V I I I . — D I S C U S S I O N S

RESURRECTION BODIES AND RESURRECTION WORLDS

HICK attempts to convince us of the logical respectability of theChristian concept of the resurrection of the body by means of threeexamples.1 His ultimate goal is to demonstrate the logical viabilityof St. Paul's concept of the spiritual body (I Corinthians, 15), whichHick renames " resurrection body ", raised by God to live in aspiritual world (" resurrection world "). His three examples are asfollows :

(1) A participant at a learned gathering in America suddenly dis-appears and, at the same moment, an exact replica appears inAustralia.

(2) The participant at the American gathering does not suddenlydisappear but suddenly dies. At the moment he dies an exactreplica, as he was just before he died, appears in Australia, whilethe corpse still resides in America.

(3) The person dies in America and the replica (as a resurrection body)appears not in Australia but in a resurrection world that is notspatially related to our own world.

Hick claims that in the first two examples we could accept thatthe person appearing in Australia was the same as the person whodisappeared from, or who died in, America. And by stretching thepoint still further we should say the same of the person appearing inthe resurrection world.

We should have qualms even about his first example, where wemight want to know why we should not regard the new person asonly a replica of the old. His second example is even more puzzling.He commences his article by arguing that, in view of the currentphilosophical climate which eschews all talk of a disembodied mindsurviving death, we should the more readily examine the resurrectiontheory. But this seems to throw the whole burden of the samenessof the person onto the sameness of the body. Yet it cannot be thatthe body in Australia is the same as that in America. The old,worn-out body in America exists at the same time as the new body inAustralia.

However, even if we allow Hick's first two examples, we shouldremain suspicious about the third. We might notice, first, a subtlechange that occurs in Hick's account of how it is decided that thereplica Mr. X is the same person as the original Mr. X. It is, I think,significant that in his first two examples the matter is decided by Mr.X's American colleagues. They fly to Australia to inspect the replica,

1 Hick, " Theology and Verification ", Theology Today (April 1960). Re-printed in Flew (ed), Body, Mind and Death, The Macmillan Company, 1964.The same argument is also used in Hick's Philosophy of Religion, Prentice-Hall,1963. Further references are to Body, Mind and Death.

581

at National Sun Y

at-sen University on A

ugust 20, 2014http://m

ind.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from

582 A. OLDING:

and observe how similar he is to their vanished colleague, how heseems to remember being at the American conference, how he thinksof himself as the original Mr. X and so on. " I suggest that facedwith all these circumstances his colleagues would soon, if not immedi-ately, find themselves thinking of him and treating him as theindividual who had so inexplicably disappeared from their midst"(p. 272).

But now, in the third example, the emphasis changes. Wecannot consult the expert opinion of Mr. X's American colleaguesbecause they cannot make the trip to Resurrection Land. Hick'squestion, then, becomes : " In these circumstances how does Mr. Xknow that he has been resurrected or re-created V (p. 273-4). Thedecision as to who he really is now rests squarely upon Mr. Resur-rection X's own shoulders. Unfortunately, Hick treats this as astraightforward question. Mr. Resurrection X remembers being onhis death-bed and is quite sure that he did, in fact, die because of thepeople he now meets, e.g. his dead " relatives ".

In one respect this example is similar to the first two in that thereplica " remembers " being in America ; and, in so far as " mem-ory " is a guide to continuing personal identity, he can claim to bethe person he " remembers " being. But precisely because Mr. X'scolleagues cannot now drop in for tea the third example is radicallydifferent. It is not merely that Mr. Resurrection X meets, and isquizzed by a different set of people from his American friends (as ifthe Americans did not bother to go to Australia but left the investi-gation to their Australian counterparts), but that resurrection personsare a different kind of persons. Surrounded by Americans or Aus-tralians, the dispute concerning Mr. X's identity goes on amongordinary examples of persons who quite patently are what they are.In Resurrection Land every one of the persons he meets is peculiar,in that each one has appeared from thin air. In the Land of Resur-rection everyone's credentials are suspect.

Persons in the resurrection world will, according to Hick, have nomore difficulty about their own identity, or in identifying others, thanwe on Earth. We may easily grant this, if we mean only that Mr.Resurrection X today is the same as Mr. Resurrection X yesterday ;or that he will have no difficulty in recognising Resurrection AuntFlora whenever he meets her. But if we mean to imply more thanthis, that Mr. Resurrection X has every reason to believe he is thesame person as old-style Mr. X, then the question has been begged." Mr. X meets and recognises a number of relatives and friends andhistorical personages whom he knows to have died " (p. 274). But,as far as we know, he has not done this. He has met resurrectionrelatives, resurrection friends and resurrection historical personages.That these are the same persons who died on Earth, and that he is thesame person who died on Earth, is precisely what has to be proved.

I shall now try to show that other important conceptual strandsare not merely feeling the strain but have parted. We should

at National Sun Y

at-sen University on A

ugust 20, 2014http://m

ind.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from

RESURRECTION BODIES AND RESURRECTION WORLDS 583

notice, first, that a good part of what plausibility Hick's thesis has isderived from the fact that we know how to ascribe personal identityto a person who merely travels to Australia from America. Clearly,this should be the master example, the case where there is no doubtthat the person arriving in Australia is the same as the one who leftAmerica. It is the concepts of this master example which are beingstretched to accommodate disappearing and appearing persons. Thatthis is recognized by Hick is shown in his discussion of his firstexample.

' 'We may suppose, for example, that a deputation of the colleaguesof the man who disappeared fly to Australia to interview the replicaof him which is reported there, and find that he is in all respects butone exactly as though he had travelled from say, Princeton to Melbourne,by conventional means. The only difference is that he describes how,as he was sitting listening to Dr. Z reading a paper, on blinking hiseyes he suddenly found himself sitting in a different room listeningto a different paper by an Australian scholar " (p. 272, my italics).

