(13 votes, average: 4.92 out of 5)
Loading...A recent Pew research poll produced interesting results on Americans’ beliefs about the afterlife. 72% of Americans say they believe in heaven — defined as a place “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” and 58% of U.S. adults also believe in hell — a place “where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.” (See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/10/most-americans-believe-in-heaven-and-hell/)
So that’s a lot. Nearly three quarters of all Americans believe in a literal heaven and well over half believe in a literal hell. The afterlife is bigtime.
In my book on the afterlife I will not be doing something completely crazy, like claiming I know for sure whether there is a heaven and/or hell. What do I know? I may state my *opinion* on the matter, but since I’m an atheist, it should be pretty clear what I think anyway. Still, it is interesting to know/think where the ideas of heaven and hell came from, and that’s what most of the book will be.
The issue returned to the consciousness of the international media last month when it was reported that the Pope himself didn’t actually believe in a literal heaven and hell. As it turns out, that may have been a false report (as if we haven’t had enough false reports intrude on our lives lately), but it got people’s attention. One of the most interesting articles I read on the subject would not have been on the radar screens of most blog members, as it was in an English newspaper, The Guardian. Here’s the link.
The author makes a very interesting point (several actually, but one that I’m particularly taken by), namely, that …
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I can understand how life after death is attractive to many people, since most of us don’t want to die. Plus, all we have ever known is being alive, so it’s hard to imagine being dead. I don’t believe in life after death, but it would be nice to at least go for a hike with my wife now and then after we kick the bucket.
I am so with you on that.
I could be wrong, but being dead is like what every human being experienced BEFORE they were conceived. What do you remember of that experience? Yahweh said he knew all of us before we were in our mother’s womb, but I can’t recall ever meeting him.
They made you drink water from the River Lethe before you entered your body so you would forget your previous existence.
Just thinking – could you be atheist and *still* believe in afterlife?
Sure!
To say that you’re an atheist is to say absolutely nothing about yourself other than that you’re unconvinced by the assertions of theists that there is a divine, supreme being or a prime mover. One can be an atheist and be a Wiccan, for example. The semantic arguments in the atheist community can get extremely tiresome, but I think it’s worth correcting some of those misconceptions.
To echo Bart (aka Dr. Ehrman), Sure! A number of authors, like Philip José Farmer, Robert Heinlein, H. Beam Piper et al have touched on that. Kinda depends on what your model of reality is, and the fact that those authors dealt in science fiction isn’t irrelevant.
Actually, the science fiction mavens didn’t write about new or different worlds because they thought they didn’t or couldn’t exist. They believed these things might have happened or could happen or might exist. If they didn’t conceive of some alternate reality, they wouldn’t have been able to write in such compelling fashion. And of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Hal look more and more scary.
As well as Frank Tipler. See my comment down below (not in hell, I hope).
Buddhism, at its core, is essentially an atheistic philosophy that believes in an afterlife.
I consider myself a “non-theist,” and I believe in reincarnation. “Believe in it,” not in the sense of believers in a religion, but because I’ve been convinced by the evidence that it really takes place. And I think that *before* one reincarnates, the part of us that survives death (I think of it as a Mind-stream) may experience things we’ve expected, such as reunions with loved ones, which may or may not have some basis in reality.
I’m curious about the evidence that convinced you of reincarnation. My email is aek03030731 at Gmail etc. if you don’t mind sending me some readings.
I would like to see how you came to your conclusions as well.
Belief in Heaven, Hell and the eternal afterlife will always find adherents because everyone is driven by fear and greed. The most primeval fear that characterizes our species is fear of non-existence. Hence, the prevalence of denial of death and of the faith that there is an afterlife. And our inherent greed leads to another article of faith, namely belief in an everlasting afterlife of pleasure for the righteous and punishment for the sinner. Organized religion uses these two hooks to exercise control over the believers. The ancient Greek philosophers are correct. Living the virtuous life means bringing your innate fear and greed under control.
Getting a little off topic maybe, but, “nothing before the big bang” is a hard notion for me. I mean, something banged, in a big way. How did it come into existence? If it was just sitting there in “pre-time”, then one could also imagine an eternal epoch of “post-time”, I suppose.
Maybe a lot of those “believers” in this poll just panicked when they got the question, couldn’t really think through the other possibilities on short notice, and didn’t want to deal with the overwhelming nature of the topic, so they just agreed to the safest, most comfortable answer. I’d guess plenty of them would be open to other notions if they thought about the matter.
