Dear Sir,
The headline-making story in November regarding a 14-year-old girl’s legal battle to have her body frozen after death, in the hope of reanimation and cure in centuries to come, was tragic all round. Her mother’s attention was focused elsewhere in the girl’s final hours, her estranged father was not allowed to see her even after her death and the hospital team were greatly distressed by the preparation process for freezing. Grief at the loss of a child is hard enough to bear without such additional complications
However, perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was the fact that there is no evidence at all that bodies preserved in this way can ever be thawed without damage, let alone be reanimated in the future. This whole situation and others like it arise from the growing refusal of our culture to accept the reality of our own mortality. Was there ever a more potent recent example than this of the observation, usually attributed to Chesterton, that anyone who does not believe in God does not believe nothing, but believes anything? Reincarnation, purgatory, reanimation after freezing or being uploaded into cyberspace are all attempts to circumvent the revealed truth of Scripture that we are all ‘destined to die once and after that to face judgment’ (Hebrews 9.27).
