“You don’t believe in me,” observed the
Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality
beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“A
Christmas Carol” – Charles Dickens
Some questions occurred to me as I considered the question of life
after death.
- If we are to believe in the afterlife, why did God create the realms of life and death?
- For what purpose do we exist while we briefly live, if we are to endure for an eternity after we die?
I will consider these questions in greater depth in my next post, about
Heaven and Hell. In this post I will
consider more prosaic concepts of life after death. This post will consider souls that remain in
our own world and walk among us as ghosts or reincarnated individuals.
The
Contemplation of Non-existence
People are reluctant to admit
the reality of personal death. It is
somehow counter-intuitive to conceive of ceasing to exist, despite the ready
analogues of sleep, which we use so frequently as a euphemism for death. Perhaps we cannot contemplate non-existence,
because the contemplation itself presupposes existence. How could we imagine the feeling of
non-existence? We cannot. And so, people have developed beliefs based
on the continuation of the human self, because we are unable to imagine actual
death.
But, for the sake of argument,
suppose we accept the idea that people possess an immortal soul. What do we think about the afterlife? What conclusions can we reach by thinking
about the traditional ideas of ghosts, spirits, heaven and hell?
A Christmas
Carol
Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas
Carol” is an absolute masterpiece. Often
performed in film and on stage, "A Christmas Carol" is essential reading for
everyone, because of its clarion call for human kindness. [If you haven’t read it, go read it now. Seriously, right now. I’ll wait.]
“Christmas Carol” is also noteworthy for its unflinching look at the
dark side of human character, in negligence and cruelty.
The story is filled with
non-human spirits, as well as human ghosts.
The human ghosts suffer for their misdeeds during life – not in hell, as
is usually presumed, but through daily coexistence with a world they can no
longer touch. The souls of those who
were good in life are not seen floating above the streets of London; presumably
they are in a better place. “A Christmas
Carol” is a work of fiction, but it draws on beliefs that are still held by
many people. I suppose if such ghosts
were real and sometimes perceived, as by Mr. Scrooge, they would play a
rational role in the world, as a warning to others to treat others well during
life, exactly as in the story.
Ghosts
I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts!
Ray Parker, Jr. ,“Ghostbusters”, song
Ray Parker, Jr. ,“Ghostbusters”, song
Ghosts conveniently appear when
there is no way to document the occasion, and leave no trace, direct or
indirect, of their existence. Some might
ask why it is so hard to believe in the unseen, when physicists’ descriptions
of reality include such concepts as dark matter and dark energy, which have never
been observed in direct interaction with ordinary matter. Another kind of unseen reality is contained
in physicists’ description of the multiverse – an infinite number of alternate
realities, existing in parallel with our own universe. What is the difference between those
versions of reality and the idea of ghosts?
The answer lies in the repeatable evidence of the weak interaction of
those phenomena with our own physical reality.
Dark matter and dark energy are apparent, even inescapable conclusions,
based on the variance of the motion of galaxies from the motion predicted by
the theory of gravity. And evidence for
the multiverse is clear and repeatable in the interaction of quantum particles
with unseen shadow particles outside of our reality. What is lacking in the search for ghosts is
repeatable evidence. Is it possible
that reality contains elements which are capricious, lacking in physical
evidenced, taunting our logic and reason?
It may be possible, but I choose not to believe in such a perverse
vision of reality. (Or in a God who
would create such a perverse reality.) In
my opinion (and this is only opinion), there will always be stories of
earthbound ghosts, and those stories will always be false.
Reincarnation
And
I feel…
Like
I've been here before.
And you know it makes me wonder
What's going on under the ground.
Do you know? Don't you wonder?
What's going on down under you?
We have all been here before, we have all been here before.
And you know it makes me wonder
What's going on under the ground.
Do you know? Don't you wonder?
What's going on down under you?
We have all been here before, we have all been here before.
David
Crosby, “Déjà vu”, song.
Reincarnation is another common
belief, across many cultures, religions and individuals. Reincarnation is one of the easiest answers
to the question of how the individual self can continue after death. When the ephemeral body expires, the immortal
soul the dwelt within that body moves to another body. It sometimes provides a rationale for
visibly unfair events in an individual life; these are justified according to good
or bad deeds in previous life.
Many religions accept some form
of reincarnation as part of the general belief in the eternal life of the
soul. Many of these accept the idea that
people may be reincarnated as animals.
The soul’s progress towards perfection depends on willful actions of the
individual and resulting karma during each life. The doctrinal narrative that explains the
process of reincarnation is very detained and complex, and of course, is
completely different from one religion to the next. These narratives are contradictory and cannot
all be true.
