Is There Life After Death

Is There Life After Death?

This is one of life’s great mysteries.

On the one hand, most people seem to like the concept and prefer to believe in it. It has a two-fold attraction. First, it can be very comforting to think that the troubles in our lives will be relieved after we die, that we will be reunited with those we love, and that we will live forever in bliss. Second, it seems unfair that evil people should prosper, as is so often the case, and that even those who suffer in the end (we’re thinking Hitler here) do so not at all in proportion to the suffering they caused – wouldn’t it be nice, or at least fair, if there were some after-life punishment for such people?

On the other hand, wishin’ ain’t gettin’ – and there seems to be precious little evidence that there actually is some kind of life after death. In fact, it seems pretty unlikely.

In favor of the concept of life after death, we have the religious teachings of thousands of years and the beliefs of billions of people. Of course, not all of them believe in the same thing. The Jewish faith is rather reticent on this subject, and Buddhism teaches that whatever we have that resembles a “soul” does not maintain its individuality but is ultimately reabsorbed into some sort of universal spiritual dimension. Hindus tend to believe in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls through multiple existences until, again, some sort of unity with the cosmic spiritual plane is attained. Christians and Moslems form the two major religious groups that maintain a clear doctrine of permanent personal survival of death. So it does not seem that the belief in the afterlife, as we traditionally think of it, at least, is universally agreed to.

Apart from doctrine, we can look to outside phenomena. If the dead live, perhaps they manifest themselves to us, either directly or indirectly. So we ask, do ghosts exist? Again, lots of people think so, and quite a few claim to have had some personal experience of this. But solid evidence is lacking. As with all paranormal phenomena, the more scientific the investigation, the more the phenomena simply disappear. There are many reasons why people think that they experience ghosts: sometimes they simply want to, sometimes they have dreams or hallucinations, sometimes people are pulling tricks on them either for fun or for more nefarious reasons, sometimes it is just the play of random sounds and odd lighting. And of course, sometimes people are just making up stories.

Unfortunately, we have all been conditioned to think of ghosts as a category of possible, if not probable, reality. Starting with fairy tales and cartoons and Halloween images in childhood, eventually graduating into the horror film genre, many of us have had this category of creature burned into our imaginations. We all know that this does not make ghosts real – but it may give their existence more plausibility than it deserves.

If ghosts really existed, one would think that their appearance should be more common than it is. There are far more dead people than living ones, yet the number of ghosts – even if we were to accept every wacky tale as true – is far less than the number of living persons. For that matter, it is far less than the number of victims of violent death (a favorite “explanation” for ghosts). Of course, since we don’t really know what, if anything, happens after death, or why, it is a bit presumptuous to say that the pattern of supposed ghostly appearances is somehow impossible, or even unlikely. Yet the rarity of ghosts does seem odd, if they are real, and there does not appear to be any good theory that covers both the situations that are claimed to have occurred and the many, many similar situations in which no ghosts or hauntings happen. With no coherent and verifiable theory to account for ghosts, we have to be suspicious, at the very least.

Another possible clue to life after death lies in the experiences of people who have revived or been resuscitated after apparently dying – people who have had “near-death experiences” (or NDEs, as they are referred to in the trade). NDEs are commonly characterized by a feeling of peacefulness, the famous passage through a dark tunnel with a light appearing at the end, visions of one’s dead family members, and the sense of viewing your surroundings as if you were an observer – that is, an “out-of-body” experience.

It is not clear what such experiences mean, if anything. Although the features just mentioned are frequently reported, none of them are always reported. Nor do we have any reports of people who have been brain-dead for months, weeks, or even days. The most basic explanation is that NDEs are what the mind experiences as it is shutting down, as the brain gradually goes out of business.

What you sense during that process is some altered state of awareness, not identical in everyone, that may combine heightened (or “less filtered,” perhaps, is a better term) perception of one’s surroundings, with the gradual sensation of losing consciousness as portions of the brain slow down (perhaps with some other portions trying to compensate by speeding up temporarily). Such experiences are much more common than used to be thought, but even so, it is not the sort of thing that can be studied scientifically other than by collecting individual reports and looking for patterns. You can’t very well bring people to the point of death and then revive them just so you can measure their brain activity during the process. Most would call this cruelty.[1]

It is legitimate to suppose, therefore, that the study of NDEs could tell us something important about the process of dying, but it doesn’t tell us much, if anything, about being dead – and it is very unlikely to tell us much about what happens long after death.

Probably the main reason for doubt concerning survival of death, though, is that if we regard humanity as the peak (so far) of biological evolution, we would not expect there to be life after death, whether in ghostly form or any other. On the contrary, if the mind is really just the activity of the brain, then when the brain ceases, the mind ceases with it. There is no “soul” that is separate from the body – there is just the body. When the body dies, it stops working, consciousness ceases, and when, eventually, the body decomposes, there is simply nothing left. This appears to be true of bacteria and protozoa, of plants and insects and fish and birds and mammals – including humans. We are different from other creatures, but we’re not that different – even if we wish we were.

For all that, however, the case is not firmly proved one way or the other, and it is probably better not to insist on an absolute answer. Unlike other elements of religious belief (e.g., which god, if any, one believes in, or which form of supposed revealed truth one offers allegiance to), the question of an afterlife seems to have little tendency to touch off wars and persecutions. People believe, or they don’t, in heaven or in reincarnation or in something else, but they seem marvelously unconcerned about sending either themselves or their enemies into the afterlife to prove their point.

How nice it would be if every theological dispute were subject to such peaceful disagreement! Since this one seems to fall into this category, though, maybe we should let people quietly choose their own preferences. For purposes of this little book, however, we will assume that there is no afterlife – not because that is certain, but to show that it is possible to live a good and rewarding life not only without God, but without heaven, either.

In fact, as we will see in Chapter 3, it can be a much more satisfying way to live.

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