LIFE AFTER DEATH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 5

LIFE AFTER DEATH

eir,-Although 1 was an interested listener, I was not very happy about the two of the "Life after Death" series of talks which‘I heard;-or about your editorial comment thereon, concerning artists: "Above all, they see around them so much wonder and miracle in earthly life that a future existence becomes a rational" expectation. " If you had -written "irrational," I could have agreed; but I know little of how artists think, _and your meaning might have escaped me therefore. Mr. Brassington well said that religion was concerned with ‘certainty and science with probability; doubt was: a vice in religion, a virtue in science. But he seemed to wish to establish some sort of logical contradiction between religious faith and scientific knowledge. These appear to be merely complementary, and his argument that. the after life is not proved, is, to my mind, insufficient. Scientific proof is not, I hope, a requisite of belief. If Mr. Brassington insists. too much on scientific scrutiny, he might reach the position of Chesterton’s acquaintance: "A man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back: on the position that he’ has no personal existence now

..in order to prove that he cannot go to Heaven, he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool." Father Johnston set out .a classical argument for belief in after life. Unfortunately it was one of those arguments from belief to belief, where the premise is no more likely to be admitted than the concliision, and ‘where the nonadmission of the premise would make. the whole thing meaningless. To his great credit, Father Johnston criticised the exclusion of the argument from revelation which alone, I think, is admissible to believers. To them who refuse to believe-or who, as Bertrand’ Russell puts it, see no reason to believe-one might as well say nothing.

ROBERT

MOUAT

(Christchurch),

Sir,-D. Martin, in your issue of February 29, maintains that if life after death is proved "salvation through faith would become an absurdity and salvation through proof must become its substitute." Proofs have been given (in Thomas Aquinas’s De Anima for instance) that man has a soul which, because it is spiritual, is indivisible, therefore cannot be annihilated, is immortal. In other words, the soul must live on after the death of the body. This however does not entail the obligation of faith. Rather, it is one of the bases on which a relation, between the Creator of that soul and the creature, may be sought for, and only if that basis is thought reasonable can it be superseded by faith, which in revelation finds a more detailed and explicit account of that relation. But, as Cobbett once said, it is one thing to be convinced and another to believe. Faith in revelation is not the necessary extension of the conclusions of natural theology. Many, though, find it a likely one.

P.

DRONKE

(Wellington) .