The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.
—Saul Bellow, Ravelstein
In the final analysis I, an unrepentant Jewish atheist, cannot accept that my death—yours, too, I guess—marks the absolute end of being as I know (and love) it. For no rational reason, I presently assume that when I have passed on, when my faculty line is gathered unto my dean and bloodlessly absorbed into a vast pool of new curricular priorities, a vague flickering consciousness of sorts will perdure.
I think the vocalist Jon Hendricks was expressing something similar about the hereafter when he sang this eulogy for one of jazz's larger-than-life virtuosos:
Now, we know that nobody dies
They just leave here
So Rahsaan Roland Kirk is looking down on us and listening to us
So everybody repeat after me ...
Perhaps to channel Kirk's spirit, Hendricks asks us to repeat the phrase "bright moments" (that being the title of one of Kirk's signature compositions). With this request, the master of the genre known as vocalese implies that we must honor, or at least entertain, those who perdure.
This all leads me to wonder if a perduring consciousness gets to do more than just look down and listen. Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead? Or will it be an agent, endowed with the capacity to act? Put differently, if someone chooses to immortalize me in lyric, will I get to sing along?
Extremely odd queries of this sort kept leaping to mind as I perused four recently released books about the afterlife. Two examine what science has to say about the possibility that we persevere even after our bodies have ceased to function. One amasses perceptions of heaven and hell across cultural time and space. The other makes the philosophical case that "a good person quite literally survives death."
This is not a topic that is easy to discuss. As Dinesh D'Souza points out in Life After Death: The Evidence, the afterlife is something not to be addressed, a "big taboo." Fred Frohock, of the University of Miami, remarks that the issue is usually avoided on secular campuses. Princeton's Mark Johnston, author of Surviving Death, asks: "How can you decently talk, in an academic context, about whether or not we survive death?"
One possible answer: without any regard whatsoever for what your colleagues might think! That, at least, is Frohock's position in his captivating Beyond: On Life After Death This self-described "closet mystic" offers us a compelling story line: A tenured professor and department chair writes an academic book in which he sympathetically explores the verisimilitude of reincarnation, zombies, near-death experiences, autoscopy, nonphysical selves, and so forth.
Just to lend it all an added air of scholarly gravitas, he sprinkles in fictional vignettes about extraterrestrials, meditations on science fiction, and reflects on the preternatural Ellington at Newport 1956 recording. He's a relentlessly adventurous thinker, Professor Frohock is. I wouldn't be surprised if, like the fellow in the Dos Equis beer ad, he's routinely questioned by the Miami-Dade police just because they find him interesting.
His investigation, which I shall return to in a moment, is a good deal more open-ended than D'Souza's. The author of the 1991 screed Illiberal Education, D'Souza is an engaging writer and a ferocious polemicist. But in Life After Death, the usual vitriol of his sometimes quite entertaining anti-left rants is mostly absent. The only bad guys he can round up are a smattering of materialist thinkers and New Atheists, many of whom he debated over the past few years and all of whom, apparently, felt the full fury of his "Christian martial arts."
His alleged victims advocate what he derisively dubs "the Enlightened People's Outlook." Such a perspective maintains that "there is no life after death, and it is silly to suggest otherwise." That may or may not be a position held by those with whom D'Souza locked horns on college campuses. But my guess is that a proper scientist is more likely to argue that there is no evidence for life after death.
D'Souza, for his part, is adamant that such evidence exists. In fact, he proclaims that science "stunningly confirms the beliefs that [Christians] held in the first place." The author has read widely and, save a few chapters, writes with pace and punch. He devotes great energy and imagination to popularizing complex scientific ideas for his readers. Whether his distillation of those ideas is accurate is something that only physicists, neuroscientists, astronomers, and biochemists, among others, can answer.
Should we, for example, trust him when he concludes: "Modern physics undermines the premises of materialism"? Is there really a "physics of immortality"? Ought we accept his assertion that "evolution has gone beyond increasing complexity; it has provided the catalyst for a new order of being in the world"?
Frankly, D'Souza's nonscientific pronouncements do not inspire confidence that his scientific ones are spot on. He ascribes to Augustine the idea "that when we become Christians, we immediately become citizens of the heavenly city." He never cites a text for this claim (which sounds much more like something Augustine's enemies, the Donatists, would have believed). Nor does he mention that for the Bishop of Hippo, even those who reside in the heavenly city on earth might be wicked and depraved. Similarly, when D'Souza parrots the theologian N.T. Wright's musings about the "historicity of the resurrection," he is advancing ways of thinking that no scholar, other than a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, could possibly see as appropriate for discussion outside of a church study group. (See "What's Wrong With the Society of Biblical Literature," The Review, November 10, 2006.)