Theoretical physicists have a number of models that posit possible answers to the question, and while, for some models, time begins at the Big Bang, for others, there is either a finite or infinite time before the Big Bang. In some models, time for our universe begins at the Big Bang, but time for other universes may measure from other singularities.
This is one of those scientific areas that will probably keep us busy for centuries to come, but it’s an area of active research nonetheless.
Last I heard, the Hadron Collider, which was supposed to get us a little further along in understanding these things, hasn’t actually illuminated much. And if it doesn’t help us, it’s not clear where physicists go from here. But I may have that wrong.
We are all ignorant on the subject of existence.
Yes, even Stephen Hawking.
He may know it all now, for all we know.
Since God was a mathematician he knew about subspaces. It is my belief that heaven and hell exist in a higher dimension space. So our universe is a subspace of this. So heaven is not up there, but everywhere we are but in a higher dimendion.
Multiverse!
Two philosophical/theological models of hell I can relate to, though they are contradictory in a literal sense, are Sartre’s No Exit (“Hell is other people,”) and Lewis’s The Great Divorce (Hell is our choice to exist in isolation from other beings, ultimately even God). Interestingly, the two hells are obverse sides of one coin.
“If we impose our own views on [the traditional Christian “authorities”], why do we need them at all? Why not simply develop our own views, since that’s what we’re doing anyway?”
Great questions, Bart!
My own experience leads me to suppose that appeal to (imposed upon!) authorities is necessary not for determining what our views are (or should be). Rather, the appeal is necessary in order to build community. People care about the traditional Christian “authorities”. That common investment in the sacred is what binds the Christian community together, it appears to me.
Thanks, Bart! 🙂
Hey, according to some theorists, the reality we see around us doesn’t exist, at least not in the way we perceive it to.
I’d stay away from that area of speculation, if I were you. Concentate on what people said they believed then.
As to what people believe now–hmmm. I don’t see a whole lot of people behaving as if they believe in hell. Hell is for other people, the way most conceive of it.
Also, I see purported atheists constantly imagining people they don’t like in hell, which is damned confusing. And Tony Kushner’s play about an angel is back on Broadway.
None of this stuff is going anywhere, and everybody better get used to it. We can’t live in a fully objective mindset, and we don’t want to. We need our pipe dreams. (Eugene O’Neill’s play about a salesman and some barflies is also back on Broadway. Saw that one. It ends with a devout unbeliever saying “God rest his soul.” And crossing himself reverently.)
The problem isn’t whether there’s an afterlife or not. The problem is what we do with this one. I see zero evidence to convince me those without religious beliefs are doing any better with this problem, and some to convince me they can be even worse.
Indeed! Up or down depends on where you happen to be, but if you happen to be on the ISS, there is literally *no* up or down!
The idea that we go off to heaven (if we’ve been good or at least penitent) to spend eternity (!!) in heaven raises so many questions that believers seem to have no answers for. For example, if you die when you’re five months old, do you spend eternity as an infant? Do you continue to age in heaven, or do you remain at the age of your death forever? Do you get a new body (as Paul surmised), and if so, are you still “you” in a different body? Is there a force of gravity to keep us upright, or do we spend eternity in a zero-g state? Is there food, music, sports activities, etc. – just what do we do there? Just being in the presence of God for all eternity undoubtedly gets tedious after a
while.
Or, if as seems certain, heaven is not a physical location, then we take a spiritual form – so how are we going to recognize our dead relatives and friends?
I could go on, but you get the point: eternal life in heaven is “a consummation devoutly to be wished”, but it does not bear up under rational thought.
Dr. Ehrman, do you know of any texts that attempt to provide answers to questions such as these?
P. S. Congratulations on winning a Guggenheim!
These are questions that believers in the resurrection have asked for a long time. (Well not about zero-g state, but about infants, and aborted fetuses, and people eaten by cannibals, and so on.) Discussions in authors from Athenagoras to Augustine in the ancient world, e.g…
However, as you know, these were questions batted around by the intelligentsia, mainly. People who were going to be debating some insoluble question to death, whether they were believers or not. Habit of mind.
Thanks for your response. One of the questions is whether your soul, a spiritual object, goes to heaven for
eternity – in which case it doesn’t matter if there is gravity there or whether you were eaten by cannibals – or does it get reunited with a physical body, which raises a whole lot of different questions.
