## 1. Survival and its Alternatives



In ancient Western philosophy, Plato affirmed both a pre-natal life of
the soul and the soul's continued life after the death of the
body. In Plato's *Phaedo*, Socrates presents reasons why
a philosopher should even welcome death (albeit not permitting or
encouraging suicide), because of its emancipation of the souls of
those who are good in this life to a great afterlife. In the work of
Epictetus, on the other hand, death is conceived of as a
person's ceasing to be. Epictetus does not argue that we should
welcome death but he holds that we should not fear death because we
will not exist after death. The philosophical assessment of the truth
of such matters continues on to the present, as does debate on the
implications of whether we may survive death. Why?



There are many reasons why there should be ongoing attention as to
whether Plato or Epictetus--or any other philosopher who offers a
different account about the reality or illusion of an
afterlife--is right. One reason is that the values we have in the
here and now have a bearing on what we may or should hope for in terms
of the future. While some philosophers believe that what happens in
the future has enormous consequences for life's meaning now,
other philosophers have so focused on the importance of the present
that questions about the future of humanity in this life, and the
possible good or ill of an afterlife for individuals, is of little
importance. Consider two philosophers who take the latter position,
Peter Singer and Erik Wielenberg.



Singer asks us to consider a case when some good act is done and its
goodness does not depend upon the future. Imagine a village where
there is great need and that need is met with aid. Singer claims that
the goodness of such an act should not depend on the long term; one
can place to one side speculation about what might happen a thousand
years later.



> 
> 
> Suppose that we become involved in a project to help a small community
> in a developing country to become free of debt and self-sufficient in
> food. The project is an outstanding success, and the villagers are
> healthier, happier, better educated, and economically secure and have
> fewer children. Now someone might say "what good have you done?
> In a thousand years people will all be dead, and their children and
> grandchildren as well, and nothing that you have done will make any
> difference". (Singer 1993: 274) 
> 
> 
> 



Singer responds: 



> 
> 
> We should not, however, think of our efforts as wasted unless they
> endure forever, or even for a very long time. (1993: 274) 
> 
> 
> 



His solution is to think of the universe in four-dimensional terms;
according to this philosophy of time, all times are equally real. On
this view, it is always the case that in the year 2020, the lives of
the villagers are made better; they are happy, healthy, and well
educated in 2020. 



Erik Wielenberg does not adopt Singer's recourse to the
philosophy of time but, like Singer, his counsel is that we should not
think (or need not think) in terms of the big picture or the future in
assessing the meaning and urgency of our current projects



> 
> 
> Isn't it better that the Nazi Holocaust ended when it did rather
> than in, say, 1970--regardless of what the world will be like a
> million years from now? I can remember occasions in junior high gym
> class when a basketball or volleyball game became particularly heated
> and adolescent tempers flared. Our gym teacher sometimes attempted to
> calm us down with such rhetorical questions as, "Ten years from
> now, will any of you care who won this game?" It always struck
> me that a reasonable response to such a query would be, "Does it
> really matter now whether any of us will care in ten years?" In
> much the same vein, Thomas Nagel suggests, "it does not matter
> now that in a million years nothing we do now will matter".
> (2013: 345)
> 
> 
> 



A possible response is that while there is some wisdom in
Singer's and Wielenberg's positions, they should not
dissuade us from appreciating that the natural trajectory of the love
of people and wisdom (or philosophy) includes concern for "the
big picture". If Singer truly cares about the villagers,
shouldn't he hope that they survive to enjoy the fruits of the
investments that have been made? Or, putting this in four-dimensional
time terms; shouldn't he wish that they are happy in 2030 and
2040...? Surely those providing aid are not (and should not be)
indifferent about the future. Granted, if the investment was made and
then a meteor struck the village, destroying all life (or if in 2030
the meteor is destroying the village), we might well think the
investment was still wise, good and noble (especially if there were no
predictions of a meteor strike). However, there would be something
deeply disturbing if one of the aid-givers announced upon leaving the
village: 



> 
> 
> No matter what happens, no matter whether you all are struck by a
> massive plague in an hour and all die a horrible death or whether a
> thousand years from now your society will be condemned as deserving of
> nothing but contempt, what we have done today is our only concern and
> the value of our act is not diminished regardless of what awaits you!
> 
> 
> 
> 



We suggest that this attitude would be bizarre. Returning to the
question of the afterlife, if you think that some good afterlife is
possible, one should hope for the long-term flourishing of the
villagers in both this life and the next rather than focusing only on
the value of their present position. And if you do have such a hope,
why hope that the lives of everyone will come to an end at a specific
time, say in a thousand years? Similarly, if you believe that it is
likely or even possible that there is an afterlife where there is
great ongoing harm, should we not hope that this not be the case for
the villagers?



Wielenberg's comments on the Holocaust are puzzling. Of course,
no one except a murderous, psychopathic Nazi would hope the Holocaust
lasted longer or that it involved the death of even one more
individual. But what one hopes will take place a million years from
now is not irrelevant ethically or in terms of values. Consider two
futures: in one, the Jews survive a million years from now and are
thriving. In another, imagine that a million years from now there is a
revival of the Nazi party. The Jews have colonized Mars and Nazi
genocidal units are dispatched to treat Jewish settlements the way the
Nazis treated the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. This time, the Nazis succeed
in annihilating every last Jew. Surely, it would be deeply perverse to
hope for the second future. It would also be perverse to be
indifferent now about whether the second will occur. We cannot imagine
that a person of integrity would say they are utterly indifferent
about whether all Jews will be annihilated by Nazis in the future, be
it a million years, ten million, twenty, or....



Nagel's comment (cited by Wielenberg) is worthy of note. His
comment suggests that what we do now will (or may) not matter a
million years from now, but there is an important distinction between
whether some event matters (in the sense that it is valuable; it is
good that the event occurred) and whether persons who live in the
future are aware of the event and care about it. Arguably, it will
always be the case that the Holocaust should not have happened,
regardless of whether any human being remembers it a hundred (or a
thousand or a million) years from now. Moreover, those of us who are
horrified about this genocide should hope that remembering it and
passing on a record of it has no statute of limitation. In keeping
with our earlier thought experiment, imagine two futures: a million
years from now, persons recall the Holocaust and continue to lament
this mass genocide; in a different future imagine persons are all
Nazis and they only recall the Holocaust as a failure to succeed in
killing all Jews, something they were only able to achieve in the year
1,002,014.