The rhetorical operation performed throughout Life After Death is well known to those who study conservative Christian culture warriors. First, D'Souza must Manicheanize social reality by dividing the world into atheists and theists. There is, after all, "complete agreement among the world's religions that there is life after death." Having bifurcated the earth into two unequal parts, he must then cast himself as a defender of God-fearers far and wide. The truth is, however, that D'Souza is arguing not on behalf of the world's religions, but for one particular Christian view of death. The "stunning evidence" he finds for the afterlife would leave Jews and Muslims, as well as many Christians, scratching their heads, not to mention damned.
The study terminates with a not very veiled appeal to the reader's immortal soul. An orator who aspires to "offer a highly persuasive legal brief for the afterlife" loses most of his jury when he intimates that by coming to Christ, we can experience "eternal life right now." While he urges us to "be open to learning something new," D'Souza merely wants science to confirm the old things he read about in the Scriptures and hears about at a Calvary Chapel in San Diego, where he worships.
Like D'Souza, Frohock is appalled by the ultramaterialism of the New Atheists. "The deep certainty of atheists that all of reality is material with no spiritual presence, and certainly no God," he laments, "is a species of arrogance utterly unsupportable by deep and sophisticated understanding of true science." But whereas D'Souza is confident that science obediently verifies his theological convictions, Frohock expresses critical doubts about science's ability to tell us anything about the hereafter.
"Science in any of its incarnations," he argues, "produces a form of knowledge that is precise, powerful, but limited to certain sectors of experience. ... There are many forms of reliable knowledge outside of the scientific community of investigatory rules." Materialism, by itself, cannot "express the full scope of the real," and for that reason Frohock looks to other narratives to help him make sense of his subject matter.
To get at the real, Frohock creatively intersperses fictional conversations of guests at a dinner party talking about past lives and other unsettling experiences. He analyzes literature and cinema with verve, all in an effort to see what those narratives can offer. It's original and clever, and the attempt to escape from academic publishing's genocidal war on professorial creativity accrues to the honor of both Frohock and the University Press of Kansas.
Still, I wonder if he underestimates the awesome legitimating power of science. We have, after all, no dearth of fictional accounts about death. Dodgy ruminations on what follows our demise have been around since ancient Egypt. We don't lack narratives about the Beyond—we lack science about the Beyond. We want something factual, anything factual, to falsify the apparent truth that when we perish we won't see our children ever again or hear the chuggy groove of a Hammond B-2 organ. God bless nonscientific narratives! Our need for knowledge of the Everlasting is something that only science can slake.
But science, Frohock freely admits, is not up to the slaking. To his credit, the author never forces any discipline to testify on behalf of his mystical hunches. What he does do is usher us to certain epistemological precipices, unknowable dilemmas that render science wordless. By the end of Beyond, Frohock offers advice on how we can constructively discuss such puzzles. Just to unnerve us, he signs off with the observation: "If individuals live on after death, where do they go? Perhaps nowhere. They're still here."
Classic Christian doctrines, of course, tend to put the dead way out over there. Those far-off realms are surveyed in John Casey's After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory . Casey, a fellow of Caius College, at the University of Cambridge, is equal parts thoughtful and disheveled in his presentation. For some reason, the author of this lengthy study never identifies a central theme—an oversight that causes him to trundle insightfully, breezily, and seemingly arbitrarily from one culture's reflections on the hereafter to another.
Casey is certainly correct that there are no "general formulae," "pattern," or "inclusive theory" to serve as a common denominator for cross-cultural conceptions of the afterlife. But if that is the case, then what motivates him to explore the particular subjects that he does? Why does he devote 100 pages to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Israelite, Greek, and Roman views of death? Why spend nearly 50 pages discussing the 18th-century seer Emanuel Swedenborg and the spiritualist movement that arose in his wake? Why does the book end with an interview Casey conducted with the Coptic Bishop Grigorius nearly 20 years ago? Our guide in After Lives is a most whimsical Virgil.
Casey's allergy to connecting the dots often obscures his considerable skill for sketching the transhistorical Big Picture. A better title for this work might have been The Christian Revolt Against Hell. For the author demonstrates that Catholics in particular have been perennially uncomfortable with church teachings on the afterlife. Ideas like eternal damnation, original sin, and predestination have evoked a wide array of fight-or-flight responses from the faithful. Forged in the crucible of the theological particle accelerator that propelled Paul's gloomy ideas into Augustine's even gloomier ones, these doctrines entail a radical rejection of human free will. To read Casey is to be reminded that these concepts are not only deeply contradictory (why repent and perform acts of do-goodery if God has your future all planned out regardless of what good you do?), but also psychologically unbearable.
