Death

Are there any arguments for life after death that are not religious?

Comments

Certainly, it was thought for a long time by a wide range of thinkers that life after death exists, even by thinkers without traditional religious views. The basic distinction on this issue is not religious vs. areligious, but materialists vs. the rest. Materialists who see us as essentially material beings can find little to be said in favour of the idea that once the matter disappears or disintegrates, something else survives.

The main argument for life after death by those who are not wedded in their philosophy to a particular religion is often a form of Aristotelianism as developed by the Neoplatonists, that the thinking part of us is aligned with the abstract and eternal, and so while our physical side is malleable, our intellect is capable of carrying on, albeit not in the sense that we as individuals carry on. It is here that the absence of a link with religion becomes significant, since whatever survives cannot really be punished or rewarded and so the traditional accounts of an afterlife fall down. Heaven for the dedicated philosopher is seen as the ability to continue thinking about philosophy, and in the afterlife not just now and then, but forever, since there are no lunch breaks. There is after all no body any longer to eat lunch. For the rest of us, though, this might seem more like hell!

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