Some versions of reincarnation
are attributed to only people. For
example, actress Shirley McClain believes that she has lived many previous
lives, beginning sometime in our pre-human past. (The fact that McClain’s version has no
resemblance to archeological or biological evidence doesn’t dissuade her from
her belief.) There are books and
websites on how to find and remember our previous lives.
The on-line literature
regarding reincarnation is filled with tangential ideas, equally without a
basis in evidence, and contrary to known facts in established science. The literature references extraterrestrials;
the possibility of extraterrestrial past lives; fabricated and incorrect
cosmology, evolution, and geology.
When I researched this topic, I
found, somewhat to my surprise, that many more people have died than are living
today. In rough numbers, about 100
billion people have lived and died since 50,000 B.C.*, and roughly 7.5 billion
people are alive today. So, for every
person living today, about 14 people lived and died before that us. In concept, enough prior humans existed that
all of us could have lived a previous life, or many lives. Most of those lives were lived sometime
between about 200 B.C. and 1950 A.D.
*There is an open question
about when humanity began. The
demographer who produced this research chose 50,000 B.C. arbitrarily, whereas
anthropologists might choose 100,000 to 250,000 years ago. The truth is there is no clear dividing line
between humans and pre-human progenitors.
We cannot say “This being has a soul, but its parents did not.” This was the point of my childhood question,
“Does a virus have a soul?”
Many people believe in
reincarnation today, including about one-quarter of American Christians,
although reincarnation is not part of Christian theology.
The possibility of
reincarnation is even the subject of serious academic research at the
University of Virginia. For over 40
years, researchers there have been gathering evidence that young children
remember previous lives. According to
the researchers, these memories fade by the age of six.
But if only a few children out
of millions remembers a previous life, and if those memories fade by the age of
six, can we even say that the previous soul survives? If we have no memory of our previous selves,
do those souls still exist, or have they evaporated, to be replaced by the soul
of the presently living individual?
Further, why should memories of
past lives only occur in a tiny handful of cases, in children? Isn’t it possible that parents have
misconstrued things said by children, or unconsciously planted ideas in the
children’s heads, that later appear to be memories? Is it possible that all of these stories are
some kind of fraud? The evidence for
reincarnation is sparse, not systematic or repeatable, and of questionable
authenticity.
Carl Sagan advocated a
principle which should be part of the foundation for any system of belief. That principle was first proposed by French
mathematician Laplace, in 1812: “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary
claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.”
Sagan’s formulation is more succinct: “Extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence.” The claim that
an immortal soul exists for each human, leaves the body at death, and resumes
its existence in another person, or an immaterial place, is certainly an
extraordinary claim. And the evidence
for that claim is weak.
Conclusion
Most modern people have stopped
believing in ghosts. There are always
legends, and there are always things that startle us in the dark. But those things have more to do with our
human senses, and our brain’s tendency to fill in the blanks when deprived of
sensory input. No clear, repeatable
evidence for ghosts has ever been gathered.
Similarly, there is no convincing
evidence of reincarnation. Accounts of
individuals remembering previous lives are very sparse and poorly
documented. The instances of remembered
past lives are not sufficiently abundant to rule out fraud, or unwitting
communication of information to the “reincarnated” individual. The idea lacks the robust evidence required
to validate belief in something unseen.
The idea of life after death,
whether as a ghost, or reincarnated soul, fails the basic test of reason. Why should life of the soul continue after death? At some point, early human individuals must
have possessed “original” souls. Why
would later individuals receive “recycled” souls? If reincarnation were an actual phenomenon,
perceptible to humans, then the beliefs of various cultures and religions would
be expected to be parallel, because they are describing the same real
phenomenon. But world beliefs about
reincarnation are not at all parallel, and for that reason, we must conclude
they are false.
---
Does a Virus Have a Soul? -- Summary
An earlier post in this series explored the question of the immortal soul. (“Does a Virus Have a Soul? http://sensibledisbelief.blogspot.com/2016/07/does-virus-have-soul.html). To summarize the earlier inquiry, there are qualities of life which give us personal identity -- memory, will, self-awareness, thoughts and emotions. There is considerable evidence that these capacities are located in the brain, and are erased at death. There is no compelling evidence that the components of the individual self exist past the moment of death. There is no evidence of any other receptacle for the self which can hold the self beyond the moment of death. So the existence of the soul, which is considered the immortal continuation of our self, our personal identity, is without basis. Further, when we consider the connectedness of life, through evolution and the complexity of the human organism, the notion that only humans possess a soul develops logical contradictions.
--
References:
Reincarnation:
Scientific research into
reincarnation:
History of past lives:
6.5 % of the people who have
ever lived are alive today.