As I see it, the central lesson of After Lives is that "the vast majority of Christians—at least, in the West—are now Pelagians without knowing it." Here Casey refers to the group that first enthralled Augustine, then vexed him, and whose ideas granted far more import to human agency and far less centrality to sin. Their dissent was overcome only by brute force. But not entirely overcome. Most churches nowadays, argues Casey, downplay "any idea of essential, inherited human depravity, and of the powerlessness of the human being to achieve anything good of their own efforts." That argument could be brought into conversation with D'Souza's scientific confirmation of Christian beliefs. For even if molecular biologists were to verify church teachings on heaven and hell, Casey's work suggests that countless Christians would ignore them anyhow.
A philosophical confirmation of the afterlife is attempted in the fourth book, Surviving Death. From the outset, let me confess that Professor Johnston's argument went so far above my head that it jettisoned booster rockets into the poppling ocean of my incomprehension. Five long lectures full of numbingly dense, abstraction-and-neologism-riddled prose await the reader. A representative sample: "Reference magnetism would therefore predict that the genidentity condition for human bodies that we have in mind by default, and so can use to predicate things of the first human animals we grow up with, is not the disjunctive genidentity condition required for resurrection by reassembly."
Got it?
Yet, out of something resembling intellectual spite, I soldiered on, vowing to survive Surviving Death. Predictably, an academic version of the Stockholm syndrome set in: The more I subjected myself to the cringe-inducing complexity and caprice of Johnston's proofs, the more I warmed to the author's considerable charms. Surely the bulk of this book should have been published in some micro-specialized journal emanating from Central Europe. But when the author lets himself go—particularly when he stops fencing with other philosophers—he reveals himself to be an engaging wit, a swaggering polymath, and, over all, a major talent.
Which is not to say he has in any way convinced me that "that a good person quite literally survives death." Johnston claims to be working within the boundaries of methodological naturalism, not supernaturalism (which he nevertheless does not reject out of hand). Unless I am missing something, this can't really be the case. The conclusion he reaches—"The good after death are conscious, they deliberate and they act ... in and through the multitude that comes after"—cannot possibly be grounded in any naturalist framework. Neither purely materialist nor supernaturalist, his methodology is a bewildering combination of logical analysis, metaphysics, and moral theology.
It would be pointless to try to summarize his hypotheses. The entire argument about life after death hinges on Johnston's view of the person as protean. If you can accept that "our essence could allow changes in our form of embodiment," then you can look forward to life beyond life! But you had better be good. Continued existence in the "onward rush of humanity," according to Johnston, is a privilege strictly reserved for a person whose "practical outlook is an expression of agape." Such a moral ringer "becomes generally embodied; his constitution is made up of the constitution of all present and future beings with interests."
As with Dante's concept of contrapasso surveyed by Casey (by which one receives in hell an appropriate retribution for a crime committed on earth), Johnston too has death perform a moral audit; it consigns the bad to the "collapse of presence, the severance of life with others." For this philosopher, the world beyond has no autonomy. What happens to you there is a consequence of how you lived here. Citing Kant, he reminds us that "morality by its nature requires the support of the afterlife."
There is, of course, a counterpossibility: If we do in fact perdure, perhaps we transit into a realm beyond good and evil—a realm so radically other that science, theology, and philosophy cannot fathom its contours. That does not mean we should stop asking questions. But insofar as there are no answers, a recommended course of action might consist of living according to some minimal standard of decency and cherishing our bright moments.
Books Discussed in This Essay
After Lives: A Guide to Heaven,Hell, and Purgatory, by John Casey (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Beyond: On Life After Death, by Fred Frohock (University Press of Kansas, 2010)
Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D'Souza (Regnery, 2009)
Surviving Death, by Mark Johnston (Princeton University Press, 2010)
Comments
1. performance_expert2 - August 09, 2010 at 09:26 am
The political-military enforced New World Order has a colonization appeal on two fronts, Christians are to go forth and convert and corporations are based on a need to grow and find new people and resources to exploit.
2. twclark - August 09, 2010 at 09:56 am
From a naturalistic standpoint it seems unlikely that a *particular* person could survive the dissolution of the body, which after all is what carries personality and character. However, this doesn't mean that at death we should anticipate nothingness or non-being. We perhaps should instead anticipate the continuation of experience, just not in the context of the person who died. A thought experiment based on the work of Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons) suggests that although there may not be personal subjective continuity beyond death, there might be *generic* subjective continuity, http://www.naturalism.org/death.htm
3. pataburd - August 09, 2010 at 10:54 am
It's amazing to me, at how glib and dismissive many treat this perhaps all-important topic. I guess we'll just have to "wing it", employing an illogic that we don't dare use even when planning an out-of-town trip.
