The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [131]
Still, it seems so unfair: some of us starve to death before we’re out of infancy, while others - by an accident of birth - live out their lives in opulence and splendour. We can be born into an abusive family or a reviled ethnic group, or start out with some deformity; we go through life with the deck stacked against us, and then we die, and that’s it? Nothing but a dreamless and endless sleep? Where’s the justice in this? This is stark-and brutal and heartless. Shouldn’t we have a second chance on a level playing field? How much better if we were born again in circumstances that took account of how well we played our part in the last life, no matter how stacked against us the deck was then. Or if there were a time of judgement after we die, then - so long as we did well with the persona we were given in this life, and were humble and faithful and all the rest - we should be rewarded by living joyfully until the end of time in a permanent refuge from the agony and turmoil of the world. That’s how it would be if the world were thought out, preplanned, fair. That’s how it would be if those suffering from pain and torment were to receive the consolation they deserve.
So societies that teach contentment with our present station in life, in expectation of post mortem reward, tend to inoculate themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes - or even for those who just did what those in authority told them - might gain a competitive advantage.
Thus, the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue on which we might anticipate widespread scepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meagre to nil. True, brain lesions can make us lose major segments of our memory, or convert us from manic to placid, or vice versa; and changes in brain chemistry can convince us there’s a massive conspiracy against us, or make us think we hear the Voice of God. But as compelling testimony as this provides that our personality, character, memory - if you will, soul - resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence.
And if there are powerful social institutions insisting that there is an afterlife, it should be no surprise that dissenters tend to be sparse, quiet and resented. Some Eastern, Christian and New Age religions, as well as Platonism, hold that the world is unreal, that suffering, death and matter itself are illusions; and that nothing really exists except ‘Mind’. In contrast, the prevailing scientific view is that the mind is how we perceive what the brain does; i.e., it’s a property of the hundred trillion neural connections in the brain.
There is a strangely waxing academic opinion, with roots in the 1960s, that holds all views to be equally arbitrary and ‘true’ or ‘false’ to be a delusion. Perhaps it is an attempt to turn the tables on scientists who have long argued that literary criticism, religion, aesthetics, and much of philosophy and ethics are mere subjective opinion, because they cannot be demonstrated like