Bartolomeo Bermejo’s magnificent painting of the Harrowing of Hell. It depicts the Risen Christ descending into the dreary dungeon of Hades where Adam and Eve, Methuselah, Solomon, and the Queen of Shebah await Him. The Risen Christ descends into the darkness, radiant in the light of his glory. Psalm 106 expresses the mystery of the moment: “Then they cried to the Lord in their need and he rescued them from their distress. He led them forth from darkness and gloom and broke their chains to pieces” (Psalms 106:13-14).
By expelling critical intelligence from the universe that gave rise to it, modern naturalism has led not only to a diminished view of human life, but to a trivialization of death as well. For there can be nothing terribly consequential about the perishing of mind if mind is merely the ethereal wisp that modem thought has taken it to be in the first place. As long as mind is separated from the universe, what happens to the subject can have little bearing on the cosmos and vice versa. When consciousness disappears, the mindless world remains unshaken. Yet today even natural science is demonstrating that critical intelligence, reliant as it is on the proper functioning of brains, is deeply dependent on specific physical features pertaining to the history of the whole universe.
The emergence of each intelligent subject has a dramatic cosmic prelude that we knew very little about until recently. When a mind emerges, the event is more than a local disturbance of indifferent matter. It is a cosmic eruption. Likewise, when a subject dies, something happens to the whole universe. If the physical constituents of consciousness extend historically back to the birth of the universe itself, then the death of every cell and every organism is something more than just another Darwinian inexorability. Death may indeed be biologically inevitable, but in some sense, as both animal and human instinct tell us, it is also a lessening of the universe.
If subjectivity were truly alien to the cosmos, as it is taken to be in naturalism’s modernist (and ironically dualistic) outlook, then thoughts about our own death would make little difference to a full understanding of nature. However, the stereoscopic outlook I have been following changes the whole picture. We cannot properly see the universe if we fail to look simultaneously at the critical intelligence to which it has lately given birth. Looking hard at the cosmos without keeping our own minds in view flattens out the field of vision, obscuring its real depth. A more dimensional empiricism, on the other hand, ties its vision of the world’s remotest physical origins tightly to an awareness of the critical intelligence that has come to birth in the foreground of natural history. By linking matter intrinsically to life and mind, this richer empiricism avoids the conclusion that lifeless matter, purged of subjectivity, is the fundamental reality. Finally, our stereoscopic vision proposes that the perishing of each subject — and not just human subjects — somehow reverberates throughout the universe. So it follows that if there is any hope for our own subjective survival of death, the universe that remains forever the root system of our subjectivity may in some sense be destined to escape final nothingness as well.
However, the question is whether there is any hope for our own survival as critically intelligent subjects. Naturalists will only scoff at such an idea. According to philosopher Owen Flanagan, there is no basis for the belief that anything about us could survive death since science has destroyed the idea of immortal souls. [Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002).]
Nevertheless, he goes on, once we have resigned ourselves to this harsh fact, our lives do not have to be sad. Flanagan is the epitome of a sunny naturalist. The universe is pointless, and death final, but that is no reason to deny that human life can be meaningful and happy. When we die we are gone for good, but in the meantime we can live fulfilling lives anyway. Flanagan concedes that most people believe they have souls and that their souls, or some remnant of conscious life, will live on after death. But, in typically naturalist fashion, he rejects belief in immortality as “irrational.” Why irrational? Because there is no scientific evidence to support it. One might respond that belief in immortality is at least harmless even if untrue. But not in Flanagan’s opinion:
The beliefs in non-natural properties of persons, indeed of any non-natural things, including — yes — God, stand in the way of understanding our natures truthfully and locating what makes life meaningful in a non-illusory way. Furthermore, historical evidence abounds that sectarian religious beliefs not only lack rational [i.e. scientific] evidence or support, but they are at least partly at the root of terrible human practices – religious wars, terrorism, and torture. Yes, I know the answer; such calamities come at the hands of fanatics. Even if this is true, the fact is that fanatics are fanatics because they believe that what they believe is indubitably true.
