HABERMAS: I agree that near death experiences do not evidence the doctrines of either heaven or hell. But do you think these evidential cases increase the possibility of some sort of an afterlife, again, given your theism?

FLEW: I still hope and believe there’s no possibility of an afterlife.

HABERMAS: Even though you hope there’s no afterlife, what do you think of the evidence that there might be such, as perhaps indicated by these evidential near death cases? And even if there is no clear notion of what sort of body might be implied here, do you find this evidence helpful in any way? In other words, apart from the form in which a potential afterlife might take, do you still find these to be evidence for something?

FLEW: It’s puzzling to offer an interpretation of these experiences. But I presume it has got to be taken as extrasensory perceiving by the flesh and blood person who is the subject of the experiences in question. What it cannot be is the hypothesized incorporeal spirit which you would wish to identify with the person who nearly died, but actually did not. For this concept of an incorporeal spirit cannot properly be assumed to have been given sense until and unless some means has been provided for identifying such spirits in the first place and re-identifying them as one and the same individual incorporeal spirits after the affluxion of time. Until and unless this has been done we have always to remember Bishop Butler’s objection: “Memory may reveal but cannot constitute personal identity.” (24)

Perhaps I should here point out that, long before I took my first university course in philosophy, I was much interested in what in the UK, where it began, is still called psychical research although the term “parapsychology” is now usually almost everywhere else. Perhaps I ought here to confess that my first book was brashly entitled A New Approach to Psychical Research (25), and my interest in this subject continued for many years thereafter.

HABERMAS: Actually you have also written to me that these near death experiences “certainly constitute impressive evidence for the possibility of the occurrence of human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human brain.” (26)

FLEW: When I came to consider what seemed to me the most impressive of these near death cases I asked myself what is the traditional first question to ask about “psychic” phenomena. It is, “When, where, and by whom were the phenomena first reported?” Some people seem to confuse near death experiences with after death experiences. Where any such near death experiences become relevant to the question of a future life is when and only when they appear to show “the occurrence of human consciousness independent of any occurrences in the human brain.”

HABERMAS: Elsewhere, you again very kindly noted my influence on your thinking here, regarding these data being decent evidence for human consciousness independent of “electrical activity in the brain.” (27) If some near death experiences are evidenced, independently confirmed experiences during a near death state, even in persons whose heart or brain may not be functioning, isn’t that is quite impressive evidence? Are near death experiences, then, the best evidence for an afterlife?

FLEW: Oh, yes, certainly. They are basically the only evidence.

HABERMAS: What critical evaluation would you make of the three major monotheisms? Are there any particular philosophical strengths or weaknesses in Christianity, Judaism, or Islam?

FLEW: If all I knew or believed about God was what I might have learned from Aristotle, then I should have assumed that everything in the universe, including human conduct, was exactly as God wanted it to be. And this is indeed the case, in so far as both Christianity and Islam are predestinarian, a fundamental teaching of both religious systems. What was true of Christianity in the Middle Ages is certainly no longer equally true after the Reformation. But Islam has neither suffered nor enjoyed either a Reformation or an Enlightenment. In the Summa Theologiae we may read:

As men are ordained to eternal life throughout the providence of God, it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation … . Reprobation implies not only foreknowledge but also is something more… (28)

What and how much that something more is the Summa contra Gentiles makes clear:

… just as God not only gave being to things when they first began, but is also—as the conserving cause of being—the cause of their being as long as they last … . Every operation, therefore, of anything is traced back to Him as its cause. (29)

The Angelic Doctor, however, is always the devotedly complacent apparatchik. He sees no problem about the justice of either the inflicting of infinite and everlasting penalties for finite and temporal offences, or of their affliction upon creatures for offences which their Creator makes them freely choose to commit. Thus, the Angelic Doctor assures us:

In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God … they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned … Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed, while the pains of the damned will cause it indirectly … the blessed in glory will have no pity for the damned. (30)

The statements of predestinarianism in the Qur’an are much more aggressive and unequivocal than even the strongest in the Bible. Compare the following from the Qur’an with that from Romans 9.

As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them
Whether thou hast warned them or hast not warned them
They do not believe. (31) God has set a seal on their hearts and on the hearing
And on the eyes is a covering
And there awaits them a mighty chastisement. (32)

In the UK the doctrine of Hell has for the last century or more been progressively de-emphasised, until in 1995 it was explicitly and categorically abandoned by the Church of England. It would appear that the Roman Catholic Church has not abandoned either the doctrine of Hell nor predestination.

Thomas Hobbes spent a very large part of the forty years between the first publication of the King James Bible and the first publication of his own Leviathan engaged in biblical criticism, one very relevant finding of which I now quote:

And it is said besides in many places [that the wicked] shall go into everlasting fire; and that the worm of conscience never dieth; and all this is comprehended in the word everlasting death, which is ordinarily interpreted everlasting life in torments. And yet I can find nowhere that any man shall live in torments everlastingly. Also, it seemeth hard to say that God who is the father of mercies; that doth in heaven and earth all that he will, that hath the hearts of all men in his disposing; that worketh in men both to do, and to will; and without whose free gift a man hath neither inclination to good, nor repentance of evil, should punish men’s transgressions without any end of time, and with all the extremity of torture, that men can imagine and more. (33)