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What if there is no life after death?

As noted in Chapter One, belief in life after death is relatively harmless. But what if there really isn’t any life after death? Doesn’t that take all the meaning out of life?

Life after death is actually a mixed proposition. First of all, think about what it would mean if your present life were never-ending, if you were literally immortal, incapable of dying – ever.

Many philosophers and writers have pondered this, and they almost always end up shrinking back from it. This conclusion partly stems from practical considerations, such as: the world would get awfully crowded. But if we assume that the afterlife is some kind of “spiritual” existence – meaning, presumably, existence without a body – then let us also assume that such practical concerns go away.

But there are other concerns. In real life, the mind tends to decay over time. Even people who do not develop some form of senility have trouble with memory – there is just too much stuff in there, and more and more of it gets lost, or mixed up, or takes too long to retrieve. Most people start noticing this after forty or so years. Imagine what it will be like after forty million or so years. And compared to eternity, forty million is nothing.

Still, you probably want to assume that there is no mental decay. All right, let’s grant you that (though, by way of full disclosure: I am not fully authorized to make this decision on behalf of the universe).

But what about all those other spiritual beings out there? What about the ones who made your life a little bit (or more than a little bit) unpleasant during your lifetime? Do you live forever without them? But if you do, don’t the people who found you irritating get to live without you, too? Can you imagine any community of individuals getting along forever without conflict? According to the Bible, even the angels, supposedly higher spiritual beings than we could ever be, failed to get along and a big heavenly war resulted. Why do you suppose that your life after death is going to be stress-free? Are all the nasty people somewhere else – in hell, maybe? Watch what you wish for, you basically nice but not-exactly-perfect person, you.

Or do you think that you will be perfect for eternity, and so will everyone else in your neighborhood? No one has ever heard of such a place, but let’s suppose it is not only possible (dubious) but confidently foreseeable (way dubious). Who are these people and how did they get that way? Are they all on drugs? Was all of their individuality removed somehow? If you were always cheerful and smiling, would that really be you? Would you want that to be you? Wouldn’t a million, billion, zillion years of that be pure hell?

For that matter, what would you do for eternity? Supposedly you could be in some automatic state of euphoria forever, but that just makes you a happy zombie, not a real human being. Here on earth, we derive a lot of our pleasure from achievement, from overcoming obstacles, from solving problems, from helping others with their problems, and so on. If all the obstacles and problems are gone, if there is nothing to achieve, the human-ness of this after-life is gone.

One of the great contradictions of Christianity is that God supposedly made the world the best he could, and that pain and evil are there because they serve some larger purpose. But if a truly happy after-life is possible, if heaven is possible, this means that pain and evil are not necessary after all, and that the theologians have been mistaken all along. Or if they are right, we have an even grimmer possibility: that after death, we are not looking at an eternity of joyous existence, but rather an eternity of more pain and evil.

So if you have been counting on an afterlife, you should think about whether you aren’t just being childish about it. A five-year old imagines that he or she is going to get that special toy or video game or whatever, and then never be unhappy again. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. Odds are, the after-life, if it exists at all, doesn’t work that way, either. The common Christian and Muslim versions of it are immature and, even worse, incoherent.

There are other versions, of course. In Eastern religions, the person doesn’t really survive, or not sufficiently to retain his or her uniqueness. Perhaps your “soul” – if you have one – is reunited with the great spiritual ocean from which it originally derived. Perhaps it transmigrates into another person or other creature. But if that is your soul we’re talking about, and at some point your “you-ness” is gone, there isn’t much difference between that and simply passing out of existence.

If you wish for an afterlife, therefore, you are wishing for something that is at best a huge gamble, and at worst an eternity of misery. It is hard to see a lot of value in this – for ourselves at least. Granted, people who suffer a lot, or people who die before they are really ready to end their lives, sometimes take comfort in the idea that they will continue after death, but without the suffering, and without the other limitations.

This is reminiscent, in a way, of the old Twilight Zone story where space aliens arrive carrying a book titled “To Serve Man.” This sounds like a fun concept, and people line up in droves to return to the alien planet where there are beings who can’t wait to serve them. In the end, though, it turns out that “To Serve Man” is a cookbook, and the people who couldn’t wait for this particular afterlife became the ingredients in somebody’s stew.

If you lived on after death, it could end up that way, or any way – and almost certainly it would be a way far beyond your imagination. Let’s hope that this works out for you, but some of us would rather not take the chance.

Meanwhile, though, there is another reason many people take comfort in the idea of an afterlife: namely, that that’s where we like to think our loved ones go when they die. And so, first, they are not really dead, which means that their lives are not simply over and that these lives have not become meaningless. Second, when we die, then we get to see all of our loved ones again, so our loss is only temporary, and it will be more than made good in the end. We might even get to see people we never knew, but only admired from a distance, including those long dead. Who wouldn’t want to get to hang out with Elvis or Groucho or Socrates – or all three at once (now that would be a party!).