So, one reason why the topic of an afterlife is of historical and
contemporary interest is because our values about present persons,
things, and events have a bearing on the future, including the
possibility of a future for individuals after their death. If we know
that it is impossible for individual persons to survive biological
death, speculation on an afterlife we might expect or hope for would
be pointless (unless it serves some purpose in terms of fiction), but
it would not be pointless to reflect on whether the impossibility of
an afterlife should dominate our values in this life. What are the
implications for our lives now if we take seriously the idea that at
death we will pass into oblivion? Some philosophers adopt a strategy
like Singer's and Wielenberg's about our individual lives.
In *Religion Without God* Ronald Dworkin is candid about
"what we desperately dread", namely "the total,
obliterating, itself unimaginable, snuffing out of everything"
(2013: 150). While he thinks some kind of individual afterlife may be
possible (even given atheistic naturalism) he does propose a
"kind of immortality" which is "the only kind we
have any business wanting" (Dworkin 2013: 159).



> 
> 
> When you do something smaller well--play a tune or a part or a
> hand, throw a curve or a compliment, make a chair or a sonnet or
> love--your satisfaction is complete in itself. Those are
> achievements within life. Why can't a life also be an
> achievement complete in itself, with its own value in the art in
> living it displays? (Dworkin 2013: 158)
> 
> 
> 



Who would deny that such acts can be great achievements? If
individual survival of death is impossible, then Dworkin is right to
cast aside (as he does) the comedian Woody Allen's aspiration to
live on forever, not in his work, but in his apartment. But do we know
that an individual afterlife is impossible? Later in this entry, we
suggest that ruling out an afterlife as impossible is philosophically
tenuous. Moreover, we suggest that the goods within the life that
Dworkin describes invite us to consider whether human lives may be
richer still if they do not end in oblivion and instead death marks a
transition to a form of afterlife that some of the world religions
envision. For an interesting secular case that many of our values in
the present moment are tied to expectations of the future, see
Scheffler 2016 (N.B. Scheffler is concerned with future events in this
life rather than an individual's life after their death.) For
more recent reflection on the relevance of an afterlife for the
meaning of life now, see Mawson 2019 and 2020.



So, we suggest that the topic of an afterlife is warranted for at
least three reasons: it is important if you love persons in this life
and hope for their enduring flourishing (or hope they are not
annihilated or meet a worse fate); it is important to think about the
implications of there not being an afterlife (or there being one) in
terms of how to understand what is important to you now; and it is
important to consider for historical reasons: speculation and beliefs
about life after death have existed through much of human history.



In most cultures, there is evidence of a belief in some sort of
personal afterlife, in which the same individual that lived and died
nevertheless persists and continues to have new experiences. There are
alternatives, however. The ancient Greeks are noted for having placed
a high premium on "survival" in the memory and honor of
the community--a practice reflected in our reference to deceased
celebrities as (for example) "the immortal Babe Ruth".
(Strictly speaking, this for the Greeks was not a replacement for a
personal afterlife, but rather a supplement to what was conceived as a
rather colorless and unrewarding existence in Hades.) Such a hope, it
would seem, provides a major consolation only if one is optimistic
concerning the persistence and continued memory of the community, as
well as the accuracy and justice of their judgments. An interesting
variant of this form of immorality is found in process theology, with
its promise of "objective immortality" in the mind of God,
who neither forgets nor misjudges the lives he remembers (Hartshorne
1962: 262). Hindu and Buddhist traditions include a belief in
reincarnation. Hindu philosophical tradition gives more credence to
the enduring of individuals through successive rebirths and deaths
than does Buddhist philosophical tradition see Knine 2010). In
Buddhist philosophy, the ongoing task is to produce a sufficient
consciousness of the self for there to be reincarnation, while
simultaneously securing the understanding that the individual self is
not (in the end) a substantial, concrete thing, but a delusion that
will dissolve or become liberated into Nirvana (see Nattier 2010).




Other entries in this encyclopedia address themes in Hindu and
Buddhist philosophy (see, e.g., the entry on
mind in Indian Buddhist philosophy),
so we will forego a comparative study here of
competing religious portraits of an afterlife. For two immensely
valuable resources for reflection on the afterlife from diverse
religious and philosophical perspectives, see *The Palgrave Handbook of
the Afterlife* (Nagasawa & Matheson eds. 2017) and *The
Oxford Handbook to the Eschaton* (Walls ed. 2010). A fascinating
synthesis of different religious portraits of an afterlife is
developed in Hick 1976. We also note, but do
not comment on, an important topic in Christian philosophical theology
concerning universalism, the belief that, eventually, all persons will
be saved (see Parry and Partridge 2003).

Our focus for much of the rest of this
entry is on the possibility and the reasonability of believing there
is an afterlife for individual persons, though we will offer some
observations along the way about the kinds of afterlife that are
possible, given different metaphysical assumptions. As for the
philosophers like Kierkegaard and Becker, cited earlier, who castigate
those of us who ignore our mortality, we suggest that sometimes the
contemplation of mortality can be disabling and distract us from
seeking immediate goods (such as those Dworkin highlights) or
relieving suffering. It would not be admirable for the aid workers in
Singer's example to pause in their work in order to hold
death-and-dying seminars. However, while there might be nothing wrong
in living without wrestling with mortality, there are sufficient good
reasons why the topics of the nature of death and the existence (or
non-existence) of an afterlife are philosophically interesting and
deserving of attention.



As we turn to the question of whether it is possible for persons to
survive death, it is natural to pursue an answer in light of the
philosophy of human persons. The next section considers survival from
the standpoint of mind-body dualism.


## 2. The Possibility of Survival--Dualism



At first, it seems obvious that dualism is a
"survival-friendly" perspective. If we are nothing more
than our bodies, it seems that if death destroys our bodies, we are
destroyed and there is nothing left of us as persons--though
parts of our bodies and the particles that make it up will be
scattered and perhaps (temporarily) come to be part of the bodies of
other living organisms. If, however, we are nonphysical (or
immaterial) minds or souls or persons who are embodied, then even the
complete annihilation of our physical bodies does not entail our
annihilation as persons. In fact, one of several arguments for dualism
is based on the conceivability of our existing without our bodies. If
dualism is true, however, it does not necessarily follow that persons
will survive the death of their bodies. It may be that the functional
dependence of ourselves on our bodies is so essential that we only
come into existence as embodied persons when our bodies reach a
certain formation and constitution and then we cease to be when that
formation and constitution is destroyed. But dualism at least opens
the door for claiming that our dependence on our bodies is contingent
(not necessary) or is essential only given the present laws of nature
(laws that may be violated by God). Dualist accounts of survival have
been seriously questioned, however. 



Some philosophers argue that dualist accounts of survival fail because
we have no "criteria of identity" for disembodied persons.
When we make judgments about the identity of persons we are not making
judgments about the identity of souls. It has been argued that we
cannot make judgments about the identity of souls, because souls are
said to be imperceptible and non-spatial. And because of this, the
identity of a person over time cannot consist of the identity of the
person's soul over time. What we are able to identify--and
re-identify--is a person's body. But once the person has
died that body decomposes in a grave, and can't be the basis for
our identification of the person who is supposed to have survived
disembodied (Perry 1978: 6-18).



