If you are looking forward to enjoying a perfectly restored earth where you will live forever with a new body, that says something very positive about your faith. Clearly you believe there is life after death. In this book, and no doubt in many other places, you have encountered strong evidence to strengthen your faith. You have seen ample evidence that Jesus conquered death and promised to raise you from the dead. So you can trust confidently in his promise.
But you may not know there is further evidence that you have an eternal soul that will live on after this life. In fact, there are many evidences that underscore the belief that there is life after death. Numerous books have been written on the subject, notably Life After Death: The Evidence by Dinesh D’Souza, and Beyond Death by J.P. Moreland and Gary Habermas. I (Sean) have an extensive chapter on this topic in my book Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists. These and other books provide many evidences for life after death. We will highlight just four in this chapter.
Recently one of my (Sean’s) former students relayed to me a conversation she had had on the first day of her college English class. The teacher began the class by reading an article by a science-fiction writer who believes computers and technology will produce superhumans who will take over the world by 2030. This teacher was hoping these superhumans would be environmentalists so that they would want to preserve our lesser-evolved selves. My former student raised her hand and asked, “How can a purely material thing spawn consciousness?” The teacher simply laughed and said, “Oh, I suppose you believe in the soul too?” And the whole class laughed at her.
There are a good number of educators and scientists today who believe that the physical world is the only reality and the human soul and an afterlife simply do not exist. Yet this view has not been the universal conclusion throughout history. In fact, it’s the opposite. Virtually every culture from the very dawning of civilization has believed in a life beyond the grave in which some type of soul survives death of the body.
It is amazing, when you stop to think about it, that a universal belief in the afterlife has dominated historical thinking in spite of having little empirical evidence to justify it. Of course, people do have reason to believe some things they have not experienced. They believe there is a Mount Everest even if they haven’t climbed its rugged heights. They believe in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia even though they have never swum the depth of the Coral Sea. It is universally accepted that hundreds of swallows travel like clockwork in a 12,000-mile round-trip from Argentina to San Juan Capistrano each year, even though most people haven’t witnessed the event firsthand. In spite of the fact that most people have neither seen nor experienced these events directly, they can be empirically observed and have been for many years—some for centuries. People record physical encounters and experiences such as these in writings, pictures, and TV specials. So it’s natural for others to accept them as fact because it’s clear that they can be physically proven.
But it is another matter when all cultures in history up to the present affirm their belief in something that seems impossible to record or experience and live to tell about it. Why is the belief that there is life after death affirmed almost unanimously among every culture in history without empirical evidence? It seems clear that the “sense” there is a life after death has been implanted deeply within the heart of humans. Wise King Solomon said that God “has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Though humans cannot see into the next life, the vast majority believe it’s there, and they have believed that since the dawn of time.
In chapter 8 of my (Sean’s) book on the “new atheism,” Is God Just a Human Invention? I deal with the fact that if we didn’t have a soul we would not have the capacity to choose freely. Following is an adaptation from that chapter.
In 1996, American culture critic Tom Wolfe wrote a short essay titled “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died.” He discussed a new imaging technique that enabled neuroscientists to study the brain of a patient during a thought or emotion. He said, “Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from?”1 We agree with this much of the conclusion of Wolfe’s argument. If there is no soul, then free will does not exist.
If materialism is true, then a human being is simply a body. If you are solely a material system, then you have no inner self that has the capacity to choose freely between options. You have no center of consciousness to make reasoned decisions. What seems to you to be a self capable of making choices is then merely a phantom projected by the mechanical processes of your mind, which is controlled solely by material processes reacting to external stimuli. Your physical systems operate completely by external programming, not by inner decision-making. Thus, if materialism is true, you do not have any genuine ability to choose your actions. What would seem to be a choice is actually predetermined by mechanical neural processes operating according to the way nature programmed your brain.
But this seems to contradict how we experience the world. We operate as if our minds freely make decisions that are carried out by the circuitry of our brains. For instance, if a stranger stops to open the door for us, we would likely describe his thought process by saying, “The polite man made up his mind to stay a moment longer and hold the door open for us.” We would not say, “The circuitry in his brain caused him to turn around and hold the door open.” We assume he freely chose to open the door, which is why we would likely express our thanks. Expressing thanks for an act of kindness would make no sense if we were both simply mechanical machines acting according to the inescapable programming of our brain circuitry.
