Secular immortality

SECULAR IMMORTALITY: You would think that if God does not exist, as atheists argue, there is no hope for life after death. But that is not necessarily so, says Jim Holt (New York Times Magazine, July 29). Plato believed that though the body as physical reality is perishable, it will be survived by the soul, which is imperishable.

William James speculated that our brains don't necessarily produce our mental life but rather transmit it from a transcendent "mother sea" of consciousness which lives on beyond our lives. In Immortality Defended, cosmologist John Leslie argues that our life patterns are part of an "existentially unified" cosmos that will live on after our lives. And the late philosopher Robert Nozick speculated that a person's dying energy could bubble into a new Universe made in that person's image. His suggestion: first imagine what form of immortality would be most desirable, then live that life in the present as though it were already a reality.

COPYRIGHT 2007 The Christian Century Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning