IV. Scientist Priestley—Total Insensibility Characterizes Death

Learned scientists, as well as men of other professions, were in the list of champions of Conditional Immortality and its usual corollary, the ultimate destruction of the wicked. And some were in North America. One such was British-born DR. JOSEPH PRIESTLEY (1733-1804), eminent man of science, discoverer of oxygen (reputedly next in significance to Newton’s discovery of gravitation), philosopher, and Dissenter theologian. It is not without significance that while pursuing his theological studies in the Dissenter Academy at Daventry the sleep of the soul was a topic of frequent student discussion. It was one of the live questions of the day. The issue was now inescapable.CFF2 214.2

Early in his career as a minister Priestley held pastorates in two churches. At the same time he was professor of languages in the Dissenters Academy of Warrington, for he was facile in French, German, and Italian, knowing as well Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic. But Priestley came to be known primarily as a scientist. As such he was a member of the Royal Society, and was honored by the University of Edinburgh. He traveled widely in Europe, where his name and attainments were highly revered. However, in the popular uprisings at the time of the French Revolution, Priestley’s home and library were burned, and his life was imperiled by a mob. Soon after, in 1794, he emigrated to the United States, where he resided the rest of his life, and there enjoyed the friendship of such men as Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.CFF2 214.3

Priestley was a voluminous writer on science, philosophy, and religion, and authored more than three hundred works, many having extensive circulations and exerting a wide influence. One was Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit, to which is added the History of the Philosophical Doctrine concerning the Origin of the Soul, and the Nature of Matter; next The History of Opinions concerning the State of the Dead (1782); and then An Inquiry into the Knowledge of the Antient Hebrews, concerning a Future State (1801). ^{2424) Cf. Abbot, op. cit., nos. 211-213, 1763, 2465.} Priestley’s treatises stirred up a veritable hornets’ nest of perfervid replies—from Whitehead, Bicknell, Dawes, Gifford, Omerod, Walters, as well as anonymous writers. But the ranks of the Conditionalists continued to have steady accessions.CFF2 214.4

In a major work, A History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782), Priestley wrote as a Protestant, charging the Papacy with corrupting the Christian faith. He attacked the Church Fathers and the perverting part that Platonism had played in the corrupting of church dogma. This accusation led, perforce, to intense and prolonged controversy. But many sided with him.CFF2 215.1

Priestley was fearless and independent as a thinker, but reverent nonetheless. He rejected theological dogmas that rested upon merely ecclesiastical authority. The Bible was the norm and test. And because he came to disbelieve the theory of the Innate Immortality of the soul, Priestley was often bitterly stigmatized as a materialist. Some went so far as to brand him a deist, or even an atheist. Nevertheless, he fought the current infidelity and remained a firm believer not only in God and the Bible faith but in a future life. He based his hope of immortality solely upon a resurrection from the dead instead of on the conscious survival of the soul after death.CFF2 215.2

Revelation and resurrection were to him inseparable and inescapable. And he held undeviatingly to the postulate of the sleep of the dead between death and the resurrection. He maintained the “cessation of all individual thought” at the “dissolution of the [human] organism” at death, and challenged the possibility of “thinking” without an “organized body” as being “not only destitute of all evidence from actual appearances,” but as “directly contrary to them.” From his study of history Priestley knew that Conditionalism was held by not a few in the Early Church, and always by some in the centuries that followed. Thus he declared—
“that the genuine Christian doctrine of the sleep of the whole man till the resurrection, did, however, continue in the Christian Church, and especially among those who had little intercourse with philosophers, there is sufficient evidence.” ^{2525) Joseph Priestley, The Theological and Miscellaneous Works, vol. 3, p. 374.}CFF2 215.3