Barr: Response to George and Lee II

I fear that Profs. George and Lee may have misunderstood my position . They seem to think that I have been arguing against any kind of continuity between the premortem body and the resurrected body. For instance, they say,

Professor Barr’s argument seems to be this: (1) When a body is completely decayed or "resolved into its constituent particles," then the only continuity possible is at the subatomic or atomic level; (2) continuity at that level does not make sense according to quantum physics. . . . [emphasis added]

If I had said (1) and (2), then I would indeed have been denying any possibility of continuity. However, in my previous response to them I was quite careful not to reject all notions of "continuity," or even "material continuity." What I argued against was "’material continuity’ of the kind envisaged by George and Lee," and "’material continuity’ in the sense of composition from some of the ‘same’ bits of matter." [emphasis added]

George and Lee correctly say that "1 Corinthians 15 . . . does not deny a material continuity . . . . Moreover, in the very passage that Professor Barr quotes, 1 Corinthians 15 seems to support the material continuity view rather than to subvert it." However, I (or rather Ratzinger/Pope Benedict) did not cite 1 Corinthians 15 in order to subvert the idea of material continuity, but rather to support the idea that resurrection will involve a profound transformation and not a mere "return of the ‘fleshly body,’ that is, of the biological structure" in the form that we know it today. George and Lee also say,

[Barr] does not feel that it is necessary to accept what he acknowledges is a strong argument, namely, that since Christ’s risen body was materially continuous with his body in the tomb, so (probably) is our risen body materially continuous with our premortem body.

However, my concern in discussing the ascension of Christ was not to deny a material continuity between Christ’s body premortem and post-resurrection, or to say anything about the continuity of our own bodies. Rather it was to argue that the post-resurrection appearances of Christ do not necessarily tell us much about what bodies will be like in heavenly glory. Again, my concern at that point was to argue for profound transformation, not to argue against continuity. Indeed, when I said that at his ascension Christ was "translated" into another realm, that itself clearly implied continuity.

My concern throughout has not been to deny continuity, but to raise an objection to what I understood to be George and Lee’s particular way of explaining that continuity. That way involved making an identification of specific bits (or "parcels") of matter. Do I have an alternative explanation to suggest? I wish I did, but I do not.

As Ronald Knox shrewdly observed in The Hidden Stream , all supernatural mysteries are rooted in natural mysteries:

It’s not surprising that there is a problem of free will in revealed theology, because there is a problem of free will in common or garden philosophy. The mystery comes in just where you would expect it to come in; where there is a mystery anyhow. The way I have tried to put it . . . is that you may picture human thought as a piece of solid rock, but with a crevice here and there¯the places, I mean, where we think and think and it just does not add up. And the Christian mysteries are like tufts of blossom which seem to grow in those particular crevices, there and nowhere else.

The supernatural mystery of resurrection grows in a place where there is already a rather difficult philosophical puzzle, namely: What makes a thing the "same thing" through time? Material continuity seems to have something to do with it. The painting on which I gaze in the art gallery is in some sense the same painting that came from the artist’s hands, whereas the forgery, no matter how exactly like it, is not "the real thing." The apple on my desk is somehow the same apple that was there yesterday, even if a bit more shriveled. The bones in the coffin are somehow the same bones the person had in life. The ashes in the urn are somehow part of the remains of the body of the deceased. The earth on which I stand is the same planet that was orbiting the sun four and a half billion years ago. So, material continuity of a fairly obvious sort can often be traced through extensive changes and over long periods of time, just as George and Lee say.

And yet, there are things that one can imagine happening to an apple (or a bone, or even a whole planet) that would efface it so completely, that no particles, atoms, bits of matter, or parcels of energy would remain that could meaningfully be asserted to have been the very ones that were once part of the original object. Indeed, such things do happen. Rather than getting into physics, let me use the money analogy again. There are certainly cases in which I can say that the money in Joe’s bank account is the same money that was once in Fred’s. I might be even able to say that if Fred was Joe’s great-great-grandfather and had set up some kind of trust fund. On the other hand, it is probably utterly meaningless to ask whether any part of the money I just spent at the 7-eleven once belonged to Abraham Lincoln.

Where are the snows of yesteryear? In particular, where is that pile of snow that was in my front yard a few years back? Can it be recovered by finding the "same water molecules"? (I believe that the phrase "same water molecules" is meaningless in this context.) Can it be recovered in any other way?

Where does this leave us? I don’t know. Our resurrected bodies will be the same ones we have now in some sense; of that I have no doubt. And that sameness may (or may not) involve some kind of material continuity. If it does, it is quite mysterious (to me, anyway) how one might conceive of that continuity in some cases. But then again, as we all agree, we are talking about a mystery.