The experience of making free choices seems so authentic that people cannot act as though that sense of choosing is counterfeit. Philosopher John Searle reminds us that if a waiter presents us with a choice of either pork or veal, we cannot rightly say, “Look, I’m a determinist. I’ll just have to wait and see what order happens!”2
Denying free will comes at a high price, for it raises troubling questions: How is love meaningful if not freely chosen? How can we hold people morally accountable for their actions if they could not have done otherwise? What’s the point of punishment? For that matter, what’s the point of reward? Our capacity for free will clearly points to the reality of the human soul.3
Pam Reynolds had little option left. She had an aneurysm on her brain stem that could not be removed through conventional medical procedures. So she chose an experimental procedure called “cardiac standstill.” Surgeons put her under general anesthesia to get her brain into a nonresponsive state. Then they lowered her body temperature to 60 degrees, stopped her heart to prevent blood flow to her brain, and put her into a “clinically dead” state.
With blood drained from Pam’s brain, surgeons quickly removed the aneurysm and brought her back from the brink of death. USA Today featured the story in a June 22, 2009, article titled “The God Choice.”4 The article quoted Pam as saying she consciously left her body and witnessed the entire operation from above the surgeons. She was able to describe intimate details of the operating room procedure, including how many surgeons and attendants were involved. She described the Midas Rex bone saw used to cut open her skull, the drill bits, blade containers, and so on. She was also able to relay specific detailed conversation between the surgeons she overheard. All the details were confirmed from the official hospital records. The doctors had no scientific explanation for Pam’s “out of body” experience.
In his book Life After Death: The Evidence, Dinesh D’Souza references thousands of documented near-death experiences that reach as far back as the writings of Plato, 300 years before Christ. In recent times, the International Association for Near Death Studies was founded to study the phenomenon and has gathered a wide body of data from around the world. “Near death research,” D’Souza points out, “now involves separate tracks of inquiry into the various categories of the near death experience—the out of body phenomenon, the tunnel of darkness, the bright light, the sensation of love and warmth, the life review, and the subsequent life transformation. What emerges from this work is how vivid and real these experiences are to the people who have them.”5
The power of near-death experiences is not so much in the lurid details related to heaven or hell that someone may report. Rather, it’s that people somehow obtain information they simply could not obtain while being medically dead. These experiences demonstrate that consciousness continues after the body ceases to function. This doesn’t prove that life continues forever after death, but they do show that consciousness is not tied simply to the physical body.
Atheists, who make up most of the critics of near-death experiences, point out that these phenomena are not valid proofs for life after death because the people involved weren’t really dead. Technically that may be so, in that the people were not dead for numerous days and then rose from the grave to give their stories. But because someone isn’t permanently dead doesn’t mean that they can’t be temporarily dead. Some of these patients were in fact medically dead, but were able to be revived. The real point of these reports is to gather information about what comes after death. And since we are lacking access to experiences from those who are permanently dead, the next best thing is to get information from those who have been very close to death or temporarily dead.
Yet we agree that while near-death experiences may refute the position held by some who say “nothing exists after death,” they still do not provide empirical evidence that the soul is immortal or indicate what the afterlife is really like. Some would contend, like the apostle Thomas after the resurrection, that they will not believe until they see better proof. To such people, scientific evidence is needed to prove the possibility that there is life after death. Well, such proof is now available.
The apostle Paul wrote, “We are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against the evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world…and against wicked spirits in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). Paul speaks here of a world or a dimension that is real yet unseen to us as humans.
After Jesus died and rose from the grave, he demonstrated his ability to pass from the “seen world” into this “unseen world” at will. Remember when two of Jesus’ disciples were walking to the village of Emmaus? Jesus came along and spoke with them, but they didn’t recognize him. As they arrived home they invited this “stranger” to spend the evening with them. And as they were preparing to eat, they recognized that the “stranger” was actually Jesus. “And at that moment he disappeared!” (Luke 24:31). Where did he go? He had a real body, yet he vanished into an “unseen world.”
When these two disciples related their experiences to the rest of the disciples, Jesus again appeared before them. They were frightened and thought they were seeing a ghost. “‘Why are you frightened?’ he asked. ‘Why do you doubt who I am? Look at my hands. Look at my feet. You can see that it’s really me. Touch me and make sure that I am not a ghost, because ghosts don’t have bodies, as you see that I do” (Luke 24:38-39).
Jesus had a real body that could move from the physical dimension in which we exist into an unseen physical dimension—the “unseen world” and “the heavenly realms” that Paul referred to. The Scriptures reliably document what the disciples saw and what Jesus did and said after he rose from the dead. That alone enables us to believe with confidence there is life after death as Jesus promised. But for those who are interested, scientific evidence has now been discovered that a physical reality exists outside our human physical dimension.
