Do athiests believe in life after death? How do they justify it?

I’m an atheist (sp) as well. Do I believe in life after death? No. Why? There is no evidence to support such a thing.

For starters, what could possibly be the “me” that would continue to exist after my death?

I can’t help you. I look at it this way. In order to “believe” in something, I need reproducible evidence that it exists. No one has ever shown me any kind of evidence at all that supports the hypothesis of some kind of continued, bodiless existence, so I figure death is the end.

I would love to believe in life after death, angels, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, leprechauns, unicorns and Peace on Earth. That’s just the short list.

No, I don’t believe in any of it.

I don’t know what happens after death. It doesn’t matter to me.

No. No evidence for it whatsoever. Our minds are in our brains.

Though it sure would be cool if a superadvanced alien civilization was recording all conscious thought on Earth and making soul-copies of dead people to inhabit an afterlife computer or something.

No, for the obvious reasons: What is existing after our brains die? If the afterlife isn’t a physical place, where is it located?

This is why I asked the question. I can’t help but believe that our energy/essence/consciousness or whatever you want to call it – our soul – continues to exist. Whether we float around, haunting old houses, or are reborn into a whole different body and different life, is debatable. I do not believe in God – the magic guy in the sky that controls everything, so just wondering if athiesm = no belief in any afterlife, or if there are others who can ponder on an afterlife without religion coming into it.

Seems to me that it comes down to the question @tom_g asks: “What could possibly be the “me” that would continue to exist after my death?”. If I take “me” to be this bag of skin and all the goo in it, or the thoughts and stories spun by these neurons, then I’d say death is pretty much the end of that. But that’s a very narrow and rather arbitrary view of “me”.

I don’t believe that there’s “something else” in me—an essence—that might live on, but neither do I accept that I ever really began or ended at this skin barrier. I think life and death are opposites only when considered from that narrow perspective of what comprises “me”.

@Skaggfacemutt We are a pretty self-centered species. I think some people just can’t understand a universe they aren’t a part of. It is a scary thought: realizing you’re here and alive, with your own seemingly unique personality. It’s easy to think of ourselves as individuals, and it’s also easy to think of ourselves as spreading bacteria on a rock.

It’s perspective. Everyone doesn’t feel that special “spirit” that makes them feel completely unique.

I believe it’s possible to build a computer with a computer program inside of it that is as conscious as a human being.

If this is the case, then the question in terms of our own consciousness would be, how does your consciousness transfer from your brain into another computer? If you destroy a computer, the programs inside the computer do not live on… unless they are transferred to another computer.

My point is that I don’t think an afterlife is impossible, I just don’t see any transfer mechanism.

I do not know what “athiests” are. Care to elaborate?

@Qingu To use your metaphor, I think we have a “chip” that holds our personality and consciousness, that isn’t physically tied to the computer itself, and does not get destroyed when the rest of the computer gets destroyed. This “chip” just hangs out as a chip, or gets put into another computer. Of course, all of the memory on the original computer is gone, so if we are reborn, we start all over again as far as memories and knowledge, but would still be “me.” Kind of like waking up with amnesia, in a different body.

@Skaggfacemutt – Are you proposing that the “chip” applies to humans? Is it just a feeling you have, or are you basing this on some evidence?

It would seem that this falls apart as soon as you look at what happens to the “self” when we experience a brain injury, mental illness, take drugs, or develop Alzheimer’s.

You can believe whatever you want. You are an atheist, you are not dictated to by some religion. Nothing wrong with believing the soul goes on, especially if it gives you comfort or makes sense to you. I don’t think you need to overanalyze it. There are religions that believe in reincarnation that don’t believe in God.

@ragingloli
I was just wondering that as well. I have seen them being mentioned a lot lately on fluther. Must be some new important phenomenon.

@tom_g Just a feeling – an instinct or maybe just a hope. The chip applies to the part of us that is “us”, not the body or brain. The consciousness, the personality. As far as the deterioration of self when the brain is injured, that would be like putting the chip in a damaged computer. It still wouldn’t work right.

I know my thinking is very abstract. Actually, my beliefs are very abstract, and that is why I can’t really express them very well.

But the chip is hardware. The “us” that you are talking about would be a program running on the chip. Since we have already stipulated that the whole brain is the chip, I’m not sure why you need another chip…

Ha! That is why I can’t seem to communicate my thoughts on it. Maybe a better term would be an indestructable wireless router or file server.

Getting away from the computer metaphor, the point is that I think the part of us that makes us who we are, is separate from the body and brain and therefore does not deteriorate when the body and brain does.

