In another thread, an interlocutor noted that before I could support my thesis that all human beings possess either everlasting life, or at least everlasting existence, I would first need to prove the existence, i.e., that there is such a thing, as everlasting life. This thread proposes to take up that challenge.
An argument to prove that everlasting life exists, must revolve, naturally, around a definition of life, of which there are many, none of which is comprehensive, none of which genuinely circumscribes or adequately defines life as we know it. Nevertheless, the point of this study isn't to get into all the nuances and or definitions of life, but rather, to attempt to make a short, sound, argument in favor of the existence of everlasting life.
All היה [being, existing] springs forth from הגה [to meditate or speak to oneself], all "to be" is founded on a thinking process. All "being" was conceived in thought before its development. Thought is the primeval origin of all; all "being" is thought translated into reality. With greater accuracy than the "cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I am) the Jewish concept of language expresses the fact of the objectively realistic existence in "cogitor ergo sum" (thought, therefore I am), I am the object of thought, therefore I am. I "am" only so long as I am the object of thought. My existence is dependent on the conception of a Higher Being whose object of thought I am.
Rabbi Samson R. Hirsch, Collected Writings VIII, p. 25.
Rabbi Hirsch's brilliant statement quoted above paraphrases if not grossly plagiarizes Bishop Berkeley who claimed we all, are, and live inside, God's thought. Berkeley and Rabbi Hirsch both focus on the duality between thought and material reality. They both imply the one, thought, is the source of the other, material reality:
Our bodies as material objects inhabit the empirical world. However, there is a part of our selves which can initiate movements of our bodies at will, independently of the laws of physics (though not, of course, contrary to the laws of physics) and which must therefore be outside the empirical world. How it does it – what the relationship is between the willing me and the physical me – is a mystery that has baffled understanding since the beginning of human enquiry. But although I do not know what I am, I know that I cannot be only my body. I know myself to be a being that somehow combines the empirical and the non-empirical. In fact I am, so to speak, the embodied interface between the empirical and the non-empirical.
Bryan Magee, Oxford Professor of Philosophy, Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 161.
Within the theological construct of life, as noted above, material reality comes out of immaterial thought, the particle is a manifestation of the immaterial wave, and is not, itself, as material and solid, as it appears. Furthermore, the immaterial laws of physics (which undergird the physical world) preexist the appearance of material solidity that comes from the immaterial laws of physics. At one point the material world, to include planet earth, had no solidity to it whatsoever: it was little more than immaterial laws, rules, awaiting their opportunity to condense and coalesce into the sarcophagus that is their material interface. We can speak of this material interface as a "sarcophagus" since nothing has a material face, persona, or interface, until it's descended at least six feet under its original entropic state of being. Being material, implies that what was originally immaterial, and perhaps immortal, or possessing everlasting dimensions, has now become mortal, material, physical, even biological, and therein subject to "death," whatever definition we choose to give to the word "death."
John