Of course, maybe you don’t get to meet your deceased family and friends. Or you do get to meet them, but they are not really themselves any more, but some insipid personality-less smiley-face version of themselves. Or just as bad, they are still themselves, but you weren’t really thinking about how they could get on your nerves sometimes, about how so-and-so used to constantly complain about nothing, or used to pick on you, or didn’t really seem to care about you that much when a certain someone else was around, or whatever. Nobody is perfect, and no human relationship is perfect. Granted, it would be great to see once more the people we loved most who have died ahead of us. But do we have to see them twice more, a dozen times more, a thousand times more? I don’t mean to be critical of your deceased relatives and friends, but honestly, most people’s company wears thin after a while, and it can make “forever” seem like an eternity!

It’s that same old all-too-human habit again. We want something because we crave the good things that come with it, but we forget that there are always dark and unhappy things, too – at least in any life (or afterlife) that contains humans.

It is certainly conceivable, of course, that an afterlife will somehow, despite all the odds, be pure heaven. But it is far more likely that, if it exists at all, it won’t be pure heaven. It might, in fact, be a whole lot like living on earth forever, which is an awfully long time.

So be wary of an afterlife. More important, there are some things that are positively good about the idea that it’s over when we die.

For one thing, we don’t have to worry about hell any more, or purgatory, or even limbo. We are not going to be eternally, or even temporarily, cooked over a supernatural fire because of mistakes we made when we were alive. Which is only fair, considering we’ve already lived through a trillion television commercials about indigestion, body odor, and hemorrhoids – how much punishment can we be expected to take?

Probably more significantly, though, dying gives importance to life. Think about it: if you lived forever, nothing you did would matter much. Eventually you would see it come apart, or be superseded by something else, or mostly, just be forgotten. Everything would just be another mile in a train ride that went nowhere, because it never ended, and could have no destination.

Imagine yourself sitting on a beach, or a wide prairie, or the top of a snowy mountain. Now imagine that you have lived many lifetimes – not just a few dozen, but one full lifetime for every grain of sand on the beach, every blade of grass on the prairie, or every flake of snow on the mountain. Untold trillions of lives. What do you imagine could surprise you after that much time? What could thrill you, entice you, even vaguely interest you? There would be nothing you hadn’t seen, done, or heard, thousands of times too many.

Death may seem to suck the meaning out of life sometimes – for example, when it cuts a life too short. For most of us, though, it is death that gives life meaning, and it is eternity that would make life meaningless.

Of course, if the traditional Christian view is correct, life on earth is important because it sets us up for eternity. It’s hard to believe in a God who is that unreasonable and cruel, but that’s the official story: in the relative eye-blink of 70 years, give or take, we supposedly use up every chance we will ever have to determine what happens to us not just for another 70,000,000,000,000,000 years, but for a lot longer beyond that. If that were true, then certainly our lives here on earth would be extremely important. But what a horrid concept, and what kind of an evil imagination must have first come up with it!

Fortunately, there is no good reason to believe that it is true. And just as fortunately, a more secular concept of the transience of life provides a strong argument for life’s importance, without making its supposed consequences so ugly. In a limited lifetime, what you do is meaningful because it is your one chance to try to get things right. True, in the end, you probably just die, your brain stops working, and your body is given back to the earth. That in itself is rather pointless, and not terribly inspiring. But life is like a book or a movie – or a game. While you are playing the game (or reading the book or watching the movie), you give yourself over to it, you get into the spirit of it, and you enjoy it as if it were real.

Imagine a baseball game that lasted forever. What would be the point of even trying to score? Anything you did would have no meaning in the end, because there would be no end. But when a game has nine innings, you know you have a limited time to win it. You could, of course, just say: well, it’s going to end, and once it’s over it’s over, so why bother to play hard. But most people don’t do that. Once they get into the game (or whatever it is they enjoy), they just run with it, make the most of it, and when it’s over they look back with pleasure, if they tried hard and did well.

You have the option of taking no interest in the game. You can even drop out of the game if you want. And some people do that with their lives. But for most of us, the very fact that we have a limited amount of time to play increases the challenge. We call upon ourselves to make the most of our time at bat (or our time at the poker table, or our chance to be on the stage, whatever metaphor you prefer). Exactly because it’s not going to last forever, it is richer, and every moment is valuable.

So all in all we are far better off that, as we saw in Chapter One, there probably isn’t an afterlife anyway. Giving up belief in an afterlife is like giving up belief in Santa Claus: it was fun for a while, but eventually it’s time to let it go, because it is not true and, if it were, it would be more than a little scary. When we grow up, we find that real life is much richer and more rewarding than made-up fantasies.

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