It is difficult to argue with the world's best-recognized cosmological scientist, Stephen Hawking, a man who has lived with death for 49 years, when he tells The Guardian: "There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark." (15 May 2011) It's too personal with him. But we might ask why do other intelligent people believe the opposite -- that physical death does not end all?
American commentator Dinesh D'Souza suggests a few such believers in his book Life After Death: The Evidence (Regnery 2009), as do Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard and myself, in The Spiritual Brain (Harper One, 2007).
First, most people who have ever lived have assumed that there is immortality in some form. Neanderthals buried their dead seventy thousand years ago with tools, apparently for use in another world. Many were placed in a fetal position, suggesting that they awaited rebirth (Spiritual Brain, p. 27). And most people have not assumed that we survive death because they are "afraid of the dark," as Hawking supposes. On the contrary, the oldest beliefs usually include ancestor worship, which includes propitiating the continuing spirits of unpleasant ancestors for fear they will otherwise harm us. Or, as Beauregard and I put it, in such a society the problem isn't that everyone dies, but that no one does. (p. 48)
So is it wish fulfilment? Hardly, because most people who expect to survive death also fear divine punishment or cosmic consequences for unrepented sin. Fear then? No, not, for instance, among the ancient Greek philosophers who repudiated "the gods" but assumed immortality as a fact. Similarly, the Buddhists' law of karma (what goes around comes around) appoints the gods as divine helpers to the faithful, not creators or governors of karma. Even new atheists believe, in a sense. As d'Souza has observed,"new atheism" (modern atheistic materialism) makes immortality untenable by definition - except in its most vulgar forms (transhumanism, for example, where we are transformed through genetic engineering miracles or get uploaded into computer Sims).
Given the ubiquity of belief, let's look at some of the better traditional arguments for immortality:
What about the claim that "science shows life after death can't be true!" Where science has actually shown things, rather than advancing speculations well ahead of facts - as increasing numbers of cosmologists do - what has it shown? A strange and wonderful world that no human eye could perceive, unaided. Those who insist that science makes immortality untenable (except on materialist terms) could usefully go back to Lord Kelvin's 1900 address, when he famously complained about two little dark clouds on the horizon of a completed physics, clouds soon to be blown away. The pesky clouds were, as it turned out, quantum mechanics and relativity.
At the end of the day, death is still the "undiscovered country," but the hints and glimpses of the other shore are good cause to accept it as a reality.