Weird, huh!

Strange. Does this just apply to humans? What about other animals? And at what stage of “I” or “me” gets stamped into the nonphysical “me”?

Good question. I guess my idea is that as long as we are alive, we are limited to accessing only the experiences we have had in this body, but afterwards we have access to all of our existence’s experiences.

This is mind-boggling enough without going into animals.

Maybe I am just trying to justify not wanting to believe that I am going to be dead and gone someday, and never exist again.

@Skaggfacemutt: “Maybe I am just trying to justify not wanting to believe that I am going to be dead and gone someday, and never exist again.”

That’s reasonable and very common. I’m one of those rare atheists who has a real difficult time with my death and my children’s death. I just can’t see any way to go from what we know about the brain to some kind of existence following the cessation of our existence.

I do not think there is anything about our conscious experience that comes from something non-physical.

We can tell from neuroscience experiments that there are parts of our brain responsible for feeling an ego or identity, and there states that our brain can be in that are responsible for being awake/alert/perceiving rather than asleep or unconscious or sedated.

If we know that the brain can and does support those things, I don’t see any reason to believe something outside of the brain is somehow also doing that but only after we die.

You didn’t ask about this so I hope you don’t mind me going on a little bit more about death. I think the idea of death is scary, but the experience of it probably isn’t so bad. In my meditation class one day, the teacher asked us to meditate with the thought that each breath we exhaled was the very last one. When he described the exercise, I thought it was stupid and would cause me unnecessary anxiety, with all that imagining the impending end.

I was surprised to find that it was a huge relief. When your last breath comes, that’s it. There is nothing you can do about it, so there’s nothing you should be doing. You can just relax.

@nikipedia No, please feel free to expound all you want. I am really taking in all of these responses, and I am finding that they are helping me form a less muddled idea of death and mortality.

I’m an agnostic fence sitter with a sore bum & as such I feel it necessary to go rub some ointment across my buttocks, so if you’ll excuse me…...

As a strong atheist (I can bench 9001 copies of Dawkins’ The God Delusion), I strongly believe that there is no afterlife and we all just take one permanent nap. The idea of an afterlife does not appeal to me at all because it can easily be boring within a year or so.
Reincarnation does not make sense to me either.

I personally really don’t want to die. I don’t want my human and aminal friends and loved ones to die either.

I want to stick around and see what happens, you know?

I don’t think it makes any more sense than asking if there is life before birth.

@flutherother Well, I do always say it seems like children under the age of 5 are trying to go back. They try to stick keys in electrical sockets, and jump into pools, and a whole bunch of suicidal things.

@JLeslie What is interesting about very young kids is how little awareness they have of time. They live almost entirely in the moment. They have no proper conception of death. It’s surprising how many of them make it to adulthood.

I’m an atheist, but I don’t really have a stance on life after death. No one can be sure, so I just leave it at “maybe”.

I am an atheist and I believe in life after death through the process of mind uploading where a beings consiousness is transferred into an unimaginabley powefrul computer where they are able to interact with other beings in a virtual reality or be transferred back into a vat grown blank. Of course the technology doesn’t exist at the moment but you can bet as it does some religious nutter will use it to create hell.

Life is energy. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; it can only change form. When you die your energy of life changes to potential energy as you decay. Various parts may become heat or food for lower life forms which may then go up the food chain changing form. You may be part of a plant or animal. Or remain potential waiting to happen. Is that life after death? I think so.

@Sunny2, I think the problem is that there is no such thing as “energy of life.”

There is a molecule, ATP, that your body uses as a sort of currency for distributing energy throughout itself. If there is such a thing as “energy of life,” it’s ATP. This molecule becomes part of other plants and animals that live off your remains.

But “you” are not your ATP, anymore than a computer program is a mass of silicon and plastic.

Wow, somebody outside of me finally touched on this point. Actually there is a growing philosophical movement among scientists to present the secular case for survival of consciousness. Michael Roll is just one of a growing amount of atheists who have become acceptable to the existence of an ‘afterlife’. I think that this will be the next fronteir in science, the survival of consciousness. Actually I have many links about this topic, but that site that I’ve linked to is a very good one.

I don’t, there is no evidence, anyone can make a claim about anything without backing it up. Making up something and putting effort into believing it is called faith. A funny concept really.