[Owen Flanagan, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (New York: Basic Books, 2002).]
The majority of the world’s people, on the other hand, would consider the final extinguishing of mind and “soul” to be the greatest of evils. The possibility that anything as luminously real and palpable as consciousness could end up in the pit of final nothingness is simply unthinkable. Humanity’s instinctive revolt against such a prospect, of course, is no proof that the naturalist is wrong. But it still seems extremely audacious for Flanagan and other naturalists to dismiss as irrational so enduring a consensus of human wisdom simply because empirical science, which is not wired to detect subjectivity even in its present state let alone after death, can find no “evidence” of it.
Most people, both in the past and even in an age of science, have believed in some form of subjective survival beyond death – in spite of the absence of present evidence. Some have anticipated reincarnation culminating in final release from the wheel of rebirth. Others have expected bodily resurrection, and still others the survival of their souls in a state of final liberation from the mortal limits imposed by the physical world. Theistic religions have based their hope for life after death on the foundational conviction that God is powerful and faithful and will fulfill the divine promise to defeat death in due time. God, according to a saying of Jesus recorded in the Gospels, is “a God of the living and not of the dead,” so the everlasting aliveness of God can surely bridge the wide abyss that now divides the living from the dead. Yet naturalism, in keeping with its physicalist assumptions and its metaphysics of the past, cannot fathom how any of this is remotely possible. Hope for immortality is a childish, though possibly adaptive, fantasy from which we must now awaken.
But is belief in life after death as irrational as Flanagan and other naturalists insist? I shall argue to the contrary that, far from being irrational, the expectation of subjective survival may be judged to be a most reasonable belief, precisely insofar as it is supportive of the flourishing of the desire to know. And is the prevalent human hope for survival of death as harmful as Flanagan contends? Granted that terrorists, emboldened by belief in an eternal reward, can do horrible things, does this say anything one way or the other about either the reasonableness or the wholesomeness of the belief itself? Flanagan, speaking with all the confidence of a true believer, consigns most of his fellow humans to the status of madness and potential criminality because they cannot give up their hope for eternal happiness. I have to confess surprise that so esteemed a philosopher seems unaware that almost anything can be twisted to serve evil purposes, and that he considers it necessary to tell us that “fanatics are fanatics because they believe that what they believe is indubitably true.” Perhaps the fanatics could reply that Flanagan is a naturalist because he believes (as he clearly does) that naturalism is indubitably true.
Here, however, I am concerned less with whether hope for immortality is harmful than whether it is consistent with the truth. When I use the word “truth” I mean it in two senses. First, truth is simply another word for being or what is; and, second, truth is a property of all warranted propositions. I am using the term in both senses. My point is that our minds cannot work without anticipating truth. Even in moments of confusion and extreme skepticism our minds still know that it is true that we are confused and in doubt. Truth stands there permanently as the inescapable horizon, standard and goal of all intellectual performance, even when we explicitly deny the possibility of attaining it. Minds are aware also, at least at some level, that truth cannot perish. “It fortifies my soul to know that, though I perish, truth is so,” says the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. I would propose, accordingly, that the expectation of subjective survival of death is completely consistent with and supportive of our performative appeal to the everlastingness of truth. If so, then this belief can be called reasonable, for it fulfills the fundamental criterion of truth: fidelity to the desire to know. Let me now unpack the proposal.
First of all, there is something imperishable about truth. For example, it is still true that dinosaurs once inhabited Earth, even though the dinosaurs themselves are now gone. And it will still be true trillions of years from now that dinosaurs, you and I did live at one time on Earth, even though we and the dinosaurs will have perished long since. Even though this planet, the solar system and the Big Bang universe will be gone, all of these facts will still be true. But since we will be gone, where will it be true? Where will the totality of truth be registered if we are not around to acknowledge it?
