What turned me around on belief in life after death was a sentence I read in Who Knows? A Study in Religious Consciousness by Raymond Smullyan. He wrote that he believed in an afterlife because he couldn’t imagine himself not existing. At the time, I didn’t believe in an afterlife, and I was surprised to read that he did. He was an expert on formal logic with a great sense of humor, and at the time I thought that the idea that someone who had died could still somehow also be alive was self-contradictory. But I thought about it and asked myself if I could imagine myself not existing, and I realized I couldn’t.
You might say, “So what? Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t prove that it’s impossible.” And I don’t dispute that, but my response is that if I can’t imagine it, I can’t believe in it either. I can easily imagine that I have died and, say, people are attending my funeral and seeing my dead body lying there in a casket, and that from their point of view, all the evidence will show that I have become permanently unconscious. But what I can’t imagine is that my point of view simply won’t be there or anywhere else. I can’t imagine being permanently unconscious.
I don’t know if I have ever been absolutely unconscious. I have been anesthetized for surgery and know what it is like to recover consciousness and to be unable to remember anything that went on from the time that I lost it. This isn’t all that different from falling asleep and then waking up later with no memory of any dreams. I’m not sure, though, that I was really absolutely unconscious. It may be that I quickly and irrecoverably—at least for now—forgot dreams that I had. At any rate, it’s clear to me that I have never been permanently unconscious, since I am conscious now.
Objection: Just because something has never happened, it doesn’t follow that it never will.
Response to the objection: That’s true, but it gives us no reason to anticipate any particular occurrence or set of occurrences.
Objection: But everyone eventually dies. Experience shows that. And dead bodies exhibit no signs of consciousness and don’t come back to life, with the possible exceptions of Jesus and the few he miraculously brought back to life and the one Peter brought back. And those exceptions wouldn’t be considered miracles if we had empirical evidence that they were likely to occur anyway. So, barring a miracle, you have ample reason to believe that when you die, you will become permanently unconscious, despite the fact that you have never yet been permanently unconscious. Right?
Response: No, that’s not right. I am not disputing that from the point of view of anyone else who may be around when I die, I will die and stay dead and my dead body will exhibit no signs of consciousness. What I am disputing is that that is how it will be from my point of view.
—Well, you won’t have a point of view.
There is no evidence for that assertion, absent the assumption that there is no meaningful distinction between my own evidence that I am conscious and someone else’s evidence that I am conscious. And there is no justification for that assumption.
—Just because something has never happened, it doesn’t follow that it never will. So, despite the fact that you have never been permanently unconscious (since you are conscious now), it doesn’t follow that you never will be.
This is on equal footing with: Just because something has never happened, it doesn’t follow that it never will. So, the fact that no one has ever come back from the dead to tell us what it is like (assuming that is true) doesn’t imply that no one ever will.
I am not denying the abstract possibility that I might become permanently unconscious, so that my point of view simply ceases to exist, even though I can’t imagine what that would be like. I’m only claiming I have no good reason to expect it, and I don’t really know what that is that I would be expecting. So it seems rather ridiculous to say, “Nevertheless, that’s what I believe will happen.”
—If your dead body here has become unconscious and follows the pattern of previous cases where consciousness never has been recovered, but you nevertheless continue to be conscious and to have a point of view, where will you be? Will you have a body? Will other people be there? Will you be somewhere else in this universe, or in some other world? How can you answer such questions? How will it be you who has died, as witnessed by those you have left behind? Isn’t such a state of affairs also something you can’t imagine?
Consider what happens when you dream. From the point of view of anyone who sees you asleep, you are unaware of the world in which they are awake. But from your point of view, you are in a place that is “here” just in the same way you are”here” when you are awake. “Here” = “where I am.” Roughly at least once in every 24 hours, we fall asleep and lose awareness of the world. But we don’t realize it. We dream and in the dream we are aware of a different world. When we wake up we often forget our dreams, but it doesn’t follow that we didn’t have those dreams; and when we remember them, we notice that there are both striking resemblances and striking differences between the events and scenes of the dreams and the events and scenes of our waking life. None of this is apparent to any third-person observer of us when we are asleep Our only evidence that we dreamed what we dreamed is our own memory of it. It is also evident from the first-person point of view that I am the one who fell asleep and dreamed and then woke up. Every experience is from a first-person point of view.
The dead have awakened from this dream. From our point of view, they are now permanently unconscious human remains. From their point of view, we are like the memories of a dream, while they are awake, walking around, doing things in what to them is “this world,” while what we call “this world” is the memory of a dream or a dream which has been forgotten.
Alternatively, the dead have fallen asleep and are dreaming. They are unaware of the world they have left behind or even that they have left it behind. Events of what we call “this world” may affect in some symbolic ways what happens in the dream world which to them is just “this world,” i.e., “the one I am in.”
All of this is quite easy to imagine and is consistent with a wealth of experience. Being sucked away into nothingness from then on forever, on the other hand— on what experience is that fear based after all?
I treat this topic more extensively, and other interesting ones as well, in Dreams and Resurrection. For a sample and info, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-Resurrection-Immortal-Psychedelics-Christianity/dp/1782796835/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558462262&sr=1-2