In giving a seminar last week to employees of a high-tech company in Peabody, Massachusetts, I discussed ways for adult children to take responsibility for their parents and other family members who may need care. We reviewed together the best approaches to elder care for aging relatives, along with the challenges and satisfactions that the role of care provider can bring.
To my astonishment, one of the first questions asked was about something called “cryonics.” The questioner, Howard by name, wanted to know what I thought about freezing bodies at death in the expectation that, in the future, medical practitioners will know how to revive them.
My first response, spontaneous and unrehearsed, came quickly. “That suggestion leaves me cold,” I blurted out, outrageously joking at what the questioner intended seriously. Fortunately, I restrained myself enough not to joke about “God’s frozen people.”
It simply had not occurred to me that anyone present would have been a true believer in this way of dealing with death.
Later Howard approached me to talk further about his belief. He said something like, “I am convinced that science will one day defeat death and that’s why I have committed myself to cryonics.” He urged me to study this subject further and recommended that I check out the cryonics web site.
This I have now done, at www.cryonics.org and can report much information about the subject. I discover, for instance, that the movement dates from the 1960s. In 1969 the Immortalist Society was established to promote cryonics. In 1976 the Cryonics Institute was founded to provide practical services, among them: “careful preparation, cooling, and long term patient care in liquid nitrogen.” (This, for me, was an entirely new definition of “long term patient care!”)
“Our aim was maximum reliability and affordability,” boasts the Cryonics Institute. For their services, they currently charge twenty-eight thousand dollars, their “minimum whole body suspension fee.” They believe that “our procedures and policies give a better chance for patient survival than any other organization’s.”
The Cryonics Institute is not shy about its claims: Cryonics is “the only hope for the elderly or terminally ill or those who die suddenly, the coming alternative to the despair of death and disease, and the new technology of life potentially unlimited.”
For me, a person committed to spirituality, cryonics has come on the scene as yet another substitute for faith in God. This confidence that ultimately science will find a way to abolish death seems both illusory and naive.
Yes, science has surprised everybody with certain achievements – – cloning of animals, gene therapy, organ replacements – – but that does not mean science can do every-thing. Nor, of course, can it ever replace religion.
For those people who do not have faith, however, substitutes must be found. And cryonics, with its promise of earthly immortality, is one such. Like religion, it offers hope but here that hope is based on the future achievements of science.
Even if the wait is hundreds of years, true believers hold that the brilliant scientists of the future will come through and find a way to ensure the revival of bodies dead for ages.
Like other forms of pseudo-immortality, cryonics has voted no confidence in the God of love whom the great religious traditions of the world celebrate as the guarantor of our future.
It is true, of course, that some of these traditions do not believe in survival after death in an individual personal form. However, they still look to a divine being as the source of their own being and everything that is good. Many traditions would echo to words of Paul of Tarsus who said, “In him, we live and move and have our being.” That divine ambience, in the faith of billions of people, will not dissolve upon death.
Even if your appraisal of cryogenics is negative like mine, such immortality schemes do people of religious faith a service in making us think more deeply about our own faith. We can be moved, perhaps, to greater appreciation of the spiritual gifts we have received that give us confidence of God’s continuing concern both for our present existence and for our future as well.
Richard Griffin