Is Death Final? | Episode 1306 | Closer To Truth

As far as the cosmos is concerned, there are bigger questions. As far as I'm concerned, none is bigger than life after death. Whenever a loved one dies, whenever children die, we cannot help but wonder, is anything beyond? On the one hand, it seems absurd that my personal conscious awareness, having come to exist, will cease to exist. On the other hand, it seems more absurd that my mental life can survive the death and dissolution of my brain. For as long as I remember wondering anything, I remember wondering this, is death final? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. Arguing that death is final seems simple. No body, no life, no brain, no awareness. Sure, I'm obsessed with the accuracy of the answer, but I'm also intrigued how this question, is death final, probes human yearning and ways of thinking. I put the burden of proof squarely on those who claim that conscious life can survive death. Believers must make their case that death is not final, offer explanation, present evidence, muster arguments. I start with an outspoken theologian and megachurch pastor who takes the Bible seriously, but can buck tradition, Greg Boyd. Greg, as a theologian, I'm sure you believe in the afterlife. I'd like to know why. It seems to me that either life ends up being the most tragic story ever told, or the most beautiful story ever told. And if death is the last word, it's just a tragic story. Good doesn't overcome evil. All the things we hope for and aspire towards and dream of, it all comes to nothing. The solar system dies a heat death. The whole universe dies a heat death, and that's it. And there's something in the human spirit that finds that objectionable. What I'm wondering is why do we find that objectionable? Why do we hunger for meaning, an ultimate meaning, not just a temporary meaning, but for our lives to matter in the long haul? Does that mean that just because we have the hunger for something, that there'll be food there? One of the pieces of evidence that there's a certain kind of food out there is that you're craving it, or that you have a hunger for it. Whenever there are beings that have a certain desire or a longing, there's something in nature that corresponds to it. So, you know, we have sex drives, and fortunately, there's sex. And we have hunger drives, and fortunately, there's food. And we long for air, and fortunately, there's air. And we get thirsty, and fortunately, you know, there's water. It would be odd if nature evolved beings that are totally out of sync with nature. Here we are, personal beings. We have a longing for meaning and for purpose. We have a confidence that good should overcome evil, that love should win in the end. If death has the last word, all of that longing, those dreams and those hopes come to absolutely nothing. And so the fact that we have these longings requires some kind of explanation, and it's one justification for believing that there's something else out there. Are we getting that causation reversed? I mean, we need the food, and therefore, we evolve the hunger. It's not that we had the hunger and the food was provided. So I'm not sure that argument works for an afterlife. The analogy would break down if you could show that there's some kind of a survival benefit for our believing in something that never has existed and never will exist. We have this desire that good overcome evil, that life should have a purpose, that death should not end it. How do we explain that if, in fact, there is no afterlife, and we're just creatures that evolve by natural time and chance? It seems to me the longing points in the direction of there being a fulfillment. Greg does not try to prove an afterlife. He won't exaggerate or fabricate so-called evidence. I like that. If we yearn for meaning and purpose, Greg says, there should be fulfillment. But if there's no afterlife, why the yearning? Wouldn't it be tragic, almost sadistic, to be denied an afterlife? It's not a logical or scientific argument. It's a big picture, coherence of the world kind of story. So where to go? Scientists go to evolution, which can select for mental traits, including yearnings. Theologians go to religion, which proclaims various visions of an afterlife. But can proclamations of an afterlife, even if widespread, support its reality? I go to Birmingham, England, to ask the distinguished philosopher of religion, John Hick. John, do you believe there is the possibility of life after death? In some form, yes. Ultimately, we have to wait and see. There's only one way to find out. I hope we'll wait a long time. Well, exactly, yes. All of the great world faiths do believe that this life that we are now living is only a small part of our total existence. There is the traditional Christian view that at death we go either to heaven or hell, or if you're a Catholic, heaven or hell or purgatory. I find that very difficult to believe because I don't think that any of us are good enough to go to anything you would call heaven at the time of our death. I don't think any of us are bad enough to go to anything you would call hell at the moment of our death. I'm inclined to favor something that is slightly more like purgatory than heaven or hell, namely multiple lives. Reincarnation, in other words. But I