Theology has always identified the ultimate repository of truth with the eternal mind and memory of God. Numerous religious texts and teachings express the sentiment that we ourselves are like grass, but that God is forever. The naturalist, on the other hand, is compelled to claim that truth also is like grass. For if truth exists only in our own minds it will perish along with our minds — since there is no eternal registry of what is or what has been. However, if the truth of that claim is a product only of the mind that makes the claim, then it need not be taken seriously. For any truth-claim to be taken seriously the basis or criterion of its truthfulness must reside somewhere other than in the perishable truth-affirming mind alone. To affirm the truth of any proposition the human mind is formulating here and now, critical intelligence must assume at least tacitly that there is something beyond its own fragile existence that can place the seal of truthfulness on its claims, or, as the case may be, judge them to be untruthful. The well-functioning mind is willing to subject its content to such a judgment.
The steady endurance of truth, however, is not something the mind can grasp or focus on, but instead something the mind anticipates in every act of knowing. The truth anticipated by the mind has already grasped that mind, inviting (not compelling) a kind of surrender. Even the hard naturalist must concede that truth-telling requires a surrender of the mind to what is the case rather than to what one would like to be the case. And only an implicit love of what is can be trusted to lead the mind to assent to truth. To be a truthful person one must love the truth. I cannot imagine that the serious naturalist would deny this. Yet the naturalist also believes that the ultimate repository of truth can only be the fragile assembly of human minds. Truth therefore will disappear once all these minds are gone.
However, if we seriously thought that it depends for its existence and survival only on the human minds that are its transient vessels I doubt that we could value truth enough to surrender ourselves to it here and now. Do you find yourself doubting what I have just said? If you do, it is only because you also love truth. But would your love of truth be justifiable if it were nothing more than a temporary attribute of your perishable mind? Or is it not the case that truth transcends your mind and that of others and invites you to surrender to it? And can you be content with anything less than such a surrender? “Naturalism is true,” you will say if you are Flanagan. But is it true because you (and other naturalists) say so? Obviously not. Every judgment the mind makes about the truth of a proposition or belief (including the truth of naturalism) requires a more enduring standard and repository than the entire set of perishable human subjects. Indeed for truth to function as a goal worth seeking, it has to be imperishable. Anything less would allow me to assume that I am the author of truth. And if I honestly thought this to be true, then “truth” itself would be no firmer than the perishable mind that thought it up.
Without a more permanent dwelling place than your own mind, or even the totality of finite minds, truth cannot last forever. And a truth that does not last cannot be deeply valued or loved. It is the nearly universal experience of humans, after all, that it is foolish to trust and love things that have no lasting value. The same principle applies especially to truth. The desire to know flourishes best where truth is valued most. And truth can be more deeply loved if it is judged to be imperishable than if it is only a patina on transient minds. So it seems safe to conclude that the belief that truth never perishes is one that fulfills the fundamental criterion of truth, that of promoting the interests of the desire to know.
I propose next, then, that the almost universal human denial of the finality of death is tied in some way to the mind’s intuitive awareness of the fact that truth never fades. Obviously I have no intention of trying to prove that subjective immortality is a fact in a way that would satisfy those, such as Flanagan, who believe that scientific evidence must underlie every claim to truth. In any case, were I to try to elicit scientific evidence of immortality I would just be capitulating to the narrower empiricism that underlies naturalistic belief. What I will say, though, is that the hope for some form of subjective survival is a favorable disposition for nurturing trust in the desire to know. Such hope is not at all irrational if it undergirds the trust required for the activation of critical intelligence.
On the other hand, a belief that mental existence is destined for absolute extinction, if taken consistently, could easily lead us to under-appreciate the cognitional core of our being. Such a conjecture, if taken with full seriousness, may contribute to the undermining rather than confirmation of the trust needed to activate my mind’s imperatives. My desire to know is most fully liberated to seek its goal, namely truth, only if I deeply trust this desire. And nothing that I know of encourages me to trust my desire to know more completely than a religious hope for the climactic fulfillment of this longing. Such a hope is reasonable if it provides, as I believe it can, a climate that encourages the desire to know to remain restless until it encounters the fullness of being, truth, goodness and beauty. In my own experience nothing outside the world of religious hope comes close to providing such encouragement to embrace the unrestricted dynamism of the desire to know.