Hasker claims that this objection is confused, conflating two quite
distinct questions (Hasker 1989:208-09). One is a metaphysical
question: *What does it mean* to say of a person at one time
that she is numerically the same person at a later time? (Or, if you
like, it is a metaphysical question to ask: Is *x* at
*t*1 the same ph as *y* at
*t*2?) The second is an epistemological question:
*How can we tell* that a person at one time is numerically the
same person at a later time? (Or how can we tell that *x* at
*t*1 is the same ph as *y* at
*t*2?) The failure to distinguish these questions (a
failure which may be due in part to Wittgenstein) is the source of
serious philosophical confusions. The short answer to the first
question is that normally, when we know what a ph is, we know also
what it is for a ph at *t*1 to be the same
individual ph as a ph at *t*2. The abnormal
cases are those in which the ph at *t*1 has
undergone changes, and we are unsure whether those changes amount to
the destruction of the ph, or its replacement by another object, so
that the very same ph cannot possibly have persisted until
*t*2. The classic example is the ship of
 Theseus,[1]
 but there are many others. In such cases, our first recourse is to
seek to understand more accurately the concept of a ph--does
our concept of a ship, for example, allow for the progressive
replacement of *all* of the ship's parts, or not? But
sometimes there may be no determinate answer to this question. Our
concepts, after all, have been developed to deal with the sorts of
contingencies that normally arise, and it may sometimes be possible to
invent scenarios (or even to discover them empirically) that are not
provided for in our ordinary usage of a concept. In that case, we must
either provide for ourselves criteria to cover the novel situation
(thus modifying our previous concept of a ph), or else admit that
the question we were asking has no answer.



When we pose this question with regard to the persistence of
immaterial souls, what we find is that there is no problem that needs
a solution. We know what it is to be a subject of experience--to
be a being that thinks, and believes, and desires various things, for
example--and *prima facie* at least this does not entail
being embodied, let alone being embodied in the very same body over
time. If we think of the immaterial soul in Cartesian terms, there
simply isn't anything that can happen to such a soul (barring
its being no longer sustained in existence by God) that could bring it
about that the soul ceases to be; Cartesian souls are "naturally
immortal". Some other dualist views may not opt for natural
immortality of the soul, and if so they will need to say something
about the sorts of changes that a soul can and cannot sustain if it is
to remain in existence as the individual it was. But there is no
problem here for the general hypothesis of survival as an immaterial
soul (Hasker 1999: 206-11).



The metaphysical question having been disposed of, it becomes apparent
that the epistemological question is less significant than it may
appear to be at first. How do we re-identify immaterial souls over
time? Under normal circumstances, we do this by re-identifying the
embodiment of the soul, but this is not always possible: prior at
least to the advent of DNA testing, cases of disputed identity could
not always be settled by re-identifying bodies. Sometimes the
subject's memory of events is an important clue, though not of
course an infallible one. But can any tests establish the identity of
a completely non-embodied subject? Evidently, the question of the
identity of a non-embodied subject makes sense to some: those who
consult spiritualist mediums certainly understand the question,
whether they're conversing with dear departed Aunt Susie, or
merely with a manipulative practitioner. But again, once it is seen
that there is no metaphysical problem here, the epistemological
question becomes purely a practical one, requiring to be answered if
and when we have the need in practice to make such
identifications.



It is also worth noting that an objection against individual
continuity in dualism can be deployed against individual continuity in
materialism. One objection (that can be traced back to Kant) against
dualism is that the dualist is unable to account for the possibility
that the soul or immaterial self is constantly being replaced by
different individual selves, (with complete updated
"memories" and psychological qualities) thus creating the
*illusion* of personal continuity of the self-same subject. If
the self is immaterial, how would we notice the successive changes?
This may be called the problem of undetected (and perhaps
undetectable) soul-switching. This objection faces many obstacles, one
being that we would be unable to properly account for our experience
of successive states (we hear Big Ben ring three times by first
hearing it ring twice) if we are not the self-same individuals over
time. But more to the point, in terms of continuity, it is logically
possible that material bodies are switched every nanosecond. If the
switch (or annihilation and creation) were done in an instant (as
opposed to an interval) there would be no duration, no event that
could be measured by us that would reveal the switch. If undetectable
material object-switching is not a problem, then undetectable
soul-switching should not be a problem.



There may still be an objection to a dualist account of an afterlife
which holds that the idea of disembodied survival, even if not
logically incoherent, is one we don't have a sufficient grasp of
to allow it to count as a real possibility. What would such survival
amount to, anyway? Of course, if the souls of the departed are assumed
to be fitted out immediately with resurrection bodies, this difficulty
is greatly alleviated. But if the notion of an immaterial soul is to
do any philosophical work, we need to be able to think what it might
be like for such a soul to exist on its own, disembodied.



This challenge has been met in an interesting article by H.H. Price
(1953). Price spells out, in considerable detail, a notion of
disembodied souls existing in a "world" of something like
dream-images--images, however, that would be shared between a
number of more or less like-minded, and telepathically interacting,
souls. Included among these images would be images of one's own
body and of other people's bodies, so that one might, at first,
find it difficult to distinguish the image-world from the ordinary
physical world we presently inhabit. The conception is similar to
Berkeley's, except that Price does not invoke God directly as
the sustainer of regularities in the image-world. He does say,
however, that 



> 
> 
> if we are theists, we shall hold that the laws of nature, in other
> worlds as in this one, are in the end dependent on the will of a
> Divine Creator. (1953: 390) 
> 
> 
> 



Someone who seriously considers Price's development of this idea
will be forced to admit that a sufficiently clear account of what
disembodied existence might be like has been proposed. (And for a more
recent work that argues that our actual world is idealist in the
tradition of Berkeley, see Foster 2007.) We need not follow Price (or
Foster) in (what appears to be) his supposition that this is a
plausible account of the actual state of persons who have died. It is
enough if he has provided an account that makes plain the
intelligibility of the notion of disembodied survival; the believer in
an afterlife can then say, "If not in just this way, then in
some other".



If there is reason to think that mind-body dualism is true, then there
is reason to think that a person's survival of death is
logically possible. But dualism has come upon hard times lately, and
is widely regarded as being discredited. Whether or not this is
warranted, dualism is undoubtedly subject to a number of objections,
though these are not necessarily more severe than the difficulties
that attend materialism (see the entry on
 dualism,
 also Koons and Bealer (eds.) 2010). For a positive case for dualism,
see Loose, Menuge, & Moreland 2018 (*The Blackwell Companion to
Substance Dualism*). In view of this let us consider also the
possibility of survival given some form of
 materialism.[2]


## 3. Objections to the Possibility of Survival--Materialism



What are the prospects for survival on a materialistic view of
persons? One possible reason for thinking that materialism is not
hostile to the prospects of an afterlife is that, historically, the
standard view of the afterlife in the major theistic traditions is
that it involves the resurrection of bodies. While there is a
longstanding theological tradition that links belief in bodily
resurrection with dualism, many theologians and some philosophers
argue that dualism is a Platonic import into theistic traditions
(Cullman 1955), and that it is more in keeping with the Hebrew,
Christian, and Islamic stress on bodily life to understand the
afterlife in materialist rather than dualist terms.