Yes. We call it marriage and slowly wait for Death’s cold embrace.

except for me. i loves my @jonsblond

Life, as we know it, exists in the physical universe. Every form begins from an existing life form, develops by consuming nonliving substances, matures and reproduces if it is lucky. Some forms of life are sentient, and the information that they accumulate (whether or not it is accurate) may be passed on to others of their kind. The question of life after death is really one of whether an individual’s collective information, the self, can somehow continue without life as I have described it.

I doubt that my consciousness can continue with my persona intact after my physical body no longer functions. While I am not able to accept that a creator of our universe exists in a physical sense, when I consider the likely chain of events that gave rise to sentient beings, however, I find that I am less able to accept that it is merely a fortuitous accident. My tentative conclusion is that a Spirit of Creation likely exists, and I am comfortable calling this creator God.

I imagine that a Spiritual Universe encompasses known and unknown reality, guiding the assembly of living and nonliving material objects. Plants, and animals without the capability for sentience, have only the “will” that their physical nature presents. We and some other nonhuman species, on the other hand, have a mental “will” that enables us to make moral and ethical decisions. We also have the physical “will” that all life possesses.

I posit that a spiritual “will” emerges from the realization that everything is connected. I see a principle at work that seeks to establish an interrelationship between a variety of life forms. For those without consciousness, their natural inclinations establish either a harmonious relationship with other life forms that permits their species to continue or they become extinct. Our mental “will” provides an opportunity to choose to seek harmonious relationships or give in to impulses arising from our physical nature. Seeking harmony, I believe that we align our spiritual “will” with the Spirit of Creation. Having achieved such an alignment, at the end of our physical existence our spiritual “will” may become one with God.

@Qingu I didn’t say that that there is energy of life. I think life is energy. Physiologically, I don’t know exactly how it works, but what dies is energy. It’s what makes the body work. I’m sure there are more exact terms for the chemical/physical pulses that jump synapses, etc., but I don’t know them and will leave them with the scientists. And unless the physical laws about energy have changed since I was in school (a possibility), I like my theory. Feel free to educate me further..

Some fellow fluther recently wrote of being an atheist yet believing in the soul, I won’t name the name. You could find it easily enough I suppose.
That simple statement was one of the more thought-provoking things I’ve read in a long time.

To me the most fascinating thing about that is that it’s no more radical than imagining that we evolved into the humans we are from a bunch of stardust, which most all of us take for granted. We simply also have this component that isn’t measurable with our current instrumentation. There is no God/Goddess presumed in the whole thing.

No, there isn’t any evidence to support it.
Death is final.

I don;t think that being an atheist should have any bearing on whether you do believe in an afterlife or a soul.
Being an atheist means you don’t believe in god, not the power of whatever makes each of us, ourselves.

@Sunny2, I disagree that life is equivalent to energy. Life is a way of organizing and using energy.

I think it’s very appropriate that living things are called organisms. It’s the structure, the organization of matter and energy, that define the existence of life, not the matter and energy itself. In fact, if you apply to much energy to life (for example, thermal energy), you kill it by destroying the organization.

Thank you, @zadeem . My feeling exactly.

I’m agnostic, so I’m on the fence, but I would imagine that most, if not all, people fear death to the extent that death is the end of our lives. Some people handle it better than others. One can be an atheist or agnostic, and still wish or hope for an afterlife. Whether you believe that there is one is a different matter. I would like for there to be an afterlife for several reasons, but rationally, I can’t justify the existence of one.

Interesting this topic came up today, because there’s a good online article just published that touches on this exact subject. I recommend reading this. I love (and agree!) with what Stephen Cave has to say about religion: “Religion is supposed to deliver immortality. That’s what it’s for.” One can be moral and have convictions about how people are supposed to behave without the need for a belief in immortality or organized religion. From the earliest times, religion has always been centered on death and an afterlife, and a celebration/reflection on the unknown, which is exactly what death is: the Great Unknown. (Even ordained ministers knew this: the noted minister Henry Ward Beecher’s last words supposedly were “Now comes the mystery.”)

I do agree with @Sunny2 that life is energy. Whether our consciousness or soul survives is debatable; but the energy that comprises our bodies returns in other ways. The traditional Yorkshire song On Ilkla Moor Baht ‘at is a great lyrical expression of this view.

@Qingu Now I’m curious. What would you call the “spark” of life? Have you watched someone in their final moment of life? It’s possible we are circling around two different definitions or concepts.

Consciousness?

@Qingu But someone who is unconscious is still ‘alive’. The spark is still there, only not available.

Then brain activity? There’s something there when you’re dreaming, too.

@Sunny2, I have to say that I’m glad the doctors in the hospital I was in were able to realize that! ;O)