Van Inwagen’s Christian Materialism and Resurrection of the Dead

Christian philosopher/metaphysician Peter van Inwagen combines a wholly materialist ontology of the human person (Van Inwagen, 2007a) with a committed belief in the resurrection of the dead as the Christian hope of eternal life. His thesis is that “dualism is a Greek import into Christianity and that the Christian resurrection of the dead does not presuppose dualism” (Van Inwagen, 1995, 2007b).

He states, “Most Christians seem to have a picture of the afterlife that can without too much unfairness be described as ‘Platonic.’ When one dies, one's body decays, and what one is, what one has been all along, an immaterial soul or mind or self, continues to exist”—a picture and a doctrine that Van Inwagen finds “unsatisfactory, both as a Christian and as a philosopher” (Van Inwagen, 1995).

He reflects, “when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I seem to discover that I am a living animal. And, therefore, dualism seems to me to be an unnecessarily complicated theory about my nature unless there is some fact or phenomenon or aspect of the world that dualism deals with better than materialism does” (which he does not find). As for the argument from phenomenal consciousness, he admits, “It is a mystery how a material thing could have sensuous properties [phenomenal consciousness],” but then retorts, “simply and solely because it is a mystery how anything could.”

Biblical Exegesis and Dualism

Van Inwagen rejects dualism biblically as well as philosophically. After examining biblical texts in the Old Testament, Van Inwagen finds “little to support dualism in the Old Testament, and much that the materialist will find congenial.”

His analysis of New Testament texts requires more elaborate (some may say more convoluted) exegesis: “twisting and turning, impaled on intransigent texts,” in Van Inwagen's own self-deprecating words. For example, Jesus's parable of the “Rich Man” and his words to the “Good Thief” on the cross (“Today you shall be with me in Paradise.”). Moreover, Paul's repeated representation of death as “sleep” cannot be discounted.

Resurrection, Material Continuity, and Identity

An important philosophical argument for Christian dualism, Van Inwagen says, is that the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead seems to presuppose dualism. “For if I am not something immaterial, if I am a living animal, then death must be the end of me. If I am a living animal, then I am a material object. If I am a material object, then I am the mereological sum of certain atoms. But if I am the mereological sum of certain atoms today, it is clear from what we know about the metabolisms of living things that I was not the sum of those same atoms a year ago” (Van Inwagen, 1995).

For the materialist who believes in the biblical resurrection of the dead as a literal future event, as Van Inwagen does, the fact that the atoms of which we are composed are in continuous flux is a “stumbling block.” He asks, “How shall even omnipotence bring me back—me, whose former atoms are now spread pretty evenly throughout the biosphere?” This question does not confront the dualist, who will say that there is no need to bring me back because I have never left. But what shall the materialist say?” (Van Inwagen, 1995).

Van Inwagen challenges Divine power: “For what can even omnipotence do but reassemble? What else is there to do? And reassembly is not enough, for I have been composed of different atoms at different times.” This leads to the conundrum of myriad duplicates.

In the end, Van Inwagen concludes, “there would seem to be no way around the following requirement: if I am a material thing, then, if a man who lives at some time in the future is to be I, there will have to be some sort of material and causal continuity between this matter that composes me now and the matter that will then compose that man.”

Van Inwagen finds this requirement looking very much like Paul's description of the resurrection: “when I die, the power of God will somehow preserve something of my present being, a gumnos kókkos [bare/naked grain/kernel^[1]], which will continue to exist throughout the interval between my death and my resurrection and will, at the general resurrection, be clothed in a festal garment of new flesh” (Van Inwagen, 1995).

While Van Inwagen would be the first to admit that “oddly enough,” few Christian dualists have been persuaded by his arguments against a Christian immortal soul, I [RLK] (for one) consider his arguments probative, disruptive, insightful (if not dispositive) (Van Inwagen, 2007b).

Footnote

[1]. Gumnos kókkos (bare/naked grain/kernel) comes from 1 Corinthians 15:37, referring to how on Earth God could resurrect the dead. Here, in context: 1 Corinthians 15:35–38, King James Version—“But some man will say, ‘How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?’ Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare [naked] grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.”