If we have developed sophisticated GPS systems to ensure us of reaching our destination twenty miles down the road, then why do so many talk about what proceeds/adjoins the death of a human being with either smug cynicism (like our author), or with seeming contentment with the vaguest ambiguity?
4. jimsimmonds - August 09, 2010 at 10:59 am
D'Souza may be a great debater, but his arguments can be based on misleading, partial truths. Case in point: In a debate with Hitchens, he pointed out that only 18 women were ever burned for witchcraft in America. I consulted a colleague who is an expert on Medieval witchcraft. "True," he said (in fact it may have been as high as 23), but in Europe it is estimated that as many as 25,000 were burned or hanged. Unfortunately, Hitchens never called him on this.
p.s. As a materialist, I am reconciled to my consciousness burning out like a light bulb when I die. Is that any more terrible than a sleepless dream?
5. raghuvansh1 - August 09, 2010 at 01:15 pm
Life after death, heaven, hell,rebirth resurrection all these concepts born ed from fear of death.Fear of death is so horrible we could not tolerate it so reassure ourselves mankind discovered these concepts. They are really illusion but we donot want truth always want illusion without illusion he could not survive within minute in the world
6. sidewinder_la - August 09, 2010 at 02:48 pm
This discussion reminds me of the wonderfully cogent and erudite conversation between science and "consciousness" undertaken by Tenzin Gyatso, aka His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, in his book THE UNIVERSE IN A SINGLE ATOM (2005, Morgan Road Books). The author recounts his fascination with and understanding of quantum physics, the Big Bang theory, Darwinian evolution, and the sequencing of the human genome. He talks about his friendships with some of the great scientific minds of the day (people like Carl von Weizsacker at the Max Planck Institute and University of Hamburg, David Bohm of the University of London, Anton Zeilinger at the University of Innsbruck, Piet Hut at Princeton, Eric Lander at MIT, Daniel Goleman at Harvard, Paul Ekman at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute and many others). And he discusses points of contact and divergence between modern science and the rich traditions of Buddhist philosophy.
The Dalai Lama very clearly and patiently describes the Buddhist concept of consciousness, its necessarily subjective nature, and the difficulty of studying it using scientific means. He makes the case that "one can take science seriously and accept the validity of its empirical findings without subscribing to scientific materialism." He argues for "the need for and possibility of a worldview grounded in science, yet one that does not deny the richness of human nature and the VALIDITY OF MODES OF KNOWING OTHER THAN THE SCIENTIFIC." (Emphasis mine).
Why does he argue in favor of this perspective? He believes strongly, he says, "that there is an intimate connection between one's conceptual understanding of the world, one's vision of human existence and its potential, and the ethical values that guide one's behavior. How we view ourselves and the world around us cannot help but affect our attitudes and our relations with our fellow beings and the world we live in." The rigorous, sophisticated, empirically-based investigations of consciousness conducted over many centuries by Buddhist philosophers and scientists open a window onto the discussion of an afterlife and other states of being that could be more fruitful and engaging than the essentially closed systems of Christian scripture and scientific materialism.
7. 12052592 - August 09, 2010 at 11:52 pm
Great. Another Jewish critique of Christian thought. Give yourself a star, you're a rebel. Supplimented by comments (sidewinder_la) about the superiority of Buddhist philosphers. Get yer head outta the clouds. Chop some wood. Kill and eat an animal.
Sing a song. Make love to a woman/man. Just STOP that incessant, self-affirming, academic whining!
8. vindolanda - August 10, 2010 at 07:28 am
"A piece of coal thrown on the fire might not burn Mr Boswell, but I doubt it. "
This says all that can be said ,the rest is lexical wind.
9. johnborstlap - August 10, 2010 at 07:49 am
The difficulty, in the West, of understanding the distinction between material reality and psychological reality, undermines the possibility of the idea that there can be a form of reality, which can be experienced by humans, that is not physical. This led to the idea that the mind is just a product of firing neurons in the brain and nothing more. But our reality, as we experience it, is a constant travelling between physical and psychological/emotional reality where stimuli are continually translated to another level. Things can be real without them being 'seen', like electricity, radio waves, etc. which can only be detected by their effects in the physical world. Some interesting research has been done by Dr Ian Stevenson, a Canadian psychiatrist, who investigated children in India and later on, in Europe, who claimed to have lived before: 'Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation'(1974). Also another psychiatrist, Dr Jim Tucker, researched the territory: 'Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives'. These are painstakingly researched subjects using thoroughly scientific methods. The outcomes are startling - yes, indeed, the conscious mind can exist beyond the body - but as the authors claim, outcomes of other research programmes, for instance in physics or astronomy, are no less startling when first observed. Reality is always much more complex than initially thought. I met Stevenson in Cambridge in 1985 or 1986, discussed with him his book and research, which was a fascinating experience. A very erudite man, with a thoroughly scientific mind, rather 'dry' and nothing of the 'new age' mentality about him. He was already quite old at the time, and I asked him whether he now thought that there would exist life after death. After a whole life of investigating the mind in this territory, he said, he now knows that this was indeed the case. - Also in some rare cases I have come across of transfer of specific, personal information from one person to another, outside the normal physical channels, which to me proved that it is possible that the mind could operate without the 'help' of matter and physicality. So, there is reason to hope we do not disappear after death.... and anyway it seems much better to take the risk that indeed the mind, and/or the soul, lives-on, than the other risk: that we live in a material universe without any hope of continuity and that the harvest of a life time's experience will suddenly disappear. If this last option would be real, and we had lived as if we would live-on after death, at least we would have lived a richer and more meaningful life (see Kant) and at death, there would be nobody to be disappointed. It is just more sensible to believe in life after death, whatever position (religiously or philosophically) you take.
