The overwhelming majority of people appear to believe in some sort of afterlife. Now, I clearly understand why a person would want to believe in an after-life. Who hasn’t grieved the death of a friend without wishing that this person might somehow live again? While this wish is perfectly understandable it’s equally apparent to me that our desires never constitute a reliable basis for our beliefs. There is no thread of evidence so flimsy that it would fail to pass as proof for something we want badly enough.
Having said that, even if we could “clean our slate†before we consider this issue, I don’t think it would be wise to do so. If I could magically strip away all the valuations I’ve accumulated in the course of my life, in order to “fairly†evaluate an issue, then it would no longer be me making the evaluation. We can only decide our beliefs from the platform of what we already are.
Neurath gives this fitting analogy of our plight. Consider a boat that must be rebuilt at sea. It must be rebuilt plank by plank, all the while remaining afloat. The sailors are in the difficult situation of replacing the very planks that are keeping them from drowning. They haven’t the luxury of taking the entire boat to pieces in order to rebuild it from scratch. As with Neurath’s boat, we humans have to revise our beliefs about this world bit by bit, yet we can only critique and evaluate these new beliefs from the vantage of our preexisting beliefs.
But let me push the nautical analogy a step further. Suppose you’ve been cast adrift in a boat with nothing but empty sea on all the horizons. You’re terribly cold and thirsty. In fact, you wonder if you might be displaying the first symptoms of hypothermia. Still, you’ve managed to keep your wits about you and try to think of a solution to your problem. But suddenly a large ship appears! It appears to be a cruise ship. On the deck you can see bikini clad babes lounging on deck chairs, with drinks in-hand. But all of a sudden you think, “Wait a minute…I’m on the North Atlantic in the middle of winter! Why are those girls wearing bikinis when I’ve ice on the end of my nose? It doesn’t make any sense. Oh God, but look at all those tanned girls with droplets of sweat on their breasts. No! It’s simply too good to be true. I only see it because that’s what I desperately want to see. It must be a hallucination. On the other hand, maybe the ship is lost? Maybe they are out searching for me? But what about those sweating girls in the deckchairs? Well, maybe there’s a glass dome covering the ship that I can’t see from here. Hey, I think the girls are waving at me…â€
So, you’re faced with a decision. Do you abandon yourself to a wonderfully pleasant belief even though you suspect that it’s simply a product of your desperate imagination? Or do you force yourself to acknowledge the fact that you are freezing and dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean?
Robert Nozick has given us a thought experiment called, The Experience Machine. In this experiment we have the option of lying in a tank while electrodes are plugged into our head. This machine will give us a perfect simulation of any life we chose. Nozick asks us if a virtual experience is preferable to what we think of as reality. Should we plug into the machine? He points out that if it’s only the experience we’re after then perhaps we should put suitable drugs in our water supply and be done with it. I’ve spoken before in this forum about the homeless kids in Latin America that spend their day breathing the fumes from little jars of gasoline. It seems they have chosen a sort of “Experience Machine†to their squalid reality. Is there a reason to prefer our everyday world to Nozick’s Experience Machine? Do we have a valid reason to criticize those Latin American street kids for spending their day inhaling gasoline vapor? We spend billions of dollars each year to escape reality by watching Hollywood films or by sitting like Zombies in front of our televisions. Aren’t shopping malls, and theme parks simply crude versions of Nozick’s Machine? We need to think carefully before we dismiss Nozick’s question. Nearly all of us might as choose to breathe gas vapor from a little jar if we were in the shoes of those homeless Latin American kids…er, well, they probably don’t have shoes.
Moving on, I’ll attempt to preempt the inevitable criticism that all such beliefs about an afterlife are purely personal, and as such, out-of-bounds for discussion. I’ll point out that religions have traditionally used the concept of an afterlife as an effective tool to herd people into behaving in accordance with their dogma. The Islamic suicide bombers appear to gladly go to their martyrdom with the belief that they will wake up in bed with a virgin. One can only wonder at how powerful an incentive this must appear to an 18 year-old Muslim, whose only prospect for having sex is through marriage and whose prospect for marriage is severely restricted by his poverty. “You mean all I have to do is detonate this bomb strapped to my body in order to wake up in a world where young women are already lined up and waiting for me?†Another example is the Medieval Christians who joined in the Crusades in exchange for a dispensation for their earthly sins. They were given, in effect, a token to be redeemed after their death. The Jehovah’s Witness faithful endure having doors slammed in their face in exchange for extra amenities in the next life. There’s little doubt that the belief in an afterlife affects the way many of us behave in this life. Accordingly, it seems reasonable to inquire about the evidence we accept for these beliefs.
So what is the evidence? Well, we can quickly dispense with the idea of physical evidence for an after-life. There is simply no credible instance of someone returning from the dead to tell us what it was like for them.
You might tell me that indeed Christ returned from the dead in just this way. I’d reply to this argument by quoting David Hume’s famous argument against the acceptance of miracles.
Suppose someone tells me of a very improbable event. Let’s call it m. Then either:
- The person says that m happened. But it did not.
