Van Inwagen, Zimmerman, and the materialist conception of resurrection

Religious Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 451-469

  Hershenov, David B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547744229     PISSN: 00344125     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034412502006248     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Peter van Inwagen 'The possibility of resurrection', International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, 9 (1978), 121
2. The 'body-snatching' description of van Inwagen's account is a phrase taken from Dean Zimmerman's article 'The compatibility of materialism and survival', in Eleonore Stump and Michael Murray (eds) Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 379-386
3. Dean Zimmerman 'The compatibility of materialism and survival: 'the falling elevator' model', Faith and Philosophy, 16 (1999), 194-212
4. An anonymous reviewer commented that it is a bit awkward of Van Inwagen to attack the dualist with an argument based upon the problems of interaction between material and immaterial objects. As a theist believing in the power of an immaterial God to intervene in the cosmos, Van Inwagen shouldn't be so quick to find mind-body interaction objectionable
5. See Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience and Mind (New York NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993) for a supplementary account of the problems arising from the threat of downward causation to the doctrine of the closure of the physical
6. Peter van Inwagen Metaphysics (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1993), 179
7. For a nice discussion of the neurological dependence of thought and other anti-dualist arguments see Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1984), 18-21
8. Van Inwagen Metaphysics, 180
9. It wouldn't be wise for believers in an immaterial soul to identify it with the spark of life. Unless such a position is qualified, it would commit its proponents to the thesis that all organisms, human and non-human, are ensouled
10. Derek Parfit Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 231-244
11. Recall Locke's discussion of the soul, man (human organism), and the person, which can all be separated from each other. Each soul can combine with a different biological man or different person's consciousness. The separation of a person's consciousness and the soul, reveal the soul to be doing little work in Locke's theory and to be of little concern for a person. The Parfit-inspired thought experiment involving the perverse scientist shows any soul to be as equally unimportant to most of us
12. An anonymous reviewer was unconvinced by my use of Parfit's spectrum thought experiment. S/he is not alone. So I don't want to give the impression that I believe that my Parfit-inspired spectrum thought experiment provides a knock-down argument against the believer in the soul. It won't be effective with those people who believe that they continue to exist as long as their brain realizes even minimal sentience. They would survive a stroke that reduced their mental life to that of an infant. If readers have the intuition that they could survive the stroke-caused loss of all biographically distinctive aspects of their mentality (memories, beliefs, desires etc.) then they may also consistently maintain that they could survive the spectrum thought experiment
13. Zimmerman 'Compatibility of materialism and survival', 381
14. Van Inwagen writes 'the atoms of which I am composed occupy at each instant the positions they do because of the operations of certain processes within me (those processes that taken collectively, constitute my being alive.) Even when I become a corpse, provided I decay slowly and am not say cremated - the atoms that will compose me occupy the positions relative to one that they do occupy largely because of the processes that used to go on within me: or this will be the case at least for a short period. Thus a former corpse in which the processes of life have been "started up again" may well be the very man who was once before alive, provided the processes of dissolution did not progress too far while he was a corpse. But if a man does not simply die but is totally destroyed (as in the case of cremation) then he can never be reconstituted, for the causal chain has been irrevocably broken. Thus if God collects the atoms that used to constitute the man and "reassembles" them, they will occupy the positions relative to one another because of God's miracle and not because of the operation of the natural processes that, taken collectively, were the life of the man'; Van Invagen, 'The possibility of resurrection', 119
15. Van Inwagen's actual examples are of a ancient manuscript penned by St Augustine that is burned and the parts miraculously reassembled by God, and a modern child's house of blocks construction that is knocked down and then reassembled by the parent. Since I am interested in the resurrection of a human being, it is useful to contrast this with the reassembly of a statue of a human being. Furthermore, the statue example, in a sense, combines traits of both of Van Inwagen's examples of a famous creation made by the hand of a historical figure and the 'lumpy' construction as involved in the blocks. I don't think any harm is done by the switch
16. I borrow this example from my paper 'The metaphysical problem of intermittent existence and the possibility of resurrection'. Faith and Philosophy (forthcoming)
17. Or consider a print. Isn't the creator the artist and not the person who runs off the prints?
18. Zimmerman 'Falling elevator model', 206
19. See Peter Unger's Consciousness, Identity and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 147-156 for an informative account of part replacement and assimilation. I am quite indebted to Unger on this matter
20. Zimmerman 'Falling elevator model', 207. My italics
21. In a postscript added in 1997, Van Inwagen admits that there could be other ways in which God accomplishes resurrection of the dead which he is 'unable to even form the idea of because I lack the conceptual resources to do so'; Peter van Invagen The Possibility of Resurrection and other Essays in Christian Apologetics (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997), 50
22. I develop these ideas in my paper 'Metaphysical problem of intermittent existence'
23. For the alternative view, see Colin McGinn's 'On the necessity of origins', Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976), 132
24. and Jack Wilson's Biological Individuality: The Identity and Persistence of Living Entities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 72-80
25. For essentialist accounts see Nathan Salmon Reference and Essence (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 193-214
26. McGinn 'On the necessity of origins', 127-135
27. G. Forbes Origins and identity', Philosophical Studies, 37 (1980), 353-362
28. Wilson Biological Individuality, 72-80
29. Kripke may also have dissuaded some readers from trying to imagine ourselves originating without gametes by his comment that it is not an exception to the thesis of the essentiality of origins if the sperm from one man was transplanted into another man and then used to fertilize an egg that had been taken from one woman and transplanted into another woman's body; Kripke Naming and Necessity, 112
30. I believe this is the culprit in Wilson's discussion of the essentiality of origins in his Biological Individuality, 76-79
31. It may also the source of error in McGinn's discussion in 'On the necessity of origins', 132
32. The scenario described in the main text in which the gametes that we originated from in the actual world exist in another possible world but we do not develop from their fusion is merely a slight twist upon a well-known for argument for the essentiality of origins found throughout the literature on the subject. See references in n. 27 above
33. This error about species membership being an essential property is made by McGinn in 'On the necessity of origins', 134-135
34. and also by Michael Dummett in his Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), 144
35. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal