by many folk as ‘not immortality at all.’”
In the introductory chapter on Pantheism, he asks, “If our universe in all its intricacy is intricate divine thinking, why are our lives to unsatisfactory? Why is God not thinking about something much better? A possible answer is that God truly is thinking about something much better. God is thinking about that ALSO. In addition to thinking of all the structure of our universe, God thinks of the structures of immensely many other universes… The divine mind contemplates everything worth contemplating. Our universe is among the things worth contemplating, but maybe it is far from the best of those things. The divine thoughts might well extend to many items NOT organized into universes… God could perhaps contemplate lives that began inside physical universes but stretched onwards OUTSIDE them, which is what many people have in mind when they talk of ‘surviving the deaths of their bodies.’” (Pg. 7)
Of Plato’s vision, he observes, “Plato’s basic point is sufficiently plain. No matter whether its temporal extent is finite or infinite, the world at every moment owes its reality to The Good. If we are to talk of God at all, then God can be identified as a creative factor, force, or principle. God, we could say, is the Platonic truth that the ethical requiredness of the world is itself responsible for the world’s existence. Or God is the world’s creative ethical requiredness, or perhaps a creatively powerful ethical requirement for the world to exist. These are simply alternative ways of phrasing the same point. The word ‘God’ may be defined slightly differently in each case, but the imagined situation is always the same.” (Pg. 19)
He suggests, “Given an ethical need for a cosmos of such and such a kind, nothing would ‘make’ this need able to bring about its own fulfillment, but neither would anything ‘make’ it UNABLE to bring about its own fulfillment.’ (Pg. 33)
He summarizes, “Where is the relevance of all this to pantheism? Well, suppose we agree that groups of photons or electrons show signs of existential unification: the kind of unification, remember, that many philosophers view as characterizing minds and nothing else. Might this not do a little towards persuading us that our universe exists inside a divine mind? Again, suppose we indeed find such unification in our conscious states. Couldn’t this nudge us a bit nearer to the same conclusion?” (Pg. 54)
Discussing the ‘Einsteinian’ view, he explains, “One way of viewing the mater could be this. Extending along a time dimension of a reality that exists four-dimensionally, humans may not be immortal in the sense that their earthly careers stretch indefinitely far beyond their births; however the four-dimensional reality, humans included, exists forever in time of another sort. The passage of this other kind of time, time in a somewhat different sense of the word ‘time,’ is not an affair of passing seconds, days, centuries. instead it consists in the fact that alterations COULD IN PRINCIPLE be occurring although they never in fact occur… Lack of all actual changes would not mean that … they couldn’t conceivably be occurring. Well, the time in which they could conceivably be occurring is a time in which you and I can exist eternally, of our world is a four-dimensional whole that never in fact alters.” (Pg. 60-61)
He continues, “Could we picture the structures of entire human bodies as continuing onwards in dimensions beyond those of the physical world, whereas in that world the bodies burned or rotted?... In an afterlife I’d not expect to fine my thoughts linked to anything like a human body. Nonetheless I might recognize the thoughts as MINE because, for one thing, they continued (at least at first) along the lines I had grown used to. I’d hope, as well, to recognize dead friends by becoming aware of their thoughts, finding that they shared various of my memories. My personal identity, I suspect, depends as little on my ever really having had a body as it does on my toenails.” (Pg. 62-63)
He states, “the persistence of something existentially unified that had carried one’s mental life is what many have chosen to mean by ‘surviving bodily death.’ The immaterial soul was pictured as just such a unified entity, and doubt was often thrown on any need for it to be free of abrupt personality changes… Clearly, the continued presence of intelligent life for many further centuries wouldn’t be sufficient, not even in an existentially unified cosmos, for ‘survival of one’s personality’ through all those centuries; but nonetheless, mightn’t it provide for something worth the name of ‘personal survival’? Personal identity strikes me as a concept nebulous enough to allow us to answer Yes just as much as No.” (Pg. 67)
He wonders, “Suppose… that after our bodies had died we really would be immortal in a sense, drawing benefits of a sort, through the continuance of something existentially unified (a divine mind, or at least an existentially unified cosmos) which carries our life-patterns at the present instant. Why hope for anything more than this? Would it not be enough by itself? The right reaction, presumably, is that an afterlife and the continuance of the existentially unified something would be fully compatible, and that there would be reason enough to wish for both of them together… The three possible forms of immortality are entirely distinct, so that any of them might be had while the other two were not. However, it looks as if we could well have all three conjointly.” (Pg. 68)
He asserts, “I recommend taking a Platonic route… Why are the world’s patterns orderly? Why, more particularly, do they have orderliness such as makes us speak of ‘laws of cause and effect’? It is because their orderliness is worth contemplating for a divine mind inside which they have their being. The divine mind itself exists because this is ethically required.” (Pg. 75)
He points out, “Such questions … have aroused more interest recently, thanks to what is described as cosmic ‘fine-tuning.’ Slight changes to basic cosmic parameters would have made life’s evolution impossible… In ‘Universes’ I looked at … such claims… What can look impressive, though, is that many of the claims appear defensible. It can seem more than a little odd to reject them one and all, perhaps adding that everything was firmly dictated by yet-to-be-discovered principles. (Imagine being invited to watch a computer as it calculates… the successive digits of pi… you suddenly see a long string of ones, twos, and zeros. Translated into Morse-code dots, dashes, and spaces, these spell out GOD WANTED INTELLIGENT LIFE TO EVOLVE. Which is more reasonable’(i) telling yourself that those ones, twos, and zeroes were… in no way fine-tunable, or (ii) suspecting the existence of a computer-programming prankster?” (Pg. 76-77)
He concludes, “It does seem that belief in God could find support in (a) the fact that ours is a life-permitting universe, (b) the fact that it has causal orderliness, and (c) the sheer truth that it is a case of there being ‘something rather than nothing’… Now, if things really could be explained on Platonic and Spinozistic lines then this might well mean… that intelligent living beings were immortal in three distinct ways. When God is not viewed as a Being whose own existence and power are utterly reasonless, even an afterlife can be plausible.” (Pg. 83-84)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying the question of life after death.
August 15, 2012
I would love to give this book 5 stars but it's going to require a second read. Some paragraphs are very complex to follow if you aren't tuned to the authors way of thinking. Although my general grasp of what has been discussed was excellent and certainly intriguing. Definitely worth reading none the less.
August 10, 2016
Leslie channels Spinoza.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews