Darwinism, death and immortality

In the conclusion to The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote ‘He who believes in the advancement of man from some low organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul’ ([1871] 2004: 682). Darwinism poses a problem for our belief in immortality because, where evolution is a gradual process, the distinction between being mortal and being immortal is a stark one. As John Dupré notes, ‘it is not that evolution cannot endow an organism with a radically new capacity. This happens throughout the history of life. But evolution does so by gradual steps and continuous change’ (2003: 65). It is hard to imagine a sliding scale of immortality. The belief that human beings and human beings alone have immortal souls is easy to maintain if all species of animals, people included, were separately created. But it is much harder to maintain if we evolved from other, non-human animals, as Darwinism shows that we did.

If we accept that our immortal souls cannot have evolved gradually, we have three options to choose from. The first is to suppose that all life is immortal: that immortality is, in effect, a property of life itself. This is superficially appealing. It has the spirit of generosity on its side. But it is not philosophically very satisfying, and it does not ultimately solve our problem. Traditionally, immortality is pegged to individuality. It is an individual soul that survives into an afterlife or migrates from one body to another. That is all very well if you are a person, or a cow, or a crab.