Cancer 76

I have a perhaps understandable focus on thinking about death. I am currently alive, but at some point in the probably not too distant future, I will be dead. As an undergraduate, I studied philosophy for two years as a subsidiary subject. One of the topics was dualism and materialism. While I was and am a convinced materialist I enjoyed the debates around the subject. As a materialist death is death, the end of life, no afterlife, no eternal life for my soul. Indeed, I do not have a soul.

I have often wondered how eternal life could be. Think about it a little and the inherent absurdity of eternal life becomes apparent. How old would I be in this eternal life? A happy child of 12 living in my childhood home? A slightly disturbed adolescent tearing down the mores of society? A young adult, physically fit but without the – ahem – wisdom of age? My age now, physically rather messed up by heart disease and cancer? Do you stay the age at which you die?

What about relationships? Will I spend eternity with my wife? What about those with an unhappy marriage? Do they get to stay with some idealised partner? Do Muslim men really get 72 virgins? What happens when they are no longer virgins? Do they get replaced with new virgins? Where do these virgins come from? Are they real people who lived and died on Earth or are they created by Allah specifically to attend to the desires of dead men?

If I had two wives, with one dying early, which one would I spend eternity with? Do I get to spend eternity with my children, my parents, and the rest of my family? What happens if I really love someone and want to spend eternity with them, but they do not want to spend eternity with me?

Then there is the problem of eternity itself. Can a marriage stand the strain of eternally living together? Do people change as their eternal lives develop? Do they get older? Do their tastes change? What do they actually do all that time?

One of the good things about a restricted lifespan is that there isn’t time to get bored with things. Life develops and changes. You get older. Your ways of thinking change. There are stages in life that are reasonably clear to most people. We have childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. They all have characteristics. They are not the same for everyone, but in many people, there is a clear development of abilities, of making a contribution to society, and a gradual loss of ability and contribution, with an acceptance of life as it has been lived and life as it comes to an end. Most people don’t go screaming into death. It is accepted as a part of life.

If we really believed in eternal life and thought it through then we would have a conflict. While some people commit suicide in real life, I can imagine that after a few centuries of eternal life many people, perhaps all, would want to commit suicide as eternal life drags on and becomes incredibly dull and/or difficult. Then we are left with the philosophical question of whether it is possible to commit suicide when one has eternal life. I would hope so.