The Unanswerable Argument on Immortality
By Alexander Ritchie
II. An Argument from Philosophy
In my first article was presented the argument from Bible teaching. But there are some who have not an implicit faith in the Bible as a supreme court of appeal. To such we would submit a philosophical argument, which we believe to be unanswerable, praying also that it may strengthen the faith of those who do believe. The Bible is an ancient history, which none in search of merely historic truth can afford to spurn, as well as a revelation. Now the Bible tells of several cases where people were raised from the dead. And the philosopher who regards his reputation, dare not reject these testimonies merely because they are found in the Bible; for abundant corroborative evidence of both the possibility and the actuality of such things, may be discovered among the writings of historians of the early Christian era who make no pretense of inspiration. Their testimony, added to the Bible statements, surely ought to make the story credible to the honest doubter. Unbelief will never invalidate the testimony of scores of reputable eye-witnesses to the fact that dead people have repeatedly been raised to life. And in these cases of resuscitation, we have a means at hand of solving the great problem of man’s condition after death. There was Lazarus, and the daughter of Jairus, and the widow of Nain’s son, all of whom were raised to life by Christ, in the presence of many onlookers. Besides these, other persons were subsequently raised from the dead by holy men in the early Christian church, over a period of at least two hundred years after our Lord’s ascension. That was an age of philosophic inquiry never surpassed. It was an age of literature, an age of investigation. Even Paul testifies to that, when he tells us that in his day, “all the Athenians and strangers which were there5spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.” Such an event as raising the dead to life, would create an unparalleled sensation anywhere on earth, at any time. “Much people of the Jews therefore knew that He [Christ] was there: and they came not for Jesus’ sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom He had raised from the dead.” That is a typical picture of what would happen anywhere, whenever any one was raised from the dead. The future state was a subject of absorbing interest then, as it is now. Does any thinking man believe that the philosophers and wise men of those days would neglect the rare opportunity of questioning those who had explored the realms of death? It is a favorite maxim among men, that “seeing is believing.” What evidence could equal the testimony of an eye-witness of the spirit world? Would not the visitor to hades be a competent person to describe its sights and sounds, and his own sensations and experiences? And if these returned travelers to the spirit world could tell of friends they met, of memories revived, of new and thrilling experiences on “the spirit plane,” as our philosophers call it, how eagerly, how joyfully would the “doctors” of that bygone day have gleaned every grain of such precious information, and inscribed it on their enduring parchment, with their names attached as scribes, to hand it down to later generations as a precious heritage of demonstrated truth on the great subject of death and what it brings to men! But—“be astonished, O ye heavens”—after ages of controversy on the subject; after the writing of books without number, to prove that the deathless spirit of man is conscious after death; after poets have celebrated man’s “never-dying soul,” and preachers have exhausted their vocabularies to extol the grandeur and immortality of the human spirit,—the unanswerable and undeniable fact remains, that out of all the number of those who have entered the portals of death, and had the opportunity to know by experience the thrill of conscious existence on “the spirit plane,” and afterward have returned to this life and resumed the current of their daily thought and activity among men—of all these, I say, NOT ONE has brought back one iota of information about the spirit world. Not one has uttered a word concerning their conscious existence there. Not one has left on record even a memory of the hours and days spent in death, to confirm the claims of our immortal philosophers. I say, It is the UNANSWERABLE argument. It is a demonstration of the divine sentence on sin, “Thou shalt surely die.” It is a nullification of Satan’s falsehood, “Ye shall not surely die: for . . . your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.” Inherent immortality is not only false and anti-christian. It is also unphilosophic and unscientific. For thought and spiritual emotions are the product of brains; and when a man dies, his brain dies with him. The brain is in the grave, with the rest of the dead body; and thought apart from the brain is an absolute impossibility. Therefore the word of God declares of the dying man, “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” Thought is consciousness, and consciousness apart from thought is impossible. Therefore as dead men do not think, they are not conscious. Again the Bible confirms the argument. “For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything. . . . Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished.” Love, hatred, and envy are purely thought. Men love, or hate, or envy, with the mind; and that is the thing that has perished when a man dies. I beg of you to give the great Creator who made us all, the credit for knowing, better than any one else, the condition of man in death. In closing, let me remind you, dear reader, that if any man who ever died in this world, would have the right and ability to be conscious in death, and to go immediately to heaven, and enjoy its pleasures, that man would be “the Man Christ Jesus.” But the Bible says, “He hath poured out His soul unto death.” Otherwise we should have had but a human sacrifice; for His soul was divine, but His body was human. Then after being dead and buried for at least thirty hours, when the Saviour rose, early on that first-day morning, He said to Mary, “Touch Me not; for I am not yet ascended to My Father.” From this we see that Christ had not been conscious in heaven, while He lay in the tomb. He had not been back to heaven since He left His glory there to enter human flesh as the Babe of Bethlehem. “He hath poured out His soul unto death,” and it took a glorious resurrection to unite soul and body again. It will take another resurrection to give every dead man a conscious existence. The necessity of a resurrection is entirely due to the fact that death dismembers the human entity. For if the disembodied spirit of man is conscious, and capable of enjoying the intellectual pleasures of heaven, why should Christ come from heaven to restore that spirit to a body? Man is far beneath angels in physical capacity, in endurance, and in his hold on life. How vain and foolish, then, does it appear for the creature of mere flesh and blood to boast of possessing a deathless spirit, an immortal soul, when God, the Judge of all, declares that Lucifer himself—the prince of spirits, the fallen cherub who sinned amid the light and glory of the eternal throne, shall eventually die for his sin! “I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee. . . . Thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be [or have being] any more.” Eze. 28: 18, 19.