One-life theism, even combined with some afterlife, faces decisive moral objections. It is a worldview that is bound to be unfair, and obviously so. Yet most intellectual theists in the west keep silent about this. Are we so insecure that we cannot discuss this issue more openly and widely?
One-God-one-life models cannot account for unfair circumstances faced by many children. This is especially true where the causes of child tragedies are natural ones. A visit to children’s hospitals devoted to cancer would remind us of this. Not that we need to visit such places. Horrifying initial circumstances for humans (and countless animals) seem to be all around us.
Physicalist intellectual colleagues simply point to cosmic randomness. For them, there is no ultimate moral sense to life, and no cosmic justice. I understand them, but I’m not with them. The naturalist typical exclamations are not adequate.
Be that as it may, the main targets of this essay are the billions of religious believers who accept supernatural models of cosmic purpose, and embrace some ultimate justice, while denying that we have more than one life. Abrahamic theists, particularly theologians, should have blown the whistle on the haphazard distribution of life-opportunities long ago! Unearned starting points for individuals — be these starting points favorable or unfavorable – do not fit in a just universe. In particular unearned starting points do not fit with the need for ultimate divine rewards to be linked to spiritual/moral performance in this, a single, life. In simple terms, what are we to make of children who are born disease-prone, and do not survive past the early years of life? Is moral virtue demanded from some humans only? Is God not just? Are some humans intrinsically less worthy than others? What to make of Job’s first set of children who are sacrificed for his moral testing, and do not get a second life?
If we had more than one life, what looks locally as undeserved harm might turn out to be either deserved or chosen, when viewed from a larger perspective (of a soul-being that takes on many roles). However, the Abrahamic religions have generally rejected multi-lives models. Thus, in accepting a benevolent and just God, they are forced to engage in convoluted mental gymnastics to deal with many forms of “the problem of evil.” These mental gymnastics cannot succeed.
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If the purpose of humans in this earthly realm includes moral testing and achievement, then what is the point of children whose lives are truncated?
Could it be that moral attainments are not part of the purpose of life? This option is not really available to western theists. Moral merit is at the center of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim views of life. The notions of sin, commandments, virtue, repentance, forgiveness, absolution, etc. are foundational in such world-views. There are differences as to what constitutes sin, virtue, etc. among various denominations. However, the significance of moral merit cannot be denied.
Is achieving moral merit consistent with single-life models of theism? It cannot be. The cases of children whose lives are truncated by natural causes rules this out. (Undeserved harm, generally, may rule this out).
My solution, as a theist-leaning person, is to point at models of the universe that include many lives, or reincarnation. Such views, of course, are not new. These have predominated in the world of India for thousands of years. Here in the west, we tend not to take multiple lives seriously. This tendency is especially present among the educated classes and mainstream media influencers. Even in the many religiously affiliated universities in the US and elsewhere this topic is mostly taboo. (Interestingly, polls in both the US and parts of Western Europe indicate that one in four of us believe in some form of multi-lives reincarnation).
How do proponents of one-life theistic models deal with the harsh fact of life-prospects denied to some children, but not others? There are some well-known answers. However, they are scandalously feeble.
1. One standard answer appeals to future compensation for children who were deprived of a full life. The compensation is through afterlife realms, like an everlasting heaven. Innocent children who die very young perhaps go straight to heaven.
This will not do. These children would attain the ultimate reward without earning it, merely through the bad luck of dying young. They would get the everlasting reward, without moral accomplishments. The rest of us who get a chance at a full life would have to attain heaven by earning it. We would often need to pass difficult moral tests. Such a cosmic model would be unfair to normal adults, because it would demand much more from them. A just god could not permit this flagrant moral disparity.
2. A second response relies on a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. The ways of God perhaps should be treated as opaque to us. We should not apply our ideas of human justice and fairness to the ways of God…
Perhaps some can accept this approach. I cannot. Either we accept some view of God as well-intentioned, or not. If we do, we should expect equal treatment, equal opportunity, equal justice, (at least for humans, on the assumption of human equal worth). If we don’t accept God as “benevolent” in human terms, then “divine” teachings become obscure, unpredictable and dangerous. These teachings will open the door to morally insane commands that purport to come from God, such as the utter destruction of the Amalekites in the Hebrew Bible, or the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, of 1978. We must rely on knowable moral standards to be able to separate genuine divine teachings from nonsense or madness. Jesus famously warned about false prophets, stating: “You shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew, 7:15-20). There cannot be opaqueness about which fruits are generally good or bad.
3. A third response claims that the suffering of innocents is allowed so that others may be tested. One form of testing involves seeing how we adults respond to the suffering and or death of innocents. Are we compassionate or are we indifferent? How does Job respond to his losses?