don't believe this in the traditional Western sense in which people discuss it, in which it is the present conscious self that lives again and may remember a previous life, but it is a deeper element within us. I would describe it as a dispositional structure. We are rather like runners in a relay race. We, at the moment, carry the torch. It was handed on to us from a previous human life. We now carry the fundamental dispositional structure that that person had, and that person modified it for better or worse, and we, in our lives, are again modifying it and handing it on to some future individual personality. And in each relay, I am transmitting something, but I'm not existing personally. I have no consciousness of it, my personality. No, that's right. Disappears. I'm not liking this very much. Well, this is something that, actually, all of the great religions teach. We have to become willing to give ourselves totally. In Christianity, you give yourselves to Christ, give yourself to God. In Islam, particularly in the Sufi tradition, you merge yourself in God. Within Buddhism, you eliminate the ego. It is the challenge of all the great world religions that we are to be willing to die, willing to give ourselves up. And suppose I'm not? I'm afraid you can't help it. I would like to live forever, but I'm not going to. And I ought to be glad that I'm contributing in this way to the long, long, long creative process, which will lead to, ultimately, I know not what. I admire John in his work, but not his kind of afterlife. I respect John seeking structural commonality among world religions, but not giving ourselves up as the price of post-mortem survival. I'm not kidding. I'd not want reincarnation to be real, lose my personality, be subsumed, disappear. I dig beneath these religious doctrines. The common denominator of all afterlives is consciousness. Could the only thing truly real be consciousness? I go to La Jolla, California, to visit the Indian-American holistic physician, Deepak Chopra. Deepak, how do you look at death from the standpoint of consciousness? I look at death as creativity. So every creative process has a death involved. In biology, we call it apoptosis, programmed cellular death. Your skin cells have to die once a month. Your stomach cells die every five days. Your immune cells die, like your blood cells, every 120 days or so. But they remember how to attack the bacterium, and in fact, every immune cell looks at a pathogen and says, have I had an experience with this guy before? I haven't, but what did my grandfather think of him? OK, because the memory of the previous cell is recycled in the memory of the new cell. DNA is the repository of the memory of evolution, but its actual stuff comes and goes every six weeks. So what recycles is a matrix of memory, which I, through my deep understanding of consciousness, is not in the brain or not in your body. It's non-local. It's in consciousness, which has no location, space, and time. So we are recycling of consciousness. If we can understand that, then death and resurrection, in the literal sense, is creativity. It's creating new context, new meanings, new relationships all the time. I'm hesitating to use the word reincarnation, because I get lost in religious ideology. But there is no question that everything in the universe recycles, everything. I appreciate the poetry of recycling, but it doesn't do very much for me. As long as you think of yourself as this little skin encapsulated ego dragging around a bag of flesh and bones, yes, it does. But I have a certain sense of my own personal consciousness. I'm my own personal awareness, and I like that. Are you going to take that away from me in some cosmic consciousness after death, the recycling? I don't remember any other cycles, and so those other cycles that I were do me no good. Okay, Robert, you want the truth with a capital T. I do. That's why I come to you. What did you have for lunch three weeks ago on Thursday? Okay, I don't remember. But the fact is there are lots of things we've experienced that we don't remember, right? So just because you don't remember being Cleopatra in a previous lifetime doesn't exclude the possibility, or being a housemaid or whatever. The question is, what is our real identity? I agree. Once you find out that your real identity is way beyond anything in space-time, then there is no birth, and there is no death. There is only the continuum of birth and death as punctuated points in the grammar of life. Does that mean I have to give up my personal sense of awareness? You have to expand your personal sense. There's nothing to give up. You can only give up what existed, okay? But if you expand your sense of awareness till you realize you're all of this and you feel it, then there is nothing to give up. You are the universe in this little impermanent life form. Will I know it's me? If you can awaken yourself into the awareness of your bigger identity now, you will never fear death because you will know that that is who you really are. But that's a different sense than I have today. It's a sense that I don't exist. It's a sense that I've blended into a cosmic consciousness. No, you don't. I'm not sure that's worth it. If you can witness- I'm not sure I want that. Okay, listen. Why do I want that? In any given day. It's