I agree with @dga471 here. This just seems to be a rehash of the first French speaker argument.
Regarding essentialism… The issue is that science doesn’t work by essentialism, nor do most scientists think about things in an essentialist way. That doesn’t some how mean that essentialism is ultimately wrong.
Nor does that the question of a “first human” hinge on essentialism.
It all seems like a red herring to me.
I would disagree. Entry into heaven would appear to be a binary condition – either you get in or you don’t. Both consciousness and whether the language you are speaking is ‘French’ both appear to be spectrums, with the consequence of ‘where do you draw the line’ being largely arbitrary.
You can argue whether there is a ‘first French speaker’ etc (but not here please 
), I do not think that you can argue (assuming for the sake of argument that heaven exists and, for the creationists among us, that evolution is real) that there must have been a first hominid (or primate, or mammal, etc) entrant into heaven.
This I think distinguishes French-speaking and consciousness on one hand, from entry into heaven.
Addendum, another way of stating this is:
Given the assumption that (some) humans have entered heaven, it is reasonably easy to show, without the need for any controverisal assumptions, that there must have been a first (or at least first-equal) Earth-derived life-form to enter heaven.
It is not possible to show this for ‘first French-speaker’ or ‘first conscious human’ without first making some, likely to be rather controversial, assumptions.
This is why I feel that the two cases are distinguishable.
Considering that I explicitly used the “first French speaker” in my first post, that should be a no-brainer. But what’s wrong with the argument?
The reason scientists don’t use it is that there are good reasons to suppose that species don’t have essences. The idea contributes nothing. We had no need of that hypothesis. Now, if you had evidence that there are essences, that would be another matter. Or perhaps you might have another way of knowing that doesn’t depend on evidence and yet is reliable, in which case it would be good to say so. But of course you make no claim about essentialism one way or the other.
Then what does it hinge on? Is this back to your particular definition of “human”, which would have a completely different basis than your definition of “chicken”? If we adopt your circular definition in which “human” means “Adam and Eve and all their descendants”, then of course there’s a first human. But this is an odd definition, since of course it means that all the people outside the garden are not human.
Since the discussion has shifted to asking about who or what came first, I have to ask mine. What was the first SARS-CoV-2 virion?
I think you are right with regards to the traditional conception of heaven, which is an essentialist one. The traditional essentialist conception of heaven obviously fits well with the traditional essentialist conception of humanity. My point is that even if essentialism is false and we must modify our conception of humanity so that it is now a spectrum, then it makes sense to also modify “ability to have an afterlife” to be a spectrum as well. (Obviously, this may upset some other traditional doctrines, such as the uniqueness of humanity, which may also have to be “spectrumized”. But let’s put that aside for now.)
Could somebody please give me a citation for the “Essentialist” conception of heaven. I cannot find one.
My argument was:
Either you get into heaven or you don’t.
At least some humans have gotten into heaven.
There therefore must have been a first Earth-derived lifeform (either human or pre-human) in heaven.
OED defines Essentialism in its philosophical context as:
The belief in real essences of things, esp. the view that the task of science and philosophy is to discover these and express them in definitions.
(Wikipedia similarly defines it as “the view that every entity has a set of attributes that are necessary to its identity and function.”)
It is not clear how any stage in my argument requires a “belief in real essences of things” (or of “attributes that are necessary to its identity and function”).
Alternatively, can anybody give me a citation for a reasonably-mainstream theological conception of heaven where entry is non-binary? The binary nature of entry was was one of the assumptions that I had thought was non-controversial.
That is all what I mean by the term “essentialist” conception of the afterlife, meaning that it is binary - either a living thing has a capacity for an afterlife or it does not. Traditionally, this was restricted to only humans, who were thought to have certain essential properties (and angels, but those are a completely different type of being entirely). This is why I called it an “essentialist” afterlife - it is tied together with the essentialist conception of humanity. (Note that here I purposely use afterlife instead of heaven, because having an afterlife doesn’t necessarily mean you get into heaven - you could end up in Hell or limbo also.)
To reiterate, my point is that if an essentialist conception of humanity is no longer held, then it seems to make sense to also slightly modify the doctrine of heaven and hell.
Certainly the spectrumization I’m suggesting is not fully traditional. Yet the idea that animals could also end up in an afterlife while certainly not universally held, is not completely alien. According to Andrew Loke’s 2016 paper on evolution, Wesley, Calvin, and Luther thought that animals could be redeemed in the future (the citation is Michael Murray’s Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, pp. 122-129).
In fact, it’s my understanding that all dogs go to heaven.
A couple of points:
[Rewrite] As my argument does not address why humans get into heaven, it does not rely on an “essentialist conception of humanity” (it would work just as well if entry into heaven were purely random). I therefore do not accept that I have relied upon an “essentialist” conception of heaven.
Whilst the question of ‘can animals get into heaven’ has some relevance to the wider thread, it does not appear to be relevant to the question of whether entry to heaven is binary. At first glance, it appears no more coherent to view an animal as being half in, half out, of heaven than to view a human being so. It is after all purely a poetical figure of speech, rather than serious philosophical discussion, to describe someone as being ‘half in heaven, half in hell’. [Addendum] I therefore cannot see how entry into heaven can be a spectrum.
I have skimmed Murray’s coverage on animals in heaven. It seems rather speculative and tentative. From Murray’s discussion, it seems that Martin Luther was more discussing his hopes for the resurrection of his own dog, Tölpel, than a wider theological investigation into the subject. It also does not seem to be a sufficiently fleshed-out view, capable of dealing with issues like @John_Harshman’s “as otherwise we eventually run into heaven populated mostly by the souls of bacteria.”
I think you are still conflating the heaven/hell distinction with the afterlife/no afterlife distinction. Here I’m talking about the latter, not the former.