The struggle to liberate the desire to know from other desires, from longings that are content to wallow in illusions, requires a tacit trust that the mind can be fully satisfied only when it encounters the fullness of what is. Even the naturalist’s own attempt to free our minds from the illusion of immortality is itself an implicit, though ambiguous, witness to the mind’s longing for enduring truth. Otherwise there would be no good reason to try to convince religious believers that they are wrong. Furthermore, every revision of scientific understanding is undertaken in the interest of getting closer to the goal of complete truthfulness. We may conclude, then, that belief in subjective survival of death need not be an illusion after all. It may be a most reasonable expression of the same spontaneous trust that energizes the desire to know. The ageless religious trust that the core of our critical intelligence is in some sense imperishable is of a piece with an unquenchable trust in the permanence of truth.
“Evidence” for immortality, it goes without saying, could never show up in the naturalist’s picture of reality. However, our wider empiricism and layered explanation have exposed this picture as incomplete. The naturalistic worldview cannot even support a belief that the mind is real here and now, let alone that it will be able to exist beyond death. It refuses, at least in any systematic way, to include the fact of critical intelligence as part of the real world. But once nature is more realistically understood to be the matrix of mind, and mind in turn is acknowledged to have cosmic extension, the landscape on which we inquire about the finality of death changes dramatically. The question of critical intelligence’s ultimate destiny is no longer separable from the question of the universe’s destiny. Here again, mind and the universe are a package deal.
Hope
Let me summarize, in yet another way, what I have been saying. The free unfolding of critical intelligence requires a trust in the complete intelligibility of the universe and the imperishability of truth. The desire to know intends or anticipates a fullness of being, meaning and truth. Anything short of this plenitude makes the intelligent subject restless for more. Hence, the naturalistic belief that the universe is essentially and primordially mindless, and that truth will perish along with our minds, would hardly make the world an adaptive habitat for critical intelligence. Only a belief that the world ultimately makes sense through and through, and that truth will not perish, can keep the spirit of inquiry alive indefinitely. If I thought seriously that at the margins of the universe, or beneath its origins and beyond its final destiny, there lurks an environing unintelligibility, sooner or later this picture of things would have a paralyzing effect on my natural incentive to ask further questions.
However, the core of each person’s critical intelligence performatively refutes such a belief. Even though the naturalist may subscribe formally to the materialist view that intelligence is rooted in unintelligence, every act of his or her mind nonetheless tacitly subscribes to a belief in the complete intelligibility of being. This silent anticipation of a fullness of truth is inconsistent with the naturalist’s explicit worldview. Moreover, to deny what I have just said would be to destroy the credibility of all claims, including those of naturalism. The only consistent or coherent worldview is one that lines up our thoughts about the world with what actually goes on in the invariant structure of our thinking and knowing.
My point is that religious hope proves itself to be more consistent with the mind’s anticipation of meaning and truth than naturalistic pessimism does. The desire to know, which cannot function without subordinating the human mind to what is, is not frustrated but buoyed by the sense that the world ultimately makes sense and that there is something imperishable about truth. Moreover, critical intelligence thrives in an atmosphere of trust that all things will be made clear in a climactic moment of illumination when the ground of the world’s intelligibility “will light up all that is hidden in the dark” (1 Corinthians 4:5). Hope for final clarification can give undying zest to the long adventure of inquiry. And a sense that the world is rooted in limitless intelligibility and truth can even serve to give science itself an indefinitely prolonged future.
I would suggest to naturalists such as Owen Flanagan, therefore, that any belief that consistently supports the desire to know – whose goal is nothing short of truth — is by definition realistic rather than illusory or irrational. Consequently, if religious hope supports the mind’s confidence in the worthwhileness of the quest for truth, then such hope cannot be dismissed out of hand as illusion. Unless the world is completely absurd — in which case the quest for intelligibility and truth would be pointless — those beliefs that most fully support the desire to know and that excite the mind’s imperatives cannot simply be discarded as unreasonable.
