A Defense of the Desirability of Heaven Clinton Neptune April 26, 2017 1 Introduction Bernard Williams famously argued that immortality would lead to intolerable tedium[7]. If his conclusion is true, then we ought not desire any sort of blissful- type afterlife (heaven) that precludes death. Of course, there are possible worlds where the afterlife is quite blissful for a finite amount of time, even a very long time. Yet of interest here, and of interest to many religious inquirers, is whether the heaven hoped for, in which denizens reside indefinitely into eternity, is in fact desirable at all. I will argue in this paper that Williams’ argument, while valid, has several objectionable premises. Moreover, further attempts to reboot his argument also fail to decisively rule out the desirability of heaven. 2 The Argument Why think that heaven would be undesirable? According to Williams, the trou- bling feature of heaven is that its inhabitants have immortality. Immortality sometimes can refer to the inability to undergo physical death, but this is not what is at stake. Rather, the worrisome aspect of immortality is that the indi- vidual will not undergo personal death. Whereas physical death marks the end of a biological life, personal death marks the end of a person’s existence. Thus, in the heavenly state of interest to most human religious inquirers, denizens of heaven enjoy the privileged position of immortality, i.e. they will not experience personal death, though they may have at one point experienced physical death. To be sure, Williams is not opposed to the notion that people might survive their physical death and enjoy a kind of afterlife where immortality was optional. His argument concedes that it may be desirable to live as long as one wishes in a non-immortal afterlife, and upon reaching or approaching the unyielding boredom that Williams predicts, the individual may choose to cease to exist. This is to affirm that his argument does not attack the notion of post-mortem existence per se, rather only the kinds that involve immortality. So, to put Williams’ complaint simply, it is the lack of personal death that he finds problematic: “I am going to suggest that...an endless life would be a mean- ingless one; and that we could have no reason for living eternally 1