One of the byproducts of naturalism is the desire to achieve immortality. If you believe this life is all there is to your existence, the logical thing is to try to make this life eternal. One way to do that could be to have your body frozen when you die until science can find a way to make you live forever. Organizations such as the Cryonics Institute in Michigan are offering cryonic eternal life.
When you pay the fee for cryonic eternal life, technicians will prepare your body. When you are declared dead, technicians cool the body with ice water and keep the tissues oxygenated using CPR and an oxygen mask. Then, they fly the iced body to a laboratory and connect it to a heart-lung bypass machine that circulates the blood. Next, they pump in a solution to act as an antifreeze to prevent cell tissues from being destroyed by ice crystals. Finally, they cool the body to minus 320 degrees F in a tank of liquid nitrogen.
The idea is that when medical science advances and finds a cure for whatever caused the person’s death, they can revive the body, reverse the aging process, and give the person another shot at life. This is obviously a very theoretical idea. However, Shannon Tessier, a cryobiologist at Harvard University, points out that when scientists attempt to freeze a sample of human tissue, “the tissue is completely obliterated, the cell membrane is completely destroyed.”
Atheists have responded to our material by saying that they are going to be cryonically treated at death so they can live forever. However, it is obvious that the technology to make that possible is a very long way off and probably will never happen. More to the point, the only reason to do this would be a desperate attempt by people opposed to God’s plan to bypass the biblical injunction “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).
Even if the proposed ideal of cryonic eternal life became real, think of the problems it would cause. Population issues would be astronomical, and all of the limitations placed upon us by our physical situation would still be present. How much greater would it be to accept a better eternal existence that God offers for free through Jesus Christ.
— John N. Clayton © 2022
Reference: Discover magazine March/April 2022, page10.