Opinatio

Recently Andrew Sullivan collected at The Dish a number of responses to his question: What do atheists think about death? It’s been interesting to read the thoughtful replies, which run the gamut from “Not much” to “Terrified, but whataya gonna do?”.

I’ve been an atheist since before I had to shave, but it’s always bothered me that believers seem to think that death is the great fly in atheists’ ointment (that’s one troubling image). I beg to differ. If anything, death is the fly in anybody’s ointment because there is no getting around the human tendency to question and doubt. I know of no honest Christian who has been completely free of doubt, brought on by both the trivial and the profound. Mother Theresa famously suffered from it for long periods of her life. My own mother, as devout as a Catholic can be, has moved in and out of deep faith many times, more often than not because of her view of death. Where there’s doubt, there’s fear. It’s there in the human genome.

Sullivan does not appear, in his various writings on all this, to admit that he could be wrong about the glory of Christ’s love, so I detect a certain pity in his tone when he asks us non-believers how we’ll face the end. In an online debate with Sam Harris, I believe, a few years ago, he reminded Harris that we’re all going to die eventually, and without belief an atheist’s search for salvation in the truth derived through science would leave him high and dry. “What will save you then?” he asked, which is nothing but a stark expression of fear, the fear of annihilation.

Harris’s answer isn’t recorded, but like most of the atheists writing in at The Dish, I would say, “Nothing.” There’s nothing to be done. If consciousness ends, then there is nothing but nothing, and that’s nothing to be afraid of, as Julian Barnes might put it.

We atheists always raise the point, in response to these questions, that there was nothing before we came into the world and it wasn’t so bad. We expect to return to that level of awareness when our brains are no longer oxygenated. As impossible as it is to imagine nothingness, eternity is cut from the same inconceivable cloth. In fact, if eternity is the absence of time, as it must be, there can be no perception of reality or being in it. The only reality we know is that of inhabiting a body and moving from birth to death through time, so to be transformed into a “soul” detached from time is to become nothing we can imagine or identify with. If we attach to it our living personality, it must perceive itself to be somewhere and to be experiencing something. But experience is tied to time, and time doesn’t exist in eternity. Checkmate.

For a year or so I’ve been having this very conversation with an old friend of mine, who is an evangelical Christian. We’re never going to understand each other, but I’m always stunned when he answers a philosophical question by quoting the Bible. I respond that the Bible is man’s work, and no living man has ever known what comes after death. He says, No, it’s God’s work, and God promises eternal life to the faithful. Naturally, I think he’s deluding himself and he thinks I’m willfully refusing to see what’s clear to him. On that front, I guess he has a better fate than I do, since if he’s wrong he’ll experience nothing and if I’m wrong I’ll be tormented forever in God’s eternal barbecue.

I understand the desire for eternal life. I can’t picture it, but I understand it. The sad truth, I’m afraid, is that wishing doesn’t make it so, and neither does believing.