As for the soul leaving the dead body and taking with it everything that is “you” – your memories,your thoughts,
personality, etc. – this leads us into the “mind -body” argument, which seems to have clearly been settled by modern-day neurological science: the mind does not exist independently of the brain – and a soul divorced from a mind doesn’t have much to work with. I refuse to go to heaven without my brain!
Anyway, I believe the whole mind-soul-brain problem needs to be re-defined in terms of modern science. Let’s not leave this to the theologians!
Meanwhile, googling all the online articles on “what is heaven like” was quite enlightening. Nobody seems to have
a clue!
P.S. I love your book! I will be teaching a course on the subject at our local adult education program in the Fall.It will be required reading.
If unembodied consciousness is a thing, then maybe there is enough matter in the non sentient universe to create new bodies for all souls, including those whose mortal bodies were eaten by cannibals. Let’s hope life is rare in the universe.
It’s almost as if the idea of an afterlife was put forth before anyone had a chance to examine its logic.
That’s to be expected. All rational arguments are generated to support what we already want to believe.The one thing logic can’t address is the efficacy of logic.
Bart,
Great post. One question, though. How is someone reinterpreting what has been written in the bible or what Christian authorities have said regarding heaven and hell different than saying you think the apostles “thought” they saw Jesus after the resurrection?
Unless I am mistaken, the Gospels stated that they actually saw and experienced Jesus, not that they “thought” they saw him.
I am not arguing that they actually did or that the resurrection took place. But if it is valid to reevaluate what was written about seeing the resurrected Jesus, it seems to be to be valid to also reevaluate exactly what is meant by heaven and hell, at least in terms of time and space.
For instance, rather than frame eternity in terms of what we experience as time of an indefinite duration in this universe (which, as you say, will end), we could postulate an existence beyond this finite span – a true form of eternity without our idea of time. After all, ex nihilo nihil fit. There had to be something before the Big Bang, or else we’d still have nothing.
I’m not hanging my hat on that as I am not that deep of a thinker, and I don’t believe in myths or legends either. At the same time, it shows a way to think of an existence beyond ours, and outside of time. St. Augustine, if I am correct, first stated that the universe was created with time, not in time, beating Stephen Hawking by a wide margin!
Thanks for the post and taking the time to respond considering your busy schedule!
Yes, it’s analogous — when people automatically interpret a text in light of their own understanding of the world, without realizing that’s what they’re doing (changing what the text meant from what the author meant it to mean) it’s like interpreting a vision as a real optic event as opposed to a mental one.
Ex nihilo, nihilo fit is based on observation. We have never seen something come from nothing; even magicians can only trick us into thinking they have produced something from nothing. But David Hume argued, convincingly I think, that no amount of observation in the past can guarantee that things will operate in the same way in the future. Every time I have seen one billiard ball strike another unanchored billiard ball, some or all of the energy of motion seems to be transferred from the first to the second. But that doesn’t prove it will be so the next time.
Dr. Ehrman, the way I think about it is: why should I take seriously the view of the afterlife from men who thought that the earth was the center of the universe?
If they can’t, at the very least, get that part right, when why shouldn’t I dismiss everything else they have to say?
Yup, I hear ya!
Because if we set the bar at perfection, we may as well pass on doubt and go straight to denying everything that’s ever been taught, spoken, or written by anyone and everyone.
If you’re not setting the bar at perfection, then you’re not doing it right. The ancients did, indeed, set the bar at perfection. But their problem wasn’t setting the bar at perfection. Their problem was not reaching the bar.
But the reason Earth isn’t the center of the universe is that the universe has no center, the physical cosmologists say. So if they could have seen the whole universe, it would still have seemed they were at the center.
So, after some decades of living on earth, the reward at death will be either eternal bliss or torment. To an outsider this may seem peculiar, but it is accepted as truth by the majority of Americans. I expect that the vast majority of these Americans fully expect to go to heaven, with hell reserved for “others”. As per the last sentence of this post, this afterlife notion is usually implanted at a very early age, and is most often not an informed adult made decision. Once the religious meme has been implanted at childhood it is difficult to remove.
Atheism has not much attractive to offer believers. The atheist answer as to the reason why we live, procreate and die, is evolution by natural selection. That’s it – and it does not provide a lot a solace at eulogies. On the other hand, an atheist, knowing full well that maybe 80 plus year is all there is, can focus on enjoying the here and now to the fullest, without fear or uncertainty about afterlife expectations.
I think you’re dead wrong. As an atheist my reason for living is family, not evolution. The meaning and purpose of life is and always has been family. Everything else in life is transitory and ultimately meaningless; but family endures.
