The Notion of an Afterlife for Humans

By Raymond Fontaine, Ph.D. - May 2006

E-mail no. 37: Holding on to the Notion of an Afterlife

    Mr. Fontaine, I see from your preceding e-mail to Mary that you don't believe in any type of afterlife because there is no evidence of it in nature. 

   I feel there may be an afterlife even though there is no evidence of it right now. Could it be that there is but we haven't found a way to detect or understand it? Kind of like in the 1600's, x-rays existed but we didn't have the tools or knowledge to realize it?

   I like this quote from the American Deist Ethan Allen: "Ungrateful and foolish it must be for rational beings in the possession of existence and surrounded with a kind and almighty Providence, to distrust the author thereof concerning their futurity, because they cannot comprehend the mode and manner of their succeeding and progressive existence." 

   I am not at all worried about the afterlife? What do your think?

E-mail no.38: Letting Go of the Notion of the Afterlife

   Before answering your question, let me remind you where I'm coming from. During the first fifty years of my life from 1917 to 1967, I believed in the afterlife. My parents at home, the nuns in the elementary school, and the priests in church spoke about the afterlife. Heaven and hell were real places. The saints and the damned were truly alive: the first group were happy while the damned were miserable for all eternity.

   But I had no reason to doubt my teachers, all of them good and sincere people. Later in my teens, I learned that the Pope and his Church are infallible, so guaranteed by Jesus, the Son of God.

   Later, between 1962 and 1967, I served as a missionary in Uganda, Africa. There, I reviewed for myself the history of the Church. I first realized the error of the Church in condemning Galileo for teaching that the earth rotates around the sun. Galileo was right and the Church was wrong.

   So it was with many other doctrines of the Church, such as its wholesale condemnation of birth control devices. It became clear to me that the Church is not infallible. It could err and it did. I no longer trusted its teaching authority - especially about the afterlife.

   After living a lie for fifty years, I decided to accept as true only what the human senses observe and what the human mind can rationally deduce from the physical revelations of nature. One example of this process is that of the designs in nature that require a supremely intelligent Designer. One such design is that of DNA.

   I assume that the American Deist Ethan Allen was thinking of people like me when he wrote what you quoted in the e-mail above. He said that we don't trust the Creator of our existence to provide a future life because we cannot comprehend the mode and manner of our succeeding existence. For that, Ethan Allen calls us "ungrateful and foolish".

   Sorry, Ethan, but I am grateful for the existence he has given to me and to all my fellow creatures. Like everyone else, I have observed that organisms on earth eventually die. There is no evidence to the contrary,

   Like Ethan Allen, I do not limit the power of the Creator. I do not deny the possibility of an afterlife. But it seems foolhardy to assume that the Creator has made or will make human afterlife a reality. Hoping against hope for this to happen is not a way of life. Basing the possibility of an afterlife for humans on designs embedded in nature by a supremely intelligent Being would be a sounder way to go. But there are no such signs There never were and most probably will never be. 

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