{"id":215324,"date":"2022-06-20T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2022-06-20T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=215324"},"modified":"2022-06-17T05:42:48","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T04:42:48","slug":"is-there-life-after-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/06\/is-there-life-after-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Is There Life After Death?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of James and Whitehead on Life after Death<\/em> by David Ray Griffin<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

16 Jun 2022 – <\/em>Life is entwined with death from the start, for death is the price we must pay for being born, even though we don\u2019t choose it, which may be why some people who are very angry at the deal, decide to choose how and when they will die, as if they are getting revenge on someone who dealt them a rotten hand, even if they don\u2019t believe in the someone.<\/p>\n

The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average person to the great artists and thinkers.\u00a0 Death is the mother of philosophy and all the arts and sciences.\u00a0 It is arguably also what motivates so much human behavior, from keeping busy to waging war to trying to hit a little white ball with a long stick down a lot of grass into a hole in the ground and doing it again and again.<\/p>\n

Death is the mother of distractions.<\/p>\n

It is also what we cannot ultimately control, although a lot of violent and crazy\u00a0 rich people try.\u00a0 The thought of it drives many people mad.<\/p>\n

No one is immune from wondering about it.\u00a0 We are born dying, and from an early age we ask why.\u00a0 Children often explicitly ask, but as they grow older the explicit usually retreats into implicity and avoidance because of adults\u2019 need to deny death or their lack of answers about it that makes sense.<\/p>\n

David Ray Griffin is not a child or an adult in denial.\u00a0 He has spent his life in an intrepid search for truth in many realms \u2013 philosophy, theology, politics, etc.\u00a0 He is an esteemed author of over forty books, an elderly man in his eighties who has spent his life writing about God, and also in the last twenty years a series of outstanding books on the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the demonic nature of U.S. history.\u00a0 He fits T.S Eliot\u2019s description in The Four Quartets<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Old men ought to be explorers<\/em>
\nHere and there does not matter<\/em>
\nWe must be still and still moving<\/em>
\nInto another intensity<\/em>
\nFor a further union, a deeper communion<\/em>
\nThough the dark cold and the empty desolation,<\/em>
\nThe wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters<\/em>
\nOf the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his latest book, which is another beginning, James and Whitehead on Life after Death<\/em><\/a>, he explores the age-old question of whether there is life after death and concludes that there probably is.\u00a0 It is a conclusion that is arguably shared in some way still by many people today but is clearly rejected by most intellectuals and highly schooled people, as Griffin writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe traditional basis for hope was belief in life after death. Modern culture, however, has so diminished this belief that today, in educated circles, it is largely assumed that life after death is an outmoded belief\u2026.The dominant view among science-based modern intellectuals is that the idea of life after death is not one to take seriously. That conclusion, however, is virtually implicit in the presuppositions of these intellectuals, such as Corliss Lamont. According to these modern intellectuals, there is no non-sensory perception; the world is basically mechanistic; and the world contains nothing but physical bodies and forces.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Griffin argues the opposite.\u00a0 His book is devoted to refuting these presuppositions with the help of William James and Alfred North Whitehead.\u00a0 It is not an easy read, and is not aimed at regular people who would find it rough going, except for the middle chapters on mediums, extrasensory perception, telepathy, apparitions, near-death out-of-body experiences, and reincarnation \u2013 the stuff of tabloid nonsense but which in Griffin\u2019s scholarly hands is treated very intelligently. Moreover, these chapters are crucial to his overall argument.\u00a0 However, the book will mainly appeal to the intellectuals whom Griffin wishes to convince of their errors, or to those who agree with him.\u00a0 It is scholarly.<\/p>\n

Without entering into all the nuances of his rather complicated thesis, I will try to summarize his key points.<\/p>\n

Griffin is what is called a process theologian and his work of philosophical theology is intimately linked with scientific thinking and the idea of evolution, even as it rejects the modern mechanistic worldview for a \u201cpostmodern\u201d cosmology based on recent science, in particular, the work of microbiology.\u00a0 Although he is a Christian, the present book does not presuppose any Christian beliefs such as revelation, nor, for that matter, specific beliefs of any religion, although he does presuppose (and partially explains in chapter eleven) the existence of a \u201cdivine creator\u201d or \u201cdivine reality\u201d who is responsible for the evolutionary process that is the expression of a cosmic purpose with the \u201cfine-tuning\u201d of the universe.\u00a0 This \u201cHoly Reality\u201d is important to his argument.<\/p>\n

The thought of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead underlies everything Griffin writes here.\u00a0 Whitehead is known as the creator of process philosophy, which, to simplify, is the idea that all reality is not made up of things or bits of inert matter, no matter how small (e.g. atoms, brain molecules) or large (people or trees) interacting in some blind way with other bits of matter, but consists of conscious processes of ongoing experiences.\u00a0 In other words, reality is constant change, flowing experiences with types of awareness and intention and the free creativity to change.\u00a0 Humans are, therefore, ongoing experiments, not static entities.<\/p>\n