Good for you. Family will give you purpose and meaning to your life. The big picture as to why there is enduring life on this planet, including human, is evolution by natural selection. Without it we would not be here.
I don’t find heaven appealing at the expense of people i know rotting in hell. Rather there be nothing….and iv been raised a conservative christian my entire life
Yes, torment! Insanity would suely ensue after, oh I don’t know, say a million years? Maybe a couple of hundred? I get bored sometimes over a long weekend, hah! Enternity (whatever that means)? Please, God, no. Have mercy. 🙂
My dad told me once that no one believes in hell. If they did, they wouldn’t behave as they do. He was awfully smart for a guy with no degree!
“Another option is not to base our understandings about what happens to us when we die on antiquated myths, legends, and uninformed worldviews, but to think anew for ourselves, given what we know now.” I hope you save some space in your book for that option.
But this empirical argument against there being heaven doesn’t seem strong to me. As in, you can’t prove a negative. Space is endless, or anyway insanely big. Most of it will never be seen or visited by anybody. So we have no way to know what might be out there. Could be the absolute cliche version of heaven out there. I don’t see how it can be empirically disproven.
If you can’t prove a negative, how do you prove you can’t prove a negative?
Reminds me of a song lyric, don’t remember who sang it that says “I know there ain’t no heaven but I pray there ain’t no hell”. Also, what is time anyway? Is it something invented by man? We base our time and relate it to our 24 hour day based on the earth’s rotation around the sun etc. Time would have a very different meaning to a life form on a different planet that had a different orbit and rotational spin. a day would be other than 24 hours, thus minutes and seconds and even lightyears would be measured differently. Just a thought.
Blood Sweat and Tears, for one.
Bart,
Have you been able to trace the point in time when thoughts of heaven and hell as locations moved from being physical locations (under the earth/above the sky) to being more spiritualized locations (other realm/dimension?)?
If so, could/would you please elaborate a little here on that???
I’m sure it’s a modern development, but I don’t know when and where the idea started.
I was listening to Cynthia Chapman’s course on the World of Biblical Israel, in the Great Courses series. She makes the point that the Babylonian Exile forced the Jews to think differently about place and moved them toward a notion of an afterlife. See in particular her lecture 16 on Ezekiel.
I haven’t heard her lectures, but I don’t think Ezekiel refers to a personal afterlife (certainly the Valley of the Dry Bones is not about that)
“It’s very difficult to turn away from views that have been deeply rooted in us….”
When I first started discussing religion and political issues, decades ago, I had the rather naïve idea that one could exchange ideas with others, modify one’s views as one learns stuff from others, and pile up evidence and reason for one view or another. What I slowly and painfully learned, over and over again, is that this not even close to the way the real world works. Large groups of people will not be persuaded about much of anything even when the evidence is overwhelming. Today, what bothers me most is not the conclusions people draw, but the fact that evidence and reason seem totally not to matter and, often, people seem to have no interest in evidence and reason. Where oh where has the power of reason gone? There may be some reason left in the academic world, but not in the real political and religious world where I actually live. I can pile up a huge amount of evidence about something and will persuade absolutely no one about anything.
Anyway, I found both your blog and the Guardian article to be very helpful and thought provoking. Thanks.
Fascinating post. I agree with your perspective. I’ve always thought if you’re coming up with a theory about life after death why not make up something wonderful for everyone?
But with regard to the time. I have read that as you fall toward the event horizon of a black hole, time (at least for the observer) would essentially stop. Which would mean from an observers perspective they could be trapped in that state eternally. That could be pretty hellish.
The problem I see with a lot of theoretical physics is it can’t really be tested. Are we in a multiverse? Maybe. But how would you ever test it and prove it? Was there time before the big bang? Maybe not. But how can you test it and prove it? Or is the universe cyclical? does it expand, and then retract, and explode again eternally? Maybe it does. But it’s hard to prove.
Maybe Elon Musk is right and we all live in a giant simulation. Maybe so, but it’d be impossible to prove that too.
So no matter what perspective we adopt aren’t we still just relying on faith to understand our place in the universe?
But if time stops, so does perception, and as all thought is based in the memory of perception past, there would be no awareness at the event horizon. What would souls in Hades give for such mindlessness?
Maybe the universe endlessly cycles through a big bang then expansion then contracting down to almost nothing only to big bang again, over and over. Maybe in that sense time doesn’t end. I have no idea, just a wild hypothesis.
