LIFE after death? The subject is ostensibly meaningless. If ‘death’ means, as we usually take it to mean, the end of life, then life ‘after’ death is a contradiction. For other amusing contradictions, see also ‘When time began’ and ‘God is outside space’.
The prevailing view in the secular Western world is that the human person is an animal who lives and dies like any other animal. (Or rather, as we suppose animals live and die.) This secular view is perfectly acceptable so long as we understand that it is just that: a view – a belief among other beliefs. In the secular view ‘life’ means biological existence which is without purpose. It is not created or caused by any supernatural agency. Mind or consciousness is a purposeless by-product of biological existence. As Bertrand Russell said, ‘I believe that when I die I shall rot.’ (Some think that with dear old Bertie the rot set in long before he kicked the bucket.)
There are countless alternatives. For the most intriguing, frequently entertaining and downright bizarre, take a look at some of the Pre-Socratic philosophers from Thales of Miletus to Plato.
Plato believed in the immortality of the soul which presents problems – chiefly that of saying just what the soul is. It is defined as non-corporeal. So where is it in relation to the individual? It does not make sense to say that the soul is in the body: for the only thing that can be in a physical thing is another physical thing. Rene Descartes declared confidently that the soul is located in the pineal gland. But then he also said, ‘I think, therefore I am’, which is rather a failure as a logical sequence – for it assumes what it promises to conclude. A distinguished visiting speaker turned up to address the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge when Wittgenstein happened to be in the audience and began, ‘Cogito, ergo sum.’ Wittgenstein was overheard to say in a loud stage whisper, ‘That’s a bloody stupid place to start!’
Various strands of thought, mostly derived from oriental religions, teach reincarnation or the transmigration of souls. This is open to at least two objections: first, that which we have come across already in the difficulty of saying what the soul is; secondly what meaning can be attached to the idea that ‘I come back’? Who exactly is the ‘I’ here? There are obvious problems of discerning both identity and continuity.
Buddhism offers Nirvana, which is a sort of holy nothingness in which the individual is free from all pain, suffering and indeed sensation of any kind. Objection: what is the difference between an existence in which there are no sensations and no existence at all?
There is always Epicurus’s cheerful view: ‘Where I am, death is not; where death is, I am not.’ Cheerful because, according to Epicurus, you won’t be lying there thinking how awful it is to be dead; you just won’t be there at all. Peter Sellers had some fun with this in the film Being There. In other words, from my point of view, time is not something that goes on and on and into which I drop, as if into a river. From my point of view, time starts when I am born and ends when I die. I am, so to speak, embodied time. And when I die time stops. Schopenhauer expatiates on this theme – sometimes hilariously – in volume 1 of his The World as Will and Representation as indeed does Martin Heidegger in Being and Time where he coins the word Dasein which, funnily enough, may be translated as ‘being there’.
Finally, as you would expect of a priest, I come to the Christian teaching on life after death – and I must start by saying that Christians do not teach the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body: anastasis – literally ‘standing up again after you’re dead’. It is, as Eric Morecambe might have said, a good trick if you can do it! How, when the corpse is rotted in the earth or burned in the crematorium’s furnace? This is an old question and no one answers it better than St Paul:
‘But some man will say, How are the dead raised and with what body do they come? Thou fool! That which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die . . . as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly . . .’ (from I Corinthians 15)
And there is this from St John: ‘What we are, we know; what we shall be, it doth not yet appear.’ (I John 3:2)
St Paul and St John seem to be telling us to believe in God and in his own good time all shall be revealed.
It’s a tall story – but, it seems to me, so are all the other opinions about life after death – or no life after death. Take your pick. As I said at the start, the biological explanation of the nature of life is but one explanation among many. Perfectly respectable. Believe it if you like. But it is not self-evidently true. Fashionable, prevailing, pretty convincing on the whole, but not indubitable.
There is much talk about the freedom to doubt. I applaud this. But it is usually taken to mean freedom to doubt the professed beliefs of religion – particularly of Christianity. As St Thomas did, I doubt these Christian truths.
But I have also doubted all the other views mentioned in this little meditation.