According to Darwinian naturalists, of course, the real cause of our instinctive hope, including our defiance of death, is natural selection. We possess hope, a Darwinian might say, because it is adaptive, or perhaps it is the byproduct of other adaptations. Belief in an ultimate state of happiness is a fiction that supposedly increases our reproductive fitness directly or indirectly. Hope in life after death has been adaptive at the level of genes, individual human organisms and even religious groups. Darwinian naturalism, by undertaking a genealogy of religious anticipation, proposes thereby to have debunked all hope for immortality. Even though sound logical argumentation demands that the justification of beliefs be undertaken independently of speculation about their origins, most Darwinian critics of religion believe that evolutionary accounts of human religious anticipation should also cast doubt on the existence of whatever it is that is being anticipated. [For a critique of this peculiar leap in logic, see Holmes Rolston, III, Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 347.]
My response to this reductive debunking of hope is to turn the attention of the naturalists, once again, to the very minds that are doing the debunking. In exposing religion’s “irrational” longing as adaptation, Darwinian naturalists may be logically subverting the confidence that undergirds their own desire to know as well. What is it that would make their own confidence in intelligibility and truth immune to the same critique that they direct toward the trust that anticipates ultimate fulfillment beyond death?
It seems to me that the mind’s instinctive longing for complete clarity is brought to its most significant expression in the quest for a meaning and truth that will redeem the intelligent subject from the threat of extinction. Hope is one of those virtues that provides support for the desire to know in its anticipation of intelligibility. Hope delivers critical intelligence from the obsession of needing to understand everything here and now. Hope widens out the world in the foreground of critical intelligence, inviting the desire to know to unfold ever more expansively.
But, the naturalist will persist, how do we know that the mind’s performative trust in reality’s intelligibility and its anticipation of a fullness of truth are not just futile stabs in the dark? Perhaps trust in truth too is an irrational belief, convenient for the sake of luring the mind into ongoing inquiry, but lacking any foundation in reality? Is not the mind’s anticipation of intelligibility and truth an adaptive fiction, a trick it plays on itself to avoid facing the ultimate absurdity of the world? Well, once again, I would not have to take this question itself seriously if that were the case, since the mind that issues such a proposal would be merely “adapting” rather than seriously searching for truth. The fact is, however, that such a question is sincerely in search of understanding and truth, and as such it is an exemplification of the very point I am trying to make: each mind, in order to work at all, anticipates intelligibility and truth.
To reduce our anticipation of truth to psychic illusion or Darwinian adaptation would be to negate the trustworthiness of all human thought. It deserves repeating that I am appealing here to what Lonergan calls the fundamental criterion of truth: fidelity to the desire to know. And I am saying that hope in the face of death for final redemption and fulfillment of the desire to know is truthful in that fundamental sense. Naturalism, on the other hand, fails to provide any comparable support for critical intelligence. It confronts each intelligent subject with the prospect of an ultimate extinguishing of both subjectivity and intelligence. According to this mostly modern kind of belief, not only will individual minds perish for good, but minds of any sort will be dissolved into the elemental stupor from which they arose. One cannot help wondering therefore how such a picture of things could ever be a nourishing environment for critical intelligence.
Naturalism, I am convinced, would be a cognitionally ruinous belief system if it were ever taken consistently — which it almost never is because of the innate trust in being and truth that empower even the minds that profess to follow that creed. On the other hand, a theological perspective, being explicitly aware of the limits of nature, enlarges the picture of reality as a whole to make a home proportionate to the mind’s full deployment. Religious hope provides a satisfactorily adaptive atmosphere for organisms endowed with an unrestricted desire to know. Critical intelligence, after all, is at home only in a world whose horizons are limitless. To be fertile and coherent, therefore, a philosophy of nature must allow the world to be large and supportive enough to contain intelligent and critical subjects. I have been arguing that only a worldview that locates the natural world and critical intelligence within a wider than natural environment can fulfill this requirement.
