Comments on Timothy F. Murphy's 'the afterlife of embryonic persons: what a strange place heaven must be'.
In this issue, Timothy F. Murphy has written a thought-provoking and carefully nuanced article that focuses on the question of a link between a first moment of conception and an end-state beyond death in the resurrection of a human person. He is particularly concerned to probe the theological implications of asserting that the person exists from the moment of conception, and he does so by asking the reader to imagine what kind of resurrected persons would thus populate a heaven filled with, for instance, the resurrected that had in this biotic life lived but a few hours post conception, or had, say, a CV that covered no more than 5 days of cellular replication. By implication, he asks us to imagine a resurrected person whose earthly life lacked memory, consciousness or bodily form, and rather had persisted as a cluster of undifferentiated pluripotent cells. Murphy's candid and fair treatment of these topics is a helpful invitation to some theologians to follow more thoroughly all implications of dogmatically held positions and to consider more thoroughly new ways of thinking of the person as an emergent reality.
St Paul's College, 9 City Rd., Camperdown, NSW 2050, Australia. ihead@usyd.edu.au
Ivan F
IF
Head
D033421:Beginning of Human Life; D004622:Embryo, Mammalian; D006801:Humans; D028723:Personhood; D012067:Religion; D012072:Religious Philosophies