10. mabeelrc - August 10, 2010 at 09:47 am
People get ready
There's a train a-coming.
11. cogprof - August 10, 2010 at 09:57 am
Is there any reason to assume that "life after death" will be any different than "life before birth"? How were those billions of years for you?
12. swish - August 10, 2010 at 10:03 am
I am annoyed whenever I hear the argument presented in the last few sentences of #10. Is that why we believe what we believe, is that why we strive to do good in the world -- because it's the safe and "sensible" bet? Ugh. There's enough reason to live a rich and meaningful life without embracing supernatural beliefs. If, in the absence of incontrovertible proof one way or another, believing in God and an afterlife comes naturally to you and feels right, well God bless you. But don't imply that those of us who are inclined to reject this invisible higher power as a fairy tale are somehow leading inferior, selfish lives.
13. annie1931 - August 10, 2010 at 10:05 am
"Will my enduring ghost be a mute witness to the goings-on down here, waving its vapory arms frantically at the undead?"
As the unliving good have had, up to now, seemingly little influence on the living bad, I think the answer to the question is a resounding "Yes". More's the pity.
14. mrmars - August 10, 2010 at 10:31 am
Looking up on a cloudless, moonless night at the unending universe provides proof enough that there are aspects to reality that we cannot fully comprehend. Yet what we do know about the workings of the universe stresses the central role of energy in ordering what we see.
Life too comes to a screeching halt when energy processing is no longer possible. No energy flow, no neuronal activity, no thought, no being, would seem to be our best bet for how things work - for now at least. So when you're dead you're "not" anymore and the "container" gets automatically re-cycled on some sort of time scale, caskets notwithstanding (better hope someone took a lot of pictures along the way).
A pity that, I was really looking forward to meeting my first mother-in-law again and giving the old bat a piece of my mind! Such are the frustrations of the finite human condition.
15. shushufindi - August 10, 2010 at 11:06 am
Just be glad that the atoms in your body will be recycled within the cosmos after you die. That should be enough.
16. dank48 - August 10, 2010 at 01:02 pm
Freeman Dyson has made the point that he rejects the label of scientific materialism because (as I understand it) "materialism" seems to evoke an outdated notion of matter as something dead, passive, cold, and so on. In fact physics has learned in the past hundred years or so that matter is a lot more interesting than it was understood to be once upon a time.
17. amosje - August 10, 2010 at 01:21 pm
The core and central question of all this jumble is really a simple one: whether the functional consciousness of the basic self is a product of structure (neurons and other wetware), or an operator/inhabitant/generator of it?
There are certain key aspects to awareness that appear incompatible with the attributes of physical structure--intentionality, understanding, and the sense of self-being that is natural to humans. On the other hand, there are lots of physical brain experiments that militate for the model that says thought is merely a function of structure.
One of the aspects that make the whole issue seem more complex is the plasticity of the individual mind, which is not a uniform phenomenon but can act like cold clay in one person and be full of exhilaration and inspiration in another. This range of states is so dramatic it almost seems inaccurate to talk about "the" human mind.
AHJ
18. zsoltaros - August 10, 2010 at 07:34 pm
jimsimmonds, writing about the church's terrible record, quotes an export on European history: "True," he said (in fact it may have been as high as 23), but in Europe it is estimated that as many as 25,000 were burned or hanged. Unfortunately, Hitchens never called him on this...".
Well, the "estimate" is outrageously high. As a materialist, jimsimmonds and his exports should be much more careful.
19. ramupallavaram - August 11, 2010 at 01:25 am
Somehow all this reminds me of the (apocrypal?) remark of Sam Goldwyn when he was particulary exasperated about some actor's behaviour: "If I trip over the door mat and fall and die, I will be the happiest man alive." Or words to that effect. Ramesh
20. strefanash - August 11, 2010 at 04:14 am
I would like nothing better than to be extinct, to be as totally unaware of evcerything as i was before i was born.
