Making sense of life--and death

Tal Bachman rashes with the Big Questions.

Uncle Tim's passing followed the recent passing of my Uncle Robbie. And just three years ago, my Uncle Gary was the first of the four Bachman brothers to pass. My dad—the eldest—is now the only son left of Charles and Nancy Bachman, my grandparents. And one day, Dad will pass, too, just as I will, and everyone reading this.

What exactly happens upon our death remains a mystery, at least for some of us. Devout theists and mystics feel certain we have spirits, and that they last forever. Most believe that upon our death, those spirits ascend to heaven (or maybe, descend to hell, or at least to some wait station). By contrast, strict materialists feel certain our death is the end of our consciousness. In their telling, we die and that's it. No more consciousness, and no afterlife. But some of us struggle to feel any certainty at all.

The truth is, I'm not sure where my uncles are right now. Or my grandparents. Or my great friend, Drew, who passed away fall of 2021, or anyone else who's passed on.

I say I'm not sure, and I'm not. At the same time, I find it difficult to believe their unique spirits—their unique selves—have completely ceased to exist. The miracle of life, of consciousness, is so immeasurably infinite and complex, that only the most narrow, arrogant, crabbed mind could dare deny the possibility that transcendent intention brought forth our existence. And if it did, then it seems improbable that death would truly be the end. Our lives seem too brief a time to justify the complex apparatus of creation. It's easy to suspect there's more going on.

A skeptic might respond that the inferences I'm drawing from human life would also apply with equal force to every living creature—snails and earthworms, wildebeests and cheetahs, grizzlies and cougars, minnows and whales. Do they have spirits, too, which live on after death? The implication of this question is: Humans are part of the animal kingdom as much as, say, field mice, so you can't believe in human immortality without believing in field mouse immortality—and that's ridiculous.

But maybe what's ridiculous is for any of us to presume to know what qualifies as "ridiculous" when it comes to this kind of stuff. The odds of life, consciousness, intelligence—let alone their vast variety of interdependent forms—even existing in the first place are so vanishingly minuscule, that I'm not sure how anything could be ruled out.

So my immediate answer to "So might field mice have immortal spirits, too?" is, "Maybe. Who knows?”

Another of those myriad things that we poor, puny humans simply can’t know; it isn’t given to us to know them. Which is where religious faith enters the picture. At least for those who appreciate its blessings, faith makes it possible to comfort ourselves with the belief that we can know. Or at least, will.

As Tal hints in his “skeptic” example above, without overtly mentioning the connection, it is purely a Left-atheist conceit (yes, they really do amount to the same thing; scratch any atheist, and you’ll almost always find a Leftist underneath) to reduce human beings to no more than animals, to insist that human intellectual drive, aspiration, and achievement is roughly on par with the grunting, rooting, and rutting of non-sentient beasts. Do those “skeptics” mean to seriously contend that Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony,  say, is of no more significance, in the grand scheme of things no more remarkable, than the daily routine of common field mice?

Oh wait, never mind; for the atheist, there IS no “grand scheme of things.” Sorry.

Despite a passing flirtation with it back in my own youth, symptomatic more of jejune rebellion than of reflection, I now see atheism as willful, blank stupidity. No, the existence of a supreme and benelovent Lord reining over all of His creation cannot be proven empirically. But then, neither can it be proven that God does NOT exist. Matters of faith are not subject to empirical proof; after all, that’s why it’s called faith. It’s the very definition of the word.

So to my way of thinking, atheism must necessarily also be a matter of faith, not empiricism. Atheists don’t know any more than I do whether we have immortal souls, whether we were created by a loving God in His own image, whether death truly is the final indignity—snuffing out all that we are, all that we know, all that we’ve experienced. As if those things, so incredibly rare throughout this incalculably vast universe of ours, bear no weightier import than snuffing out a candle—extinguishing forever the unique light of our lives, leaving nothing but darkness behind.

Atheism, like faith, is a choice—one chooses not to believe, just as another chooses TO believe. That being so, then, why would any sensible person choose atheism, to smugly reject that most fundamental and universal of human yearnings—the eternal quest for meaning in this brief earthly existence—as nothing more than ignorant superstition? Why would anyone willingly choose the path that offers no hope, no real future, rather than subsume their vanity and intellectual pride just that slight bit required to  believe that there really might be something greater awaiting us beyond this mortal coil?

YMMV, of course, but atheism seems to me to be the darkest, bleakest choice imaginable. And for what? Why choose atheism? For the atheist, there is no God waiting to congratulate him for his superior intellect, no Heaven to reward him in some non-existent afterlife. No redemption, no continuation, no eternity, just…nothing. As his loved ones pass away one by one, they will be lost to the atheist forever. His ego and nihilism will just have to get him by in this, the one and only life he’s going to get.

What a grim, joyless prospect. Thanks, but no thanks, guys.