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Resurrection and the ‘replica objection’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Frank B. Dilley
Frank B. Dilley
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Delaware
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Extract

Resurrection has been used as the conceptual basis for attempted solutions to two problems that occur in the context of western theism, the problem of cognitive meaning and the problem of theodicy. Because John Hick has proposed resurrection as a solution to both problems so extensively, and because Antony Flew and Terence Penelhum have examined those solutions so strenuously, I will use their writings to lay out the problem. My aim is to improve upon Hick by overcoming a weakness in his defence of resurrection. My narrower focus will be on resurrection and the ‘replica objection’, rather than the wider use of resurrection to solve problems of evil or the meaningfulness of theistic discourse, but some brief remarks on the wider problems will be necessary to set the stage.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1983 , pp. 459 - 474
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

page 459 note 1 Works by Flew, Hick and Penelhum will be referenced by title and page in the text. References from Flew, Antony are from The Presumption of Atheism (London: Elek/Pemberton, 1976)Google Scholar and New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM, 1955).Google Scholar References from Hick, John are from Death and Eternal Life (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1976)Google Scholar; Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966)Google Scholar; Philosophy and Religion, 2nd edn (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1973).Google Scholar References from Penelhum, Terence are from ‘Personal Identity’ in Edwards, Paul (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar; ‘Reply to Michael Durrant’ in The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1974), pp. 519–25Google Scholar; Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970)Google Scholar; ‘Survival and Identity: Some Further Considerations’ in Shapin, Betty and Coly, Lisette (eds), The Philosophy of Parapsychology (New York: The Parapsychology Foundation, 1977, pp. 171–89).Google Scholar

page 461 note 1 My own individual philosophical preference is to attempt to overthrow Flew's pieces rather than to play Flew's game. Neither the notion of cognitive meaning nor the notion of personal identity can be satisfactorily analysed without more ‘metaphysical’ notions of soul and God. I have never understood why the concept of God as spiritual is intelligible on Hick's view, whereas the concept of persons as spiritual is not. I should think that to agree with Flew that incorporeal persons are unintelligible would be to jettison God also.

page 461 note 2 Hick starts with ‘exactly similar’ and then allows for change over time, but why must even the initial similarity be exact? Admittedly it is easier to identify an exact replica with the original, but in practice we allow personal identity to survive even quite drastic changes. When body transplants are perfected we surely will allow that Hick survived when his brain was transplanted into the female motorcyclist's by after the crash that killed that body's brain.

page 462 note 1 This particular point was not made by Hick, as far as I am aware, but I might be mistaken. Hick has not really discussed criteria for identity over time as much as he might have. In fact, as I will point out, he did not really examine the relation of mind to brain until fifteen years after he had first written about eschatological verification.

page 462 note 2 Peter van Inwagen objects to the idea that reconstituted persons can be the ‘same’ person. He claims that sameness of person requires not only sameness of atoms but also that the atoms bear the relationship which they do to one another because of the natural processes that were that person. For God to reassemble the original atoms would be to constitute something entirely different from the original. Such a thing would not even be a member of our species, or speak our language, or have memories, etc., though of course it would appear to be or have those things. For van Inwagen, the only resurrection that would count is the miraculous replacement of the corpse by a simulacrum and the removal of the corpse (or a key component of it) to the resurrection world. (‘The Possibility of Resurrection’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1978, p. 119.)Google Scholar

page 463 note 1 Perry, John, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (Indianapolis, Indiana, Hackett, 1978), p. 42.Google Scholar

page 468 note 1 Ibid. p. 35.

page 471 note 1 It is of some philosophical comfort to note that Bernard Williams is willing to consider persons who have been duplicated as in some sense the same person. Commenting on a case in which sameness of person is preserved through replacing a person's brain with a new brain in which the old information had been replaced, he notes that if this is so, ‘it looks as though the information could be put back, not merely into a new brain, but into a new brain in a new body – “new”, that is to say, relative to the body the person originally had, whether it was or was not newly manufactured’ (Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. 80). He points out that all the resultant persons will be in a ‘type’ sense the same person, in contrast to the ‘token’ sense of being the same person. A room, he observes, could in one sense have five persons and in the other sense two persons, if it were composed of two Smiths and three Robinson.Google Scholar

page 472 note 1 It has been pointed out to me by my colleague Harrison Hall, who approves of this paper in few respects, that the pattern theory as I have developed it so far allows for the anomalous situation that persons could be duplicates of me even though they had no causal connection with me or with the experiences which originally composed part of my self. Suppose that in three centuries there is someone, call him Knarf Yellid, who has exactly the same genetic make-up as I have, and has exactly the same experiences I have had, would he be me although he had no real connection with me? My considered opinion is that an accidentally duplicated self would not be me re-created just because of the fact that it is only accidentally related to me. Beethoven's ninth symphony was the one created by Beethoven and anyone who plays or hears that symphony hears Beethoven's ninth. Anyone who hears Zxygx's fifth symphony (a symphony identical in every respect with Beethoven's ninth but composed in complete independence of the latter work) hears a different symphony even though it is exactly similar to the ninth. To be Beethoven's ninth it had to be the one written by Beethoven, or one which is exactly similar because it was the deliberate attempt of someone to copy the Beethoven work. How can I get away with this? Because a key feature of being part of a self is a causal relation to that self. It is the fact that an idea occurred to me that makes it my idea. An idea that was identical in all respects to my idea would not be my idea if it occurred to someone else. I support allowing the stretching of ‘my idea’ to cover deliberate duplications of ‘my idea’ in the form, say, of cutting out my brain cells and putting in duplicate cells which were programmed to deliver to my brain an exactly similar idea to the one my original brain cells once delivered, because the new occurrence of that idea had a causal relation to the old one. It is not the same causal relation that produced my idea originally, but it is a causal relation. I would call the new occurrence of the idea my idea because the reason that it was re-occurring to me was that the original instance of that idea had occurred to me. That principle would distinguish deliberate duplicates, whether created by God or by a super-scientist, from accidentally similar copies. You could ask the one responsible for the resurrection replica that is ‘exactly similar’ to me and to Knarf Yellid, which one did you replicate? The answer to that question would determine who it was who had been resurrected.

page 474 note 1 Geach, Peter, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 23Google Scholar