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Life After Death: The Evidence, Part 2

In part one of this article, I reviewed a few of the arguments for life after death, namely, the two empirical arguments (Near Death Experiences and Jesus' resurrection) and the three non-empirical theistic dependent arguments (the image of God/love of God, divine justice, and biblical revelation).

In part two, I will continue to make the case for life after death by going over the non-empirical theistic-independent arguments, followed by an assessment of all these cases together.

A Non-Empirical Theistic-Independent Argument:
The Desire for an Afterlife

Two non-theistic dependent arguments exist for immortality. The first is the argument from desire advanced by Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis:

1. The desire for life after death is a natural desire.
2. Every natural desire corresponds to some real state of affairs that can fulfill it.
3. Therefore, the desire for life after death corresponds to some real state of affairs — namely, life after death — that fulfills it.

Critics claim that the desire for immortality is nothing but an expression of ethical egoism, that people do not universally desire it and, even when they do, it is a learned, not a natural desire, and that even if it is a natural desire, sometimes such desires are frustrated. While adequate responses exist for these rebuttals, they weaken the force of the argument, though it is hard to say precisely how much.

A Non-Empirical Theistic-Independent Argument:
Consciousness and the Soul

The second argument claims that property and substance dualism¹ are true and this supports belief in life after death in two ways:

1. It makes disembodied existence and personal identity in the afterlife intelligible and …
2. It provides evidence for the existence of God and against naturalism because naturalism requires the emergence of mental entities from pure matter (naturalistic depictions of matter do not attribute to it mental potentiality).

This is a case of something coming into existence from nothing and the reality of finite mental entities is best explained by the existence of a primitive, brute Mind. This, in turn, provides grounds for re-introducing the theistic dependent arguments for life after death.

The argument for property dualism claims that however much mental and physical states are causally related, they are not the same. Consciousness (for example, various sensations, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, acts of will), is constituted by distinctively mental properties and can in no way be described using physical predicates. Once one gets an accurate description of consciousness, it becomes clear that mental states are not identical to physical states.

Mental states are characterized by their intrinsic, subjective, inner, private, qualitative feel, made present to a subject by first person introspection. Mental states like pains have an intrinsic, raw conscious feel. There is a "what-it-is-like" to a pain. Most, if not all mental states have intentionality, i.e., they are of or about things, but of-ness is not a physical attribute and no purely physical state has intentionality. Mental states are inner, private, and known by first person, direct introspection.

Those methods of knowing about a physical property of a physical entity are available to everyone else, including ways of knowing about the physical attributes in one's brain. But a subject has a way of knowing about his mental properties/states not available to others — through introspection. For these and other reasons, it is clear that consciousness is genuinely mental and not physical.

The case for a substance soul is too detailed to discuss here, but one argument is worth noting: The unity of conscious experience provides evidence for a substantial, immaterial ego. Consider one's awareness of a complex fact, say, one's own visual field consisting of awareness of several objects at once, including a number of different surface areas of each object. Now one may claim that such a unified awareness of one's visual field consists in the fact that there are a number of different physical parts of the brain each of which is aware only of a specific part and not the whole of the complex fact. However, this will not work, because it cannot account for the fact that there is a single, unitary awareness of the entire visual field. Only a single, uncomposed mental substance can account for the unity of one's visual field or, indeed, the unity of consciousness in general.

Final Assessment of the Case

While these two arguments provide some grounds for belief in an afterlife, it must be admitted that they are far from conclusive. At the end of the day, the justification of belief in life after death is largely theistic dependent, though the empirical arguments — at least evidence from NDE's, since it is a matter of dispute whether historical arguments for Jesus' resurrection presuppose theism or not — and the non-theistic arguments provide some presumption in its favor.

Is this an unfortunate conclusion? Not at all.

Quite often, when a theory as a whole is well established, its credibility permeates each of its individual parts, thereby justifying them in a sort of piggy back relationship. For example, certain parts of quantum theory (that matter can be depicted as either a particle or a wave) would be irrational to believe were we asked to assess them on their own. But those same topics become quite reasonable if they are part of a larger theory for which there is solid justification.

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Similarly, while there is some evidence for an afterlife that does not depend on there being a God, it is not conclusive. Still, belief in the afterlife is beyond reasonable doubt when it is judged as part of a broader theory — Christianity — for which there is solid justification (from arguments for God's existence and the historical reliability of the New Testament). So our conclusion regarding the justification for belief in life after death fits a pattern one frequently finds in one's intellectual life.