From a netfriend:

Martin Gardner in his book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener” (OUP, 1985), said that he regarded himself as a “philosophical theist”.

I came across a passage in chapter 18, “Immortality: Why I Do Not Think It Strange”… Gardner has been discussing “the resurrection of the body” and just what various people might be doing in heaven, and on page 302 he writes:

Will there be sex in heaven? “Yes!” shouts the Koran. The Christian “No” is based almost solely on how Jesus answered the Sadducees when they tried to trap him with a story about a woman who survived seven husbands. Whose wife would she be in the life to come? Jesus replied (Matthew 22:30) that in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage. Aquinas, following Augustine, believed that after judgment day, when we receive our celestial bodies, we will keep our sexual organs, but only to restore the perfection of our former identities as male and female. The organs will otherwise be functionless.

Gardner then writes “C. S. Lewis handles the topic circumspectly:” and quotes from chapter 16 of Lewis’s “Miracles: A Preliminary Study”:

‘The letter and spirit of scripture, and of all Christianity, forbid us to suppose that life in the New Creation will be a sexual life; and this reduces our imagination to the withering alternatives either of bodies which are hardly recognisable as human bodies at all or else of a perpetual fast. As regards the fast, I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure, should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer “No,” he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don’t bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing which excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it. Hence where fulness awaits us we anticipate fasting. In denying that sexual life, as we now understand it, makes any part of the final beatitude, it is not of course necessary to suppose that the distinction of sexes will disappear. What is no longer needed for biological purposes may be expected to survive for splendour. Sexuality is the instrument both of virginity and of conjugal virtue; neither men nor women will be asked to throw away the weapon they have used victoriously. It is the beaten and the fugitives who throw away their swords. The conquerors sheathe theirs and retain them. “Trans-sexual” would be a better word than “sexless” for the heavenly life.’

I suspect that when Lewis wrote “What is no longer needed for biological purposes may be …” he was thinking of sex for procreation. As I am sure most realise, this purpose for sex is only involved in a very small proportion of what married couples do (less than 5% ? Less than 1% ?). So if sex for non-procreative purposes takes place in heaven (“for splendour”, to use Lewis’s words) …

I don’t know how accurate Lewis’s analogy might be – I’ll have to wait until I’m dead to find out.

Salaam

Ken Smith

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