Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (21 page)

From our standpoint this is a bit like the ship of Theseus. We
need not make a big issue of whether you become person A or you
become person B. We might find ourselves regarding one of the
new people, or even both of them, as you-or we might find ourselves regarding them as newborns. An analogy used by the contemporary philosopher David Lewis is with a road that splits. We
do not think it is a big metaphysical issue whether we say that just
one branch is the old Turnpike Way, or whether both are, or
whether neither is.

But from your standpoint, it might seem the truth is crucial.
Either you will spend next year in the cold, or in the heat, or you
will not survive at all. There are just three crisp options. You can't
wrap your mind around vagueness and indeterminacy: `It will be a
bit as if you are in the tropics and a hit as if you are in the Arctic'
makes no sense. There is nobody at the later time for whom there is
some kind of mixture of tropic and Arctic, heat and cold. A is cold,
and B is hot. There is nobody for whom it is half-and-half. Equally,
`It will be a bit as if you don't exist and a bit as if you do' is just as
bad. Either you will be in the one place sweating it out, or in the
other place freezing, or you will have joined your ancestors. `You
will be there as both of them' just sounds like cant, as if someone
consoled me for never having seen Venice by saying `You will be
there as your son goes' Blow that. (As Woody Allen said of a similar consolation:'I don't want to achieve immortality through my
work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying!)

The queer thing is that we lose this sense of crispness when we
think of the past. Suppose in this world you learn that you now are
the result of a scrambling operation that involved two persons, C and D, who each contributed this and that to the person who you
are. That is interesting, but it does not give you the same wrenching, urgent need to know. If you learn that C spent Christmas 199o
on a ship and I) spent it up a mountain, but you can't remember either, you need not obsess over the question'Where was Ion Christmas Day 1990?' If the scrambling gave you vague awareness of both
experiences that is fine too: you are someone for whom it is a bit as
if you climbed a mountain that day, and a bit as if you went sailing.

It is chilling to realize that at the later tune there need he nobody
who is upset about identity. Person A in the Arctic has a partial
continuity with you now, and so does person B in the tropics. Each
of then can look back with nostalgia on some of your doings. And
if they like they can wish for more or less of your parts or your psychological traits and memories, just as we can look hack with nostalgia on our earlier selves, and wish to be more or less like them.
We can grieve over lost powers and memories, or rejoice over
gained knowledge and maturity, according to taste.

Some people think there are definite solutions when we look to
the future. They might pin their faith on their identity surviving so
long as the actual brain that they currently have survives, in working order. Locke, of course, denied this, since continuity of a func-
tioningbrain by no means guarantees continuity of consciousness:
the brain might be'reprogrammed, or reconfigured so that memory and personality all change entirely. And in any event, we might
imagine that some scrambling operations pick and choose where
bits of the brain go. Other people might pin their faith on a Lockcan continuity of'soft ware' rather than hardware. But they face the
difficulty that in a scrambling world we might he able to copy the software at will, creating many future people with identical 'memories' and personality traits.

In short, there seems to be no metaphysical match between the
simplicity we imagine when we look to the future, and the complexities and vagueness that scrambling can bring about.

Some thinkers get impatient with this kind of scenario. They say
that our notions of identity are tailored to the real world, where,
perhaps fortunately, `scrambling' operations are impossible. They
say we should let identity look after itself in these bizarre, invented
cases. My own opinion is that this is wrong. I agree with these
thinkers that we should lose interest in questions of identity when
bizarre possibilities are introduced. But I do not think we should
lose interest in this feature of our thinking about ourselves: that the
options in front of us seem to have a crisp determinate nature
whatever the vaguenesses that beset our animal features and parts.
I suspect it is a feature that fuels many peoples' thoughts about
problems of life and death. It motivates hopes, and faiths. It motivates some people to get their brains put into frozen suspension, in
the hope that one day they will unfreeze and begin a new life, when
technology permits. It motivates Reid's belief that the soul is simple. A simple soul, that could not be divided, is just what is needed
to preserve the three crisp options. It goes one place or another.

Perhaps however our attachment to the crisp options rests on illusion: the same kind of illusion as the imaginings we considered
in the last section. There we insisted that no `I' was transferred into
the imagined scenarios. Here we would have to insist that no definite `I' is to be introduced into these future scenarios. Once the
facts about which current living human animal is going to be present go vague and indeterminate, then facts about who now is
going to be present then go vague and indeterminate as well. Our
propensity to think otherwise is an illusion. It might help to dispel
the illusion to remember the reason why Hume could not find his
`self, and why the Kantian explanation of the need to think in
terms of a self at all gives us a purely structural motivation. A
nugget or atom of me, however simple, cannot do what we need
the self for.

