You Will Live Forever. Deal with It.

 

Friend Xerxes has made a declaration in his most recent column:

“Nor are we, as some like to believe, immortal souls temporarily housed in human bodies.”

He does not explain this claim.

To Christians, the Bible is a final authority. The Bible seems utterly definitive in saying this is exactly what we are. 

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

But the Bible also agrees with all other ancient authorities. The pagan Romans and Greeks also held this to be so—that the soul goes on to an afterlife. The Egyptians, Chinese, and Hindus held it to be so. The native people of North America held it to be so. The aborigines of Australia held it to be so.

An appeal to authority is not definitive. But if you are going against all authority, the onus is on you to make your case. As Chesterton observed, you cannot tear down a fence simply because you do not understand why it is there. Nobody has the right to tear down a fence until they do understand why it is there. If you were to proclaim that there was no such place as Africa, you would need to explain why all the atlases are wrong.

Xerxes perhaps hints at an argument in the parenthetical comment, “as some like to believe.” This suggests that people believe in an immortal soul and an afterlife because they find it comforting. This is a familiar claim from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

But why is it not at least as comforting to suppose that at death, consciousness simply ends? What sounds bad about eternal rest? This is the very goal of Buddhism: nirvana, “extinction.” It is the goal of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: moksha, “release.”

The afterlife, on the other hand, Christian, pagan, Hindu, or Buddhist, implies judgement and just punishment. This cannot be comforting to those conscious of having done wrong. And, according to Christian teaching, we are all worthy of condemnation; nobody can assume salvation.

Remember Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come..

 

It is he who denies the afterlife who is indulging in wishful thinking—whistling past the proverbial graveyard.

Beyond the voice of universal authority, there is empirical evidence—scientific evidence--here and now of the immortality of the soul.

First, it is all but conclusively proven by some “Near Death Experiences” that consciousness continues after physical death, and in the absence of detectable brain activity. There are also examples of people with virtually no brain tissue who nevertheless are conscious and can function normally—suggesting that consciousness is not dependent on the physical brain. The brain may only be, more or less as Descartes suggested, a conduit between consciousness and the physical world, more or less as the eye or hand is. Second, “ghost stories” are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls.  Many are purely empirical accounts: people see things, people hear things, people feel things. If we do not accept these claims, or accept the simplest explanation for them, isn’t it often only for the unscientific reason that they do not fit materialist preconceptions? They are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls. And note that we do not, on the whole, find ghost stories comforting. Believing in an afterlife is not wish fulfilment. Our most natural reaction is fear. 

Hamlet suggests the analogy of sleep and dreams. We know that consciousness persists when the senses shut down in sleep. Why wouldn‘t it persist in physical death, when the senses shut down permanently? We all have the experience of consciousness continuing without our physical senses. By contrast, do any of us have any kind of empirical experience of ceasing to exist?

In our experience, sensed objects die or decay or disappear, but thoughts do not. I see a hummingbird at my feeder. After a few minutes, he is gone. Nevertheless, I am still able to see a hummingbird in my mind. Everything is immortal in memory, in thought form: sensations, thoughts, emotions, urges. We may no longer feel the emotion. We may no longer consent to the idea. Yet we can still summon them to consciousness; we are aware of them.

You might object that memories too fade over time. Perhaps this is what Buddhists are counting on. But is it true? Over time, we may have trouble retrieving a particular memory; but it does seem it is always still there somewhere. The taste of a madeleine, as Proust relates, can bring it all back vividly. A smell, a familiar melody—returning to a place. Wilder Penfield could stimulate vivid memories with electric probes.

So it looks as though all things, once created, continue to exist forever in some metaphysical place, the “storehouse memory,” or “storehouse consciousness,” to use the Buddhist phrase. This is perhaps also where abstract eternal concepts reside: the truths of mathematics or logic, the concept of justice, moral good and evil, beauty, truth, and so forth. Plato’s realm of ideal forms, the Bible’s Kingdom of Heaven. 

Berkeley pointed out that this realm is more immediate, clear, and certain than the physical world. The existence of the physical world is a mere hypothesis, and an unnecessary one. As Christians, we hold it to be real, on authority. Most cultures do not.

We are immortal souls, temporarily housed in human bodies. At the end of time, we will again be housed in physical bodies, but perfected ones.