Following Whitehead, Griffin has coined the term \u201cpanexperientialism,\u201d meaning that all reality is comprised of experiences.\u00a0 It is worth noting that the etymology of the words experience<\/em> and experiment<\/em> are the same \u2013 Latin, experiri<\/em>, to try.\u00a0 Life is therefore a trying.\u00a0 As some might say, it is trying to be born and to know you will die.<\/p>\n

Griffin begins by noting the importance of life after death and why many argue against it.\u00a0 He states how he will avoid many of their objections and how he will show how the valid ones dissolve under his analysis.\u00a0 He promptly writes that \u201cMicrobiology has dissolved the mind-body problem.\u201d \u00a0He bases this on the work of acclaimed evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis,, among others, and her theory of symbiogenesis:<\/p>\n

\u201cHer theory of symbiogenesis was based on the idea that all living organisms are sentient. Saying that her world view \u2018recognizes the perceptive capacity of all live beings,\u2019 she held that \u2018consciousness is a property of all living cells,\u2019 even the most elementary ones: \u2018Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Margulis\u2019s point is consonant with Whitehead\u2019s philosophy of organism, meaning that all physical reality possesses a degree of perceptive experience, although \u00a0Griffin says \u201csome of us may prefer to save the term \u2018consciousness\u2019 for higher types of experience.\u201d\u00a0 The fundamental point is that all of physical reality experiences, or, as he quotes William James, \u201cis a piece of full experience.\u201d\u00a0 In layman\u2019s language as applied to people, the mind and body are one.<\/p>\n

Having laid down this scientific\/philosophical foundation in the first four chapters (and in two more detailed appendices), Griffin turns to psychical research and how Whitehead and James believed in the need for such research and how James\u2019s radical empiricism supported the reality of parapsychological events as did Whitehead, who accepted telepathy.\u00a0\u00a0 Griffin writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cLike James, Whitehead affirmed the reality of non-sensory perception. Moreover, besides affirming its reality, Whitehead argued that non-sensory perception is fundamental, so that sensory perception is secondary. Far from being primary, sensory perception is derivative from non-sensory perception\u2026.Accordingly, there is nothing supernatural about telepathy; one becomes aware of the content of other minds through the same non-sensory mode of perception that tells us about causation, the real existence of physical objects, memory, and time.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Let me interject the simple but important point that it follows that in order to have any perceptions one must exist in physical form.)<\/p>\n

Turning to actual psychical research that was promoted by the establishment of The Society For Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882, Griffin, as previously mentioned, devotes four key chapters to mediums, telepathy, extrasensory perception, near-death out-of-body experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation. This research and its findings, while rejected by the modern scientific worldview, is widespread and quite believable, in various degrees.\u00a0 Griffin shows why this is so.\u00a0 The truth of such \u00a0psychic experiences is hard to refute since there are so many examples, which Griffin gives.\u00a0 He would agree with James who said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe concrete evidence for most of the \u2018psychic\u2019 phenomenon under discussion is good enough to hang a man twenty times over.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And James, of course, the longtime professor at Harvard University, is revered as one of the United States\u2019 most brilliant thinkers, not a fringe nut-case.\u00a0 This is also true for many of the others Griffin calls on to show how solid is the evidence for much psychic phenomena.\u00a0 Most readers will find these chapters very engaging and the most accessible.<\/p>\n

Finally, Griffin explains why the idea of a fine-tuned universe makes the most sense and how it dovetails with the belief in God, even as it runs counter to the mechanistic, materialistic, and atheistic view of many intellectuals. He writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new worldview advocated in this book requires a new understanding of the divine reality.\u00a0 Whitehead and [Charles] Hartshorne [an American process philosopher and theologian who developed Whitehead\u2019s work] advocated a view of the universe known as \u2018panentheism.\u2019\u00a0 The term means \u2018all-in-God.\u2019\u00a0 Panentheism [the world is in God] is thus distinguished from pantheism, on the one hand, and traditional theism, on the other.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Based on these factors \u2013 microbiology, Whitehead and James\u2019s philosophy, psychic research, etc. \u2013 Griffin concludes that there is ample evidence for life after death, not in the physical sense but in that of psyche or soul or spirit.\u00a0 He says that he has \u201clong believed in life after death,\u201d but that in offering this book with his argument for life after death as our \u201conly \u00a0empirical ground for hope\u201d since we all die, he does so reluctantly.\u00a0 \u201cI suggest this answer with fear and trembling, knowing that most of my friends and other people whose opinions I respect will hate this answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

