Perhaps it's worth resurrecting this blog with a post related to resurrection and the afterlife. I got the following example from Ben Bradley about a completely different topic, but since it raises interesting issues about the afterlife I figured I'd steal it and ask some questions about it.
Suppose you had a terminal illness. You're given six months to live. There's a treatment that can save you, but it will lead to a total transformation of your personality and interests. For example, you might stop enjoying philosophy and the intellectual life and start enjoying bottle cap collecting. You would find complete fulfillment in bottle cap collecting and not miss the intellectual life, but the desires you currently have would no longer be fulfilled. Ben poses the case as a means to wondering whether it would be better to die in six months or to undergo the treatment and be transformed so drastically that your current desires and preferences would very likely go unfulfilled.
My question is this: what significance does this case have for the possibility of an afterlife? More particularly, what should someone who is not a univeralist say about this sort of case? If I need to spell out the details of what I'm thinking to guide the discussion in the direction I've been thinking, I will, but I'd rather see what people want to say about it first.
Jeremy,
Interesting question. However, I don't see how Universalism makes a difference to how we answer the following question:
Would it be better to die, in old age, six months later with a radical transformation of interests?
I think if the transformation is radical enough, then we die when we have the surgery. Who then would go to heaven? The man post surgery or prior to surgery? Or both?
I don't know. I would have the surgery though. Better to enjoy bottle cap collecting than to have no enjoyment at all. Better for the man post surgery, even if it isn't me, even if I don't care as much about him as I do myself.
If something survives death that is me, then whether or not I have the surgery is irrelevant to surviving death. I suppose however that if we thought the personality at the end of life is the same personality as the personality that goes to heaven then we should care which one goes, we would want to die prior to the surgery when our personality is the one we would rather have for eternity. But, I don't think this is true, that our personality survives death, so I would have the surgery.
Here's how universalism is relevant. The kind of question I'm interested in is now so much whether the person afterward is the person before. I take it as obvious that it's the same person but with very different beliefs and preferences. Even if I were to admit two different people, universalism has no problem, since both would then be present in the afterlife. Everyone gets there, so both would get there.
The interesting thing, if universalism is not true, is what happens to someone whose personality and beliefs change to the degree that someone who had a very strong faith and commitment to God no longer is inclined to believe in God at all. There are actual cases like this with brain damage. If you think they're different people, maybe the earlier one is saved and the later one not. I'm just not inclined to that kind of view of personal identity. That's why it's an interesting question for non-universalists who share my assumption about it being the same person all along.
Even if universalism is not true, what accountability is impugned upon someone who ceases to believe in God due to brain damage? I recognize that will vary according to ones theological perspective. But some might argue that one can't be held accountable for some action based upon brain damage. i.e. if the person who kills because of a tumor in their brain isn't really responsible for the murder, then why would the dibeliever be responsible for similar reasons?
Of course perhaps this poses problems for certain theological perspectives on belief. But I'd suspect dualists of even the Thomist sort would make a distinction between what is in the soul and what is in the brain.
I suppose that's something you can say, but it doesn't automatically follow from anything I'd be willing to defend.
It wasn't dualism I was worried about but compatibilism about divine sovereignty and human moral responsibility.
Dualism does raise interesting questions, though. If this were to happen, are you suspecting that someone's mind would come derailed somehow from the material world? Mental events would no longer correspond or even be causally connected to the physical events that usually give rise to them and are caused by them? If so, isn't it pretty much giving in to one of the standard arguments against dualism, one that I would have thought involved a mistake about what dualists believe?
Well, I'm no dualist, so I'm probably not the one to ask about what a dualist believes. However I think that there are dualisms in which one wouldn't consider this an unhinging of mental events, merely a disconnect about the proper "end" of the soul and its physical manifestation. i.e. more in line with Aristotle than Descartes. That's why I mentioned Thomist dualism rather than Cartesian dualism. As I recall Thomist dualists avoid many of the problems that Cartesian dualists encounter.
It seems that there is an imputation of value, as in philosophy and the intellectual life vs. bottle cap collecting. So there is the addition of an observer valuing one greater than the other as a worthwhile occupation.
If the implied observer were God, then God's values would be the standard.... if you, then your standards. Then the question is whether there is nothing more to consider than ones own standards, and whether those may be changed if anothers standards are deemed more important.
Fulfilled desires are an iffy thing in any case.
But striving to fulfill duty is something different. It comes from outside oneself, in terms of desires and dispositions. Anyone could find themselves convinced of the right thing to do, if they have their faculties.
When one no longer has sufficient faculties, they are subject to another's oversight. They are not responsible for themselves to one degree or another- that's commonly recognized and compensated for with the guardianship for their person.
What we call the heart, however, is a very powerful and resilient thing. Tyrants and torturers have tried to crush it, gainsayers and deceivers try to extinguish it, but it has been known to transcend their reach.
I think it is the "heart" you are talking about. This would not be changed by any physical damage or influence... simply reduced in its expression.
And it is the heart that God is most concerned with; understandably so.
Our interest in philosophy or bottle cap collecting has very little to do with our worth as persons. It is merely our expression of ourselves and our personal uniqueness. If that changes... it is not what makes us intrinsically us; it is only an outward expression which for most of us changes over time with experiences, etc.
Our power and ability to love- that comes from within us-, however, is a measure of our worth. And it is known that even extremely damaged persons can give and benefit from expression of love.
So any ideas of fatalism or of kismet or whatever it may become termed, are really very little when compared with the hope and aspiration of what's inside a human being. And people on one level or another usually recognize that as "spirit". Even if only using the common expression of the word.
Ilona, I think your claim about faculties is at odds with Christian thought about the fall, which says that our moral faculties are not fully in place to the degree that would allow us simply to understand what's right and why but are in place to the degree that we're morally responsible for what we do. The kind of moral faculties that would get lost in such a case are exactly the ones that a Christian believes the average nonbeliever doesn't have. It doesn't absolve from blame, then.
I am not sure what you mean by this comment. If it were related to certain points of Christian doctrine I would probably understand you better.
The justice system of God is unchanged by the fall. What is changed is our ability to abide by it, and thus our capability to exist in a face to face relationship with God.
If I read it right, Paul says that when the law came we died. The sentence gets passed. The conscience, or knowing of right and wrong, is involved in the process.
This is one of the great differences between those who apply the idea of original sin to babies and believe in infant baptism as necessary, and those who believe that original sin is a principle that gets activated by knowledge of ones sin against God and believes in adult baptism.
Neither stance abrogates the justice system of God, but one says that there is culpability without moral faculties and the other says that a certain recognition must take place.
Both are recognized, though conflicting, Christian doctrines.
I believe there is one single answer, but that is not for this discussion. It is obvious that unbelievers have moral faculties, it is arguable that the fact that they are unbelieving proves that something is damaged in those abilities.
From the Christian view.
Calvinists call what I'm talking about total depravity. Paul and other biblical authors call it minds and hearts being darkened and hardened. You don't need to be a Calvinist to believe in something like this.
The case I have in mind could go as follows. A faithful and committed Christian gets brain damage to the point where she ceases to believe in God at all and thinks belief in God is morally abhorrent. This is not just a fictional case, by the way. A friend of mine knows of someone this happened to. You were saying something about someone not having faculties and thus being absolved from blame. The options you give aren't exhaustive, since what someone thinks about baptism doesn't necessarily line up with whether they think children who die at a young age will be saved. The issue here is unrelated to any of that, though. I have in mind someone whose brain damage removes none of those faculties but just leads to the person being offended by Christianity instead of being delighted by it and excited to be a Christian.