I’m not sure what exactly is problematic about an afterlife which is populated by the souls of bacteria.
Given that I never stated my argument in terms of an “afterlife” (or previously used that word at all in this thread), but only in terms of “heaven” (and only mentioned hell once in the overtly less-than-serious context of an explicit “poetical figure of speech”), it seems highly unlikely that I am conflating the two. In any case my argument works just fine substituting “afterlife” in place of “heaven” throughout.
This conversation seems to have gotten its wires crossed with one with a ‘Tim from an Alternate Universe’ who talks about the “essentialist conception of humanity” and about the afterlife. To save further confusion (to myself if nobody else), I’ve decided to bow out of this conversation and let this alternate Tim finish.
So now you’re bring the multiverse into this! That’s gonna complicate things a bit.
Hi everyone,
Sorry for not getting back to you all earlier, but I’ve been rather busy lately. I’d just like to reply to a couple of comments on this thread:
There easily could be discontinuities that are below the detection level of scientific inquiry. In that case, there would be scientifically subtle/invisible historical discontinuities that are of immense theological/philosophical importance. Relatively speaking, still, the discontinuities in the past would be smaller than the discontinuities we currently observe.
Interesting speculation, but I believe it was you who wrote that “an honest look at human evolution, even from a strictly scientific perspective, reveals that humans truly are exceptional. A ‘singularity’ in our planet’s history has occurred.” That quote suggests that you regard the discontinuity as macroscopic (i.e. visible to all), rather than microscopic. And an incremental appearance over millions of years is not the same kind of event as a singularity, which is by definition sudden.
It seems to me that you might have been better off saying that humans are singular animals, rather than describing their emergence as a singularity. In any case, I shall address what I take to be your current position in my remarks to Daniel below.
There are two routes one can take:
- Perhaps there is also a spectrum of levels in the afterlife, where all living things (or even inanimate things too, assuming some sort of panpsychism is true) share in an afterlife, but the duration and/or nature of the afterlife depends on how “human-like” they are.
- Perhaps some living things do not have an afterlife, so there was indeed a “first hominid with an afterlife”, but we cannot determine when that person lived, just like we cannot determine the first French speaker.
Re suggestion #1: has it really come to this? You’re now ready to embrace panpsychism in order to defend your position? They say that politics makes strange bedfellows; apologetics, even more so, judging from your latest remarks. Panpsychism is poles apart from Christianity. It has far more in common with Shinto or perhaps Taoism than with any of the Abrahamic religions.
Christianity makes a number of claims about humans that simply cannot be expressed in panpsychist shades of gray: humans (unlike other animals) can know, love and serve their Creator; humans are moral agents (which is why we jail humans but not chimps when they kill infants); and humans have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Knowledge, morality and rights may be possessed to varying degrees, but they cannot be half-possessed: you either have them or you don’t.
Re suggestion #2: I don’t think the analogy with French is an apposite one. The boundary between French and its linguistic predecessors is not a sharply defined one, but the boundary between an animal’s having a subjective, first-person experience and an animal’s being describable in purely objective, third-person terms is about as sharp as one could imagine. Recall Thomas Nagel’s question, “What is it like to be a bat?” Either there is a “what-it-is-likeness” or there isn’t.
In that case, even if we cannot know which animal in history was the first human (e.g. by easily pointing to a set of obvious definite criteria for what constitutes a human), that doesn’t mean there was never a first human.
Agreed, but now that you’ve defined “humanity” in terms of unobservable criteria, you can no longer appeal to empirical observations (whether scientific or otherwise) to support the Christian claim that humans are fundamentally distinct from other animals. That puts you at odds with @swamidass’s stated position, that “an honest look at human evolution, even from a strictly scientific perspective, reveals that humans truly are exceptional.”
According to Andrew Loke’s 2016 paper on evolution, Wesley, Calvin, and Luther thought that animals could be redeemed in the future…
You might like to look at Wesley’s sermon “On the General Deliverance.” In that sermon, Wesley expresses his belief that all animals will be raised again, and he also maintains that many animals are rational, but he nevertheless insists on human uniqueness: he declares that humans alone know God, humans alone are moral agents, and man alone is God’s vicegerent upon earth. In Wesley’s own words:
God regards his meanest creatures much; but he regards man much more. He does not equally regard a hero and a sparrow; the best of men and the lowest of brutes. “How much more does your heavenly Father care for you!” says He “who is in the bosom of his Father.” Those who thus strain the point, are clearly confuted by his question, “Are not ye much better than they?” Let it suffice, that God regards everything that he hath made, in its own order, and in proportion to that measure of his own image which he has stamped upon it.
To me, that sounds vey much like “essentialism” - for if the abilities to know God and act morally are not essential characteristics, then what is? I’m sure you will agree with me on this point.
Look. I’m not saying the problem I’ve raised with regard to human uniqueness I’ve raised is insoluble. I, too, hold that humans are unique and special. What I am saying is that the scientific evidence seems to suggest that there was no magic moment at which humans first appeared, and that the problem of how to reconcile the findings of 21st-century science with the teachings of Christianity remains unsolved, at the present time. An honest and unbiased look at the evidence should therefore leave us feeling perplexed. That’s all I really wanted to say.
Well, you can certainly imagine that it’s sharp, but you can also imagine that it isn’t. I see no reason why the boundary is necessarily sharp, and there’s some evidence (the distribution of ability to pass the mirror test, for example) that it isn’t.
Notice that this exceptionality arises gradually, as @swamidass implies, and that it’s a sharp boundary only because the intermediates are extinct, just like the sharp boundary between elephants and non-elephants. (There’s a lot of ambiguity about what “human” means in various discussions here, so you need to settle on that.)
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