Death and Eternal Life by John H. Hick (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Death and Eternal, Life. By JoHN H. HICK. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Pp. 495. 1n his characteristic clear and readable style, John Hick has undertaken to explore the numerous current conceptions of life after death. His wideranging but critical study basically seeks to establish both the plausibility of the doctrine of personal human immortality and possible modalities of post-mortem existence. Hick stresses that his study of immortality is to be a different approach utilizing the insights present in all the religions of the world, rather than a presentation restricted to Western views of life after death. This he terms the" Copernican revolution in theology," which views " religions as different responses to variously overlapping aspects of the same Ultimate Reality " (p. 81). Hick rightly notes that the heart of the matter is the nature of man, and to this he repeatedly returns. For example, in Chapter Two he takes a brief look at the doctrine of the soul as a substance, and argues that if the soul is to be interpreted as the locus of personal identity and personality, this doctrine faces the difficulty of accounting for the apparent genetic bases of many of our dispositions and character traits. The evidence is so strong as to encourage us to discard the term " soul " as denoting a spiritual entity; if we are to use the term, we must see it as " a valuing name for the self" (p. 45). Seen as such, it affirms the value of the individual person, but does not make any metaphysical claim about a spiritual, substantial foundation of that self. Though this would seem to lead to a materialist approach to the human person, Hick chooses not to follow that path. The identity theory, he argues, ultimately fails to show that the relation between brain process and thought process is one of identity rather than mere correlation. The criterion of identical spatial location is inapplicable when applied to language about the mind. Similarly, he rejects epiphenomenalism, for it leads to the self-refuting position of determinism. What then is Hick's position? Early in the book he writes," In rejecting mind/brain identity, then, we accept mind/brain dualism" (p. mo)' while later he advocates a three-fold analysis: body - soul (mind) - spirit (atman) (p. 450) . But if he accepts mind/brain dualism-the view that mind and brain are independent but interacting realities-one wonders not only why he was so quick to dispose of the doctrine of a substantial soul, but also what happened to the strong evidence of genetic determination. Part of the answer to both is that, though Hick approves of multiple stages of 666 BOOK REVIEWS 667 human development through various lives in other worlds, he argues that, contrary to some forms of Hinduism and Platonism, there is no pre-existent soul. "In favour of this being each person's first lifo there is both the positive fact that the individual does seem to be formed ab initio in the womb from which he is born to this present life, and the negative fact that human beings do not normally remember any previous existence" (p. 457). Thus genetics plays a most substantial role in the creation of the initial embodied individual, whereas in successive lives the karmic bundle of characteristics or psychic structures, which as a psycho-physical being we have become, provides the commencement state for the new incarnate existence. However, the origin of the psychic entity and its relation to the genetic remains problematic in Hick. His shift of emphasis " from the question of origins to the question of ends " (p. 46) hardly suffices to resolve the difficulty. Further, mind/brain dualism itself comes in two packages: either the mind cannot exist independent of the body and perishes with it, or else the mind is capable of existing independently of the body, so that the death of the latter will affect but not destroy the former. Parapsychology is sometimes looked to as providing substantial evidence showing that the mind is capable of independent existence, and Hick in Chapter Seven briefly looks at its evidence. He concludes that " it is extremely probable that the spirits, particularly...