I am the resurrection (1)

The greatest hope held out by most religions is the promise of eternal life, but before they can get to that point, they must first overcome the barrier called death. The most common solution settled on is resurrection.

Some ancient religions solved the problem through a belief in reincarnation
(re-incarnation, i.e. to "re-flesh"). This belief starts with the premise that there are two parts to a living being, namely the body, which is tangible, and consciousness which is intangible. Consciousness, according to this belief, is eternal, and merely occupies the material body for a relatively brief time. When that body dies, consciousness must seek another one.

Some religions, such as Hinduism, attribute a moral dimension to this journey of consciousness. Consciousness is seen as something which is aware of its own existence, and which is actually travelling on a path back to its origin in the divine. In order the complete this journey, consciousness, usually referred to as the soul, must undergo certain learning experiences within the material body. When all of these lessons have been learnt, the soul will once again achieve union with the divine, but until then, it must pass through a successive series of "lives" within various bodies.

Consciousness, or the soul, may be described as "that which looks through one's eyes". It is easy to see why early humans would conclude that consciousness must be something separate from the body. Consider a living woman and a recently deceased woman. There are certain similarities between the two - both have bodies, for example - but there is one fundamental difference between the living and the dead - the dead lack what may be called life-force, that is they lack consciousness. Where did it go?

Similarly, you could probably construct some form of body by using basic elements such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen, along with the other trace elements found in all living organisms, but it is highly unlikely that the "thing" will then get up and look around. That type of outcome still only happens in science fiction. So, what is this life-force that so many ancient myths say is the final ingredient in the creation of life? Where can we get some of this "breath of life" so that we can make some living things?

Some scientists and atheists believe that it is only a matter of time before life can be created by humans. They believe that consciousness is simply the sum total of all of the chemical processes going on in the brain and central nervous system. Perhaps, but that still does not tell us what causes these processes to amount to self-awareness. One thing is for certain, though - the day that we succeed in synthesising life, there will no longer be any reason to believe in the existence of a divine being (or aliens, or whatever).

Anyway, back to the world of facts. Let us concede that this mysterious thing which we call consciousness struck our ancestors as being something distinct from the material world. How do we get from this point to the belief that consciousness continues to exist after the body has ceased to function?

The primary reason is our desire to live for ever. Most of us do not want to die. We want to continue living, and living, and living. We have one more game to play; we want to see our children's children grow up. We want to spend one more day with our loved one. Unless we have come to the stage where we are in severe pain, whether physical or mental, death is not a part of our plans. In fact, death is the main barrier to our plans. If only we could find a way to avoid death...but what if we could?

The next logical step, at least to my mind, is to believe that consciousness does not die when the body dies. After all, it cannot be seen, touched, nor understood, so who is to deny this possibility? We in our own time are aware of the deep impression which the memory of a recently lost loved one can have on us when we sit in their old room, or smell the same brand of perfume which that person used, or suddenly happen upon an old diary or album of theirs. Nowadays, we are a bit better informed, but for early man, experiences akin to these probably gave rise to the belief that the deceased still remained alive in some form. No wonder we have over the centuries developed such a fear of the dead.

We know that we will all die at some point, but the desire to live is so strong within our species - perhaps we should call it the desire to survive - that at some time in our past, the idea arose that there was no logical reason why we should not continue to live on. This conviction would have been reinforced by the strong belief that the our deceased loved ones seemed to leave some part of their being behind.

We now have the two halves to the solution. Early humans, faced with the instinctive desire to survive and convinced in their own minds that something or the other survived after the death of a loved one, arrived at the conclusion that some invisible aspect of the deceased survived the cessation of physical existence. This offered hope that everyone would undergo the same metamorphosis.

One would expect then that there would be some speculation as to the nature of those who had undergone this change. Where do they live? What do they do? Are they a threat to the rest of us, and if so, can we do anything to protect ourselves from them? What kind of powers do they have? Perhaps they can assume another body - maybe another species, maybe a newborn human. Along some such lines would have gone the early speculations about the nature of the soul. There is no need to rehash here the argument that the worship of many of the gods of various ethnic groups seems to have evolved from the worship of the spirits of deceased ancestors, except to say that what we have been reviewing here is not a new theory.

None of the above really explains a belief in resurrection. We have attempted to account for a belief in a soul, a belief in the possibility of the survival of the soul after the death of the body, and a belief in the possibility that the soul may occupy another body. to account for a belief in resurrection, we need to embark on yet another journey.