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“A man who has lived and loved,” wrote G. K. Chesterton “falls down dead and worms eat him. That is Materialism if you like.” I thank Michael Gerson, whose recent column in the Washington Post brought this bit of religion-infused thinking to my attention. And in response to Mr. Chesterton, I unhesitatingly say: I like.
For Gerson and other evangelicals – indeed, for most people who espouse pretty much any religious tradition – it is simply unimaginable that human beings are material creatures and that after death, for the creature that has died (whether hippo, halibut, or human) there is quite literally nothing. Finished. Done. Over with. Kaput. Almost as unimaginable for believers is that everyone doesn’t agree with them. It is literally a matter of faith that there simply must be something more, if not life after death, then persistence of some ineffable part of a person – her soul – that keeps on going, whether to heaven or hell (traditional Christian teaching), or perhaps into another body, quite likely a different species altogether, depending on how much “merit” one has accumulated while alive (Hindu).
But any way you slice it, fear of death and a refusal to accept it as the end has been a major motivating factor in nearly every religion. Show me a religion, and I’ll show you a way of wiggling out of the undeniable biological and physical fact of death’s finality.
It is extraordinary in the extreme that belief in some sort of persistence after death is so widespread despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence for it, and an abundance of evidence that it is nothing but a consoling myth.
This isn't simply my insight, motivated by vigorous atheism, but a recognition that has a long history in Western thought (in this regard, I can't speak authoritatively about Eastern traditions). In Plato's Phaedo, we read that "There is a child within us to whom death is a sort of hobgoblin; him we must persuade not to be afraid when he is alone in the dark." Thoughts of death leave - and, moreover, often afflict - all of us, in a sense, alone in the dark, and yet, isn't it time we grow up and stop being the child that Plato so accurately observes? Death is real, but hobgoblins are not - except in the minds of those unable or unwilling to face the facts of physics, chemistry, and biology - and here is simply no reason to espouse the contrary.
There is, of course, a sense in which “life” after death is scientifically supported, an ecological – and, interestingly, a widespread Buddhistic – perspective that builds upon the reality that a body’s constituent molecules and atoms are very rarely broken apart, and even more rarely destroyed. Rather, they are literally recycled, most often – in the short term - into part of the nonliving environment, if not into other organisms. This is not only true, but is downright inspiring, since it expands the boundaries of the “me” to include everything. At the same time, this may seem like special pleading; certainly it is a far cry from the widespread yearning (shared by Chesterton, Gerson and the overwhelming majority of human beings) that our deeper, truer self, in some manner carrying an imprint of our subjectively experienced slice of selfhood, will somehow be preserved and carried on in perpetuity.
Believe it if you must. But bear in mind that whatever you might want to be true, the natural world isn’t required to oblige. Moreover, (and just between the two of us), a non-materialistic component of us, as for all other organisms, not only “ain’t necessarily so,” but the overwhelming likelihood is that it is necessarily false.
I suggest embracing this reality, since after all, reality is all we have, and in this case the alternative to a comforting myth is the even-more-comforting truth of literal, material continuity, which connects us with all things living and dead, loving or not, and, as the naturalist Henry Beston wrote, “caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. His most recent book is Through a Glass Brightly: using science to see our species as we really are (Oxford University Press, 2018).
