That’s what this investigation is about. Is death the final reality? Is the grave the ultimate end of human hopes or is there, as billions have believed since the dawning of self-reflective consciousness in our earliest ancestors, a more glorious future yet ahead? Is there, in short, life after or beyond our final hour on earth?
A headline in a major newspaper a short time ago trumpeted: “Eternal life, here—scientists are making some amazing finds.” The story dealt with humanity’s age-old, universal dream of discovering the secret of immortality, or some magical talisman to stave off the hour of our death. While carefully documenting the latest research into the ageing process, however, in the end the account had very little to say about the headline. The best it could offer was the hope that future scientific progress in this field will increasingly ensure that people “die ‘young’ as late as possible.”
Not long after the newspaper article quoted above appeared, the same paper ran a story billed “Advocates of Cryonics Defy Death.”1 It told of the American Cryonic Society’s ventures in freezing recently dead bodies and brains as a logical step “toward immortality.” At the rather sparsely furnished Trans-Time warehouse in West Oakland, California, two human bodies, two heads, one brain and a dog and cat are “on ice” in cryonic suspension inside shiny, stainless-steel containers that resemble giant silver thermos bottles. They have been frozen, with instructions that they be thawed some time in the next couple of centuries and, with luck and presumed scientific advances, brought back to life. Altogether, about seventy members of this society have made similar arrangements to be frozen when they die. One of them, Art Quaife, has reportedly arranged for his freezing to be paid for through life insurance. “Fifty cents a day for immortality,” he was quoted as saying. “I like the deal.”
All of this gives further emphasis to the ancient truth that there is indeed nothing new under the sun. It’s just that today, at least in the West, we tend more and more to rely on technology in what was once the exclusive territory of God and religion. We now know that the graves of Neanderthal man, dating to some fifty thousand years ago, contained spherical stones and other ritual objects, including food and weapons, that strongly suggest they believed in a life after death. On October 21, 1987, newspapers everywhere carried the story of how American and Egyptian scientists, using space age technology, discovered a five-thousand-year-old pharaoh’s funeral boat at the Cheops pyramid near Cairo. The team, coordinated by the National Geographic Society, lowered cameras through a hole some four inches in diameter into a pit sealed by the Egyptians in or about 2600 BCE. They took a picture of this “solar boat” and found it to be similar to one found nearby in 1954. Under the ancient Egyptian custom of the solar cult, a cedar boat was left in the tomb to transport the soul of the dead king to the afterworld.2
In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, dating from about 1500 to 1400 BCE, the chief features of the myth of Osiris and his divine son, Horus, are elaborated. But the story existed orally for many centuries before it was written down—probably back to 2500 or 3000 BCE Osiris/Horus was the “king of eternity” and the Egyptian doctrine of eternal life was based upon the story of his resurrection in a transformed body after an unjust and cruel death. Since Osiris was the mythical way of speaking of the fate or destiny of every person, the way to eternal life was described in terms of identification with him, just as Christians speak of their identification with a crucified and resurrected Lord. Just as happened to Osiris and Horus (or to Jesus Christ, according to St. Paul) at death, the body of every individual germinates or is transformed into a spiritual, glorified body. The Egyptian Book of the Dead says that, when a person enters heaven, he becomes “God” or the “Son of God.” He or she receives a crown, feeds upon the Word of God as “bread,” is clothed in white raiment and eats of the tree of life.3In this book I am more interested in current phenomena and thought than I am with the distant past. But unless we can see the matter in its proper context, unless we sense the longevity and the universality of the question Is there life after death?, we are destined to go badly astray.
There is today a major paradox in the fact that, while more people than ever are concerned about dying and what may lie beyond, fewer and fewer are turning to traditional religion to find the answers they seek. Little of what traditional religions teach today about life after death—and my research suggests that many clergy avoid the topic completely—makes much sense to many people. To the increasing number of those outside the Church, Western teaching on life after death often seems childish, a boring prospect and the product of mere wishful thinking. Yet there has seldom been a time in history when more men and women held some form of belief in survival beyond the grave. Indeed, in many ways, the present spiritual searching in our culture is a rebuke to organized religion and suggests that its essential message has failed to communicate reasonable answers to life’s most basic and most urgent concerns.
Surely the most momentous personal question of our day—or indeed any other—is, having died, is that the end or do we somehow live again? Moreover, if the answer is in the affirmative, what kind of life can we expect? While, for obvious reasons, this is not an area where categorical finality of thought or utterance will ever be possible, nevertheless there is an extraordinary need for some clear thinking and analysis. This book is an attempt to provide that. What is the evidence, if any, for life after death? What are we to make of the contemporary surge of interest in near-death experiences? Is there any truth in the New Age insistence upon reincarnation, with all the tales of past lives that now appear so frequently in the popular press and other media? Have we really lived before and have we already died a thousand times? What is the teaching of Christianity and of other major world religions about life after death? Is there a flaming hell for sinners and a heaven above the stars for all the redeemed? Has modern science anything to say to all of this? After reviewing and sifting this material, what is left for an intelligent modern man or woman to believe? It is to these issues that we now must turn.
Before we do so, however, it is important that we make some initial, basic distinctions. Evidence for the belief in a life after death has to be sharply distinguished from evidence for life after death itself. Humans have always and nearly everywhere held some form of belief that life does not end with the grave or funeral pyre. Anthropology, sociology and the history of world religions all provide ample evidence of the extent to which our species has expressed its solid, near-universal faith that death is not the last word. But evidence of such a faith, however abundant or moving, is not the same thing as evidence for the reality of a life beyond.
This doesn’t mean we must simply discount faith or ignore it altogether. That would be highly unscientific to say the least. The fact that something is obviously very widely believed must itself be accounted for. The inherent conviction in the human psyche that there is some kind of eternal life or survival after death has to be explained. It may be a form of indirect evidence of the truth of what is believed. In other words, such an effect could testify to such a cause. But, in and by itself, it doesn’t necessarily do so. When I speak of evidence for life after death itself I have in mind material— whether historical documents or recent experiences—that bears directly upon the subject. Yet, it must be said, even this evidence, however solid and weighty, or even at times sensational, does not establish absolute certainty.
This brings us to the second important clarification. Evidence and proof are by no means one and the same thing. For example, I am fully convinced that there is considerable evidence to be taken into account when trying to answer the question Is there a God or not? But, because of the very nature of the inquiry, there can be no proof of God’s existence in the normal, scientific use of the word “proof.” This should not, however, discourage us or make us think that any discussion of what we call metaphysical (beyond the physical or material) concepts is a matter of “Your guess is as good as mine.” In science, as in courts of law, those areas where absolute empirical proof is possible are far more limited than many of us imagine. With regard to many important and far-reaching scientific theories or legal cases, the best one can do is to gather all the available evidence, weigh it judiciously and then make a decision based on a reasonable conclusion about where the evidence leads. I propose to follow the same principle here.
One final brief observation—a personal one. Most