This is a valid point, but surely those innocents that get so used need compensation and a second chance to prove themselves. Again, they cannot just be pawns.
A second form of testing relies on the need for some haphazard distribution of good fortune and bad fortune. If bad fortune were always correlated with bad deeds – if only bad guys were to get cancer — agents would quickly learn to do the right things, but for selfish reasons. They would choose goodness to avoid misfortune in this life. To avoid such shallow morality, some unpredictable and undeserved harm is necessary for genuine moral testing. The short lives of some innocent children might constitute such necessary collateral damage.
Unfortunately, according to a one-life model, such haphazardly undeserved harm would be final. Those who suffer it remain pawns for the moral testing of others. A child whose life is truncated cannot be a tool!
4. A fourth response introduces an intermediate after-life realm, like a purgatory, before one enters an everlasting reward-place like heaven. Perhaps short-lived children can be placed there temporarily.
This also will not do because it creates another form of injustice. Typical conceptions of such a realm involve some process of purification or purgation… (assuming that children who die young need such purifications). Such a place does not typically include a setting for moral testing and moral development. If it did, it would have to reproduce the key precarious and tempting conditions of this life, so that moral merit becomes earned, and not simply acquired through time spent passively being “purified.” If purgatory involved some active process of purification, or better, if purgatory were a place of moral schooling, based on precarious and tempting conditions, where choosing correctly is crucial…, then it would be in effect a second life. The model would become a multi-lives theistic model!
If a purgatory does not involve moral testing, then we are back to option 1, with some of us entering heaven without moral accomplishments.
5. A fifth response would deny that attainment of moral merit is an important element and purpose for human existence. Perhaps we are mainly here for other reasons, such as enjoying unique earthly experiences, through human and animal sensory and emotional constitutions. Perhaps the choice-making, free-willed, element of our lives is insignificant or even illusory.
Such a view would make us sentient but robotic play-things (for God?). Could we be tools through whom a spiritual superbeing gets to experience unique sensations and emotions, etc.? While there are passages in texts such as the letters of Paul, the Old Testament, the Quran, and no doubt elsewhere, that indicate that we are mere vessels — and that God is the potter, and we are the pots — that is not the dominant view of Abrahamic theologians. Even if it were, the idea of a “benevolent” God who is like a parent who “owns” the children, and will use them whimsically as mere resources, is morally offensive. Fundamentally, if we are indeed in a Matrix-world where agency and free will are illusions, … then any attempt to make moral sense of things would be pointless. Let’s assume we’re not in such a world.
6. A sixth response would view “sin” not as a state resulting from individual choice-making, but as a state inherited from primordial actions of our fore-parents, or from some devilish source.
Needless to say, such views are morally indefensible. A benevolent God could not allow such sources of moral guilt. Individuals cannot be held accountable for a condition over which they had no say (whether this be a negative moral score, or some other mysterious stain/pollution). To punish or reward a person because of the sins or merits of parents, or of others, is patently unfair.
The fact that so many of us have accepted such morally scandalous views for centuries is baffling and disconcerting!
If we continue to assume a benevolent purpose behind this world, the attainment of moral virtue, through free will, must remain an important goal for members our species. In such a setting, more than one life is needed to deal with the haphazard distribution of chances faced by children, as we’ve seen.
Even aside from the cosmic treatment of children, we have other moral reasons for a multi-lives scheme.
Let’s assume that moral virtue is an important goal in life. What does it involve? It involves learning to respect beings that matter – beginning with ourselves and those close to us, but extending to other humans, and then to other beings with inner lives. Such respect would begin in not harming them needlessly. It might involve also going out of one’s way to help them, particularly the innocents in trouble.
Can most of us learn to properly honor self and others in a single life? The answer seems to be no, for both obvious and deep reasons.
The obvious reason is that a single opportunity is subject to too many arbitrary limitations, as we have seen.
Even for those who make it to adulthood, unchosen psychological and cultural handicaps make it very difficult for some to learn proper honoring of others. The distribution of moral opportunities is not initially equal. Having multiple lives would widen these opportunities and might equalize them.
Even those of us who are fortunate to face moral tests without major handicaps might need more than one life. We tend to learn in phases. Notice how many of us fortunate adults in the richer communities of the world still engage in morally dishonorable behavior. Notice the prevalence of spouse or child abuse, the willingness to tolerate killing and being killed in wars of dubious reasons, the widespread treating sentient animals as if they were our tools.
While these shortcomings could be simple moral failures, they suggest that either moral virtue is a tough task, or that we are obtuse. In either case one single life seems insufficient for the task of moral education to be completed — even for most fortunate humans.
