Easter Sunday celebrates the raising of Jesus from the dead after his crucifixion. The occasion marks the promise of life after death for us and our loved ones.
That may seem unlikely from a scientific viewpoint. However, those who reject the idea of afterlife are, globally speaking, a clear minority. More than three quarters of the world’s population belong to four religions – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism – that believe in one or more of the following: heaven or paradise, reincarnation, or an immortal consciousness.
Are there grounds for an atheist to believe in an afterlife? Philosopher David Berman thinks so. The former Trinity College Dublin professor claims there is “evidence” for believing not only in reincarnation but also in the idea of a world beyond this one.
Berman is an international expert on the work of George Berkeley – the “good bishop” whose name was recently stripped from TCD’s main library over his link to slavery – and he has written on a wide range of topics from “the philosophy of coffee” to the history of atheism (although he describes himself as an agnostic). He has influenced many TCD graduates including Irish Times columnist Laura Kennedy who, in her book Some of Our Parts, hails Berman “for being the model of an individual in a world that pushes us to conform”. In his retirement, he has taken a closer interest in mortality – and is working on arguments for an afterlife that he hopes to turn into a book.
Speaking to the Unthinkable column, he explains that he is developing a “two world theory”, inspired by Plato and drawing upon the work of English philosophers HH Price (1899-1984) and John McTaggart (1866-1925). He has two main lines of attack. The first focuses on the “dream world” that our “dream selves” occupy at night. “I believe that dreams constitute another world, different from our material world, and that there is reason to believe this other world is the next world,” he says.
To support this view, he points to the way objects “which our dream selves are aware of in dreams” seem odd when we wake up but do not surprise us, or disconcert us, at the time. For example, he had a recent dream where he walked into his bedroom and saw that one of the walls was “a shallow earthy cave”. His dream self – let’s call him “Dream David” – “thought there was nothing odd about his bedroom having an earthy cave wall, which I remembered upon waking up – when I also wondered how I could have dreamed such an odd thing”.
Berman argues that “the best, if not the only, explanation” for Dream David’s lack of “surprise” was that encountering a cave in his bedroom was “the sort of thing which he is used to” or “normally happens in his experience”. It follows that Dream David “must be having more experience than I am aware of in my dreams; hence that [Dream David] has been living his life, even when I am not dreaming”.
Even if you accept Berman’s theory that “the dream self goes on with his dream life, even when the living person is not dreaming”, it does not follow that your dream self will survive the shutting down of your brain. There’s a further qualification: the dream self is not the same as the material self. “How would you feel if you knew that when you died, you would be no more but that your dream self would survive? Would that satisfy you? Would it lessen any fear or dread of death that you had?” he asks.
Here Berman turns to his second line of attack – a justification for believing “genuine reincarnation is true”. Berman draws on McTaggart’s exploration of “love at first sight”.
True love is normally reached between two people over a long period of time, says Berman, “but there are some very rare cases where it manifests straight away, and McTaggart holds that it lies in pre-existence. In short, that someone had gone through and experienced true love in the slow way in his relation with someone else in a previous life and that this was then activated in his later incarnation”.
Other cases of possible “pre-existence” are child prodigies or raw geniuses. Berman gives the example of Edgar Rice Burroughs who started writing in his late 30s, without any prior experience, and suddenly produced a slew of best-sellers including Tarzan. It seems a “miracle”, says Berman.
Could Burroughs have been the reincarnation of a previous, talented author? Fanciful as that may seem, “large parts of the world take reincarnation seriously”, says Berman.
Putting the best spin on his theory, Berman claims the study of dreams and the exploration of “pre-existence” together provide evidence of an afterlife. “I won’t say it’s decisive evidence,” says Berman, who, coincidentally, used to meet Eavan Boland regularly in library reading rooms when they were separately doing research in Dublin – the poet’s name recently replaced Berkeley’s on the TCD library. “If there is an afterlife, and if she is looking down, I think she will be quite proud.”
[ ‘Death is like going on the most wonderful holiday without the bother of packing’Opens in new window ]
Before taking my leave, Berman says philosophy may not be able to provide the ultimate answer – “I won’t say they will start naming streets after me.” Crucially, however, he says, “science has not disproved life after death”.