The central logical problem for materialist versions of the
resurrection is personal identity. On dualist assumptions, personal
identity is preserved by the persistence of the soul between death and
resurrection. But for materialism, *nothing* bridges the
spatio-temporal gap between the body that perishes and that body
resurrected. Without such a bridge, how can the
"resurrected" person be identical with the person who
died? Considerable ingenuity has been expended in the search for an
answer to this question.



Without doubt, the most popular materialist option here is the
"re-creation" theory, according to which, at some time
after a person's death, God re-creates the person by creating a
body with the identical characteristics of the body that perished
(Hick 1983: 125-26). While this may seem rather ghastly in cases
of violent death, there is no reason why God could not correct any
injury and renew the body's youthfulness, and so on. But can
this re-creation preserve the necessity of the identity relation (the
fact that your persistence over time as you is strict and not
contingent)? If you are re-created, the "you" that comes
into existence in the re-creation cannot just contingently happen to
be you (as if someone else could do the job of being you). One reason
to suspect that the identity relationship is not preserved (and this
is not merely an epistemological matter) is that if God could create
one body that is exactly similar to the body that died, why not two or
more? It is not a satisfactory answer to this to say that God, being
good, would not (and perhaps could not) do such a thing. On the view
in question, what is necessary for resurrection is merely that
material particles be arranged in the correct fashion, and it is
hardly a necessary truth that only God could do this. (Perhaps a
really smart rogue angel could pull it off!) Nor is it feasible to
guarantee uniqueness by requiring that the identical particles present
in the dead body make up the resurrected body. On the one hand, the
body has no doubt shed, during its life, enough particles to make
several bodies, and it is hardly credible that the replacement of one
of the atoms present at the time of death with an atom shed by the
body a few seconds before death would mean we have a different body
(assuming other requirements to be satisfied). If, on the other hand,
only particles from the body at the time of death may be used, there
are the long-recognized problems about the availability of some of
these particles, which within a few years may have made their ways
into a large number of other human bodies. In any case there is a
hard-to-quell intuition that reassembly, no matter how expertly
completed, would at best produce a replica rather than the identical
body that perished. Peter van Inwagen offers a compelling example:



> 
> 
> Suppose a certain monastery claims to have in its possession a
> manuscript written in St. Augustine's own hand. And suppose the
> monks of this monastery further claim that this manuscript was burned
> by Arians in the year 457. It would immediately occur to us to ask how
> *this* manuscript, the one we can touch, could be the very
> manuscript that was burned in 457. Suppose their answer to this
> question is that God miraculously recreated Augustine's
> manuscript in 458. We should respond to this answer as follows: the
> deed it describes seems quite impossible, even as an accomplishment of
> omnipotence. God certainly might have created a perfect duplicate of
> the original manuscript, but it would not be *that* one; its
> earliest moment of existence would have been after Augustine's
> death; it would never have known the impress of his hand; it would not
> have been a part of the furniture of the world when he was alive; and
> so on. Now suppose our monks were to reply by simply asserting that
> the manuscript now in their possession *did* know the impress
> of Augustine's hand; that it *was* a part of the
> furniture of the world when the Saint was alive; that when God
> recreated or restored it, God (as an indispensable component of
> accomplishing this task) saw to it that the object God produced had
> all these properties. [para. break in 1978] 
> 
> 
> 
> We confess we should not know what to make of this. We should have to
> tell the monks that we did not see how what they believed could
> *possibly* be true. (van Inwagen 1992: 242-43) 
> 
> 
> 



Given these difficulties with the re-creation view, attempts have been
made to find other ways of accounting for resurrection in materialist
terms. One of the more interesting of these is Lynne Rudder
Baker's invocation of a constitution view of persons (Baker
2000, 2001, 2005). On this view persons are not identical with, but
are constituted by, their bodies. (She discusses the constitution
relation at considerable length; the details of this are not relevant
here.) What is distinctive of persons is a "first-person
perspective", roughly, the capacity to think of oneself *as
oneself*. This ability, which humans possess but other animals
seem to lack, is an essential component of moral responsibility as
well as of our ability to plan for the future and to perform many
other distinctively personal activities and functions. According to
Baker, the constitution view opens the way for a doctrine of
resurrection that avoids the difficulties of the re-creation theory.
Since persons are not identical with their bodies, it need not be
maintained that the resurrected body is the same identical body as the
body that died. What is required, however, is that the first-person
perspective of the resurrected body be the same: "if a
person's first-person perspective were extinguished, the person
would go out of existence" (2005: 385). So the first-person
perspective must somehow be transferred from the original body to the
resurrection body: 



> 
> 
> person *P*1 at *t*1 is the same person as person *P*2
> at *t*2 if and only if *P*1 and *P*2 have the same
> first-person perspective. (2000: 132) 
> 
> 
> 



Baker holds that there is indeed a fact of the matter as to whether a
given future person has the same first-person perspective as I now
have, though there is no "informative" way of specifying
criteria of identity between the two.



Although Baker's account is intriguing, it seems problematic
when one takes a closer look at the idea of a first-person
perspective. Arguably, to have a first-person perspective, one has to
be a person. To have a first-person perspective is to have the
capacity to experience things; to act, think, speak, and so on with
intention. Such acts can in principle be qualitatively identical in
different thinkers and speakers; what individuates them is the
*person* who's doing the thinking or speaking. In other
words, intentional acts derive their identity from the person
performing them. But if this is true of the acts themselves it is also
true of the first-person perspectives, which are nothing but the
capacities of various persons to perform such acts. So to say that
*P*1 and *P*2 have the same first-person perspective is just
to say that *P*1 and *P*2 are the same person, and the
criterion reduces to a tautology. Regrettably, we have not yet been
given any help in understanding how a person, *with* her
first-person perspective, can occupy first one body and then
another.



Another proposal is offered by Kevin Corcoran (2005). Corcoran, like
Baker, is a constitution theorist, but, unlike Baker, he does not
believe persons can be transferred from one body to another. Corcoran
proposes that the body of a resurrected person does need to be
identical with the body of the person when he died. Corcoran advances
several proposals about how this might be possible. The one to be
noted here is what might be termed a "brute force"
solution: 



> 
> 
> If God causes that body to exist once, why could God not cause it to
> exist a second time? ... But what makes the first stage of the
> post-gap body a different stage of the same body that perished is just
> that God makes it so. (2005: 172) 
> 
> 
> 


 This comes extremely close to making identity over time a matter
of convention--divine convention, to be sure, but convention all
the same. (It is reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards' view that we
are justly punished for Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden because
God has decreed that the segment of Adam's life including the
sin is a segment of our own lives also.) It is difficult to measure
when an appeal to divine fiat is philosophically licit or illicit. The
challenge facing Corcoran's position may be similar to the one
Hick faces: how would God distinguish between re-creating the same
body that was destroyed earlier and creating an exact duplicate? For a
recent treatment of survival from a materialist perspective, see
Merrick 2022.