But I think I can promise the reader that the idea of those three
crisp options is very hard to suppress. Thinking can help, but it is
hard for it to destroy the illusions of the self.

So the `real distinction' Descartes thought he had provedCartesian dualism-does not die easily. The reader is free to try to
protect it against the line of thought of this chapter and the preceding two. For what it is worth, Kant himself tried to leave room
for the immortality of the soul. His rather feeble reason is that we
need to suppose that goodness brings happiness, and since it does
not do so always or even reliably in this life, there had better be another life in which it does. Then people get their just deserts. Most
philosophers think that this is not Kant at his best. But the religious
dimension certainly affects the thinking of many people on this
matter. So we shall turn to look more directly at that.

FOR SOME PEOPLE, thinking about the soul is next door to thinking about religion. And thinking about religion is for them one of
the most important of life's occupations. For others it is almost a
complete waste of time. In this chapter I introduce some of the arguments that surround this area. The arguments, at least, are not a
waste of time, for they introduce important principles of thought.

BELIEFS AND OTHER THINGS

Beliefs are supposed to be true. `I believe that p' and `I believe that
it is true that p' come to the same thing. You cannot say, `I believe
that fairies exist, but I don't think it is true that fairies exist: And religious people apparently believe various things, which other people do not believe.

But it is not actually obvious that religion is a matter of truth, or that religious states of mind are to he assessed in terms of truth and
falsity. For perhaps religion is not a matter of beliefs, and these
states of mind are not beliefs. Accepting a religion maybe more like
enjoying a poem, or following the football. It might he a matter of
immersion in a set of practices. Perhaps the practices have only an
emotional point, or a social point. Perhaps religious rituals only
serve necessary psychological and social ends. The rituals of birth,
coming of age, or funerals do this. It is silly to ask whether a marriage ceremony is true or false. People do not go to a funeral service
to hear something true, but to mourn, or to begin to stop mourning, or to meditate on departed life. It can he as inappropriate to
ask whether what is said is true as to ask whether Keats's ode to a
Grecian urn is true. The poem is successful or not in quite a different dimension, and so is Chartres cathedral, or a statue of the Buddha. They may be magnificent, and moving, and awe-inspiring,
but not because they make statements that are true or false.

Some think that this is all there is to it. So if someone says `God
exists, it is not like saying `Abominable snowmen exist' (where it is
an empirical question whether they do) or `Prime numbers between 20 and 3o exist' (a mathematical question). It is more like ex-
pressingjoy, or expressing fear (or, more sinister, expressing hatred
against outsiders or infidels). Because of this, what is said is immune from criticism as true or false. At best, we might scrutinize
the states of mind involved, and try to see whether they are admirable or not.

But this way of understanding religion has not been common.
While admitting the emotional and social side, people have taken
themselves to be making definite claims about the world-literally true claims, for which there is argument, and evidence. On this
view, religious belief is like other belief: an attempt to depict what
the world is like, what things it contains, and what explains the
events in it. On this view, a funeral service is not true or false, but
some of the things said in it are, such as that we will rise again from
the dead. On this view, people sincerely saying that they will be resurrected are not choosing a metaphorical, or poetical, or emotionally resonant way of saying something else, or of putting a certain
colour on the ordinary world. They are announcing something
they expect, as literally as they might expect to take a journey, or expect the appearance of a friend.

In this chapter, I shall discuss religious beliefs in terms of argument, reason, and evidence. We suppose them to be intended as
true, and therefore to answer to our best ways of getting at the
truth. It is only when they are taken in this sense that they have interested most philosophers, although some moral philosophers,
notably Friedrich Nietzsche, have railed against the moral attitudes and emotions (humility, self-abasement, and compassion)
that they think certain religions encourage.

To jump the gun a little, I am going to present a fair number of
reasons against supposing that anything recognizable as religious
belief is true. Some readers may feel threatened by this. They can
take some comfort from the tradition in theology that the more
unlikely a belief is to be true, the more meritorious is the act of
faith required to believe it. But at the end of the chapter, the restless
spirit of reflection will cause us to look at that view as well. I start,
however, by considering the classical philosophical arguments for
the existence of God: the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the design argument, and arguments from revelation
and miracles. We end by thinking more about the nature of faith,
belief, and commitment.

ANSELM'S ARGUMENT: DREAMBOATS
AND TURKEYS