In Australia, we are supposedly eagerly anticipating the cannonization of Mary MacKillop as Australia's first saint, or so the willing media breathlessly informs us. It seems to escape them that not all Australians are Catholic, and that the Catholic church doesn't decide what is or isn't for all of Australia. As much as it might like that power. So, we should say that the Catholic church will soon cannonize it's first Australian born saint. I'm not going to get into the good or lack thereof that MacKillop did in helping institutionalise faith based schooling in Australia. Except to say that no matter how much good she thought she was doing, she helped divide education provision that is now entrenched here, and religions always seem to divide the chosen from the lost, one way or the other.
As I understand it, to be cannonized, a potential saint has to have two miracles attributed to that saints intercession. Apparently, you pray to the dead person, who, in spite of being dead, has the living persons intellectual faculties intact, and this person metaphorically has a word in God's ear - for surely God no longer walks in the garden of Eden with man nor is so anthropomorphized that he still has ears, even if we, ears and all are made in his image - and God then decides to change his mind, making a joke of the idea of God's perfection in planning, or perhaps, God being omniscient knew that potential saint would be prayed to in order that an intercessionary request would be made to itself, thus making a whole charade of the idea of free will and miracles.
In any case issues of free will and an omniscient God aside, the interesting thing to note is that a living person has issued a prayer, possibly silent, possibly vocal such as a rosary, and dead person (contradiction in terms?) , manages through methods unknown to hear or receive the prayer, and that spirit or ghost in turn manages to convey the prayer to the deity. God of course, assuming omniscience already knows that the living person has a request, but perhaps having a non-living person as a go between adds a more pleasing touch and thus God is given to respond more favourably to such intercessionary requests.
The whole idea of intercession and miracles is predicated on the idea that a persons mind or intellect survives the death of the body. Not some amorphous energy that is part of some giant life force, elan vital, that leaves the body upon death, but a well delineated personality. God itself, presumably never having lived, and eternally present, too is a person or has personality. Without the survival and continued ability of intact intellectual faculties of a future saint after he or she expires, then there can be no miracles of the type of which MacKillop will be cannonized.
But is this at all feasible? Can a person, without senses, without brain function, without body be said to be a person? We know, and have known for quite some time that damage to the brain changes an individuals personality. This means that a person is the functioning of their brain. The results of neuroscience point this out. Religious people seem to acknowledge this, because the evidence of strokes, or other neurological damage such as alzheimer's is too much to ignore. But to believe in ghosts, even saintly ones, one must believe that the personality is inviolate or carries over from death. One might ask which personality? The one a person had when they died? Do the children of a parent who's died from dementia imagine the forebear to be a demented ghost? For that was the personality they died with, or do they imagine the ghost to be their parent when in possession of a sound mind? It has all the hallmarks of wish fulfilment.
Consider the mechanics of the mind surviving the body. The body ages with time, and the mind changes also. I had no personality when I was born, having not much more than enough neurological function to be able to feed, poop, sleep. Over time, a personality developed and matured (hopefully). As time progresses I'll no doubt become a crotchety old fool. But if I were to die today, would my personality, sans body, stay that of an Australian man in his late 30's? Time would pass, but my personality would be frozen? It appears that death leads to the death of a personality again. A personality that cannot change isn't really a personality. What about thought, thought is a process in time, there is a before and after. God, therefore, having gone from being a totem of a tribe in the middle east to being an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient creator cannot possibly think. Being outside time precludes this. God cannot have personality. And saints or ghosts? They seem to live on contemporary to us, but without changing, in time, but timeless. A contradiction. If a ghost cannot age, cannot change, it cannot think.
In the end, a personal God, timeless, but able to think, or a ghost, even a ghost of a good person, able to think but unable to change, are contradictions in terms. Wish fulfilment. A hope against inevitable death. From Plato, down through Descartes, to us today, minds that do not die, souls, have seduced people who do not wish to die or cannot bear the thought that loved ones are really gone forever.
Where does the dualism of mind and body arise? It appears from the illusion that our evolved brain creates. We feel we are a unified self. A whole person. But this is an illusion as brain trauma such as neglect demonstrate. Descartes cogito ergo sum was too much. There is thinking, but the I that thinks is an illusion. A stroke might change my brain in such a way that another personality inhabits my body, another thinking thing. That personality changes with maturation of the brain is a fact all observed, that personality changes with damage to the brain is one most acknowledge on some level, but some choose to ignore when death comes into the picture. We feel separate from our bodies, an illusion, we feel that we might be able to continue on without our bodies, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary and the insurmountable problem of how an immaterial mind can interact with a material body.
That there is no ghost in the machine is plain. That we don't feel this is plain too. Religion such as Catholic saint veneration and belief in a personal god cannot survive without this feeling. However rational we are, most of us it would seem would rather trust our feelings and ignore or argue around the stark fact that we have no mind separate from body, and the very idea of a personality without brain is a contradiction, piled on top of the contradiction of immaterial interacting with material. God isn't dead, it isn't even possible. Ditto for saints and ghosts.