- The person says that m happened. And it did.
Hume tells us that both statements 1 and 2 contain surprising elements. So I need to ask myself which is the more surprising or improbable statement? Well, of course statement 2 would be more surprising. But I also know that people often have their own reasons to misrepresent the truth. Now this logic doesn’t preclude the fact that statement 2 could possibly be true. It could. But this logic tells us that statement 2 is less likely to be true. We ought not to believe 2 without any other supporting evidence.
So, I shouldn’t accept the explanation of Christ’s apostles without some other supporting evidence.
Now, I was saying that we have no credible physical evidence to support the idea of an afterlife. Can a metaphysical case be made? Does the concept of a “soul†help make the case? Well, the soul is one of those slippery notions that can mean nearly anything to anyone. It’s difficult to strike a blow against the soul because it’s so difficult to hit a moving target. If we succeed in arguing the soul into a corner it very cleverly morphs into something else and slinks away unblemished. For these reasons I normally try to steer clear of this word. But for the purpose of my argument I’ll take the liberty of defining the soul as – a non-physical personal identity, or essence, that inhabits a body whilst it lives.
Now I will argue that while we have no physical evidence to support the idea of an after-life, we do have evidence to deny this idea. First there is the argument of the corpse itself. Few would agree that it retains the life of the former inhabitant. So right from the start it appears that if there is an after-life, it will have to appear somewhere else other than the body that it once inhabited. Some folks have an image of a “soul†taking flight from the corpse at the moment of death. But this seems a strange notion to me.
Consider the case of a man suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease. In the last decade he has declined to the point that he can only sit in a chair and chew on his buttons. Gone is his former charm and wit, gone are his memories of his life and even of his wife’s face. But I wonder if his soul still inhabits his body? As noted above, I think most people would say yes, it only leaves his body at the moment of death. But the afflicted man before us is so vastly different from his former self as to be unrecognizable by his personality alone. His past acquaintances could only recognize him by his body.
But this is a curious thing. We’ve already agreed that his soul - that which makes him who he is - is distinctly separate from his body. If his soul is the single, unique vehicle destined to carry away his identity to the after-life, it will have to carry on-board everything about him that is him. But we’ve said that no trace of him resides in this ruins-of-a-man that is now so oblivious to the world. If the soul at this point is still inside him, why can’t it assert itself? If this soul is so robust as to survive death how could it be so easily trapped inside a malfunctioning body? If the soul can be so easily trapped by a neurological disorder how will it be able to free itself from his corpse? When the man finally dies and the soul takes flight does it carry on the man as he was at the end of his life, chewing his buttons off of his sweater? Would you want this version of you to live on for eternity?
Or will the soul only carry on some vestige of his former self as he was in the height of his life? But what was the height of his life? Did it occur in his youth when he was serving time in prison for car theft, yet able to do 100 pushups? Or did it occur when he was 60 years old and the respected husband, father, and community leader but already unable to walk across the street unaided? Which arbitrary version of his former self will take-flight from his corpse in the form of his soul? You might object that all the versions of him continue to live in an afterlife. But do all the former “selves†live concurrently or serially? If concurrently, how could a decrepit shell-of-a-man co-habit the same soul along with a young prison inmate? If all these former selves live serially, what is their time frame? Do they continue to replay themselves in an endless loop? Would you think that having to live your life over and over until the end of time is more akin to Paradise or to Hades?
Consider the infant that dies less than a minute after having been born. I think most people would say that it has a soul. But if the soul represents that child’s essence, what exactly is the essence of a newborn child? It hasn’t had a chance to develop a complex personality, it has no accumulated memories, never developed hopes and never had any beliefs. Since the child never had a full minute to live in this life, what sort of personal identity or essence will be carried by the soul into the afterlife? Is an infant consigned to live on until eternity empty as a newborn child? Someone might suggest that the complete soul of the infant should contain the essence of a full life that it might have had if it had survived. But this only brings up more problems. What about the child that dies at age-ten? Does he get to carry over a soul of the real plus extra virtual life as well? At what age is the soul complete with the life already lived? Even the old man with Alzheimer’s would have likely lived some years into the future if he hadn’t had this disease. Does he get an extra virtual life experience tacked on to his soul as well?
If souls have the ability to transcend space and time then isn’t the human body more of a prison than it a temple for the soul? What is it about my present body that caused my free-floating soul to be pulled out of the spiritual ether? Or was my soul created at birth? But if the assembly of my body created my soul then why wouldn’t I think that the disassembly of my body would destroy my soul? Why would the human body be a one-way valve for the creation of an everlasting soul when the body itself so conspicuously begins to degrade after only a few decades?
If the concept of the soul was created as a way to explain life then I would say that it has failed miserably. I have as many unanswered questions about the soul as I do about life itself. Explanations are supposed to be less mysterious than the question they aim to explain.
Is it better to look death in the eye for what it is, namely; the end of our existence? Or is it better to deny, as most of us do, that life really ends at death?
Michael