I have always puzzled over how the Israelites could have resisted developing elaborate notions of the afterlife, in sharp contrast to the very elaborate beliefs of Ancient Near-East cultures e.g. Egyptian beliefs of the underworld. Do you think the Israelites deliberately resisted developing system of beliefs about afterlife for political reasons and to distinguish themselves from the neighbouring cultures?
Apart from Egyptians, I don’t think there were beliefs about afterlife that were markedly different from what was found among the Israelites, were there?
It might be significant that ancient Israel was basically the Belgium of the Middle East for over 2,000 years.
What I mean by that is, the same way that Belgium was the battleground between the mighty French and German nations for over a century — and thus Belgium has for centuries been a mix of French and Germanic cultures — ancient Israel was the battleground between the mighty Egyptian and Mesopotamian empires. And for that reason, ancient Israelite culture was an odd mixture of both cultures, where they would, for example, avoid eating pork and circumcise their boys (like the Egyptians), but at the same time speak a Semitic language, wear Semitic clothing and worship Semitic gods (like the Mesopotamians).
It also appears that the admixture of Egyptian and Mesopotamian elements would vary with the degree of hegemony from either empire. For instance, when Egypt had hegemony over Canaan/Israel/Palestine, the Israelites acted more Egyptian. But when the Assyrians had hegemony over it, they acted more Mesopotamian.
I think this might be a clue to the ancient Israelite beliefs about the afterlife.
I see a couple of other drivers for why people want to believe. One is a sense of justice: people don’t want to believe that really bad people are going to get away with it or the really downtrodden won’t get some reward. “It just isn’t FAIR” so heaven and hell offer a fairness. I also get hit in discussions a lot with “purpose of life…”. Some people have to believe that there is a purpose to everything. When asked “what is the purpose….” and I say “What is your proof there IS a purpose at all” they either go blank or grab a Bible for a circular proof (at least in the Bible belt).
Trying to imagine cosmic fairness seems a bit like trying to get even for every wrong and slight: it’s always too much or too little. Baby Bear never gets to say her line.
Moreover, the universe will one day end. And this means that, at least in our cosmic environment, there is no time for eternity.
Not sure what you mean by this. The universe may expand until it becomes a de Sitter vacuum. Is that the same as ‘ending’? Why?
There is quite a diversity of thought on the past and future history of the universe, and it is not necessarily bounded in either direction. In fact, I think most cosmologists would disagree with that proposition.
Well, light doesn’t experience time and distance (place).
So, lets say that our consciousness would be massless and that it would travel in the speed of light in the afterlife, then in theory, it could experience eternity. We do not need another dimensions for that.
https://phys.org/news/2014-05-does-light-experience-time.html
Another funny things is that if we accept that everything is energy (E= mc2) and that time started from the Big Bang, then Jesus really was one with God at the beginning and he pre-existed (as energy) in the creation as did all of us just like the occultist would say. So, maybe the beforelife exists as well.
I think the transition between Heaven being God’s realm and being the place of the afterlife equally interesting. In Second Temple Judaism some seemed to think that the righteous one’s soul goes up to God upon death, then goes back down to Earth on Judgement Day into the resurrected body.
It’s funny how this idea of a near-future judgement on Earth (plus temporary residences for souls) gets twisted into instant personal judgement upon death with no connection to judgement on Earth. Any views on why that happened?
Yup, I hope to be exploring that in my book, possibly on the blog.
As the foregoing discussion has made clear, “reality” is a slippery and amorphous topic, especially in today’s multimedia environment with news and opinion programs made-to-order to reinforce whatever you already believe. However, I think most people believe there still *is* an ultimate and actual truth out there, whether that truth resides in some sort of ethereal platonic realm, or merely exists as sets of undeniable cause and effect relations in the world.
Regarding your ideas on time and space… well, let’s just say that even these concepts are being questioned by scientists and philosophers these days. Our universe definitely is the result of a Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago, but whether that event can actually be seen to be the classic creation ex nihilo is among the most hotly debated topics in cosmology today. Space is definitely elastic – it bends with gravity and expands at an ever-increasing pace, but whether the universe “ends” at a big crunch, a big rip, or expands forever until even the protons at the heart of atoms eventually decay, no one knows.
Time is another great mystery – ever since Einstein, we have known that there is no such thing as a privileged frame of reference, and no such thing as a universal “present moment”, or “now”. St. Augustine is supposed to have said “don’t ask me what time is, and I know…ask me, and I cannot tell you”. Black holes are our best clue in studying the extremes of time and space (how a hypothetical person passing over the event horizon can be both alive and dead at the “same time”, for example).