That we are able to assert sameness of person, then, in Hick's threeexamples seems to be logically parasitic upon the straightforwardcase of a person travelling from place to place. In his first twoexamples it is, in many respects, as if the person had travelled fromthe one place to the other in a perfectly ordinary way. Now how is itthat we are able to say this ? Clearly it must depend on the factthat it is logically possible for such a journey to take place. As amatter of fact there was no journey ; what was involved was some-thing more like a quantum jump, but there might have been such atrip. We know perfectly well what it would mean to say that Mr. Xhad. journeyed from America to Australia.

What, then, of Hick's third example ? If this is to be analogousto the first two then we should be able to say that it is in somerespects as if the person had travelled to the resurrection world.But such a journey is logically impossible. Whatever else our bodiescan, or cannot do, they certainly cannot (logically cannot) take atrip to the resurrection world. This follows directly from the sup-position that the resurrection body " is located in a resurrection worldwhich does not stand in any spatial relationship with the physicalworld " (p. 273). If A and B do not stand in a spatial relationship toeach other then it is impossible to travel from A to B. At least onestrand of Hick's conceptual rubber band has been stretched beyondbreaking point.

There are other strands which look as if they also are about to part.In his first two examples the replica appears at the very moment theoriginal either vanishes or dies. Now this, I think, is significant forit is one more feature of these examples that lends plausibility to theclaim that we have to deal with the same person. The plausibility isgained in at least two ways. First, the coincidence in time of the twoevents might, in itself, be sufficient to persuade us that there mustbe a very intimate connection between them; so that taken in

at National Sun Y

at-sen University on A

ugust 20, 2014http://m

ind.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from

584 A. OLDING:

conjunction with the marvellous resemblance between them wemight well be persuaded that we have to deal with the same body.But, secondly, and more important, it seems that by the replicaappearing at the very same moment that the original vanishes, anydoubts we might have about bodily continuity are somewhatassuaged. For if the one body vanished in America, and the replicaappeared in Australia two years later, we might well wonder if wehave to do with one and the same person ; or if we believe that it isthe same person we might wonder where on Earth he had got toduring those two years. We have, in our examples, at least kepttemporal continuity.

Now what, once more, of Hick's crucial third example ? If Hickwere able to say that a resurrection body appears in the resurrectionworld at the same moment that the physical body dies or vanishes,he might have succeeded in retaining something which is at leastanalogous to bodily continuity. But, once more, we must ask if heis entitled to say this. To speak about the simultaneity of events inthe two different worlds presupposes that bodies in the two differentworlds might be temporally related even though they are notspatially related, and it is not clear that this is possible. Consider,for example, a nebula in our own universe that explodes. Anastronomer observing the event, and knowing how far away thenebula is from us, can calculate how long ago the explosion tookplace. But suppose a similar explosion occurs in the resurrectionworld and we ask our astronomer how long ago it occurred. Hewould not know where to begin. This is not simply because he hasnot been able to observe the explosion, but rather because it islogically impossible for him to have the relevant data to perform thecalculation. The nebula is no distance away from him, meaning notthat it is on top of him but that it is not spatially related to him.

It might be objected here that some idea of a temporal relationshipbetween the two worlds might be obtained in the following way.Suppose a person noticed, just before dying, that the clock in hisbedroom stands at five o'clock. At the moment of the appearanceof the resurrection body the resurrection clock on the resurrectionmantlepiece of his new home stands at half-past five. If there werea series of such incidents, in which the newly appearing resurrectionpersons notice a half-hour time difference between their " memories "of Greenwich mean-time and the time of their resurrection, could wenot then establish a temporal relationship between the death bedscene on Earth and the resurrection scene on the resurrection Earth ?In this case we could take Greenwich mean-time as our standard andsay that resurrection time is half an hour in front of us.

Clearly, this will not do. It will not demonstrate that there is atemporal relationship between the two worlds, merely that there is arelationship between the two time-series, each in its separate world.And this follows quite simply because, from the start, we have con-structed the resurrection world so that it resembles our world. To

at National Sun Y

at-sen University on A

ugust 20, 2014http://m

ind.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from

RESURRECTION BODIES AND RESURRECTION WORLDS 585

try to make sense of the view that resurrection time is half an hourin front of our own might involve answering the awkward question :How far in advance are the clocks at places en route from Greenwichto Resurrection Greenwich ?

If it is the case that no temporal relationship can exist betweenthe two worlds (and it seems to me that the onus is now on Hick toshow that one could exist) then one more strand of his argument hasbroken. For, as we have seen in his first two examples, the replicaappearing at the same time as the body in America disappeared ordied was a substitute for bodily continuity. But now it seems tomake no sense to say that the resurrection body appears at the sametime as the physical body dies. No time elapses between the deathof the physical body and the appearance of the resurrection body, notbecause the two events are simultaneous but because they are nottemporally related.

That the two worlds are not temporally related has further disas-trous consequences for Hick. In particular, problems arise when weattempt to ascribe memory to the resurrection person for, we mightthink, it is a logically necessary condition of memory that it refers tothe past. Hick says of the resurrection person : " He remembersdying ; or rather he remembers being on what he took to be hisdeath-bed, and becoming progressively weaker until, presumably, helost consciousness " (p. 274). But the resurrection person cannotremember being on his death-bed, because the death-bed scene is nota past event. It is an event that occurs in another world.

University of Waikato A. OLDING

at National Sun Y

at-sen University on A

ugust 20, 2014http://m

ind.oxfordjournals.org/D

ownloaded from