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Here's an interesting excerpt from Alson J. Smith's 1954 book Immortality: The Scientific Evidence.
As the title suggests, the bulk of Smith's book is devoted to presenting evidence for postmortem survival and related issues as gathered by psychical researchers and parapsychologists over the previous 75 years. Smith cites many interesting cases, including Hodgson's work with Leonora Piper, Drayton Thomas's "book tests" with Gladys Leonard, the famous "Chaffin will" episode, the cross correspondences, Pearl Curran ("Patience Worth"), J.W. Dunne's precognitive dreams, and J.B. Rhine's lab work on ESP and PK. The book is a little dated in its treatment of anthropological material, but overall it's an intelligent, well-researched presentation that serves as a very good introduction to this subject.
Toward the end, Smith widens his focus to consider the existence of God. He offers a section on scientific arguments from design that were current at the time. Then he goes on:
But our subject here is immortality. We have shown that science, or at any rate many scientists, has come to believe in God through an awareness of design in the universe. But does this belief in God necessarily postulate a belief in immortality?
Yes. Human consciousness is too great an accomplishment to be snuffed out as though it had never been after less than one brief century of existence. As [physicist and Nobel laureate Pierre Lecomte] du Nouy has shown, the whole end of the evolutionary process to date, proceeding slowly through eons, has been the achievement of consciousness. And consciousness (spiritual component, soul, mind) is a singular of which there is no plural, as Dr. Erwin Schroedinger, of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, points out in his book What Is Life?
A God, who, having bestowed the gift of consciousness on His creation, should then capriciously limit it or make it subject to accident or happenstance, would certainly not be the God of the intricate and majestic design of nature. Even less would He be the God who is very name is a contraction of the word Good.
Also, unless immortality is a fact, then God is in much the same position as the operator of a dog race, who entices the animals to run by keeping an electrically operated mechanical rabbit a few feet in front of them. In that case, the hope of eternity would be the deceptive gadget that keeps the human race plunging down its allotted three score years and ten. We may sometimes think (as many profess) that men would lead as good, honest, ethical lives without the hope of immortality as they do with it, but we would be guilty of overestimating man as a biological animal. Deprive him of his soul and his expectation, however faint, of its survival of bodily death, and you will have cut the nerve that gives meaning to life. Life would go on, but it would be an empty thing if we believed that there were no values that were not transitory and no morality that was not relative. The divine sanction that gives life significance would disappear with positive assurance that life ends in the grave or the crematorium.
I have pointed out earlier that most men do not believe in immortality merely on the basis of philosophical and religious affirmation of it, that they do not live actively as though it were a fact. This is true, but they do not live in disbelief of it either. If they do not believe it any longer because philosophers and theologians tell them it is so, neither have they given it up altogether as a vestigial remnant of an outmoded Age of Faith. What they (we) are doing is living in a sort of a state of suspended judgment about it, afraid to disbelieve and yet lacking the scientific knowledge (the only kind we have any faith in) to affirm. Thus we live at half-speed, failing to realize our spiritual potentialities, but keeping just ahead of bleak Nihilism.
Finally, also as indicated before, it is impossible to postulate a moral God without at the same time postulating another life beyond this one, a life in which there is some opportunity to correct the manifold injustices of this existence....
No, the immortality of the spiritual component, the individual human soul, is the inevitable corollary of a belief in God, no matter by what route we come to that belief. When Dr. J. B. Rhine made his memorable statement in Town Hall* that "The soul theory has been confirmed," he followed it with another statement. "In a similar speculative way, we can now at least rationally conceive of the existence of a universal spirit equivalent to the modern conception of God." [pp. 170--173]
*The talk cited is "The Relation Between Psychology and Religion," broadcast from Town Hall, New York, on June 11, 1946.
What struck me as particularly interesting were Smith's comments on how modern people live in "a state of suspended judgment ... at half-speed, failing to realize our spiritual potentialities, but keeping just ahead of bleak Nihilism."
Something to ponder as the New Year begins ...
Michael Prescott
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Reproduced by kind permission of Michael Prescott