like disappearing. In any given day. I don't want to disappear. Listen to me. As long as you don't confuse yourself with the role you're playing right now as Robert, you're free. If you get attached to the role, then you're in the melodrama of fear and existence which everybody is going through their existential crisis. You're like a guy in a movie theater who has forgotten that they're watching a movie. Okay, you're the witness of the movie. It's your destiny to play an infinity of roles, but you're not the roles you play. You're the eternal witness in which the roles come and go. And you better get hold of that internal witness because it's your ticket to reality. It's your ticket to freedom. It's your ticket to immortality. I agree with Deepak to the extent that I take consciousness seriously. Consciousness in the cosmos is no accident. But the path of the mystic, I cannot follow. I'm a realist about the physical world, just as I'm a realist about consciousness. Both, I think, can be fundamental. But even if it were ultimate truth that it was consciousness from where I came, and it shall be consciousness to where I'll return, though I'd want eternal life, I'd not want it this way. Perhaps I languish unenlightened, but I insist on preserving my sense of self. How to have eternal life and maintain my personal awareness? I visit neuroscientist Warren Brown, a Christian believer. Why does he reject immortal souls, but accept a resurrection? Warren, you're a physicalist. You're also a believer in God. How, then, is life after death possible, if at all, if there is nothing about the person that's not non-physical? Life after death, obviously, is an easy answer for the dualist, because the body deteriorates, the soul escapes, goes off to wherever, to heaven. For a physicalist, as you say, that's problematic. You have to have some idea of a re-embodiment. And fortunately, the basic understanding of life after death in Christian theology is resurrection, not immortality. So, life after death becomes a re-embodiment, a changed body, but a re-embodiment. But for me, somehow, in that re-embodiment, my form of consciousness, my form of mental life gets re-represented, re-instituted, re-created in a new creation. So, the Bible really talks about a new creation and talks about resurrection. The Bible really does not talk about soul escape or soul existence or immortality of the soul. So, how is that happening? And now I'm talking to you as a neuroscientist. How are you going to re-create the essence, which is you, your first-person experience, so that in the resurrection, when should it occur, you would feel just like you would in the morning if you had a dreamless night? What would that take? So, I'm actually not the same physical body I was a year ago. What I am is the same organization. And so, what would have to be preserved in my re-embodiment or my re-creation in the resurrection would be something about the pattern that is me, the way my brain body is organized, and that organizational description would have to be preserved in whatever that is resurrected or re-created that is me. And speaking as a neuroscientist, how on earth could that happen? I don't know. As a neuroscientist, it's beyond description. What is necessary is that we have a creator God who in some way created what exists now and will be re-created in some way and what exists in the resurrection. But how you go from here to there, that's just way beyond what anybody can fathom. No immortal soul in the Bible. All hope is on a resurrection. A resurrection will happen, Warren says, but we have no idea how. I'd like to believe in a resurrection, but I need an idea how. Granted, a resurrection of the dead would be wildly incredible. And it may sound doubly ludicrous to ask how, other than if God exists and God is all-powerful, then God can do anything. For me, it's a miracle. Just doesn't cut it. I push for how and why things could happen, if only to test consistency or discern ways of thinking. I ask a philosopher of religion trained in computer science, Eric Steinhardt. Eric, you're a naturalist. You believe in the scientific picture of the world, that everything we see has physical causes and effects, and we don't need to inject anything in this world that is of an immaterial nature. Correct. In that case, it would seem to be that any sort of hope in life after death is impossible. Any hope that you're going to survive death is a false hope, I would say. I think consciousness is just a brain process, and so when you're in a body process, too, of course. But when your brain dies, your body dies, your consciousness is extinguished permanently. I don't think that renders life after death impossible. If you even go back to the earliest Judaic and Christian accounts of resurrection, one of the views of resurrection is the extinction-recreation view. And there's good evidence for that in the Old Testament and New Testament, is when you die, you're dead. And then God made the original version of you, and God will make another one. That's the standard kind of Judaic and then actually early Christian, in fact, New Testament view. Even though today it's been really morphed into an immortal soul, in most religions, in Judaism as well as Christianity, there's an immortal soul component to it, which is