We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know how… (19.11.24)

Here’s a confession. I heard and saw my mother after her death. The experience is as true as anything I’ve experienced and deeply meaningful, but I can’t prove it. Nor can I draw on other people’s experiences to build a scientific case to support it. Life after death isn’t a scientific question. How could it be?

Take love. Science talks of chemicals and neuronal activity, all of which are valid but that isn’t what we mean by love. Do we then dismiss the idea? No, and the same holds for life after death. 

Still, I don’t think the concept makes much sense without belief in God.

Let’s start with the soul-theory. On death, your soul leaves your body and continues to exist. Without a body, your soul is like a mind with thoughts and desires. The nearest analogy to this is the dream-state. When I’m dreaming, I believe the experiences to be true but nothing external to my mind is causing them. I’m not walking down the beach; the stranger isn’t chasing me… They’re figments of my imagination.

This raises all sorts of problems. Without a body, my mind can’t connect to anything external to itself. Remember, it has no eyes to see with or ears to hear with. So, my hope of seeing my parents again is problematic. I might ‘dream’ I’m giving them a hug, but that isn’t the same as actually doing so. For all I know, they’re ‘dreaming’ of something else, like being on holiday.  Perhaps this doesn’t matter. If you believe it’s real, then that’s all that matters. But what if you’re suffering from depression? On death, you leave your body not your mind, making life after death a hellish experience. 

One solution is a shared psychic ‘environment. I’ll ‘see’ my parents again because our minds will somehow connect with each other. For such a ‘place’ to exist, however, there needs to be a power with the intelligence and desire to create it, that is, God.

Another solution is a bodily life after death. This is favoured by the monotheistic religions and gives us a shared physical space, much like the one we experience now. But it has problems of its own.

For one thing, it can’t be the same body. It might be a copy (replica) but if it is, we need to decide whether a copy is the same as the original. Generally, we say ‘no’, but if you can’t tell the difference then perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Interestingly, Christianity rejects replication. This isn’t a problem if we’re defined by our character and not our body (see my earlier articles). St. Paul writes, ‘when you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed.’

A bodily life after death pays homage to the created order and ourselves as physical beings, but it’s difficult to understand how it works. The computer analogy might help.  If we liken our minds to software and our brains to hardware, then our minds could be

‘downloaded’ from our current brains and ‘uploaded’ into new ones. For this to happen, we need a being with the power to do it.

This isn’t the same as the Hindu idea of reincarnation. In Hinduism, your personal identity doesn’t survive death, atman does. In Buddhism, it’s even more complex because there is neither personal identity nor atman.

So, sticking with the monotheism, any meaningful life after death requires an omnipotent, omniscience and omnibenevolent being willing to grant it. If such a being doesn’t exist, then it’s likely that life after death doesn’t exist either.