I’m an Atheist, and I Believe in the Afterlife
There are more paths to life after death without God than with Him.
Satellites orbiting Earth and a sanctuary for chimpanzees called Chimp Haven have something surprising in common: They both reveal potential paths to the afterlife. More importantly, they illuminate those paths even in the absence of God.
The idea of an afterlife without a god may seem ludicrous, but several scientific and philosophical theories suggest that every human alive now, and every human who has ever lived, may find themselves enjoying immortality even without divine intervention.
How real is the universe?
The first potential path to the afterlife runs through Chimp Haven.
In 2003, the Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom had an ingenious insight — scientists will eventually be able to simulate human consciousness in a computer; moreover, researchers who create models of human behavior like to make those models as accurate as possible. It follows that when the capability arises, scientists will routinely simulate human consciousness in extremely realistic computer models.
This leads to a simple comparison — there is only one physical world, but scientists will eventually create millions of simulated worlds with trillions of simulated human minds. Basic probability suggests that those simulations have already begun, and we are much more likely to be simulated humans in one of those computer models than real humans in the physical world.
But what will the scientists do with all the conscious minds they create when their simulations finish running?
This is where Chimp Haven becomes important. In 2013, the National Institutes of Health began to phase out support for chimpanzee biomedical research. Once the biomedical experiments had ended, there remained the question of what to do with all the chimpanzees still living in labs. By far, the easiest and least expensive option would have been to humanely put each of the chimpanzees to sleep.
Fortunately, that notion was immediately rejected. Instead, the U.S. government created the Chimp Haven sanctuary. To compensate the chimpanzees who had been used in biomedical experiments against their will, they were rewarded with an ape version of paradise.
Analogously, if scientists simulate conscious minds that replicate physical human minds, it seems unlikely they will create those minds and then simply delete them. To do so would be like putting real humans to sleep after they had finished their part in a biomedical experiment.
The most obvious way to compensate a conscious mind forced to exist as an experiment in a computer simulation is to reward that mind with an idyllic life after it dies in the simulation. In other words, we should expect that any human mind created in a computer will be rewarded with a simulated paradise — call it Chip Haven.
If the probabilities are correct and everyone in this world is simulated, then life after death becomes extremely likely.
A big block of universe
Even if you think it doubtful that you are a simulated creation, don’t despair as there are other paths to the afterlife. The second route comes from considering satellites orbiting Earth.
When you were about three months old, something remarkable happened — you began to realize that even if you couldn’t see or touch an object, that didn’t mean the object no longer existed. Psychologists call this object permanence.
As adults we have no trouble believing that an object a hundred miles away exists, even if we can’t see or touch it. Interestingly, we have no corresponding understanding of temporal permanence. We believe that the present moment in time is real, but that the past has already occurred and cannot be changed, and the future has yet to occur but can never be reached.
We are almost certainly wrong.
Scientific understanding of time changed abruptly when Albert Einstein proposed his special and general theories of relativity. Although it seems contrary to our deepest intuition, time flows relatively faster or slower depending on how quickly you are moving and how much gravity you’re experiencing.
Consider satellites orbiting Earth at high velocity and low gravity. The computers on those satellites must use the equations in the special and general theories of relativity to update their onboard clocks — if they didn’t, those clocks would rapidly differ from clocks on the ground.
As Einstein so elegantly revealed, space and time are not separate measures of the universe, they are intertwined with each other to form spacetime. Just as we accept that objects distant from us in space exist even though we cannot see or touch them, the behavior of time suggests that objects distant from us in time also exist even though we cannot see or touch them.
Physicists call the idea that every moment in time exists simultaneously the block universe hypothesis. They call it that because the entirety of space and time — past, present, and future — exists, forever and unchanging, as one big four-dimensional spacetime block.
In a block universe there can be no such thing as “after.” Every second of your life exists in the block universe forever, which also means that your conscious mind exists forever.
There may be sections of the block where you are not present — sections where you are not yet born or sections where you have died — but the moments where you are alive and where your conscious mind exists will always be there. Even “after” you have died, you are still alive in the block universe.
We are all immortal because time does not erase the past, time simply catalogues it.
Einstein himself appears to have accepted the block universe hypothesis. Writing in 1955 to the widow of his close friend Michele Besso, Einstein penned the lines:
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.
No God means more possibilities
I’ve only touched on two potential paths to the afterlife, but there are several more. Scientists and philosophers have proposed a range of ways that every one of us may achieve a version of life after death, even without God. My book, Atheists in the Afterlife: Eight Paths to Life After Death Without God, discusses six other routes to the afterlife.
In this way, it is quite liberating to be an atheist. For those who believe in God, there exists only one path to the afterlife; for atheists, many such paths exist.
