The Afterlife

I took part in a discussion about the afterlife recently, and I had an observation on the matter that I think is worth repeating. The original question was whether or not animals experienced any form of afterlife. It was really just a question of personal beliefs, a poll of opinion I guess, since evidence really can't be brought to bear on the matter. So people were giving their personal feelings on the matter of animals in the afterlife, and, surprisingly to me, most people said yes, that animals went to heaven. Now, I think at this point it is important to note that Occam's Razor demands that the base assumption be that animals do not experience an afterlife, because there is no evidence in favor of that proposition.

One of the other posters posited that since animals are incapable of sin, they all go to heaven. I believe that the assumption was that since animals do not have free will, they cannot sin. But I think this idea needs to be examined more closely. It isn't simply a matter of possession of free will. While it is true that animals are entirely without a moral sense, it is not true that they are incapable of wrong actions. They don't know any better, but that doesn't make their actions any more right. Dogs kill children, bears kill offspring of other males to induce heat in females, lions routinely rape lionesses. These actions are reprehensible. Nature is heartbreakingly cruel. The fact that the animals don't know any better is immaterial to the fact that these actions are negative. They are entirely outside the human field of morality. To say that that fact warrants eternal reward for animals is patently absurd.

But what prompted my observation was the question of whether or not creatures like ringworms or amoebae go to heaven. While amoebae are not animals, it raises a very fertile point: what about the other kingdoms of life - plants, fungi, protists, and the two types of monera? What about viruses, which are not alive? Suppose we start with the position that animals, but no other kingdoms, go to heaven. This is problematic when we remember that animals were not always animals. They began as bacteria, and moved along the evolutionary line until they became the creatures that we recognize today. The first animals are thought to have been sponges. However, there was no single point at which you can look at a sponge and its immediate predecessor and say that one is an animal and one it not. The taxonomic distinctions made between organisms are artificial and to an extent arbitrary. So there is no one single point that you can say that the daughter organism goes to heaven but the parent organism does not. This leaves us with the position that all organisms go to heaven. But this position has a similar problem: where is the distinction between organism and non-organism? While science has very definite rules for what is alive and what is not, there was a point in the Earth's history where these distinctions would run into quite a bit of trouble. Life did not spontaneously come into being. The earliest life had itself evolved from earlier forms of self-replicating entities. It is thought that the first self-replicating molecules were analogues of the modern molecule RNA. Like the distinction between animals and other kingdoms, there is no single point along the evolutionary path as the molecules became more complex and gained new structures that we can say the entity is now alive, or at least no point where the addition of a new structure clearly indicates the presence of a soul. And if self-replicating molecules have a soul, then why not other molecules? If we are to take the animist view that spirits inhabit all matter, we are left with the problem that these molecules have no state comparable to life/death where we can say that their spirits have moved on to the next realm.

Now, if we take this line of questioning in the opposite direction, we arrive at humans, who are at the top of the evolutionary ladder (I find it rather anthropocentric to place ourselves at the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder and to consider ourselves the height of complexity. What is our reasoning in placing ourselves at the top? Why is there even a "top" at all?) Regardless, let us consider humans. Humans are pretty widely regarded as experiencing heaven, at least among those who believe in such a thing. But humans run into the same problem as any other organism I've discussed: when did they start going to heaven? Humans were not always as they are now - the evolved from "lower" organisms, the early hominids and pre-hominids moving towards the forms we see today. Again, there is no single point that you can look to and say, "This is where man first obtained a soul." Who was the first human to go to heaven? (If you say Abel, you lose.) Looking at it this way, there is no logical way to propose that humans experience an afterlife. I find that the more thought you put into this kind of stuff, the harder it is to believe.

Also, if you think about the universe for a while, the idea of an afterlife becomes a little silly. The universe is extremely old. Humans have only recently arrived on the scene. And the universe is immensely large. So if there is a heaven waiting for life to come along, it was sitting empty waiting for an immensely long time for life to come along. And of all the thing in the universe, the stars, the planets, the dark matter, the very tiny bit of the universe that life makes up gets a special place move on to. Even ignoring the rather problematic issue of extraterrestrials in the afterlife, that still leaves this place waiting for billions of years for the arrival of a very tiny speck of matter out of the entire universe. It all seems rather silly to me.