So, if even time and space are being questioned as fundamental entities among the sharpest minds in the business these days, we would do well not to use them as bedrock assumptions and jumping off points to further speculation. We also should guard against the danger of being overly smug in how our current understanding of the universe far surpasses that of our ancient forebears. Whether you believe the universe to be resting on a ‘tower of turtles’, or put your faith in an eternal inflating universe, I can’t help but think our most cutting-edge ideas in cosmology today perhaps are closer to the turtles idea than we would like to think. Whatever the fundamental ‘reality’ turns out to be, it likely lies beyond our wildest imaginings.
The University of Kentucky conducted a study last year called “How many atheists are there?” They found that the Pew and Gallup polls may have underestimated the percentage of atheists within the U.S. They estimated that 26% of Americans are atheists.
https://uknow.uky.edu/research/us-may-have-more-atheists-previously-assumed
You’ve always referred to yourself as an agnostic over the years that I’ve followed your work. I see that you used the word “atheist” in this article. I’d love to hear if something sparked the change.
I’m both — I’ve posted on that a couple of times, but if you want I can find the old posts.
*If* I believed in Heaven and Hell (which I don’t), I’d simply say they exist in another dimension, or possibly *two* other dimensions.
Back in reality, it’s by no means certain that nothing existed before our Big Bang! Some scientists speculate that the Big Bang resulted from the eruption of a supermassive black hole in an older universe. And *if* that’s the case, Big Bangs may be taking place all the time, in a vastly greater Cosmos.
That, by the way, is an argument against the claim that our Big Bang’s having produced a viable universe proves “intelligent design.” If Big Bangs are taking place *somewhere*, perhaps at every moment, some of them will necessarily produce viable universes. Certainly, there’s no proof of that; but there’s also no way to prove it *isn’t* happening.
Interesting codicil to that line of thought (that I’ve encountered) is the possibility that as new universes are formed, its “universal constants” (G, c, n, etc) might be different; that viability as you say may depend upon stable values for such things (not necessarily our universe’s seeming stable set of values).
So possible viable universe might not have scattered matte rover space, for example, but be something else completely.
We (our universe) may indeed be one “miniscule” “bubble” in an ocean of other bubbles, or other possible universes. This would seemingly explain the otherwise inexplicable reason why our universe is balanced on a razor’s edge of fundamental constants that are “just right” for life to emerge and evolve. Otherwise called the Anthropic Principle, our specialness is de facto “explained” by the fact that there are an infinity of other universes, the overwhelming majority of which are not conducive to life. One problem with this notion is that, once formed, these universes theoretically lead “separate lives” – they are fundamentally and forever sealed off from each other, and if they do indeed have wildly varying fundamental constants, or no constants at all, why the laws of quantum mechanics and probability should lie at the root of and govern this multiverse is the million-dollar question which demands an explanation. Anything else is simply to accept the multiverse, and ergo our universe, as brute facts – an anathema to science.
W.L. Craig is so full of mud on so many things, I don’t know if he is ever to be taken seriously, but he claims it’s been proven that a multiverse, if it exists, cannot have existed for infinity. I’d like to read a “William Laine Craig for Dummies Who Can’t Decide if He’s All That Smart.” Did I cross the line there?
The philosophical problems we run into trying to explain how a universe could be born out of absolutely nothing (no time, space, or anything else) are far greater than postulating a universe born out of an eternal cycle of “creation” and “destruction”. Whether the mechanism involved is a “white hole”, as you speculate, a collision of higher dimensional “branes”, or an eternally inflating multiverse giving rise to baby “soap bubble” universes all the time, is the ultimate Nobel-prize-winning question. I think most physicists and cosmologists favor there being *some* mechanism giving rise to our universe, however outrageous. To simply invoke, as Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and others have, a universe “popping” into existence via a quantum fluctuation, makes sense only if the quantum “laws” are a priori assumed to somehow exist. I firmly believe that nothing can come from nothing, and even more, that the idea of absolute nothingness is a philosophical and logical non-sequitur and non-starter.
Hey Bart, did Jesus believe in a supernatural hell, the kind that if you dont repent of your sins and turn to him you will burn forever? (Like conservatives believe today)….Or is this a theology developed later?
I think it’s a later development.
What do you think Jesus’s views would of been on the afterlife?
