Book Review…A Naturalist’s view on Life and Existence

Apr 29, 2018 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

---

Book: The Illusion of Immortality

Author: Corliss Lamont

Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

With scholarly rigour, naturalist Corliss Lamont counters transcultural beliefs regarding the afterlife. He systematically presents his argument with unwavering authority, leaning heavily on biology, sociology and neuropsychology.

The afterlife is a subject that has captured the imagination of ancient peoples, present-day theologians, scientists and lay persons. Lamont offers a detailed purview of diverse eschatological teachings to highlight man’s preoccupation with his mortality.

For many, the afterlife remains an unfathomable, indefinable mystery. Others, in particular, theologians, have gone to great lengths to describe this inscrutable abode that awaits every man. It is with conviction, based on scripture, they stake their position.

A celestial home, they say, is the meed for living righteously with full obedience to the creator. A hellish state is said to await violators of the Law. Outside of scripture, poets and mystics have also offered captivating versions of the afterlife. Look no further than Dante’s Divine Comedy and Swedenborg’s De Caelo et Eius Mirabilibus et de inferno, ex Auditis et Visis (Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen).

The result of man’s speculation is that “the hereafter [has become] a complex and bewildering kaleidoscope of various heavens – while the here-and-now [has become] an unending sequence of sacraments and rituals – all administered with the next world in mind.”

Lamont understands the existential nature of such a profound subject. He cites the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick: “The goodness of God is plainly at stake when one discusses immortality, for if death ends all, the Creator is building men like sand houses on the shore, caring not a whit that the fateful waves will quite obliterate them.”

Interestingly, Lamont culls from scripture to present his case, stating that the breath of life – an impersonal force – is all that survives death. He quotes Ecclesiastes: “The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward, for the memory of them is forgotten.”

The author establishes that while Christianity has built its theological edifice on Jesus’ death and resurrection (a promise of man’s own resurrection), there is enough historical evidence that other religio-cultural beliefs are also rooted in the survival and immortality of the soul.

This, Lamont rejects. His position that death is final is rooted in what he calls Monism or the absolute unity of the mind (personality) and the body. Monists argue that Dualism (the soul or personality survives the death) cannot be corroborated.

Lamont pens, “[On the] extraordinary experiences and activity of thinking, it is true…that the whole body thinks, just as the whole body, every cell of which needs and takes in oxygen, breathes… just as the whole man walks.”

He continues, “Memory patterns… millions and billions of them – are all embedded in the gray cortical matter of the brain. It is difficult beyond measure to understand how they could survive after the dissolution, decay and destruction of the living brain in which they had their original locus.”

Lamont asserts that the mind is part of the personality, and that the personality is very much a quality of the body, not independent of it, [and] that the personality cannot exist in the same way the flame of the candle, without its wax base.

He argues that the mind is complex, and even the most confounding manifestations attributed to God’s wonderment, for example, stigmata, could be caused by our multilayered mental faculties.

“More is being known of the subconscious or the unconscious,” he notes, and that any “attempt to smuggle back the supernatural soul through the subconscious is an old and exploded procedure using the supernatural to explain the relative unknown.”

Lamont proceeds to explore biological laws. He explains the nature of the creative process and questions the notion of a Grand Architect that deliberately fashions every nook and cranny of life.

He writes, “During the act of procreation, any one of the 300 to 500 million spermatozoa of the father may unite with the ovum of the mother. During his life a man may produce, at a conservative estimate, the staggering total of 500 billion or more germ cells and a woman some 17,000 cells of ova, though only about 400 of hers come to maturity. There is an indefinitely complicated pattern of events behind the appearance of every human being in this world.”

He concludes, “To believe that we are here because of a separate, specific act of God created to fit each embryo as it enters the realm of existence, becomes the most gratuitous of theories.”

Death, according to the author, is a celebration of life, a part of the biological process we see played out daily in nature. Death, he avers, “provides for a perpetual fountain of youth.” And “remarkable as human bodies are, Nature eventually discards them for fresh ones.”

The author dismisses fears that the absence of religious teachings will have an adverse social impact. His observation proves just the opposite. Even in the animal kingdom, he writes, “the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grieve their grief out and do not immediately seek distraction in the gorge.”

Here, he appeals to man’s innate capacity for good outside of religion and scriptural injunctions.

Lamont’s position is now validated by neuroscientific research on empathy and compassion.

Fittingly, the author concludes, “It is my conviction that the frank recognition of human mortality, far from undermining morals and stopping progress will, other things being equal, do exactly the opposite. People will then realize that here and now, if ever, they must develop their possibilities win happiness for themselves and others, and take their stand and do their part in the enterprises that seem highest.”

 

Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby

The Illusion of Immortality by Lamont Corliss

Publisher: The Continuum Publishing Company

ISBN: 0-8044-63778

Available at Amazon

Ratings: Essential 

---

---