Life After Death: Science and Religion

Recently I had the misfortune of watching my grandfather pass away. He left this world, and he left me with a list of unending questions that he now possesses the answers too. In spite of all my philosophizing and theological speculation, it’s he who now possess the answers to our most troubling question, and I do not. Even if there is nothing to be found in the afterlife, he has found nothing in abundance, and possesses nothing.

In order to contemplate the veracity of nothing awaiting after death, allow me to dig into the opposite subject, “What do we know about everything?”. There are three possible options, either we know less about everything than there really is, or we know precisely everything there is to know, or we know more than there really is to know. Since the option that we know more than there really is to know places us in a idealistic nightmare where my experiences are illusory, I could never accept that option as I could never know it to be true without knowledge being a delusion. If we know precisely all there is to know, I would think we are gods, and we are not. It seems to me that the humble option is to say we know less than there is to know, there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.

What do we know of the afterlife? Allow me to suspend theological speculation, and ask what we really know. We know the proposition that bodily life slips into lifelessness, is true. Either this proposition is more than what goes on and death is an illusion, as some mystics say, or the proposition is solely what goes on, or the proposition of bodily life coming to an end is less than what goes on in reality and there really is something more.

Since I don’t believe that death is an illusion, and I do believe there is more to reality than meets the eye, when I watched my grandfather stop breathing, I chose to believe there was more to the event than what I could investigate with my senses. The event that presented itself to my senses was merely respiratory failure, but I don’t believe that my senses told me everything that happened. I am also told by some atheists that this is wishful thinking at its most pathetic, it seems to me as if I’m not being naively optimistic but just being humble and they are being arrogant - thinking they know all that there is to know about death. This is a far cry from transferring the truth of the whole to the truth of the part, it’s merely adopting epistemic humility.

The view that life continues on is unscientific, as everything in science tells us life ends when the body ceases. I don’t accept that science can tell us everything though, at the very least, science cannot tell us that “science is the only path to knowledge”, as it is a proposition advanced without any scientific reasoning, and so by its own criteria we couldn’t know it to be true. The principle that we can only accept what can be experimentally verified cannot be experimentally verified and so I accept the great, unverifiable, undiscovered country that goes beyond what science can tell us. And with the undiscovered country comes the frightening notion that there might await us joys that would dazzle our imagination, and terrors that would paralyze the explorer’s soul.