We have left until last van Inwagen's own proposal for a
materialist resurrection. For in spite of his criticisms of the common
view, van Inwagen is himself a Christian and a believer in the
resurrection. Here is his proposal:



> 
> 
> Perhaps at the moment of each man's death, God removes his
> corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or
> rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps He
> removes for "safekeeping" only the "core
> person"--the brain and central nervous system--or even
> some special part of it. These are details. (van Inwagen 1992:
> 245-46)
> 
> 
> 



Continuity is maintained, then, through the preservation of the body
(or crucial body-part, such as the brain), and when the time comes for
resurrection to occur, God restores life to the body in question and
one's resurrected life can begin. In fairness, it should be
pointed out that van Inwagen originally advanced this proposal only in
order to demonstrate *the logical possibility* of a materialist
resurrection. In this he may well have succeeded. But as a proposal
that is supposed to represent the actual way in which God enables
humans to live again, the account has very little to recommend it. In
this view, God assumes the role of contemporary practitioners of
cryonics, preserving the dead body until such time as it is revived
and restored to health. But this is bad news for the actual
practitioners, since the "bodies" they are preserving are
mere simulacra and presumably incapable of being revived, even if all
the technology functions flawlessly. Furthermore, the feature of the
account that makes it unacceptable--that God "spirits
away" the crucial part of the person's body, leaving
behind a simulacrum--is essential to the view's success in
depicting a possible way of resurrection. In the Author's Note
appended in 1992, van Inwagen writes:



> 
> 
> If I were writing a paper on this topic today, I should not make the
> definite statement "I think this is the *only* way such a
> being could accomplish it". I am now inclined to think that
> there may well be other ways, ways that I am unable even to form an
> idea of because I lack the conceptual resources to do so. (1992:
> 246)
> 
> 
> 



A more recent, and extremely ingenious, account of an afterlife from a
materialist point of view has been proposed by Dean Zimmerman. The
proposal goes roughly like this: at the instant of death, each
elementary particle in a person's body undergoes
"budding" in which it produces another particle of the
same kind. The newly produced particle takes its place in a
resurrection body, existing in a resurrection "space"; at
the same time the original particle remains in place as part of the
corpse. Since it is the resurrection body, and not the corpse, which
continues the life of the subject, the resurrection body rather than
the corpse is the "closest continuer" of the pre-death
body. It is, then, the resurrection body and not the corpse that is
the same body as the one that previously lived, and personal identity
is preserved. This proposal abandons strict (Leibnizian) identity in
favor of a "closest continuer" theory. It also shares an
interesting feature with van Inwagen's account: the remaining
corpse is *not the same body* as the one that previously lived.
(Zimmerman 1999 and 2010; Hasker 2011). For a critical analysis of
Zimmerman and van Inwagen thought experiments, see Taliaferro &
Knuths 2017 and Knuths 2018.



It has not been shown conclusively that an identity-preserving
materialist resurrection is impossible, but the difficulties, as
outlined above, are formidable (Hasker 1999: 211-31). Proponents
of an afterlife, it seems, would be better served if they were able to
espouse some variety of mind-body dualism. This entry cannot undertake
an assessment of the comparative merits of dualism and materialism. It
is worth noting, however, that recent philosophy has seen an increased
recognition in some quarters of the difficulties resulting from
materialist views, and a corresponding interest in different (not
necessarily Cartesian) varieties of dualism. (See Koons & Bealer
(eds.) 2010; Batthyany & Elitzur (eds.) 2009; Loose, Menuge, &
Moreland 2018; and Lofton 2017.) Given even the apparent coherence of
dualism in which the person and her body are contingently related
(metaphysically, it becomes more difficult to argue that it is known
that the annihilation of the body entails the annihilation of the
person).


## 4. Parapsychology and Near-Death Experiences



During the heyday of logical positivism in the twentieth century, it
is interesting that while Moritz Schlick proposed that its demands for
empirical verification would render propositions about God as
meaningless, it would not rule out as meaningless propositions about
life after death so long as they involved subjects having experiences.
Interestingly, some of the most rigid materialists in the last
century, such as Willard Van Orman Quine and Paul Churchland, allowed
for the possibility of there being compelling empirical evidence of
parapsychological powers and even ghosts. In this section, let us
consider whether there is empirical support for belief in an
afterlife.



Parapsychology investigates phenomena that are alleged to lie outside
the boundaries of ordinary naturalistic explanation. These phenomena
include telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, mediumistic messages,
possession-type cases, reincarnation-type cases, apparitions, and
others. Not all of these phenomena are directly relevant to survival
and the afterlife, but some of them, if accepted as veridical, do
provide such evidence: for instance, messages received through a
medium, allegedly from a deceased person, that contain information to
which the medium has no other access.



The evaluation of this body of evidence is highly contentious. Clearly
there exists both motive and opportunity for fraud and fabrication in
many cases. It is questionable, though, whether a responsible inquirer
can afford to dismiss out of hand all cases that seem to defy ordinary
naturalistic explanation. It counts against a sweeping dismissive
approach that the phenomena have been attested as probably veridical
by some highly reputable investigators, including such philosophers as
William James, Henry Sidgwick, C.D. Broad, H.H. Price and John Beloff.
These men had little to gain personally by their investigations;
indeed in undertaking them they endangered already well-established
reputations. Investigating the subject with finely-honed critical
instincts, they have applied stringent tests in selecting instances
they consider to be credible, and have rejected many cases they held
to be fraudulent or inadequately attested.



If we are willing to give an initial hearing to this evidence, what
conclusions can reasonably be reached? A conclusion that many (but not
all) of these investigators would accept is that the evidence provides
some, but not conclusive, evidence for personal survival after death
(Steinkamp 2002). However, the reason why the evidence is deemed
inconclusive will give little comfort to many afterlife skeptics. The
reason it is not conclusive is that the experiences are susceptible of
a different explanation *if we accept the existence of some rather
spectacular forms of extra-sensory perception*, also known as
"super psi" (see Braude 2002). An example is a case in
which a medium received information that apparently was known in its
entirety to no living person. In order to avoid the conclusion that
the information was communicated from the deceased person, the medium
must be credited with clairvoyance as well as the ability to integrate
information received telepathically from several different persons.
C.D. Broad (1953: 114) summarized the situation well: the possibility
of extra-sensory perception weakens the direct force of the evidence
for survival by making possible alternative explanations of that
evidence. But ESP strengthens the overall case by raising the
antecedent probability of survival, insofar as it renders problematic
the naturalistic view of the human person, which for most
contemporaries constitutes the greatest obstacle to belief in
survival.



