"Life After Death"

Dinesh D’Souza is a Christian looking to make an argument for the existence of life after death. His Christian bias colors his research no less than Dawkins’ bias colors his, and we can forgive him of this. While he acknowledges that his arguments don’t support a strictly Judeo-Christian approach to spirituality and life after death, the final chapter is written precisely to persuade skeptics over to Christian faith.

Much of D’Souza’s argument revolves around a critique of reductionist materialism, the idea that (a) all that exists is matter, and (b) everything can be boiled down to physical phenomenon. Reductionist materialism, a philosophy that ran rampant within scientific circles and which lies at the heart of much atheist critique, is a philosophy that’s slowly unraveling and falling apart. Reductionist materialists leave no room for anything, or Anyone, beyond the physical, and the assumption that matter is all that exists can be neither confirmed nor denied, and it can’t be tested by the scientific method. The limits of the physical sciences tell us that if there is more to reality than that which meets our senses (and discoveries in physics seem to tell us this is the case), the scientific method is all but useless for detecting it. D’Souza addresses reductionist materialism again and again throughout his book, arguing against it in almost every chapter. He’s insistent that there’s reason for us to believe that reductionist materialism has it all wrong, that there is more to reality than physical phenomenon.

Data exists confronting the assumptions of reductionist materialism, data that supports “another world” beyond the world that we can taste, see, touch, smell and hear. Throughout several chapters, D’Souza brings evidence to the table: some (not all) Near Death Experiences, the universal belief in “another world” beyond ours, and recent discoveries in physics, neuroscience, and philosophy. The existence of morality—not a moral code but a sense of good and bad, of what IS and what OUGHT to be—doesn’t make sense to the reductionist materialists, but positing “another world” into the equation, a world of justice against which we measure our lives, DOES account for such morality. He argues that belief in God, an afterlife, and spiritual realms is justifiable in light of physics, neuroscience, Western philosophy, and morality. It makes sense of the data in a coherent manner. That belief is justifiable doesn’t mean that it’s right, but because of the widespread, global belief in spiritual things and immortality, the burden of proof remains on the handful of Western scientists possessed by their fundamentalist assumption of reductionist materialism who’re disagreeing with the rest of the world because of a different set of assumptions. Not only do reductionist materialists seem unable to rid the world of belief in the supernatural, their efforts have backfired and made room for the supernatural.

My major critique of the book lies in two chapters near the tail-end of the book. D’Souza argues that belief in an afterlife is both good for society and good for ourselves. It’s apparent why he brings such a discussion to the forefront: throughout the book he argues against New Atheists such as Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett (he considers two of them to be cherished friends), and one of the major thrusts of the New Atheists is the argument that religion and belief in the supernatural isn’t simply illogical but dangerous: “Look at all the evil that’s happened in light of religion!” D’Souza points out that the arguments of the New Atheists are unfounded, that much good has come from belief in the supernatural. This is all well and good, but when he starts advocating belief simply because it’s better for society and us than non-belief, he’s in error: the effects of a belief in life don’t prove a belief to be true, they just prove a belief to be “workable.” What matters is if a belief is TRUE, regardless of the effects of that belief in a person’s life. D’Souza makes good arguments against the New Atheist’s accusations, but the whole argument is an irrelevant sideshow to the issue, since even if religion (or atheism) has directly caused suffering, violence, etc., that’s no reflection on the truthfulness of the belief. The cause of evil is human nature and free will, regardless of beliefs or ideologies. Some beliefs may indeed act as springboards for evil, but again: that’s no reflection on the truthfulness. The issue isn’t “What’s best?” or “What works?” but “What’s TRUE?” I find all the arguments about which is better for the world, religion or atheism, to be tiring, nothing but a bunch of polemics and apologetics that don’t tell us anything about belief: if atheism causes evil, that doesn’t make it false, and if religion makes people better people, that doesn’t make it true.

His final chapter, written solely from a Christian point of view, is a defense of Christ’s resurrection along the lines of N.T. Wright’s argument in The Resurrection of the Son of God: the resurrection isn’t simply historically possible, it’s also historically plausible according to current historical methods. Alternative theories to explain what happened “back then” from scientific, psychological, or sociological phenomenon don’t make sense of the data in a coherent manner, but the presupposition that Christ DID die and DID rise from the grave makes sense of the historical data. The leap involved is an admittance that reductionist materialism may be wrong, and because that assumption lies at the heart of much scientific thought and practice, the traditional explanation, that Christ did die and rise from the grave, must be tossed out. The problem of the resurrection doesn’t lie in historical implausibility but in how it runs against such cherished scientific assumptions as reductionist materialism. Following his brief arguments for the historicity of Christ’s resurrection, the final chapter seems to plummet: the writing becomes sloppy and disconnected as he writes about Christian conceptions of the afterlife, heaven and hell.

One of my favorite quotes in the book comes from page 204: “Even within its acknowledged jurisdiction, science discovers not final, but only provisional truths, always subject to amendment as new evidence comes in. If we take as truth what science today holds to be true, we would do well to remember that a hundred years ago the advocates of science adopted precisely the same position, and yet virtually every scientific proposition of that era has been radically revised or replaced in the intervening decades. It is quite likely that many scientific truths of today will look quaint, if not ridiculous, a hundred years from now.” The scientific presuppositions and frameworks for understanding our world have been changing, but no one seems to notice or comprehend. All of physics has been turned on its head over the past few decades, but no one knows: high school physics text-books still teach old models and theories that have been revised or discarded altogether. Science has made room for the existence of God and spiritual realities, but no one’s really talking about it because it undermines reductionist materialism, which lies at the core of Western science.