But I know too much.
However for me there are only two posiblities, the heaven/hell of classical theism, or the total oblivion of materialst atheism.
For an atheist to hanker for continued existence is for him to violate hsi own assumptions.
But then my own hankering for non existence violates my own assumptions also.
WE wil all find out for sure soon enough. But if the atheists are wrong they are in deep trouble.
By the way. St Paul's doctrines of hell do not deny free will, even if Augustine's or Calvin's do. Without free will there is no accountability, and on that assumption i am adamant
21. swish - August 11, 2010 at 10:23 am
If I am wrong, and if God and heaven and hell do exist, I would hope that God would judge my by my actions, my intentions, my values, and find them worthy of something better than eternal damnation. If the fundamentalist Christians are right, and faith is the only "virtue" that counts in one's admittance to the happy hereafter, well, that kind of god is not one I would respect, let alone worship, and I'll willingly join the damned in cursing Him.
22. goxewu - August 11, 2010 at 10:45 am
I'm surprised that the issue of what kind of "life" does or does not continue after "death," and, indeed, what, exactly, "death" is are not dealt with more explicity by those who posit an afterlife.
To take the latter first, the pro-afterlifers seem to be accepting the coroner's definition of "death": that a given human being no longer has a pulse, that his/her body temperature is dropping, and that, after a while, the body of that human being begins to rot. But there's a lot of "life" left in that body if we include, to oversimplify the matter, the composting functions it can perform.
Similarly, most of the proponents of an afterlife seems to accept as the "life" that may or may not persist after the death described above as the continuation of the intact consciousness that body enjoyed. In other words, if John Doe flatlines in the hospital his sensory/intellectual POV will somehow maintain itself. One wonders: 1. Preserved from what point in John Doe's life? The physical peak or just before he kicked the bucket, with severely diminished capacities? (Nice way to spend eternity.) 2. With that same ol' front vision five feet off the ground and normal hearing, smell, taste and touch, or some kind of cognition now unconstrained by the physical body? (Would that make John Doe some kind of "god"?) 3. Does the post-death "life" itself change, e.g., head toward a second "death," or maybe get livelier and livelier, or is it, from the flatline-in-a-hospital "death" onward, immutable? (Again, nice way to spend eternity.) 4. Does the continuation of consciousness obtain for chipmunks and Bengal tigers, too, or just humans?
My only cursory knowledge of Buddhism suggests to me that its idea of "oneness" as a continuation of our lives after earthly death, and my even more cursory knowledge of religions subscribing to reincarnation, suggest to me that both of those are much more plausible kinds of afterlife than the Christian being re-united in your favorite vacation duds with Grandma and Sparky the pup in a "heaven" that looks like a cover illustration for The Watchtower. (My skeptic's antennae do quiver when, as in #6, the Dalai Lama is described as "His Holiness," and I remember that all those big scientific brains with whom he conversed didn't get their titles or their cred from, quite literally and solely, the convenient time and place of their births.)
Still, all this afterlife stuff seems to me, an atheist* continually tempted at three a.m. to hedge my bet, wishful thinking. This is especially so with the likes of Mr. D'Souza, whose a priori Christian "faith" predetermines the results of his research. (If it doesn't, what's the point of the "faith"? He'd be like one of those tobacco-company scientists whose research told him that cigarettes did indeed cause cancer. Better not tell the boss or publish the book.)
* Atheist in the literal sense: a-theist, not necessary anti-theist. I am, however, anti-theists who get paid, wear funny clothes, and expect deference and/or the presumption of goodness, like one of those movie priests played long ago by Pat O'Brien.
23. sponsa9 - August 11, 2010 at 06:14 pm
I'd like to comment on the constant criticism of Christianity concerning the burning of witches, in the New World and the Old. Read some history, please. The human race is a vicious bunch and bad things happen over and over like a broken record. Read, for instance, about the horrific tortures and deaths of the early Japanese Christians by the shogunate in the 1500's. Or perhaps you prefer modern cruelty: two million Cambodians murdered by the Communist atheists of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Burnings? How many people were burned by the atheistic Nazis? The Nazi ideology was anti-Jew, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christ. Or how about the millions killed by the atheistic Stalinists and Maoists. The human race is implacably murderous and has been since Cain killed Abel. People calling themselves Christians are not always Christians, and like everyone else, Christians have made terrible mistakes. Which brings us back to religious, philosophical, ethical, discussions, to which empirical science, genetics, evolutionary theory, provide little help. One last thing, I personally know many scientists and I read the news. They are as fallible and mixed up as everyone else, and often involved in outright fraud in their quest for fame and money. Those who put their faith in scientists will be sadly disillusioned. Heck, even Bob Dylan doesn't trust scientists: "Don't put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist." (From Dylan's song, "Do Right To Me Baby")
24. barrycooper - August 11, 2010 at 10:17 pm
Oi. This is an empirical question. Do people, of any stripe, survive "death"? The evidence, for the serious, appears to indicate "yes". For all of us, contemplating the rest of our lives, this is a critical question. How do we better this world? How do we reduce pain?
