The reasonableness of life after death

Of course, not everyone believes in life after death. A prominent British humanist said, “On humanist ideals life leads to nothing and every pretence that it does not is a deceit.” There are, however, plenty of good reasons for believing in life after death for those who have an open mind on the subject. These are not in themselves proof, but if the weight of evidence counts for anything, I would suggest that the balance is very strongly in favour of its truth. Consider the following lines of evidence.

The universality of belief in life after death

It seems that the human race has a built-in instinct for expectation of life beyond the grave. Billy Graham, who majored in anthropology, says he didn’t find a race anywhere in the world that did not believe in life after death. Sir James Frazer, one of the greatest of authorities on the uncivilised races, remarks in his book Belief in Immortality:

Among the savage races a life after death is not a matter of speculation and conjecture of hope and fear, it is a practical certainty, which the individual as little dreams of doubting as he doubts the reality of his conscious existence.

Peter Kreeft has written about what he calls the deepest hope of the human heart—the hope of heaven. In Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, he says: “From earliest times humanity has hoped for heaven. The earliest artifacts are burial mounds. The dead were always prepared for the great journey.” C. S. Lewis expressed a similar thought in The Problem of Pain: “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.” Selwyn Hughes adds a useful analogy from nature:

Birds, beasts and fish have what students of natural history call ‘the homing instinct’. Cats and dogs find their way back across vast stretches of unknown country. Salmon return unerringly to spawn in the rivers of their birth. Nothing in all nature is more wonderful than this amazing ‘homing instinct’ in some of the lower species. I want to suggest that deep in the heart of every human being is a homing instinct—a yearning for heaven. It can be ignored, overlaid, denied, but it is there nevertheless—persistent and ineradicable.

Even in our modern, secular society, every poll that is taken on the subject indicates that a substantial majority believe in some form of life after death. Is this belief merely wishful thinking arising from some evolutionary process that has produced a growing self-consciousness and a belief in our importance as beings at the top of the evolutionary scale? Or could it be that an eternal and loving God has given us this awareness because he longs to enjoy a relationship with us that will last forever? As the writer of Ecclesiastes put it, “He has...set eternity in the human heart.” (3:11).

The nature of God

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once tried out his theory of belief in God but no heaven, on a rather simple-minded peasant. The peasant thought for a minute and then replied, “So, what is this God for?” A pertinent question! If God is the God of love that the Bible says he is, who created us to enjoy a loving relationship with himself, is it logical to assume that he would enable us to enjoy that relationship for a few years and then cast us aside? Particularly when, as William James put it, “we are just getting fit to live.” The God I personally came to know as a teenager fifty years ago is a more wonderful God than that!

When Jesus was disputing with the Sadducees of his day, who did not believe in life after death, he made the telling point that God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:27). In response to their materialistic attitude to life he declared, “You are completely wrong! You don’t know what the Scriptures teach. And you don’t know anything about the power of God” (v.24). The love of God, the faithfulness of God and the justice of God demand that there be life after death.

The witness of science

In the past, a wrong view of science has often been used to buttress the idea of the non-existence of anything that is not “material” or cannot be demonstrated by logical proof. This is “scientism”, the giving to science that which its best practitioners do not claim. Modern quantum theory has long demonstrated the false assumption behind such beliefs.

Speaking about life after death, Dr. Von Braun, who was elected President of the National Space Institute in Washington D. C. in 1975, said:

In our modern world many people seem to feel that science has somehow made such ‘religious ideas’ untimely or old-fashioned.

But I think science has a real surprise for the sceptics. Science, for instance, tells us that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without trace.

Think about that for a moment. Once you do, your thoughts about life will never be the same. Science has found that nothing can disappear without trace. Nature does not know extinction. All it knows is transformation!

Now if God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of His universe, doesn’t it make sense to assume that he applies it also to the masterpiece of His creation—the human soul? I think it does. And everything science has taught me—and continues to teach me—strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without trace.

Over the last thirty years much study has been done on the subject of near death experiences (NDEs). Modern technology has proved remarkably effective in resuscitating people who, to all intents and purposes, are clinically dead. Hundreds have described their experiences from “the other side”. The publication of On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969 was a landmark in the development of such studies. Her researches were continued by Raymond Moody whose Life After Life went on to sell three million copies, while further investigations were embodied in At the Hour of Death, by Kaarlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson (1977). Contrary to popular opinion, not all reports of NDEs are pleasant ones. Philip J. Swihart of the Midwest Colorado Mental Health Centre, in The Edge of Death (1978), and Maurice S. Rawlings of the Diagnostic Hospital in Chattanooga, in Beyond Death’s Door (1978), have recorded experiences that are terrifying and accompanied with a fearful anticipation of judgement. Later works by psychologist Kenneth Ring, Life at Death (1980), and cardiologist Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death (1982), helped put the subject squarely on the scientific map. A 1982 Gallup Poll found that an estimated eight million people in the United States have had an NDE. Whatever we are to make of such experiences, they certainly don’t point to a cessation of existence at the moment of death.

However, even science today is reluctant to speak of “proof”. Scientific theories are based on reasonable assumptions, based on weight of evidence—evidence that can change with further experience. John Fiske, in The Destiny of Man, described the materialistic supposition that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body as “perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption known to the history of philosophy.” He believed in life beyond the grave “not in the sense which I accept the demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God’s work.”

