Cryogenic Resuscitations and Naturalism

Written by Steve Tsai | 15 August 2008
Posted in Blogs - Steve Tsai

My friend and I were having an interesting conversation the other day, and it dealt with issues in post-death experiences. His question was if someone was cryogenically frozen and brought back to life in the future, wouldn’t that be evidence of naturalism? His reasoning was that if naturalism is true, then life is ultimately reducible to mere chemical or physical qualities, and a resuscitation of a frozen patient would show this to be the case.

I thought for a second, and realized that an interesting parallel existed. Sure, a cryogenically frozen patient is clinically dead (though potentially resuscitatible), but wouldn’t any resuscitation allegedly prove naturalism? This includes resuscitations of a few seconds as well.

Given most people don’t see much conflict between short-term resuscitations and the Christian view of life after death, I wondered why the cryogenics case would illicit different intuitions. Maybe it’s merely the time frame. I guess it is easier to envisage the soul returning to the body in a few seconds rather than hundreds of years. In any case, if there’s a serious problem for the Christian worldview with long-term resuscitations, I don’t see logically why there wouldn’t be the same problem in short-term ones as well.

My response was this. Firstly, if you hold a Thomistic view of the soul in which the soul functions primarily as a life-principle or animating force, the strictly speaking nothing can be alive without a soul. Yes, on the Thomistic view, everything that is alive has a soul, including animals and probably plants. This may sound strange to some, but it is actually a quite biblical view. In the beginning chapters of Genesis, the same Hebrew word nephesh (translated as “living creature,” “living soul,” or “soulish creature” is used of both animals and human beings. These passages clearly show that at least animals have souls (by the way, this has been the position of the church for centuries). In fact, our English word "animal" comes from the latin word anima, which means "soul."Plants having souls is more of a logical extrapolation (Aristotle), but nevertheless a good conclusion. Now this does not necessarily mean plants and animals survive the death of their bodies, or that they go to heaven. Animal and plant souls are different in kind from human souls. Aristotle separated the soul kinds into at least three, the nutrientive soul (plants), the reactive or sensitive soul (animals), and the rational soul (humans).

So given this Thomistic view of the soul, what can be said of the cryogenics case? Well, logically there are two options:

The soul always stays with its potentially resuscitatable body. That is in fact what gives the body the potential to be resuscitated in the first place.

The soul leaves the body when the body is clinically dead (even if potentially resuscitatable). The soul then returns to the body when the body is resusciatated.

Some reasons to accept option (2) are first person life-after-death reports. It seems there are reports by credible people that have been clinically dead for extended period of time and have been revived that they have either visited heaven or hell (the former being the more common of the two). After all, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, right? Even Paul admitted that his “visit” to the third heaven might have actually been in spirit and not just a vision. That could be a case of disembodiment and visitation to heaven. The point here is that Paul considered disembodied visitation to heaven and subsequent re-embodiment a possibility. And if its possible its not impossible. In any case, if these reports are true then that would bode well for option (2). But option (1) works as well, and one could take life-after-death reports to be more visionary in nature than actual accounts of disembodiment.

Admittedly, for the Cartesian view of the soul, things work out a little differently. But since I don’t hold a Cartesian view of the soul, I’ll just leave it at that.

I think what could possibly make a case for the naturalist would be a creating life from non-living materials. I know we’ve created things like amino acids, but no scientist as far as I know has ever come close to actually creating a living thing. Cloning does not count, because it is not a case of life coming from non-life, but life coming from life (as a living embryo is uses, albeit with the DNA switched out). True creation of life from non-living materials would not hold well for the Thomistic view of the soul, but would provide no real problems for the Cartesian view. Since this has not been done and looks like it won't be done (at least anywhere in the near future), I conclude the Thomistic view of the soul is safe on that front.

But, as my friend mentioned, merely having non-living materials as the origin of living things is not enough to justify the naturalists ontology and creation story. Not only must life come from non-life, but life must come by non-intelligent causes. And intelligent cause to life is intelligent design. And yes, this precludes extremely intelligent origin of life researchers purposely creating life.

So in conclusion, I don’t think cryogenic resuscitations (or any for that matter) support naturalism. In fact, given the abundance of reports of NDE’s (near death experiences), I’d say that favors a Christian worldview.