More recently, it has been claimed that a superior source of evidence
lies in so-called "near-death experiences" (Bailey and
Yates (eds.) 1996). These are experiences of persons who were, or
perceived themselves to be, close to death; indeed many such persons
met the criteria for clinical death. While in this state, they undergo
remarkable experiences, often taken to be experiences of the world
that awaits them after death. Returning to life, they testify to their
experiences, claiming in many cases to have had their subsequent lives
transformed as a result of the near-death experience. This testimony
may seem especially compelling in that (a) large numbers of persons
report having had such experiences; (b) the experiences come
spontaneously to those near death, they are not sought out or
deliberately induced; and (c) normally no one stands to benefit
financially from either the experiences or the reports.



These experiences, furthermore, are not random in their contents.
There are recurring elements that show up in many of these accounts,
forming a general (but far from invariable) pattern. Typical elements
include a sense of being dead, peacefulness and absence of pain;
"out-of-body experiences" in which the subject views his
or her own body "from outside" and witnesses various
events, sometimes at a considerable distance from the location of the
person's body; passing through a dark tunnel towards intense
light; meeting "beings of light" (sometimes including
friends and relatives who have died previously); and a "life
review" in which the events of one's life pass before one
and are subjected to evaluation. The subject may be initially
disappointed or reluctant to return to the body, and (as already
noted) many testify that the experience has been life-changing,
leading to a lessened--or even a complete absence of--fear
of death and other beneficial results.



These experiences are surprisingly common. A Gallup poll taken in 1982
found that eight million Americans (about five percent of the adult
population at that time) had survived a near-death experience (NDE).
The experiences occur regardless of age, social class, race, or
marital status. Probably the improvements in medical technology, which
enable many to return from a state of "clinical death",
have increased the numbers in recent times. But NDEs have been
reported throughout recorded history and from all corners of the
earth. Since the publication in 1975 of Raymond Moody's book,
*Life After Life* (1975), there have been numerous studies of
the phenomenon, some of them carried out with careful attention to
scientific objectivity (e.g., Ring 1980; Sabom 1982; van Lommel *et
al.* 2001).



As one might expect, there is a wide variety of interpretations of
NDEs, from those that interpret the experiences as literally revealing
a state that lies beyond death to interpretations that attempt to
debunk the experiences by classifying them as mere reflections of
abnormal brain states. Clearly, there is no one medical or
physiological cause; the experiences occur for persons in a great
variety of medical conditions. An interesting counterexample to
explanations in terms of the "dying brain" is found in the
NDEs experienced by mountain climbers in the midst of what they
expected to be fatal falls (Heim 1892); it is hardly credible that
these experiences can be reduced to either drugs or oxygen
deprivation.



On the other hand, interpretations of NDEs as literally revelatory of
the life to come, though common in the popular literature, are
extremely questionable. Carol Zaleski has shown, through her
comparative studies of medieval and modern NDEs, that many features of
these experiences vary in ways that correspond to cultural
expectations (Zaleski 1987). A striking instance of this is the
minimal role played by judgment and damnation in modern NDEs; unlike
the medieval cases, the modern life-review tends to be therapeutic
rather than judgmental in emphasis. In view of this, Zaleski ascribes
the experiences to the religious imagination, insisting that to do so
enhances rather than diminishes their significance. Claims of
cross-cultural invariance in modern NDEs are also questionable. The
majority of the research has been done in cultures where Christianity
is the predominant religious influence, but research done in other
cultures reveals significantly different patterns. One amusing
difference occurs in the episodes in which it is decided that the
experiencer will return to embodied life rather than remaining in the
afterworld. In Western NDEs there is often a "spirit
guide" who counsels the experiencer that it is better that he or
she should return to life. In India, on the other hand, the person is
often turned back with the information that there has been a clerical
error in the paperwork, so that it was by mistake that he or she came
to this point! (K. Augustine 2008,
 Other Internet Resources,
 see the section on "Cultural Differences").



The causation of these experiences is problematic. Some aspects of the
experience have been deliberately induced by the administration of
drugs (see Jansen 1997); this demonstrates that such phenomena can be
produced by chemical alterations to the brain, but in most NDE cases
no such chemical causes can be identified. Several researchers have
concluded that the triggering cause of the NDE is simply the perceived
nearness of death. (NDEs have also been experienced by persons who
believed they were close to death but were not in fact in any
life-threatening situation (K. Augustine 2008,
 Other Internet Resources,
 see the section on Pam Reynolds).) The specific content of NDEs can
be divided into *mundane* content, in which what is experienced
is or resembles typical features of the ordinary world, and
*transcendental* content, portraying "another
realm" quite unlike the world of ordinary experience. The source
of the transcendental content is problematic, though the cultural
variations suggest that a significant role must be assigned to
cultural expectations concerning the afterlife.



Finally, there is what Gary Habermas has termed the
*evidential* aspect of NDEs. These are phenomena that, provided
they can be verified, would indicate strongly that something is
occurring that is not susceptible of an ordinary naturalistic
explanation. This might seem to be the most helpful direction to look
if the aim is to arrive at an objectively compelling assessment of
NDEs. If it should turn out to be possible to verify objectively
certain paranormal aspects of NDEs, fully naturalistic explanations
could be ruled out and the way would be open for further exploration
concerning the meaning of the experiences. On the other hand, if all
such evidential aspects could be fully explained in terms of ordinary
natural processes, the claim of NDEs to be revelatory of anything
metaphysically significant would be greatly weakened.



Evidential aspects of NDEs fall into several categories. First, there
are out-of-body sensory experiences, in which patients, often while
comatose, observe accurately features to which they have no access
through normal sensory channels. In one case, an eight-year-old girl
who nearly drowned required 45 minutes of CPR to restore her
heartbeat:



> 
> 
> In the meantime, she said that she floated out of her body and visited
> heaven. Additionally ... she was able to totally and correctly
> recount the details from the time the paramedics arrived in her yard
> through the work performed later in the hospital emergency room.
> (Moreland and Habermas 1998: 159)
> 
> 
> 



Second, there are accounts of sensory experiences which accurately
report events that occurred during periods in which the
subject's heart had stopped, and even during "flat
EEG" periods in which there was no detectable brain activity.
Finally, there are "surprise encounters" during the NDE
with friends and relatives who had in fact recently died, but where
the subject had no knowledge of this prior to the time of the
experience. Here the crucial question would be, Where did the subject
obtain knowledge of the other person's death? If ordinary
channels of communication can be ruled out, the most natural
conclusion would seem to be that this knowledge was obtained from the
deceased person, who is somehow still alive.