At the turn of the twentieth century there was a revolution in science represented in the transition from classical to modern physics. There was a radical reformulation of the laws of space, time, and matter. This was accomplished through Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, and the laws of quantum mechanics.
Prior to the new findings in physics, scientists like British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell ridiculed the idea of life after death. He contended that for life to be sustainable after death, matter must be capable of qualities radically different from any matter in our physical world. And that was thought to be impossible—that is, until Einstein and quantum mechanics proved otherwise.
Previously it was assumed that we experienced space in three dimensions and time in one dimension. Einstein brought these dimensions together and postulated that we live in the four-dimensional entity of space-time. And with quantum mechanics, the idea of our four-dimensional world of space and time opened up the idea that the behavior of matter is not completely governed by fixed laws and predictable outcomes we can observe. Instead, scientists began suggesting that we are part of a larger multidimensional world including several dimensions that are hidden from what we experience in this physical world.
Dinesh D’Souza explains this scientific phenomenon in chapter 5 of his book Life After Death: The Evidence:
The idea of multiple dimensions is part of a powerful new approach to physics called string theory…In its most famous form, so-called M theory, scientists tell us that reality is divided not into four but rather eleven dimensions, ten of space and one of time. So where are the other dimensions? Well, string theorists say they are hidden dimensions somehow positioned so that they are invisible and inaccessible to us. While we can’t see them, they help to account for the things that we do see. As physicist Lisa Randall puts it, “We are in this three-dimensional flatland…Our world is stuck in this three-dimensional universe, although extra dimensions exist. So we live on a three-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional world.”6
How do scientists account for hidden dimensions that are invisible to us? To start with, most physicists accept the notion that the vast majority of matter and energy in the universe is what they call “dark matter” and “dark energy.” It is matter and energy we can’t see or detect. They arrive at that conclusion because galaxies are held together in clusters, but the gravitational force of ordinary matter simply isn’t strong enough to keep them together. So what keeps them from flying apart? They say it’s the gravitational force of “dark matter”—matter that we cannot see. Scientists come to the same conclusion about “dark energy.” They say this undetected energy force explains the increasing pace of the universe’s expansion.
The evidences add up to an intelligent, reasonable faith by which we can see with spiritual eyes what Jesus promised we will experience with our new bodies on a new earth for all eternity.
Two thousand years ago the writer of Hebrews said that Christ “sustains the universe by the mighty power of his command” (Hebrews 1:3). Today scientists confirm that, beyond our dimension, a greater source of energy exists that actually holds our physical universe together. They are also saying there is far more physical matter existing beyond our dimension than within it. They, of course, are confirming what Jesus and Scripture have been saying all along. Jesus has prepared a real place for us where he now exists, and we will one day experience with him.
What’s interesting is that physicists have even calculated the percentage of matter and energy in the unseen world as compared to the seen world:
The figure is an astounding 95 percent! Ordinary matter and energy make up a mere 5 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe. The vast majority of matter and energy in existence cannot be observed or detected with any instruments.7
Jesus told us there was an eternal place beyond time. He promised to bring God’s home to us, which is now invisible to us and outside our dimension. He demonstrated following his resurrection that he could pass from our visible dimension to a dimension invisible to us. Now the modern science of relativity, quantum mechanics, dark matter, dark energy, and multiple universes confirms the physical reality of the “unseen world”—a world Scripture has revealed to us all along.
Dinesh D’Souza draws this conclusion:
Modern physics has expanded our horizons and shown how life after death is possible within an existing framework of physical reality. The materialist objection has proven to be a dud; in fact, modern physics calls materialism itself into question. In a crucial area, and sometimes against the intentions of the scientists themselves, modern science has proven itself not the foe of religious believers, but an unexpected ally.8
There is compelling evidence for life after death. The Jesus of history lived and died and rose again, making a way for us to live after death. We all sense a living soul existing within us, just as has every society in the earth’s history. Our capacity of free will confirms the existence of an immaterial soul. Near-death experiences reveal that people experience consciousness and sensation outside their physical bodies. And modern physics shows how life beyond this dimension is in fact a physical reality.
These evidences add up to an intelligent, reasonable faith by which we can see with spiritual eyes what Jesus promised we will experience with our new bodies on a new earth for all eternity. Jesus said:
Don’t be troubled. You trust God, now trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s home, and I am going to prepare a place for you. If this were not so, I would tell you plainly. When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am (John 14:1-3).