Edward W. Russell, in his books "Design for Destiny" and "Prospects for Eternity" subtitled "Debunking Death" makes the case, among others, that Nature (his select word for God) would not waste the creation and learning of a lifetime of a person and that therefore reincarnation and continuity would reasonably be the case. Expand on this view citing others who take this view as well. Save your disqualifiers for another time.




Edward W. Russell built his case for survival on a principle he took to be evident in the workings of what he preferred to call Nature: nothing in the natural order is wasted. In Design for Destiny (1971) and Prospects for Eternity (1974), the latter subtitled Debunking Death, he argued that a human life accumulates experience, character, and hard-won understanding across decades, and that it would be inconsistent with the economy of Nature for all of that to be annihilated at death. What is painstakingly built is not casually discarded.

From this he drew the conclusion that some form of continuity—whether survival in another mode of being or return to embodied life through reincarnation—is the more reasonable expectation than total extinction.

This is a teleological argument from economy rather than from scripture or mediumship, and Russell is not alone in it.

Its most famous ancestor is Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, where the argument is made that the soul, being the principle of life and akin to the unchanging, cannot admit death; and in the Meno and Phaedo the related claim appears that learning is recollection, that truths we acquire are recovered rather than invented, which implies a continuity of the knower across births.

The idea that the soul's education would be pointless if it ended with the body runs through the Platonic tradition and into Neoplatonism, where Plotinus holds that the soul's descent and return are stages in an ongoing education that death does not terminate.

In the modern period the argument reappears in different idioms. Emmanuel Swedenborg taught that the inner life a person forms in this world carries over immediately into a spiritual world, where the same affections and understandings continue and develop, not as reward or punishment arbitrarily assigned but as the natural unfolding of what one has become. The waste would lie in supposing that the making of a character could be for nothing. William James, in his Ingersoll Lecture "Human Immortality" (1898), approached the matter from a different angle but with a comparable refusal to accept that mental life is simply extinguished: he proposed that the brain may be a transmitting or permitting organ rather than a productive one, so that the ending of the brain need not mean the ending of the consciousness it serves.

F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist, argued in Riddles of the Sphinx and elsewhere that survival is a postulate required by our moral and practical nature, and that a universe which produced persons capable of growth only to destroy them would be incoherent with the values we have reason to trust.

Henri Bergson, in Creative Evolution and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, held that life is an élan that carries consciousness beyond the individual organism, and that the death of the body is not the end of the impulse that produced it.

In the twentieth century the same note is sounded by those who argue from the ubiquity of psychical research and from philosophical anthropology. Frederic W. H. Myers, in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), held that the evidence points to a soul that persists and evolves after death, and that the fragmentary nature of earthly personality suggests a larger whole to come.

C. J. Ducasse, in A Philosophical Scrutiny of Religion and The Belief in a Life After Death, argued that survival is a coherent and rationally defensible hypothesis, and that the burden of proof lies as much on the denier as on the affirmer. H. H. Price, in Essays in the Philosophy of Religion and in his work on survival, developed the idea that death may be a transition into a world of mental images continuous with our present experience, in which the life of the mind continues to have content and direction.

John Hick, in Death and Eternal Life (1976), surveyed the world's traditions and concluded that a general human resurrection or rebirth into a further life is the most adequate way of making sense of the religious claim that this life is a preparation rather than a terminus; for Hick, as for Russell, the waste of unfulfilled potential is precisely what the after-life hypothesis is meant to address.



The reincarnationist version of the argument has its own distinguished company. Hindu and Buddhist thought take it as axiomatic that the karmic process is educational and that lives are lived in series until liberation; the Bhagavad Gita presents rebirth as the continuation of a journey in which no good effort is lost. In the West, the argument from unused capacity was pressed by Gustav Theodor Fechner, who in his Zend-Avesta and The Little Book of Life After Death argued that death is a second birth into a larger life, and that the soul's development in this world is a preparation for that. Rudolf Steiner built an entire spiritual science on the premise that the human being returns repeatedly to earthly life, each life adding to the education of the eternal individuality, and that the failure to see this leads to a senseless view of existence.

The same conviction appears in the work of the psychologist and philosopher William James's friend and correspondent, and later in the writings of theosophists and anthroposophists, and in the more sober philosophical form given by J. M. E. McTaggart, whose Some Dogmas of Religion argues that the self is immortal and that the universe would be defective if the values realized in personality were perishable.

The common thread in all of these is the refusal to accept that the universe is indifferent to the very thing it most elaborately produces: the conscious, growing person. Russell put it in the language of economy—Nature does not waste—but the same intuition is expressed by Plato as the soul's kinship with the eternal, by Swedenborg as the continuation of the inner life, by James as the transmission theory of the brain, by Bergson as the creative impulse, by Hick as the logic of a purposeful world, and by the reincarnation traditions as the long education of the individual across many births. The argument is not a proof but a judgment about what kind of universe we inhabit and what kind of being we are. For Russell, the learning of a lifetime is too costly to be thrown away; for those who stand with him, the same conclusion follows whether one calls the ground of things Nature, God, or the élan of life.