not the original. That's right, the original doctrines didn't have that immortal soul, right? In fact, the soul doesn't really play any significant role in those early texts. So I like that extinction-recreation account. That has to be fixed up in various ways. Well, I'm sure you can do it. I better, that's my job. The idea is that there's a universe, and you're here, you're born, you die, and then you're dead. And God will create another universe, and he will create a replica of you, of your life, in that other universe. And so between this universe and the next, you don't exist. You had a tricky change of word there, from resurrection, which I was pleased to go along with you, and then you talked about replica. I don't like a replica. I like the resurrection. I'm not sure what the difference is. The most God can do, it would seem, would be to make a replica. It doesn't matter what the old stuff is. In fact, that never mattered, because stuff goes through our bodies all the time. But there's a pattern there that forms our memories and whatever else that... It's the pattern that's important. So when we take that pattern and we re-instantiate it in some new stuff, that's a replica. Now, some people say, well, you shouldn't call that resurrection. You should, you know, and that's kind of technical. Well, no, it's not technical, because it really speaks to, am I going to survive death? You've already said no. I said no. You said, I'm not going to survive death, so I'm ready to get up and go home, have a beer, and forget the conversation. But I'll stick with it for a while. You're attached to yourself. I am attached to myself. I mean, you know, it's the only one I got, and I'd like to, you know, keep... But everyone agrees, Buddhists, Christians, right? Jews, the whole tradition, everybody agrees. That's gone, man. That's an illusion. I am what I am, and I do want to maintain a personal identity. That's why I see a difference between replica and resurrection. Resurrection is you are literally the you that has the first-person consciousness would come back to life. Replica means something that looks like you, acts like you, thinks like you, is the pattern of you, but is not your first-person consciousness. That's correct. And to me, that's the difference between night and day. I can't see any way that makes any sense to get that continuity of that first-person consciousness that survives death. If God could make this universe, why couldn't God recreate my first-person consciousness? Actually, I think that's impossible. You think that's impossible? I think that's logically impossible. Logically, why? Because your first-person consciousness exists only now, and at some other time, some other place, some other universe, what is anchored to the now, here and now, this universe, this moment, this point in time, right, and space, that can't be recreated ever. Once this now is gone, it'll never be again. But I mean, I have a sense of continuity for every now as it goes forward. I mean, I have this unity of personal consciousness. Well, if you're only asking for a unity and a continuity, then we can give that to you easily. We can make a robot that thinks it was you. Yeah, I... But it wouldn't be you. But it wouldn't be able to transfer my internal sense of self right now. I would blank out. So, the robot would claim to be me and act like me and... Why would you black out? Why couldn't your internal sense of self be copied and transferred all over the place? Oh, it could be. It could be, but it wouldn't be my awareness. But you think of your awareness as a substance that has a permanence and an endurance of its own. That's an illusion, I would say. That is an illusion generated by your brain. I'm asking whether your gods have the capability... You're asking for an illusion. No, I want to know whether your gods can create that interpersonal experience that I feel now. Well, my gods, yes, they could do that, but that's not actually very hard. We could do that just by making a duplicate of your brain here. It wouldn't be the same internal sense that I have. They'd be like a twin brother. I don't put too much interest in having that persistence of that experience. I would like all the things that Eric Steinhardt could do but can't do here, I would like that form to have all of its potentials realized. I want a transformation of consciousness, not a persistence of consciousness. Well, I'd want a persistence of consciousness and a transformation of consciousness. But if forced to choose, I'd go with persistence. I want to be me, and I'd trade transformation to remain me. As for the clash of worldviews, resurrection or reincarnation, each is problematic, each based on a massive assumption. Resurrection requires an all-powerful God who somehow takes personal interest in every creature. Reincarnation requires the primacy of pure consciousness, which somehow guides uncountable souls into innumerable bodies. Even if absorbing me into cosmic consciousness could elevate my reality, still, no thank you. I'd take a pass. I'd go for resurrection. Yet life after death, in any way, seems so far-fetched, the triumph of hope over reason. So, is death final? Yes? No? Either way, those yearnings and ways of thinking are Closer to Truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com