That they would be surprised by his conclusion is a bit perplexing since he has long believed in life after death.\u00a0 I surely do not hate his answer and believe that he has made a strong case for his long-held belief.\u00a0 I share it, but differently.\u00a0 And I think that many of his scientifically-oriented friends and others may indeed agree with him more than he thinks, for his argument is rooted, not just in philosophy and theology, but in science.\u00a0 It is based on the idea of the non-duality between mind and matter, with the difference being that for him matter is conscious and for them it is not. They may come to accept the recent findings of microbiology and reject the \u201cassumption of materialists and dualists alike\u201d that \u201cneurons are insentient.\u201d\u00a0 They may reject some of their own presuppositions.\u00a0 For these debates take place at the highest level of abstraction where intellectuals dwell, and accepting one new scientific paradigm does not necessarily lead to belief in life after death.\u00a0 Far from it.\u00a0 That is when God enters the picture.<\/p>\n

Griffin wisely uses hardcore commonsense beliefs to refute dualism and materialism.\u00a0 But I propose that there is another hardcore, commonsense belief that he ignores: that people know and feel that they are flesh and bones.\u00a0 Out of this feeling comes our conceptions about life, not the other way around.\u00a0 The Spanish philosopher Miguel De Unamuno, in The Tragic Sense of Life<\/em>, put it this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cOur philosophy \u2013 that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life \u2013 springs from our feeling toward life itself \u2026. Man is said to be a reasoning animal.\u00a0 I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal \u2026. And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

David Griffin, relying on John Cobb\u2019s term, says the \u201cresurrection of the soul\u201d is a better term for life after death than the more traditional ones of \u201cimmortality of the soul\u201d and the \u201cresurrection of the body,\u201d since it splits the difference, thereby taking a bit of truth from both terms.<\/p>\n

But as I understand his argument in this book, he is doing what he cautions against via Whitehead: \u201c\u2026 he [Whitehead] said that one must avoid \u2018negations of what in practice is presupposed.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Griffin\u2019s presupposition is that both dualism and materialism are both wrong and panexperientialism is correct.\u00a0 He writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cPanexperientialism is based upon the supposition that we can and should think about the units comprising the physical world by analogy with our own experience, which we know from within. The supposition, in other words, is that the apparent difference in kind between our experience, or our \u2018mind,\u2019 and the entities comprising our bodies is an illusion, resulting from the fact that we know them in two different ways. We know our minds from within, by identity and memory, whereas in sensory perception of our bodies, as in looking in a mirror, we know them from without. Once we realize this, there is no reason to assume them really to be different in kind.\u201d<\/strong><\/em> [my emphasis]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So if that is true, I ask this question: why, if body and soul\/mind are inseparable and are what people are, why is it necessary to argue for their divorce in death?\u00a0 If God created them as one at birth, could not God recreate them as one in death?\u00a0 Why Griffin concludes that this is impossible or would require a miracle escapes me. \u00a0Maybe contemplating it is a bit too pedestrian and non-philosophical.<\/p>\n

Despite my point above, James and Whitehead on Life after Death<\/em> is another quintessentially brilliant volume from Griffin\u2019s pen.\u00a0 It forces you to think about difficult but essential matters.\u00a0 It may not be easy reading, but it may force you to imaginatively ask yourself, what, if anything were possible and life continued after death, you would want such a life to be like.\u00a0 Maybe the man David Ray Griffin wants it to be non-bodily.\u00a0 Maybe many do and can\u2019t imagine an alternative.\u00a0 But I can, and I hope for bodily resurrection.\u00a0 It\u2019s just what I am.<\/p>\n

Philosophy and theology can get very abstract and leave regular people in the dust.\u00a0 Another poet comes to mind, a counterpoint to T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yates, who wrote in \u201cAn Acre of Green Grass\u201d:<\/a><\/p>\n

Grant me an old man\u2019s frenzy,<\/em>
\nMyself I must remake<\/em>
\nTill I am Timon and Lear<\/em>
\nOr that William Blake<\/em>
\nWho beat upon the wall<\/em>
\nTill Truth obeyed his call;<\/em><\/p>\n

A mind Michael Angelo knew<\/em>
\nThat can pierce the clouds,<\/em>
\nOr inspired by frenzy<\/em>
\nShake the dead in their shrouds;<\/em>
\nForgotten else by mankind,<\/em>
\nAn old man\u2019s eagle mind.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would love to read what a frenzied David Ray Griffin has to say, now that I have read his philosophical logic. I can\u2019t help agreeing with Unamuno:<\/p>\n

And thus, in a philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The man of flesh, blood, and bones.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Edward Curtin is a widely published author and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. His new book is <\/em>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/a> \u2013 His website: Behind the Curtain<\/a> – email: edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Jun 2022 – A review of \u2018James and Whitehead on Life after Death\u2019 by David Ray Griffin – The meaning of death, and whether humans do or do not survive it in some form, has always obsessed people, from the average person to the great artists and thinkers. Death is the mother of philosophy and all the arts and sciences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":215325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[804,1169,1170,2538,805],"class_list":["post-215324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-belief","tag-death","tag-life","tag-reincarnation","tag-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}