Materialism, Personal Identity, and Resurrection: Part 2 - Platinum Post by Dennis J. Folds, Ph.D.

[00:00:01] Materialism, Personal Identity and Resurrection Part 2 Platinum Post by Dennis J. Folds, Ph.D. [00:00:10] read by Ken Teutsch Materialism, Personal Identity and Resurrection, Part two In part one of this post, I explored the link between a specific individual and the idea of the resurrection of that individual. I contrasted the Hebrew notion of the resurrection of the body and the Greek notion of the immortal soul. I found both to be rooted in the cosmology of the ancient world, almost impossible to express in modern terms. In this second part, I'll see what I can do to relate the notion of resurrection to modern thought. [00:00:49] Modern Science and Resurrection Modern science, biology and psychology are more aligned with the Hebrew viewpoint of what constitutes a person than the Greek. Although there is still a lot of uncertainty and debate about whether there is a non physical answer that can explain consciousness, it is clear that consciousness has some sort of biological basis. Consciousness is altered by biological phenomena such as sleep, coma, drugs, fatigue, and disease. In this framework, no matter how consciousness is ultimately explained, the person cannot be defined separately from from the human body. But to many modern scientists, physicists, psychologists, and neurobiologists, the explanation of consciousness as an emergent property of biology is entirely insufficient. A mechanistic, purely material universe might give rise to complex biological entities, but not to consciousness as we experience it. It seems that there is something else at work. We just don't know what. It does appear that our experience of consciousness is at least mediated by the biological reality of the human body, that procession through time. It is the body that is conscious, or at least has consciousness, not some immaterial entity inhabiting the body. [00:02:11] Then can we make sense of the doctrine of resurrection? There are at least two categories of solutions to this problem. [00:02:20] Reconstitution of the Biological Procession first, there is a notion that the biological procession will be reconstituted as a deleted data file might be reloaded from a backup copy, and then resume as a procession. In such a view, the resumed procession would begin at whatever arbitrary reconstitution point was chosen by the restorer. It might be at a snapshot that corresponded to some actual configuration of the original biological entity, or it might be constituted as a configuration that was derived from the original entity, not corresponding to any particular point. More tangibly, this category of solution allows the initial state of the resurrected body to be any age chosen by the restorer, let's say God. Presumably this resumed procession exists in a different environment, one without disease or death, or with constant agony and isolation. If, in that awful other place, this reconstituted existence now has a sharp beginning and an Undefined end point. Still, though, this reconstituted existence presumably involves some sort of procession over time. Having new conscious experiences. The resurrected person gets to converse with others and learn about things they always wondered about. They see all their departed loved ones and reminisce. Get to talk to Paul and Moses and Jesus, of course. And eventually they even come to understand the Enfield Fly rule. This goes on forever. In modern thought, such an explanation would be rooted in something akin to the simulation argument, the notion that we are living in a simulated reality. What controls the simulation? We might as well call it God. God could retrieve our Bart from memory, transform him, and resume the procession in a new environment. Why? Just because he wanted to. [00:04:20] Enshrinement of the biological procession the other category of solutions is that the original biological procession gets somehow enshrined in a state where it never ceases to be. It is made eternally alive, either exactly as it was lived, or in some derivative in which only certain portions or aspects are preserved. As a metaphor, consider the making of a movie about a specific person. Imagine that some sort of recording occurs every day, maybe every second of every day, from gestation to death. Resurrection, in this framework, means that some aspect of the recordings gets preserved forever. On a metaphysical dvd, it might be the entire recording, down to every second of every day. Or it might be that only a subset is preserved, maybe only the things that are worth preserving. That original procession does not resume existence. It does not have new conscious experiences. Rather, that original procession continues to exist as preserved by God. To modern science, a view in this category is not nonsense, at least to theoretical physicists. Some believe that our fourth dimension of time is an illusion. Our space time continuum already exists as our universe from beginning to end. For example, block universe theory or eternalism holds that past, present and future all exist simultaneously. In a block universe, time as we perceive it is an illusion. Instead, every moment exists eternally. We only seem to travel through that fourth dimension, experiencing novelty, when in fact it's already a done deal. It's as though the character in a movie doesn't know what's going to happen in the next scene as the movie is being played. But to an observer outside the movie, all the scenes exist at the same time on that dvd. [00:06:18] So we have a fundamental question of materialism. Is a person more than or other than that material biological entity, that biological procession with a fuzzy start and a fuzzy end? If the real person is an immortal soul, the New Testament notion of a bodily resurrection is simply a vestige of its Hebrew roots and can be quietly dropped or at least disregarded in favor of a doctrine that emphasizes the destiny of the immortal soul. But if the person is that biological procession, then bodily resurrection must either mean that the procession is reconstituted so it can continue in a different milieu, or that it becomes or has already become enshrined so that it can be forever recalled. [00:07:05] Scripture. There's nothing at all in the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament doesn't give us much to go on. First Corinthians 35 is the only place I find any relevant remarks. [00:07:17] But someone will ask, how are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come? [00:07:23] You do not sow the body that is to be, but God gives it a body he has chosen. So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory, it is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. [00:07:47] So Paul at least believed that the resurrected body would be derived from, but not simply a continuation of, the deceased body. What emerges from a germinated seed is not simply a revived seed, but something pulled out of that seed into a new existence. [00:08:05] Personal reflection. [00:08:07] My view, I have no idea. We're like some kernels of corn on a corn cob, enveloped by the husk on an ear of corn, alive on a corn stalk in a cornfield, speculating and arguing about what it will be like when we are planted and then sprout out of the ground. There is no way those kernels of corn have any inkling about what is to come. All they have is wishful thinking. I do think that the person is indistinguishable from the bodily procession and that on our own, when it's over, it's over. If there's anything beyond this, be it bodily resurrection or some other form of afterlife, it's all God's doing. It's his project, not ours. I have no say in it. I'm comfortable with the idea that, metaphorically, God takes the recording of our entire life, makes his director's cut to cut out and burn the parts he doesn't like and keep what he values enshrined so those parts never die, but somehow keep existing without further modification. Think of a shelf with a multitude of DVDs or VHS tapes for us old timers, each one a movie about a particular person. Any one of them or all of them can be put into a player where for all eternity they can continue to reenact whatever the director decided to save. And for all we know, it may have already happened, and we're lucky enough to be able to experience the wonder of passing through it. We continue to exist because God remembers us, whether through a bodily resurrection akin to a seed sprouting anew or a divine director's cut preserving what God values. The enduring mystery of what makes us us underscores the wonder of being created in God's image and of processing through this world as we do. It reminds us that we live with unanswerable questions, and in that uncertainty I find hope.