The righteous would be resurrected; the unrighteous destroyed.
My favorite treatise on death is the ending of Bicentenial Man. Andrew the 200 year old robot man has died/stopped. His wife and love on life support commands the robot Galatea to unplug her. As a robot, Galatea must follow orders unless they would harm or allow a human to be harmed. Galatea pauses, then serenely complies…..
The best modern take on Pinnochio I know. Andrew is the puppet who aspires to and attains real boyhood, by accepting mortality as the cost of freedom. Galatea never imagines herself as anything other than what she is, yet is upgraded into the perfect image of a real human, until personal agency is called for. But your insight on the implications of death for humans being necessarily harmless, from the perspective of the machine, had evaded me. Thank you.
What if we take science as the starting point. Matter and/or energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed. We certainly know where the matter of our body goes. But what of the mind, this energy can be measured while the body is alive. Is this energy move on? Does it change? Why would so many people in so many cultures believe in an afterlife? The experiences of Dr. Eban Alexander , “Proof of Heaven”, only give more questions. The way quantum particles interact defies what we think we know about the world. The real truth is that Death is the great mystery everyone of us must enter. If there is nothing, then there is nothing to speculate on. If there is something, it would be beyond our frame of reference. When I love someone, is it an energy I send out or is it just a chemical reaction in my brain? To admit we don’t know the answer, of what we term “afterlife”, to be real or not is the only real answer until we have proof. If we see a cocoon and the caterpillar that entered but did not see the butterfly emerge, is our evidence of the empty cocoon the true knowledge of no afterlife (after caterpillar)? We only know of the butterfly when we have the experience of seeing this happen.
Science itself is in a constant state of change. With so many questions unanswered, and our answers themselves changing as new information becomes available, we really should not be looking to science for the answers to all our questions. It’s going to be hopelessly inadequate at addressing most of them. Science is a process by which we increase our knowledge and understanding of the physical world. Nothing more. If we try to make it more, we’ll corrupt it. Just as when we try to make religion and philosophy means of determining which facts are really facts, we corrupt them.
I especially appreciate your last paragraph, i.e. most people are reluctant to think seriously. So…
Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there.
Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn’t there and saying, “I found it.”
Science is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat using a flashlight!
But the cat or the room must not really be black, or all the light from the flashlight would be absorbed.
Just a thought, re arguments that we can’t prove or disprove things like the existence of a deity or an afterlife…
All anyone can be *totally* sure of is good old “Cogito ergo sum” – in colloquial English, ”I’m thinking; therefore, I exist.” (One may, in theory, only be imagining that s/he once *learned* that from someone else.)
So *everything* beyond our own existence is a question of probabilities. When I want to say I “know” something with the greatest possible degree of certainty, I say i know it as certainly as I know Australia exists – Australia being a random choice of a place I’ve never seen, even from the air.
What if there is no I that thinks: only thinking? The Cogito is an insight, not a proof.
Idea for a science fiction story: while delving deep in the earth, humanity runs across an actual sheol/hades.
Crisis occurs when the first human dies outside of earth’s gravity well.
Hello. Dr. Ehrman. I look forward to the publication of this new book. Hopefully though it will not have too much of your understanding of astronomy in it :-).
The current universe will not end. The expansion is accelerating. It will likely then only ‘end’ in the sense of heat death but will still exist. Also, while you are right that time as we experience it now started in the BB it is not nonsense to talk about ‘what came before’ as much of the current research in cosmology is on precisely that. In particular, many distinguished researchers are trying to remove the idea of creation out of nothing (now THAT is nonsense) by constructing some sort of cyclic scenario; the universe always existed in some form, maybe.
By the way if you ever figure out exactly what time is, please let me know and we will write it up – and win the Nobel.
Finally I just wanted to say, as someone who has traveled a path in reverse of yours (atheism to the firm conviction of some sort of creative intelligence behind our universe), atheism in the strict sense is not rational. Such certainty is not scientific. Agnosticism, yes, atheism, no.
Peace
Agree with what you have to say, for the most part. All the current evidence seems to be pointing to our universe accelerating to an eventual heat ‘death’, but as you say, the quantum vacuum will presumably still exist, and that is, also as you say, not nothing. However, although all the evidence so far seems to point to an eventual heat death, I don’t think we can yet say with certainty that this definitely is what the universe will evolve to.
I agree that it makes no sense to talk about a beginning to time – whatever reality lies at the bottom of everything, just by force of logic, must be eternal. Finally, I agree that the common understanding of atheism, as the belief that there is no God, is illogical. The most that any thinking person can claim is that they are agnostic on the matter.
