Cy Kellett is joined by apologist Joe Heschmeyer to tackle the intriguing question of reincarnation and its implications for the nature of life and souls.
Transcript:
Caller: Yeah, I’m not Catholic because I’m Hindu. And so I’ve been reading a lot recently. I’ve gone through the Bible in a year with Father Mike Schmitz. And particularly, I’m in the ISKCON sect of Hinduism. I wanted to get your guys’ thoughts on reincarnation and what is the Christian or Catholic refutation on reincarnation?
Cy: Well, let’s do that and then we’ll come back to you and see what you think of the answer.
Joe: Joe, I’ve got a couple of questions. ISKCON, this is a group someone called the Hare Krishna, right?
Caller: Yes, that’s right.
Joe: Okay. The Krishna consciousness is the “Khan,” I assume, in ISKCON.
With reincarnation, how do you harmonize that? Well, okay, let me step back even a little further. Within the cycle of reincarnation, I know that includes humans and at least some animals. How low in the kind of evolutionary org chart does that go? Like, does that include single-celled organisms? Is there a chance you would die and come back as like an amoeba?
Caller: Yes. So in our tradition, everything that has life has a soul, basically. And there is a chance that if you die, you can be a clean amoeba.
Joe: It seems like for this to work you would need a fixed number of living things throughout all time. Is that fair to say?
Caller: Right, right.
Joe: But it also seems like we know that the number of living things has grown from zero to a few to a bunch. That’s true whether you look at human history, the history of animals, or the history of organic life on earth. So how do you harmonize that with a view of reincarnation?
Caller: Yeah, so I mean, I have to say I’m not particularly a scholar in my faith, but what I do know is that there is this idea that there are always souls that are fallen, and they’re entering the material world and thus populating the world that we live in.
Joe: Okay. And so they go from like a pre-existent spiritual realm to becoming material. And then is the goal eventually to escape that and reach nirvana in that way?
Caller: Exactly, exactly. And so one thing that we actually are quite similar on, as opposed to like the Buddhists and other people who believe in reincarnation, is that we believe that there is a God above all other gods. I know the purpose of life is to develop a personal relationship, a loving personal relationship with Him and to be reunited with Him in heaven, so to speak.
Joe: And so what words… I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. What would be good evidence you would see for that? Because I assume we don’t have any conscious experience or memory of having lived some other existence. And a lot of the beings that we’re even talking about, I don’t know what it would mean to say that this human used to be an amoeba because an amoeba doesn’t have any of the elements of a human soul.
And so this thing used to kind of move around and then it died. Okay. There’s a certain sense we could talk about it having a material form, and we can call that a soul, but we don’t really mean the same thing by that word as we do when we talk about a human being having a soul with an intellect and will. So what would it mean to even say that you used to be an amoeba or an animal or whatever else?
Caller: Yeah, so it would mean that you are. Because we believe that the soul is less of our qualities as a human and it’s the spark of life. So like that spark is the soul, and everything else is either your physical, material body or something like your mind, which would be considered part of your subtle body.
Joe: Okay, yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. I’d forgotten about the subtle body. That does make for a different metaphysic. Yeah, because it seems like the spark of life thing… We want to affirm that there is something like that. Like even the word “anima” in Latin, which is the word for soul, is like the animating principle.
So if you were to take like two… Peter Kreeft gives the example of like two identical cows. One of them dies. The difference between them isn’t at the physical level, at least not right away. They might have the same number of cells, they might have the same identical looking organs, but one of them has this spark of life within it and one doesn’t.
That there is, in the case of one, an animating principle of the body, and in the case of the other, that animating principle no longer exists. And so the body decomposes. And so that part, I think we would find some common ground.
I think the difficulty is in the case of an animal, and even more so with like a lower life form. These are not subsistent souls. These are not souls that can exist apart from the body. To talk about that spark of life going into another thing would be like saying, well, this one thing I have has an on switch and then it gets destroyed. But this other thing I have also has an on switch.
