Rethinking the Eternal: D.Z. Phillips, Immortality, and Eternal LifeLoyd Ericson, Claremont Graduate UniversitySMPT May 2009In his book,

Death and Immortality

, D.Z. Phillips

asks the question, “Does belief in immortality

rest on a

mistake?”

His answer to this question is in the affirmative, arguing that if immortality meansthe survival of the personal soul or conscience after death, then such a belief is confused. This, heargues, arises from mistaking the religious concept of eternal life for something it is not, and arriving atwhat is ultimately philosophical non-sense. For Phillips, the Christian concept of eternal life does notdenote the endless survival of the soul after death, but rather refers to the type of life that one ought tobe living and attaining in our present mortality.In this paper I will look at the three main philosophical arguments which Phillips uses to arguethat the common belief of immortality is a mistake, and show how the divergent conceptions of the souland the afterlife in Latter-day Saint theology are such that his arguments cannot be applied. However,while his arguments for confusion in the traditional Christian thinking are negligible in Mormonism, Iwill show that Phillips

‟

s conception of eternal life is one that can have considerable traction for Latter-day Saints as an alternative view of eternal life. Finally, I will argue that for moral reasons, Latter-daySaints ought to shift away from the traditional concept of eternal life as an eschatological immortalgoal, and instead adopt an understanding that places eternal life within the grasp of our present mortalcondition.The first point of confusion Phillips elucidates deals with the conceptual problem of a belief inthe continued existence of an immaterial soul. Reflecting on what it might mean to say that someone

has survived death, he writes, “If we hear that someone has survived an accident, we know what it

meant. But if we hear that someone has survived his death, we do not know what to make of these

D.Z. Phillips,

Death and Immortality

(London: Macmillan, 1970), 1.

words.” Now of course these words are often used to describe those who may have managed to avoid

death in a tragic accident, or those who were thought to be dead, but turned out to still be alive

—

forexample Phillips gives two possible news hea

dlines: “Torpedo Crew Survive Encounter with Death,”and “Torpedo Crew Member Survives Death”—

yet in both of these examples, we are referring topersons who have not actually died. On the other hand, in our common Christian context, when we talk about a loved one surviving death we are referring to persons who are actually (meaning physically or

biologically) dead and yet continue to live. Thus, according to Phillips, “the immediate problem facing

someone who believes in immortality is to explain how it is possible for human beings to survive the

dissolution of their bodies.”

If, when we talk of the immortal survival of a person after death, we are not referring to thesurvival our bodies, what is it then that continues to survive. Phillips points out that a common

Christian response is that “when we die, what lives on is some kind of non

material body.”

Whilesome have argued that whether or not a non-material body continues to exist after death is an issue of empirical science and not a logical one, Phil

lips disagrees. According to him, “Philosophers . . . have

the right to say something about the conditions which must be satisfied if these non-material bodies are

to be said to exist.”

When we talk of something existing (as opposed to not existing), we are usinglanguage tied to concepts surrounding material bodies. Our discussion of the existence of

things

depends on related concepts of verification, location, measurability, size, etc. that are all notions of materiality. When we talk of something existing in this sense, we are talking about somethingmaterially existing. Thus the concept of the existence of a non-material body that survives death doesnot just rely on an empirical question of whether or not it is shown that such a body exists, but aconceptual question of whether or not it even makes sense to talk of the continued existence of a non-material body. Because talk of existence is the talk of material existence, according to Phillips, the

Ibid., 2.

Ibid.

3notion of the continued existence of a non-material body after death is nonsensical.For Phillips however, this is not the only point of confusion. Even if we grant that there areimmaterial (or even material) bodies that do continue to exist and that these bodies are the soul, to saythat these bodies are the same person as that of the deceased is the second point of confusion whichPhillips argues lies behind the common Christian belief in immortality. This is the belief that the person

and soul is in some way distinct from the body such that the body “can b

e thought of as the prisonwithin which the soul is temporarily restricted, the house within which it is lodged for a time, or as thesuit of clothes which adorns a person for the moment. The essence of a person, what it means to be aperson, is identifiab

le with the mind or the soul.”

At death, while the body dies and is no more the soulof the person is what continues to live. It is important with this belief that the soul that remains afterdeath is the same soul and same person as it was when the person was living, and not merely a remnant

of them (such as a mere appendage). As Phillips puts it, “If John Jones can be identified with his soul,

then if John Jones

‟

s soul survives John Jones

‟

s death, John Jones has survived his death. Unless one

‟

ssoul is o

neself, its survival would be of no interest to one.”

The confusion lies in believing that the person is somehow totally distinct from the body andthat our conceptions of what and who a person is can be understood separately from our interactionswith that person as a material living body. According to Phillips,The notion of the self is not the notion of an inner substance, necessarily private, whoseexistence and nature we must guess or infer from bodily behaviour which is but a pale reflectionof the reality behind it. Persons are not mysterious entities that we never meet directly or havedirect knowledge of. On the contrary, we do meet persons, come to know them to varyingdegrees, sometimes know them better than they know themselves, share or not share theirexperience and so on. . . . [T]hese features of human existence depend on there being ways of life in which human expectations, plans, and disappointments, ways of working and playing,which people have in common. . . . [U]nless there were a common life which people share,which they were taught and came to learn, there could be no notion of a person. . . . [W]hat itmeans to be a person cannot be divorced from these common features of human life.

Ibid., 3. For more on Phillips on the soul, see DZ Phillips,

Religion and Friendly Fire: Examining Assumptions inContemporary Philosophy of Religion

(Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), 133-44.

Phillips,

Death and Immortality,

Ibid., 5-6.