All of these claims concerning the evidential value of NDEs have been
called into question. One of the most thorough discussions is by Keith
Augustine
 (Other Internet Resources,
 2008), who draws on work by a large number of other researchers. As
noted already, there is overwhelming evidence that NDEs do not provide
a literal experience of conditions in the afterlife; this is attested,
among other things, by the considerable variations in these
experiences in different times and different cultures. Also relevant
here is the fact that similar experiences sometimes happen to persons
who mistakenly believe themselves to be in life-threatening
circumstances. Apparently it is the *perceived* nearness to
death, rather than the actual proximity of the afterworld, that
triggers the experiences. The encounters with persons recently
deceased, but whose deaths were previously unknown to the experiencer,
become somewhat less impressive once it is recognized that
still-living persons may also be encountered in NDEs ("Living
Persons"). These still-living persons were otherwise occupied at
the time of the NDEs; they cannot have been literally present in the
other-worldly realm in which they were encountered. And given that
still-living persons can appear in NDEs, it becomes statistically
probable that on occasion there will also be encounters with persons
who have recently died but whose death was unknown to the
experiencer.



Claims that NDEs occurred during periods with no brain activity are
countered by the rejoinder that an EEG may not reveal all activity
within the brain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, for example,
can reveal activity that is missed by an EEG. In cases where brain
activity has indeed ceased for a given patient, the NDE may have
occurred either before the cessation or after normal brain activity
has resumed; it is not necessary to assume that the NDE and the
brain's non-activity were simultaneous ("Living
Persons"). With respect to the claim of information that was
learned during the NDE that was not otherwise available, various
answers are possible. It is noted, first of all, that
*inaccurate* "information" is often reported
("Out-of-Body Discrepancies"). In some cases where the
information is confirmed, we may be dealing with subsequent
enhancement as a result of the repeated recital of the story. (This
need not involve deliberate deception; it is a common experience that
stories often repeated tend to gain new features of interest in the
telling.) In other cases, it is argued that the information was in
fact available through ordinary sensory channels, often through the
experiencer's hearing of things said during a medical procedure
when they were apparently unconscious and unresponsive. (There is
considerable evidence that "unconscious" persons do hear
and register things said when they are apparently oblivious to their
surroundings.) ("Veridical Paranormal Perception During
OBEs?") However, it is worth noting that Augustine makes little
effort to establish that the factors cited in his naturalistic
explanations were actually operative in the various NDE cases. It
would appear to be his view that the burden of proof lies almost
entirely on the shoulders of those who make claims on behalf of the
evidential value of NDEs.



With regard to this entire body of evidence, both from parapsychology
and from NDEs, we may be close to an impasse. Those who support the
evidential value of the experiences will argue that the naturalistic
explanations that have been offered are not adequate, that they
display excessive skepticism towards well-confirmed accounts, and are
in many instances highly speculative. Those who reject the evidential
value of these phenomena (including some believers in the afterlife)
will argue that the evidence is insufficient to warrant the
extraordinary claims that are made, that the naturalistic explanations
work well overall, and that a full explanation of the most puzzling
cases would require a detailed knowledge of the events and surrounding
circumstances that in many cases is not available to us. Further
careful research on individual cases may offer some hope of progress,
but it seems unlikely that the fundamental disagreements can be
resolved, especially when the different viewpoints are supported by
diverse worldviews. For a thoughtful treatment of NDEs and the
paranormal as evidence for an afterlife, see Lund 2009 (Part II).


## 5. Metaphysical Considerations Concerning Survival



Leaving aside such empirical evidence, what general metaphysical
considerations are relevant to belief in survival? While some
philosophers have sought to marginalize metaphysics (see, for example,
Hadot 1995), such deflationary accounts have been found wanting by
many philosophers (see, for example, Wynn 2020). We have already seen
that a materialist account of persons creates some serious
obstacles. As van Inwagen and others have argued, God could bring
about an afterlife for persons in a way consistent with a materialist
philosophy of mind. But in the absence of God, a materialist,
naturalist worldview seems not at all promising for survival. As noted
earlier, mind-body dualism would offer some support for the
possibility of survival but dualism by no means guarantees survival;
the old arguments from the simplicity and alleged indestructibility of
souls are out of favor. As Kant observed, a "simple" soul,
which cannot be dissolved into its constituent parts, might still fade
away gradually until it has completely disappeared. What often is not
sufficiently appreciated, however, is the close tie between theism and
belief in an afterlife. The point is not merely that theistic
religions incorporate belief in an afterlife which many persons accept
because of this religious context. The tie is closer than that, and it
has considerable force in both directions.



Suppose, on the one hand, that the God of theism does in fact exist.
According to theism, God is both all-powerful and perfectly good, and
this goodness is supposed to be of a sort that is relevant to the
welfare of human beings (and other rational creatures, if there are
any). Indeed, this is not merely a speculative assumption; there are
Biblical texts proclaiming that God is a God of love. If there is
reason to believe that God loves created persons, then it is highly
plausible to believe that God desires to provide creatures with the
opportunity for a greater, and longer-lasting, fulfillment than is
possible within the brief scope of earthly existence. This is
especially true, one would think, for those who, through no fault of
their own, find their lives blighted by disease, or accident, or war,
or any of the other natural or anthropogenic disasters to which we are
vulnerable. And yet even those of us who enjoy relatively good and
satisfying lives are conscious of far, far more that could be
accomplished and enjoyed, given more time and the vigor and energy to
use it well.



This argument can also be reversed to telling effect. If there is no
afterlife, no realm in which the sorrows of this life can be assuaged
and its injustices remedied, then it may be argued that the problem of
evil becomes impossible to solve in any rationally intelligible way.
Arguably, a perfectly good and all-powerful God would not make a
cosmos in which all or most created persons have lives that are full
of misery and then are annihilated; nor would an all-loving good God
create a cosmos in which there is no opportunity for transformation
beyond this life. That is not to say, of course, that allowing for an
afterlife makes the problem of evil easy for theists--that is far
from being the case. But it does provide a way in which this
life's injustices can be seen as not having had the last
word--victims in this life do not have to be eternally victims
and those who've done evil won't get away with it. For
these reasons, one would be hard pressed to find very many theists (as
opposed to deists) who do not also affirm belief in an afterlife.



The close connection between theism and an afterlife is affirmed in
Kant's arguments for the "postulates of practical
reason". To be sure, Kant gives different reasons for
postulating God and for postulating an afterlife, and the ends to be
served by these postulations are ostensibly different. In actuality,
however, it is highly plausible that the two postulates are
inseparable. We ought to postulate God, because only in this way is it
possible that in the end happiness should be enjoyed by persons in
proportion to their moral worthiness. Given the actual conditions of
the present life, it is evident that this end can be secured, if at
all, only in a future existence. We are told to postulate immortality,
because only an endless life makes possible continued progress towards
the goal of a coincidence of one's will with the requirements of
the moral law. But for such continued progress to be at all likely to
occur would seem to require some kind of morally benign conditions in
the afterlife, and Kant implicitly assumes that such conditions will
obtain.



