Eternity for Atheists

Jim Holt in the New York Times Magazine:

If God is dead, does that mean we cannot survive our own deaths? Recent best-selling books against religion agree that immortality is a myth we ought to outgrow. But there are a few thinkers with unimpeachable scientific credentials who have been waving their arms and shouting: not so fast. Even without God, they say, we have reason to hope for — or possibly fear — an afterlife.

Curiously, the doctrine of immortality is more a pagan legacy than a religious one. The notion that each of us is essentially an immortal soul goes back to Plato. Whereas the body is a compound thing that eventually falls apart, Plato argued, the soul is simple and therefore imperishable. Contrast this view with that of the Bible. In the Old Testament there is little mention of an afterlife; the rewards and punishments invoked by Moses were to take place in this world, not the next one. Only near the beginning of the Christian era did one Jewish sect, the Pharisees, take the afterlife seriously, in the form of the resurrection of the body. The idea that “the dead shall be raised” was then brought into Christianity by St. Paul.

The Judeo-Christian version of immortality doesn’t work very well without God: who but a divine agent could miraculously reconstitute each of us after our death as a “spiritual body”? Plato’s version has no such need; since our platonic souls are simple and thus enduring, we are immortal by nature.

More here.

Comments

[Bill]

nothing - 10%
return - 10%
different place - 24%
heaven/hell - 48%

So, how is "heaven/hell" not "a different place", and what about the missing 8%?

[Scott Ahlf]

Oh yes----
The old Ghost In The Machine-----
Steven Pinker would be proud---

[Nizam Arain]

Bill, I think the distinction centers on whether salvation is earned by faith (in Jesus) or by actions.

I wonder which category contains the respondents who believe in heaven and hell, and believe that one's beliefs, not actions, determine his or her final destination, but do not believe in the divinity of Jesus?

[Randomaction]

Love the Chart. Not heard of Charles M. Blow personally but clearly not a disciple of Edward Tufte.

"the missing 8%?"
...is represented by the eight white squares in the middle.

[beajerry]

The 8% believe that you become noodles that are added to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, blessed be His name.

[Dr. Tushar K. Ray]

Bill, I want to add the following information that is critical for any spiritual person at this hightec age. There is a 5000 year old philosophy in India, called Vedanta, dealing with the consciousness that has drawn the attention of many noted philosophers and scientists of our modern time. This philosophy goes back to at least a thousand year before Plato and now considered as a very mature and verifyable spiritual science. In fact the modern concept of quantum mechanics and uncertainty principle is at the very core of this ageold philosophy. Consequently the adherance to this philosophy has been increasing by leaps and bounds over the last few decades.

According to Vedanta, we are the immortal condciousness ourselves, and the narrow intellectual part (a small part indeed) of this limitless consciousness provides us the freedom of choice for personal experience in life that, in turn, helps us to evolve following the Karmic Law to higher states along our journey thru many incarnations on earth until we achieve the stable state of blissful pure consciousness, and be forever free.

According to Vedanta, we are the architects of our own fate, and cannot blame others for our destiny.

[phish]

All this talk about "our immortality" and "our afterlife" -what about our closest evolutionary relatives? What about the species of 'ape' that came right before homoseapiens developed? They certainly had consciousness, do they get an afterlife? Does a chimpanzee? Certainly they have conscious experience. Or what of the elephant or the dolphin, since they appear to be aware of themselves?

Perhaps even our dogs and pet fish have an immortal soul and an after life?

Is there a heaven and hell specifically for neanderthals?

Its weird how ridiculous all this "afterlife" speculation woowoo sounds when we start including other, but also self-conscious, species of animal.

[aguy109]

This speculation about a non-religious afterlife demonstrates the flaw in the Dawkins-Dennet argument that religious belief is a delusion and that religious people are necesarily stupid. If a professed atheist begins to speculate about an unprovable concept such as survival of the soul after death, it shows that the human mind includes a "speculation generator" (SG)that cannot always be turned off, and that questions like the Meaning of Life are always with us at some level, even if we learn to scoff at "bronze age delusions and myth". The SG will compensate by inventing new beliefs and myths, like flying saucers, lake monsters and the like. As Chersterton said: "Once we stop believing in something, we'll start believing in anything"

[Elatia Harris]

Jim Holt, the writer of this piece, is an extremely talented essayist and journalist, although the present is not his best. He has a terminal degree in philosophy from a prestigious university, and he's very, very unafraid. He's also a dog owner, and there cannot be even an ironclad atheist dog owner who has not furtively, childishly considered at some point whether the answer to the question of who goes to Heaven isn't: Dogs Only.

I agree with aguy109 -- meaninglessness is threatening, and if the idea of an afterlife allows us to attach significance to our choices and actions, then it is too understandable to be truly absurd, however wrong it may be. While we see frightening behavior in the name of an awful lot of woo, we must ponder also the dwindle rate of moral and ethical behavior in the absence of metaphysics.

[Bill]

@Nizam: ah, I get it now. Thanks.

@Randomactin: "the missing 8%?"
...is represented by the eight white squares in the middle.

Yes, but what do they believe?

[Nick Smyth]

A "speculation generator" which pushes us to contemplate an afterlife is almost certainly linked, in some motivational sense, to dissatisfaction with our actual lives.

Why the drive to explain the existence of an atheist afterlife? If it's there, we'll see it. If not, we may be wasting our actual time on earth. Either way, a waste of time.

[Elatia Harris]

Nick, it's not a waste of time unless wondering what lies beyond the farthest star is also a waste of time. Positing terra incognita, and then furnishing it, is what we do as a species. This is hardly wasteful of our resources, and if it did not deliver us from more barbarism than it enabled us to effect, then we would have long since ceased being born that way. While it is probably true that belief in an individual afterlife has helped many to see terrible suffering as redemptive, mere dissatisfaction with the status quo leads to too many other actions and beliefs to ignite on its own a passionate confidence in Heaven.

[Scott Ahlf]

Flying Spaghetti Monster--- For sure that is what the 8% is--
A pirate told me--
Did you know Global Warming is caused by the decline in pirates?
I think Jesus told me that- it may have been in a dream-- or it could of just been the refrigerator- sometime The Lord speaks in strange ways-

[aguy109]

Nick, The "speculation generator" I was talking about would not be waste of time if were also engaged in more practical concerns like: "I wonder if by digging a hole and covering it with branches, I might be able to make wild deer fall into it, so enlarging my food resources" or "If I planted a lot of these seeds together in one place, might I be able to grow a lot more of these tasty plants" Both these examples were highly speculative when first thought of, but those speculations paid dividends to ou ancestors. The same SG would promote the kind of relentless curiosity about less tangible things like deities and the meaning of life.

[Jonathan]

I'm with Elatia on this one. As an "ironclad atheist dog owner" I often consider furtively whether my dog will pass on to a better life after her time in this world is over. I mean, she does live completely without sin and only brings joy and happiness to others. Houellebecq's latest novel--The Possibility of an Island--is devoted in part to imagining both dog and human cloning as a secular form of immortality. Interestingly, while the human clones are better than us, dogs remain pretty much the same, suggesting, as seems right to me, that dogs have already arrived at a state of perfection.

[Scott Ahlf]

Zen Saying:
"I wish I was the person my dog thinks I am"