Afterlife Is Not Special

Ionut Sterpan, May 6 2008

As a matter of popular theology, people seem to believe something like this:

We now don't know whether God exists, whether we are immortal or not, or whether Heaven exists and we’ll be forever saved. But in Afterlife, if there will be such a thing, then, we shall find out the truth; we shall know for sure whether God exists, whether we are immortal, and whether we shall be forever in Heaven.

I present an argument showing that we still shall not be sure of any of these things, even in Afterlife. As long as we see Afterlife as a continuation of our personal experience, then Afterlife cannot get us rid of uncertainty.

1. We shall never know for sure whether God exists:
Because any proposition about experience (such as "This is God in front of me now") is falsifiable by a possible future experience. (I may meet a new Being pretending more credibly that It and not the old one is the true God; how do we ‘know’ that this is not right? And then, after a period of happiness, a new Being, even greater than the last one comes and pretends even more credibly that It is God, not the other guy. How Can we ‘know’ that this is the Real God?).

2. We shall never know for sure whether we are immortal:

 The same argument applies to our belief of immortality: Even if we are immortal, we can never be sure that we really are immortal.

3. And we shall never know for sure whether we'd stay in Heaven forever:
3.1.Because if we preserve our freedom of choice, then we shall always be able to hurt ourselves (and we’ll be aware of that). We shall not be absolutely secure that our happiness will last forever.

3.2. Or, the "dream argument": I may always fear that I am dreaming and I might wake up from what it feels like Heaven, but it is just a dream of Heaven. In our daily experience sometimes we ask ourselves: Am I dreaming? So, we may ask ourselves the same thing in Heaven. Therefore we cannot be sure that we really are in Heaven, even if we are in Heaven.

Personal solution for believers:

We learned from the discussion above that the certainty-bringing Heaven we are looking for, cannot ‘be presented’ to us, ‘brought to us’ by an outside event, like death. Afterlife and Heaven should not then be regarded as gifts, possibly offered after death, because any gift is an experience, an experience we are subjects of, and all experience falls prey to the arguments above. We can always ‘be subsequently presented’ with a falsifying experience and we are aware of that at any point. So if we just ‘wait to die and see’ how things are (what we shall be presented with), we may live after death only to witness our own disappointment: still be unsure of God’s existence, of our immortality, and of our salvation.

As a believer in a very special Heaven, I may be forced by the above argument to conceive of Heaven this way:

What if Heaven was a matter of choice, supported by continuous active choice to believe? We can make this choice regardless of the experience we are presented with, after death or now. God and Heaven are not brought to us by history, they are somehow outside of it, and we can choose to also live out there, regardless of the history we are in.

Conclusion:

The “passive” way of looking at Heaven, as an experience we are provided with, renders the difference between our present experience and afterlife experience irrelevant.  On the other hand, the active way of looking at Heaven, renders the difference irrelevant again: I may choose Heaven, whether I’m here, before death, or after it, regardless of the kind of experience I am subjected to in both states. Still, in both cases, "passive" (where Afterlife is bound to disappoint since no experience can bring certainty) or "active" (where Afterlife / Heaven does not disappoint, as it is supported by our continuous choice to believe), life after death does not bring anything special.