What about an argument in the opposite direction: if it is reasonable
to believe in an afterlife, is it more reasonable to believe in
theism? Given the reasonability of believing in an afterlife, it would
be more reasonable to believe that theism is true rather than
materialistic naturalism, but the reasonability of theism would have
to be weighed in the context of non-theistic philosophies and
religions that include belief in an afterlife. Nontheistic Hinduism
and Buddhism include beliefs about an afterlife; in these religious
traditions, belief in an afterlife is part of their understanding of
cosmic justice, a system in which one's reincarnation (and,
ultimately, one's enlightenment and liberation) depends on
one's Karma. These, and other traditions such as Jainism,
involve matters that are addressed in other entries in the SEP, but we
offer here a modest observation on how the evidence for a good
afterlife (an afterlife that is in accord with some morally sound
order) might lend more support for one religion or philosophy than
another.



Imagine that we have good reason to believe (or we possess Kantian
justification for faith) that the cosmos is ultimately ordered in a
just and moral manner (felicity and virtue will be in concord, and the
wicked will not flourish indefinitely and so on). Imagine further that
we can limit the most plausible accounts of such a moral order on the
basis of either traditional theistic accounts of the afterlife or a
system of reincarnation in which Karma is at work determining
successive re-births until enlightenment--liberation. Robin
Collins has argued that the second alternative faces what he calls the
"karma management problem". He writes,



> 
> 
> Traditionally Buddhists have believed that by and large the
> circumstances of one's rebirth are determined by one's
> karma--that is, one's deeds, whether good or bad in this
> and previous lives. This, however, seems to require that there exist
> something like a "program" that arranges your genes, the
> family conditions you are born into, and the like to correspond to the
> moral worth of your past deeds (Collins 1999: 206).
> 
> 
> 



For theists, such as many (but not all) Hindus, this minute
arrangement of one's life circumstances to match one's
karma can be viewed as the work of God. So long as we recognize the
intelligibility of divine agency, the "management" of
reincarnation should in principle be no more difficult to accept than
any other theistic explanations. But in the absence of theistic,
intentional explanations, how would a "karma program"
work, and how was it initiated? We know today, by means that were not
available to the ancient Hindus and Buddhists, that
"nature"--the nature that is known and studied in the
natural sciences--simply doesn't work this way. The laws of
nature are subtle and marvelously complex (though also, in their own
way, "simple"), but it is abundantly clear that they do
not work in such a way as to determine physical situations in
accordance with the moral worth of persons, or in accordance with any
moral considerations whatsoever. The laws of nature, we might say, are
no respecters of persons--or of morality. Rather, they are
impersonal in character, and in many cases are expressible in
mathematical formulae that are far removed from the teleology that
permeates human existence. So if there is a "karmic moral
order" of the sort postulated by the Indian traditions, it must
be something radically different from the order of nature that (so far
as science can discern) governs the physical processes of the world.
And yet the two orders must be intimately related, for it is precisely
these physical processes which, in the end, are said to be disposed in
accordance with one's karma. It is wholly implausible that two
diverse systems of cosmic order such as this should arise from
unrelated sources and come together accidentally; they must, then,
have a common source. If the common source of the natural order and
the karmic order is impersonal, we are still in need of some account
of how and why it would be such as to produce these two quite
different sorts of order in the cosmos. These questions, it would
seem, are much more readily answered if we postulate a
*personal* source of both the natural and the moral
order--that is to say, a God who desired that there be created
persons, and who wished to provide a stable natural order within which
they could live and exercise their varied powers.



This is of course a mere sketch of an argument that would require much
more space for its full development. We offer the above line of
reasoning as an example of how one might compare the merits of
alternative accounts of an afterlife. It is also offered to make the
point that the case for or against an afterlife is best understood in
light of one's overall metaphysics. To see further how
philosophical reflection on an afterlife might be guided by
metaphysical considerations, consider briefly what has been called the
argument from desire. Without question, many persons strongly desire
that there should be an afterlife and believe in one largely if not
entirely for that reason. It is also beyond question that most
philosophers would regard this as a classic case of wishful thinking.
But this conclusion is too hasty; indeed, it commits the fallacy of
begging the question. To be sure, if the universe is naturalistic,
then the desire that many persons have for an afterlife does not
constitute any kind of evidence that an afterlife exists. One might
inquire about the causes of such a desire and, given its widespread
occurrence, might wonder about its possible Darwinian survival value.
But no evidential weight would attach to the desire on the assumption
of naturalism.



Suppose, on the other hand, that theism (or some view close to theism)
is true. On this supposition, human life is not the accidental product
of mindless forces that have operated with no thought to it or to
anything else. On the contrary, human life (and the life of other
rational creatures, if there are any) is the product of an
evolutionary process, which was itself designed to produce such
beings, by a God who loves them and cares for them. If this is so,
then there is a strong case to be made that desires which are
universal, or near-universal, among human beings are desires for which
satisfaction is possible. The inference does not amount to a
certainty; it is possible that humans have distorted God's
purpose for them, and certainly human conceptions of the way in which
certain desires could be satisfied may be wide of the mark. But the
presumption must be that desires that are widespread or universal are
aimed at some genuine and attainable good, however inadequate the
conceptions of that good held by many individuals may be. And if this
is so, persons who take the desire for an afterlife as a reason to
believe in one are on the side of right reason in doing so. Only if
one assumes from the outset that the universe is not human-friendly
can the charge of wishful thinking be sustained. In a recent
contribution, Johan Eddebo (2017) argues that because we do not know
that we are not in a human-friendly universe we cannot rationally rule
out the possibility of an afterlife for human persons. 



A great many persons who believe in life after death do so because of
reasons that are internal to their own religious traditions. Hindus
and Buddhists have their accounts of persons who remember in detail
events of their previous lives. Jews will rely on the visions of
Ezekiel and the traditions of the rabbis; Muslims on the prophecies of
the Koran. Christians will think of the resurrection of Jesus. Whether
any of these appeals has serious evidentiary force is a question that
cannot be pursued within the scope of this article; they must all the
same be included in any overall assessment of the rationality of
belief in an afterlife.

 Some recent philosophical work on the
afterlife takes up issues that go beyond this entry. For example, if
there is a heaven would persons (souls) have free will? Would they
have lives that are dynamic (subject to change) or static or
changeless? What might individual cognition be like in paradise? Would
there be suffering in paradise? Given the basic teachings of the
Abrahamic faiths, is there reason to believe that some nonhuman
animals enjoy an afterlife? For engaging work on such questions, see
Byerly & Silverman (eds.) 2017.