I'll leave you all to "answer" the question. Good night. Sleep to get done.
25. johnbee - August 12, 2010 at 05:41 am
Mother Goose, Mother Goose, stewing in your own juice;
what a way to go, you dying to know.
26. goxewu - August 12, 2010 at 08:59 am
Re #25:
"Do people, of any stripe, survive 'death'? The evidence, for the serious, appears to indicate 'yes'."
If barrycooper means that after the dead body of barrycooper is carted away to the morque, his consciousness as "I, barrycooper" is still maintained somewhere, somehow, there isn't any real evidence. Anecdotes from people who "experienced death" (e.g., flatlined in the hospital), and who were then revived to tell stories of a "great white light," etc., don't count because a) they didn't really die in any permanent sense, and b) they're reporting from resumed earthly life, not from the great beyond.
If barrycooper means, as do several other commenters, that "life" in on a cellular or molecular living continues, then he's correct but his contention that "people...survive 'death'" is meaningless in terms of human consciousness.
Should barrycooper awake from the sleep he had to get done, might he enlighten us as to some specific aspects of the afterlife?
27. swish - August 12, 2010 at 10:42 am
I have no overall disagreement with sponsa9 (#23), but regarding the statement "The Nazi ideology was anti-Jew, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christ":
I thought that Nazis *embraced* Christianity and Jesus (who was not actually a Jew, in their view). I thought they believed God had created the Aryan race to be superior to all others, and that their extermination of Jews and other inferiors was a sacred mission. I thought Hitler actually expressed this idea in speeches. Haven't got time to research this -- not now, anyway. If anyone else knows for sure, chime in.
And regarding barrycooper's comment (#25) "Do people ... survive 'death'? .... For all of us, contemplating the rest of our lives, this is a critical question. How do we better this world? How do we reduce pain?" I second goxewu's response, and I'll repeat my previous point: Why should the persistence or obliteration of one's "self" after death have any bearing on one's behavior in this world right now? I can't see why making good, honorable, and, yes, "righteous" choices in life should be influenced by what happens afterward.
If the only reason a person refrains from selfishness, crime, or other ways of causing misery is the thought of punishment in the afterlife, that's not real virtue. A "virtuous life" like that, in my view, wouldn't really be worthy of any heavenly reward. (And I hope God, if He exists, feels the same way!)
28. fizmath - August 12, 2010 at 04:53 pm
How is consciousness explained without an immaterial soul? How can it be reduced to electrical signals in the brain? Is the national power grid conscious? What about my HP calculator? My experience is that you will either get this or you won't. This is beyond science.
29. goxewu - August 12, 2010 at 06:50 pm
Re #28:
And this "immaterial soul":
1. How does it interact (i.e., have any effect upon) the material world?
2. Is this "immaterial soul" an unlimited wild card in the largely material universe, or, are there material limitations to its longeivity and power, and why?
3. One "immaterial soul" to a customer, kind of like a laptop, or is it more like a mainframe--one big "immaterial soul" for everybody, and we're just plugged into it?
4. At what point on the evolutionary scale did an "immaterial soul" kick in for homo whateveriuses?
5. Do animals have "immaterial souls"?
6. How come a bullet to the brain seems to end all signs of consciousness in people who meet that fate? What evidence, pace Mr. d'Souza, is their that their consciousnesses, in the form of some "immaterial soul," survive it?
And so on. Sorry, but "immaterial soul" is the all-purpose, metaphysical magic putty that's supposed to answer the tough questions about consciousness in the same way that the posited existence of "ether" was supposed to answer the tough questions of physics a long time ago. Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" may leave a lot of unanswered questions, but he takes us pretty far down the road to figuring it out without resorting at some frustrating dead end, as most philosophers of consciousness do, to, "And then, a miracle occurs."
"Immaterial soul" = "And then, a miracle occurs."
Of course, in fizmath's setup, all of the above is proof that I just don't "get it." Ah, there's thems of us'n who just know the truth, and thems that don't, and that's the end of it.
30. fizmath - August 13, 2010 at 12:27 am
Re: #29
1) We don't know how but the soul interacts with the brain
2) It is eternal and bound to each human while the human lives
3)one unique soul to each person
4)Whenever humans first came to be, however you imagine that
5) no animals don't have them. There is a radical difference between humans and other animals. We are the only species that can have this conversation.