The Christian view of life after death is not only supported by all the facts that we are presently aware of, taken as a whole, it is also remarkably consistent within itself. David Winter, in his excellent paperback Hereafter, writes:

Unlike many of the speculative ideas, the Christian doctrine of life beyond death meets the main criteria of a sound working hypothesis: it fits the known evidence, it provides a satisfactory answer to the problem posed, and it does it without either internal or external contradiction. Rightly understood it is a magnificently strong consistent ‘system’. In preparing this book, for example, I have not at any point been embarrassed by any detail of the Christian doctrine of resurrection, nor have I found any point at which it raised any problems of inconsistency or contradiction.

Evidence from nature

If there is no life after death, what are we to make of the seemingly countless illustrations that we are confronted with day after day from the world of nature?

William Jennings Bryan in The Prince of Peace, declared:

Christ gave us proof of immortality, and yet it would hardly seem necessary that one should rise from the dead to convince us that the grave is not the end.

If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the cold and pulseless heart of the buried acorn and to make it burst forth from its prison walls, will He leave neglected in the earth the soul of man, made in the image of his Creator?

Could we have a more wonderful analogy of the reality of resurrection than the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly? As Hugh Ross says in Beyond the Cosmos, “God has given us sneak previews of our future in new dimensions—in his Word, his Creation, his Incarnation and in his Atonement.” Maybe we just need to have our eyes opened to what happens all around us.

The fact of revelation

When Socrates drank the poison hemlock and lay down to die, his friends asked, “Shall we live again?” The dying philosopher could only reply, “I hope so. No man can know.” But the opinion that we cannot know is an assumption for which there is no logical foundation. If a God does exist who loves us in the way the Bible says he does, and who longs to have a personal relationship with us, it is most logical that he would want us to know, not only that he exists, but also something of his ultimate purposes for us. And if he is indeed God, then he must be able to make himself known.

It has always been the view of Christianity that God has made himself known in specific ways. He has revealed certain things about himself in the world of nature. “God’s eternal power and character cannot be seen. But from the beginning of creation, God has shown what these are like by all he has made. That’s why those people don’t have any excuse” (Romans 1:20). More specifically, he has made himself known to certain individuals throughout history, and finally, and most completely, by condescending to become one of us in the person of Jesus Christ. “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe” (Hebrews 1:1, 2).

The record of this revelation, so Christians believe, is given to us in the sixty-six books of the Bible, recorded over a period of over 1,000 years. This collection of writings, which has topped the best seller lists since the invention of the printing press, is open for all who wish to check its contents to see if it has the “ring of truth”. It would take another booklet to go into all the reasons why millions believe this collection to be the revealed word of the living God. Suffice it to say that when we come to the New Testament and the teaching of Jesus himself, where the revelation is most complete, life after death becomes one of its major themes.

According to my reckoning, there are about 147 statements by Jesus himself in the four books that tell the story of his life and teaching (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) in which he implies, or clearly states, that there is life after death. Over half of these come in contexts where the emphasis is on reward or punishment for deeds and attitudes in this life. Eleven of his parables (stories he told to illustrate a point) speak of the division that will take place between those who are rewarded and those who are punished when he judges the world. ^[4]  Is it reasonable to suppose that the person who has had the greatest influence for good in the history of the human race ^[5]  should have been totally wrong in one of the major planks of his teaching?

One of the reasons Christians believe in life after death is simply because God has said so—and done so most plainly.

The resurrection of Jesus and the faith of believers

In the booklet Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? I have given the weight of historical evidence that is available to us for believing in the truthfulness of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. To this we could add the testimony of the countless stories of those who have devoted their lives to Jesus and who have faced death with a confidence that comes from beyond this world. In Part 2 of this booklet I have shared some of my favourites.

Our ingrained sense of justice

However much our consciences may be deadened by misuse, there is within all of us some sense of right and wrong and a desire for justice. We are quick to condemn acts of injustice done by another, even if we are equally quick to overlook our own faults in this regard! Where does this sense of justice come from? Is it only something that has “evolved” over countless millennia, or could it be that the biblical account of a just God who created us “in his own likeness” (Genesis 1:26, 27) makes more sense?

If the latter is true, then we have a problem. When we look around us we see injustices everywhere, and we know that most of them will not be sorted out in this life. If there is no judgement beyond death in which a God who is wholly just and who knows everything is going to sort things out, then how can we speak of justice? It simply does not exist. Nevertheless, if it is true, then it does explain perfectly where our sense of justice comes from and also gives us the motivation to work for it in this world. We know that acts of justice will ultimately be vindicated and injustice condemned.

David Winter, in Hereafter, makes this point:

If he is all-powerful and good—which is what the word ‘God’ means to most of us—then it seems to me he must act to put things right. Justice on a cosmic scale must be done, and must be seen to be done, or God is not God.

I would consider this perhaps the strongest argument of all for life after death and a final judgement.

Having explored some of the issues we are faced with when considering the possibility of life after death, I will spend the rest of the booklet explaining the Christian view as it is presented to us in the Bible, particularly the New Testament which tells of the coming of Jesus and the early preaching of his followers. It is not my intention to go into detail about alternative views such as those of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam or other religions, but where appropriate I will point out some significant differences.

Footnotes

^[4] The Wheat and the Weeds (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43).
The Good Fish and the Bad (Matthew 13:47-50).
The Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22:1-14).
The Faithful and Unfaithful Servants (Matthew 24:45-51).
The Wise and Foolish Virgins (Matthew 25:1-13).
The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30).
The Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46).
The Shut Door (Luke 13:24-30).
The Great Banquet (Luke 14:15-24).
The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31).
The Ten Trusted Servants (Luke 19:11-27).

^[5] I have given some detail on the influence of Jesus Christ in history in the booklet Is Jesus Really God?