There is a deeper reason. Suppose that the more fortunate humans generally passed the needed moral tests. A single life would still not suffice to complete our moral education. This is because of the nature of a valid moral education. What is at stake here is what philosophers like Thomas Nagel call “moral luck,” following suggestions by Immanuel Kant.
A valid moral degree requires more than respecting others when one finds oneself in fortunate inner and outward circumstances. It may be “easy” to be kind if one has a nice disposition, and has favorable outward circumstances (such as nice parents, mind-expanding teachers, and good health). With a kind heart and a cultural education that encourages respect for others, perhaps most of us would indeed turn out to be quite virtuous.
However, in a single-life world we would not have earned such kind traits and favorable circumstances. These would be a matter of luck. So, a more valid test would have to include virtuous performance in the context of more difficult circumstances. One would have to live life from different vantage points.
Would one be sensitive to others if one had grown up love-deprived, or physically-deprived — and possibly facing chronic feelings of unworthiness, insecurity, jealousy?
What if one had grown up sickly and unattractive? What if one had grown up or in a culture that honors violence towards some outside group, as in a racist one; or in one that views all other animals as mere resources? What if one finds oneself as a person with strong internal urges for narcotics, or for power, or for cruel sexuality? What if one has suffered difficult tragedies?
If in at least some of these difficult circumstances, one still honors others, this honoring of others would no longer be mostly a matter of luck. One would have shown, as Kant would say, that one does the right things for the right principles. One will have earned a valid and complete moral degree.
Thus, to truly show moral mastery, we need to live many lives.
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All of this, so far, seems to me to be reasonably obvious. Are there valid reasons why most of those that have thought deeply about theistic visions of life have not seen this?
Perhaps we have not seen this because of metaphysical objections to multi-lives schemes?
One type of metaphysical objection tends to arise for any view that embraces some form of non-physical afterlife.
Some simply object to the notion of non-physical essence or “soul” that would be the core of a human person. Can there be such a being disconnected from our current physical person, and would such a being still be you? The answer is probably yes, and it would rely on the psychological continuity between some post-life-being and our current physical person. As long as memories (and perhaps other personality trait) are preserved, one would have survived. Of course, what it means for genuine memories and psychological continuity is a matter of deep controversy
However, as long as our main audience is one that accepts non-physical survival, as most of the Abrahamic world does, objections to notions of “souls” cannot be used.
Might there be unique metaphysical problems associated with multiple earthly lives? Perhaps a soul-being taking on multiple human roles or personalities fails to make metaphysical and moral sense.
Here is one way of raising this question. Can the idea of a “soul” entity that is not essentially either my current personality or any of my past and future personalities have any content? Perhaps it is merely an empty notion, like that of a bare particular?
I admit that there is some mystery here. The “soul” entity must have a subtle individuality, like a unique fingerprint. How could that be? Perhaps we can use this analogy: within a single life each of us can play very different roles, from a child to a teacher to a husband to a sports player, … at different times, and displaying very different skills and dispositions. We generally assume that the carrier of these many roles is a single underline being with a unique style. Can a similar unique style apply across different lives?
The memory links might be crucial between these different roles in a single life. But similar memory links could obtain, at some level, between the series of personalities involved in multiple lives. Such a level can surface in-between lives. It could be reached during lives via hypnotic regressions. It could surface at the end of the series of lives… Or all of the above. There is at least anecdotal empirical evidence that a few children recall parts of their “past” lives. Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker, at the University of Virginia, have produced serious research in this area over the past 50 years.
There is also a moral question that may be raised uniquely against multiple-lives schemes. Is it fair for “karmic” moral merit to be transferred from one personality to another? Is the fair for a current personality to have to deal with difficult initial inner and outer circumstances, given that this current personality had nothing to do with the acts of the previous ones that brought about these circumstances?
Here too, there is some mystery. Some of it revolves, again, around the nature of the underlying entity taking on many lives. If that can be resolved, then the underlying entity (our deep self) would be the carrier of past mishaps and past accomplishments into future life-roles and personalities. It would be the same underlying entity that manifests as both past and future personalities.
We might have an analogous situation in cases where a bad person, who does terrible things, undergoes a profound spiritual transformation, and becomes an entirely different type of person. Even if this different type of person were to forget, perhaps because of brain damage, the past misdeeds, it might not be unfair to for the “new” person to have to face tough consequences caused by the “previous” person. This would be all the more of the case, if the loss of memory were not final, but recoverable at some point in the future… or in the present under hypnosis…
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These types of challenges to multi-lives schemes are fair challenges, and would need a lot more discussion. They do depend on complex issues of metaphysics. Still, it is far from clear that they deal serious blows to multi-lives schemes.
In contrast, the moral weaknesses of one-live theistic schemes seem decisive.
At a minimum, an open-minded theist needs to take more seriously the possibility of many lives. We are currently far from that!