The mathematics all seems to point to a multiverse, so this may indeed be the case. It would certainly ‘explain’ the otherwise inexplicable ‘goldilocks’ universe we inhabit without the need to invoke a creator, but as I said in a previous post, even in this scenario one must still assume that the quantum and statistical laws govern the entire ‘structure’. Only in this way could universes like ours that are ‘just right’ for life necessarily emerge just by dint of the probabilities involved, and only in this way can we avoid the necessity of invoking a creator.
Hello. My only comment to what you say is in your last paragraph. And that is, what mathematics may point to is of course not the same, as I am sure you will agree, as to what is reality. String theory, for example, involves a lot of powerful, novel, (and the mathematician in me must say beautiful) mathematics, however it may very well be describing a physical structure that does not at all correspond to the universe in which we live. And much of it, as with the notion of multiverses, seems to be untestable which would place it outside of science and consign it to little more than fantasy. If I were to go out on a limb here, I would bet that such questions on ultimate causes may forever be beyond our ability to answer. Fun to think about though, no doubt :-).
Peace
Why would it be a heat death? The more it expands, the fewer collisions will occur between particles, causing the temperature of everything to approach absolute zero, no? See this lecture by Lawrence Krause. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XLJ04fZpec0
https://www.britannica.com/science/heat-death-physics
Actually, the current thinking is that the universe will never cease to be. Here is a lecture by Lawrence Krause on the future of it all: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XLJ04fZpec0.
Also, if it was not on your reading list, you might want to check out The Physics of Immortality by Frank J. Tipler, wherein he proposes that humans may succeed in creating an eternal mode of life for all real and potential sentient beings.It wouldn’t be afterlife, obviously, for those who had never existed.
This is the first thread of comments I’ve read from start to finish in a small eternity. Wild speculation is my meat and drink. Looking forward to the next book!
Perhaps our bodies in the after life are composed of dark matter and our souls become dark energy. Seems about as plausible as a real heaven and hell. Your new book is a great read Dr. Ehrman. Which type of book do you enjoy writing more? Scholarly or popular books?
I enjoy them both, but in very different ways. Writing the scholarly books is a far more intensely focused and prolonged experience.
Why do you think Americans are so literal/fundamentalist in their religious beliefs compared to most of Europe?
Those figures are worryingly high!
Also *Hawking 🙂
I’ve long thought about it and have never figured it out. Christianity in particular is dying in Europe, but not so much here (though the liberal denominations are losing members hand over fist….)
What do you say to those of us who have died and crossed over & had either a positive near-death experience (NDE) or negative NDE? I tried to commit suicide (age 22) and I was dragged down into Hell. Before Hell, I was floating in a black Void for what seemed like an eternity. Don’t repeat that lame ‘scientific speculation’ that flatliners are just experiencing ‘sparks in our dying brains’. As a biology professor, I used to have to teach that (as per the university. But, I KNOW that’s just NOT what happened to me.
My mother flatlined in her dining room in Oct. 1998 and had a NDE. Mom ‘rose upwards’ out of her body, went thru the tunnel, and entered into Heaven. She didn’t see any dead relatives, but she had a conversation with Jesus. As she pointed at the EMTs and they both peered down at her lifeless body, she asked, “Well Jesus, am I coming with You or am I going with them?” She said she was back in her body in an instant, in extreme pain.
So, what about those who’ve died and had NDEs? NDEs are much more common nowadays due to modern medical interventions.
I certainly can’t deny what you know you experienced. I can say that knowing what we know is a neurological function — it is never, ever unmediated. And the brain is extraordinarily complicated.
I read a ton of books and articles on NDEs when working on my book on Heaven and Hell, written by those who experienced them (all the classics and many recent ones, both on heaven and hell) and studied them from both sides of the reality-issue. To me the research is very clear that they involve neurological events. That does not mean they are not real. They are very real, as anyone who has one (or more) can attest. They are palpable and completely compelling, for everyone. So I don’t deny the reality of the experience. But I don’t think the reality of the experience demonstrates the historial reality of the event itself. It definitely happens in the brain, but that doesn’t mean it happens outside of it. There is no way for anyone of us to get *outside* our brain (i.e. our neurological functions) to observe what happened in correpondence to what is *inside* our brain. (Just like false memories seem every bit as real to us as true memories: there is no neurological difference and no way to tell the one from the other from the inside)