Columns

Nancy El-Gamel argues the affirmative while John Brinsley-Pirie argues the negative.
Affirmative
 
I often hear the line “I don’t believe in an afterlife, I believe in science” and my response to these people is threefold.

Firstly, there needs to be an explanation that science and religious belief are not mutually exclusive; one can believe in an afterlife and evolution, you simply need to put the “God made evolution happen” thing in there.

The second point is that to not believe in something because science can’t prove it is not only bad science, it is just stupid. The whole idea of science purports that we not yet know everything - that’s why we are looking - so to just wave away something because the idea doesn’t appeal is based on ignorance. If an individual wants to take it upon themself to use science and logic to help support their belief in no afterlife, they need to prove the following: an absolute negative that there is no afterlife.

Proving an absolute negative implies that one has looked everywhere and not found what one is looking for. Now nobody can claim that they have looked everywhere and not found an afterlife; the very nature of the afterlife means that you cannot have plausibly looked everywhere (you need to be dead, right?). So for someone to claim that they do not believe in the afterlife means that they do so without evidence or reason on their side; how does that make it a better belief than if you do believe in an afterlife with no reason or logic?

Well, this is my third point. Since we have shown that neither reason nor logic exist on either side, we now turn to the flowery and emotive arguments. On one hand, we have the idea of hope, hope that our lives are not meaningless and we will exist past the decay of our flesh. And on the other we have “life is about me and we should treat it as such”.

So we have a life where there is hope of redemption if we have been morally wrong, and hope that we will never truly be gone, or we have an egotistical view of the world where live is about the individual only. Which would you rather have?
 

Negative
 
Dying is a fact of life. Although we hate to admit it, we end up burned or in the ground. Our bodies are left to decompose or be swept to sea. We have very little choice in the matter and, as much as we try to delay our demise, I am afraid to say that when the end comes, that is it. We have had our one shot, our chance at a happy life, and hopefully most of us have succeeded in the goals we set for ourselves.

For us to think we are more than atoms and particles is egocentric. To believe that we have a “soul” or “energy” is wishful thinking. If all living things had “souls”, the afterlife would be filled with not just us, humans, but also animals, plants, bacteria, viruses. The list goes on. We would end up with a world very similar to our own. This is probably what led to the theory of reincarnation but unfortunately the world is finite. We can’t be reincarnated again and again. Eventually there will be nowhere for us to be reincarnated to. Would we just be souls, floating through space?

As heaven and hell must be mentioned in this article, it is important for me to first tell you that I am an atheist, a strong one. The idea of an omni-God (one that is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving) I find mildly comical. An all-loving God would prevent all the evil He (or She) possibly could. An all-powerful God would be able to prevent all evil that He (or She) wanted to. Therefore, if an omni-God existed, there would be no evil. The recent events in Christchurch and Japan are proof that evil exists, along with other painful events that weren’t natural, Germany under Hitler for one example. The fact that there is evil proves there is no God in the way religious books claim there is, and therefore believing in heaven or hell (both created by religion) is like believing in Mordor. Lord of the Rings may be a very popular book but that doesn’t make it real.
 
It would be nice to think that when our time is up, we magically get given infinity to play around with. Believing in an afterlife should lead people to live their lives for others, helping others and making them happy, even at the expense of one’s own happiness. Although this isn’t a bad ideology to live by, I hope you don’t get disappointed when you have lived your whole life trying to make other people happy only to find, when you are six feet under, that you never receive the eternal happiness you deserve.