Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [436]
Newberg and d’Aquili tell us that God will not go away because the human brain is “wired” to receive such experiences, even helping society find its direction. Yet the latter is not necessarily true. People who live in a scientific system do not need to interpret their ecstatic experiences as proof of divine providence. Thinking that humans will always find new and important revelations is no salvation; it does not distinguish between prophet and madman, between visions that take humanity in a good direction or a bad one.6 To believe in the validity of all such experiences is surely dangerous. It can justify fanaticism and psychosis. Science should seek understanding, not infallibility.
This is exactly what Paul Tillich warned about half a century ago when he cautioned against the idolatry of divinizing the work of our hands. In fifty years, one more corollary must be added-namely, divinizing the thoughts of our minds or the revelations of our dreams and visions. Instead, Tillich advocated only the taking of universal, transcendent values as our ultimate concern.7 To avoid idolatry, humanity, said Tillich, had to put its confidence only in transcendent values and, at the same time, to realize the importance of doubt to faith.
The Transcendent and Doubt
THE CONSENSUS of liberal theologians has for a long time been that the existence of God, hence the validity of religion, is not susceptible to ordinary scientific notions of confirmation and disconfirmation.8 One person looks at a sunset and sees the handiwork of the creator; another sees merely the particles of pollution adding color to the sky. Neither can move the confidence of the other because neither perspective is subject to confirmation or disconfirmation. The perspective is, rather, something more fundamental about personal orientation to meaning in the universe. The existence of God is an aspect of our understanding of the meaning of existence-along with justice, love, beauty, and a host of other human values-not something that can be verified scientifically.
Life after death, at first, seems quite a different proposition. The major pictures of life after death in the world’s cultures are propositions about objective places. They do not have the uniformity or cultural universality of the question of the existence or nonexistence of the transcendent. Yet, when subjected to historical analysis, which shows that the afterlife is constantly in flux and constantly being accommodated to social, political, and economic necessities in the society, the propositional value of any particular heaven grows much less important than the general claim that an afterlife exists at all.
So, in the end, the afterlife is another way to express the same transcendent, non-confirmable issue of God. The afterlife is particularly important to religions that organize themselves as missionary religions and not nearly as important to religions which do not. Instead, the very speculation that an afterlife exists seems like a human need and an ideal-again, like love, beauty, or justice-that exists in our minds rather than the world and gives a sense of meaning to our lives. Like beauty and justice, life after death is no less important for being unverifiable.
This is not a pleasant thought; nor is it a view that most people will appreciate easily. Most people will prefer to live within the system of beliefs that they inherit. The very variety and change of our notions about the afterlife speaks against any literal truth. The inherent implausibility of any one depiction of an afterlife based on the variety of contradictory notions has certainly brought naive notions of the afterlife into question. But implausibility alone does not actually reach the deep issue of the reality of personal afterlife or its potential meaning and significance in human existence. It has not even ended speculation of the soul’s afterlife.
Physicians have placed word generators high up and facing the ceiling in operating rooms so that an out-of-body patient can