And I think in some way those on switches are spiritually connected to each other. And it’s just not clear what that kind of claim would even mean. Because if they’re not physically one turned into the other, what kind of spiritual quality that’s bringing in is a little amorphous.
So I think we would just say we don’t see any evidence that subhuman life forms have immaterial souls and that therefore a cross-species reincarnation would be precluded. For that reason, at the level of reason, the number of living beings, the number of humans, or the number of all species, whatever, would have to be fixed.
And all evidence seems to point to the fact that it’s instead going up, and we don’t have any conscious experience, like memory of past lives that would put any weight on the other side of the ledger. Just to support maybe that being the idea that rather everything seems to point to the fact that we didn’t exist before we were conceived and that when we die there is a certain permanence to death, while at the same time we would believe death doesn’t have the final word.
There is a finality to death, that the decisions we make in this life are permanent, for better or for worse. So you’re not going to have a situation where you live a holy life and then die and then have to do it over again. But you’re also not going to have a situation where you live an unholy life, reject God, die, and then, you know, get another bite at the apple.
So whether that’s good or bad news, I think depends on the kind of life one leads. But we would argue that, I think, both from reason but also pretty clearly, you know, Scripture teaches it is apportioned unto all men to die once, after which comes the judgment. That there is a clear biblical denial of anything like reincarnation in favor of what’s called the specific judgment upon death.
Caller: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. And there are a lot of things in my own faith that I have a hard time reconciling, like the things that you mentioned. And in a certain sense, it comes down to something like, what is the definition of a soul? Because even in our faith when we die, we forget everything and then we get put into a new body.
Joe: And so… But that would be a completely different person or living being.
Caller: Right, right, right. Like what it means to even call that you. If you have no connection bodily or psychically, or, you know, psychologically, you know, like, how is that still you is one of the questions that I’ve grappled with in trying to understand it.
Joe: Yeah, I had some exposure to ISKCON and the Bhagavad Gita when I was in my teens and early 20s, and I found some good impetus to delve more deeply into these questions. I mean, the Bhagavad Gita is beautiful, but at the same time, I think the message that it has is deterministic in this way that as a Christian, I’m, as much as I’ve appreciated kind of what it did for me, if I’m being honest, I’m grateful that the Christian message seems to me much more optimistic and hopeful than I get from any of the early Hindu texts.
Caller: Right, right. I guess my last question would be like, in short, what would your definition of the soul be from a Christian point of view?
Joe: So, okay, you’re asking a philosophy nerd to do a short answer to a question that could go much longer. But at the very broadest level, it’s the immaterial principle of life for material things. So that’s for all things. And in the case of a human, because we have a rational soul, it is also the seat of the intellect and the will.
It is that part of us that isn’t reducible to the body and that part of us that can survive even when the body is destroyed. There are parts of you that are just your… you know, they’re so tied up in your body, you can’t even imagine, like, what does it mean to, you know, stub your toe without a foot? It doesn’t seem like it means anything.
But there are other things where to remember, to contemplate, to pray for. Those things don’t appear to be reducible to the body, that we have evidence that there’s more to ourselves than just our bodies. And the term for that spiritual center is the soul.
Joe: I get the feeling like you’re very open to kind of exploring the spiritual riches of what the Catholic Church has to offer. And I wonder if… oh, what, I’m blanking. What is the book we just came out with?
Cy: The Soul of Apologetics.
Joe: Oh, yeah, send them both. Apologetics.
Cy: Send them both. Of course. The Soul of Apologetics. Okay, we’ll send you both of those, Arch, if you’d like them.
Why? We’re Catholic and the Soul of Apologetics. It’s actually… it’s lovely that you called and talked about your Hindu faith, because I must admit, and it probably has to do with the demographics of the United States, we don’t get as many calls from Hindus as we would like to get from time to time.
We do, but we’d love to get more. So, you know, if you’re Hindu and you didn’t call today, Arch is just better than you. That’s what I’m saying.