Do you believe in the idea of an afterlife? Is there a part of your existence that keeps going when the body dies? How can we know?
It’s made much harder by the fact that I can’t see your soul. I can’t measure it with a tape measure or a thermometer.
How do we know what comes next after we die?
How can we even answer the question?
I have three answers… two of which are no use at all.
- If there is an afterlife, we will know how it works when we die. That’s not very helpful. That puts it in the “too late” category. If one of the religions was right and I believed a different one (or none of them), I’m almost certainly in huge trouble. Every major religion teaches that the way to a good next life is to follow the practices and beliefs of that religion. I could take a wild guess, but the odds are not in my favour.
- Someone else who is dead could tell us. Scratch that. Dead people don’t generally talk back to us. Yes, there are people that say they talk to the dead, but there’s little to no consistency to what they say is on the other side. On top of that, there’s no real way to prove that they are actually talking to a dead person. No one else can hear it and we have no idea what they ARE hearing. Again, not very helpful at all.
- The creator could tell us. Arguably the only one qualified to say what happens after we die is the one who is in charge of that system. Now that all hinges on whether there IS a creator and whether that creator has spoken, but if both those are true, then we can answer the question of what comes next.
Christians would of course argue that there is a creator who made us and that this God has spoken to us through the Bible which can prove that it is more than a man-made book. On that basis, we can know what comes next.
So do you think there is a creator? Did someone make you and me?
Has that creator spoken?