6) We have no way of testing this if the person is truly dead. Like I said, this is beyond science.
Why do you see a frustration dead end? How about eternal life?
31. goxewu - August 13, 2010 at 08:12 am
See what I mean? We don't know how the soul interacts with the brain, but it just does, period, no explanation. The soul has no temporal limitations, period, no explanation. It's "bound" to each human being while the human being lives, period, no explanation. There's some phylogenic point at which a soul appears, period, no explanation. Well, there is an explanation of sorts: "This is beyond science." And apparently beyond any reasoned discourse whatsoever.
"Frustrating dead end" referred not to my attitude toward life in general, but to cul de sacs that philosophers trying to figure out the nature of consciousness encounter. (That they do encounter them doesn't mean that their endeavors are wrong-headed from the git-go--"frustrating dead ends" occur to investigators in all fields.) To posit an "immaterial soul" that can conveniently skirt any and all "frustrating dead ends," plug any and all gaps in knowledge, and be explained only with, "Just because, that's why," is perhaps the greatest sophistry of them all.
32. jackchicago - August 13, 2010 at 03:39 pm
What part of "dead" do you people not understand?
33. rei40 - August 14, 2010 at 05:58 am
Those who found this article interesting should read this:
http://www.afterlife-knowledge.com/answers.html
It seems that we are living (or believe we are living) in the ultimate virtual reality game.
34. 2rouse - August 15, 2010 at 03:47 pm
Each day I walk my dogs Riley, and Tug past a grave yard. Most days start around 5:00 A.M. At this time it is dark, and kind of creepy walking past a graveyard. I have come to a conclusion after having participated in many discussions of the afterlife, and some classes in phylosophy. The people that are enterred in the said graveyard are gone. Their physical remnants are there, but their soul, spirit or whatever one would label the portion of the human being which is not physical, has gone. As I ruminate on where that might be however, I and my spirit are still here with all the opportunities to experience the here, and the now. Knowing that the spirit is gone makes the walk by the graveyard something else altogether. Not the creepy experience it once was, but a real feeling that even though science cannot tell us, or we must believe Theology without question, where the spirit goes when we die is not in the ground. Live in the here and now.
35. ton_wolf - August 16, 2010 at 11:33 am
I live next to a graveyard. It's full of very quiet neighbours. Only one long-deceased gentleman's grave keeps moving underneath the barbed-wire fence, presently relocating his final residence for two-thirds onto my property. Sadly, his movement must be ascribed to soil instability, not to posthumous activity. Nevertheless, some visitors find it frightening, rather than entertaining or just interesting.
The illustration with this article gave me the idea to have a headstone with a real door in it for myself, to be opened by anyone curious to know where I have gone.
36. beret - August 17, 2010 at 02:07 am
Lose the metaphor. The resolution will be clearer.
37. arrtist - August 18, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Life after death means there's no such thing as death, always life, so what's the big deal? All the energy (thinking/imagining) and ink (religious rhetoric) won't change that simple fact.Is it only that we recognize death/dying (i.e. consciousness) that we've invented a "life" after it (death)? We'll always be bystanders in this cosmic theater, at least until our part in the play ends.
38. tallyskeptic - August 19, 2010 at 11:05 am
Thanks for this review of four books on an afterlife. I have just a few comments:
Jacques Berlinerblau: "For no rational reason, I presently assume that when I have passed on, when my faculty line is gathered unto my dean and bloodlessly absorbed into a vast pool of new curricular priorities, a vague flickering consciousness of sorts will perdure."
TallySkeptic: Why do people assume that propositions are true for "no rational reason"? Because they care less about being correct than they care about fulfilling their wishes.
"D'Souza, for his part, is adamant that such evidence [for an afterlife] exists."
TallySkeptic: How can he be adamant about it? Well, ok, maybe there is evidence for an afterlife (NDEs, medium talk, reincarnation memories, etc.), but it's just very poor evidence.
Frohock: "There are many forms of reliable knowledge outside of the scientific community of investigatory rules."
TallySkeptic: But even if there are such forms, are they relevant or are they successful to demonstrating what the author wants to conclude? I doubt it. The high correlation of mental states with brain states (especially in cases of brain damage where tissue in a specific area has been destroyed) is very strong evidence pointing against an afterlife. What does Frohock expect to happen when all the brain is destroyed rather than just a part of it?
39. iriselina - August 31, 2010 at 08:47 am
I loved #s 14, 32 and 35!
If there is no giving in marriage in heaven, then how can a mother-in-law surface there?
Do we really re-meet? Hope not. The illustration with this article is great!
Iris