I read Soren Kierkegaard recently. That's all I wanted to say. I read Kierkegaard. I bet you haven't. The end.
Granted, I only read a few pages. It was a book called "Fear and Trembling," and it starts with Soren (I call him "Soren" now) arguing that the afterlife has to exist, because it's too terrifying to think it doesn't. He basically just kept saying that over and over. I thought it was that was an infuriatingly stupid argument, so I gave up on the whole book. Still, the fact remains that I have read some Kierkegaard.
Here's my take on that idea. It takes a while to get there, so stay with me.
I think human beings are born with essential needs that we inherit because they enabled us to survive in the "environment of evolutionary change." That's the "primitive" environment in which our species did most of its evolving -- not only physically, changing from a more chimpanzee-like form to the nearly hairless bipedal form we know and love, but also mentally and emotionally, the ways that we think and feel.
I think most of us accept the former, that our physical environment somehow led to us losing body hair and walking upright and etc. But the latter we often have no perspective on. We just assume that human beings' particular emotional needs and thought patterns are valid, and then try to bend our conceptions of the world to fit them. But in the end, the world doesn't give a crap how we want it to be. It is what it is.
I'll give you an example of what I mean. Before modern science, people naturally tended to think that everything around us was created by some sentient being -- sentient similar to the way we are. That's the construct we were used to seeing: If something happens, someone did it. We simply couldn't fathom any other method.
Science has given us another method to fathom. Increasingly, we're confronted with more and more plausible theories about how the universe was created by dispassionate and certainly non-sentient natural laws. Man was not created by some invisible fellow whipping up some dust or whatever -- man was created through many millennia of biological phenomena, which have at their root chemical phenomena. A few basic chemical reactions occurred to create the building blocks of life, and the molecules got increasingly complicated over billions of years, eventually joining forces with other molecules, and on and on until you get to the complex multicellular lions and humans and mongeese (mongooses?) and naked mole rats and etc.
Some people accept this but insist on keeping God in the machine. They'll say that maybe God helped DNA form, or that God sparked the Big Bang, or what have you. And they certainly could be right. But it seems increasingly unlikely -- every time science uncovers something new, people always decide that God fills in the gaps of what we don't know. And then we discover more, and God recedes into the gaps of that knowledge. And on and on. Eventually, you have to wonder: Why do we presume this "God" person is involved at all?
I grew up quite religious. But as I got older I increasingly saw God as something that I may want and even need, but, when I look at it all objectively, had to recognize just wasn't terribly plausible. I have a strong need to believe that there is some benevolent force watching over me and ensuring that I'll be OK. I have a strong need to believe that when I die, there is something else to experience, that all I have lived and felt and learned won't suddenly become dust.
But in the end, what do those strong needs matter? Why should the world care about and conform to my needs? A man in the middle of the desert desperately needs water, or he will die. That doesn't make a river spring up. Human needs do not make reality. It is only our supreme arrogance as a species that leads us to think that what we need has anything to do with what actually is.
We are but one species that arose out of chemical and biological processes from this particular planet. We thrived, and indeed took over entirely, because we have these large brains that are able to construct incredibly elaborate ideas and strategies out of what are, deep down, just the same motivations to survive and procreate that any other species has.
These drives aren't some sort of distant mystical thing driving our behavior behind the scenes. They take form in our emotions. The strong feelings we have for children, and our children in particular, motivate us to procreate. Failing that, there is always the emotional reward of sex, which means that even people who aren't that interested in kids end up procreating. Thus the species survives.
And the drive to survive takes form in a terrible fear of death. Without that fear, we might go through a rough patch and figure, "Well, might as well see if death is better." There would a lot more suicide. Add to the fear of death the pain that comes with hunger and thirst and asphyxiation and everything else that keeps us alive, and most of us have sufficient motivation to keep living.
Maybe our fear of death is actually a little too strong for our own good, because it also motivates our species to construct elaborate mythologies and rituals just to keep the fear of death at bay. Death isn't final, we tell ourselves. We go off to another world. We believe in this idea not because we have any evidence of it, but because, a la Kierkegaard, the alternative is too painful to bear.
I of course understand anyone who chooses to deny the reality of death by believing in an afterlife. I would prefer to believe in an afterlife, frankly - it would make me a lot happier. But I am unable to. Science seems so much more plausible to me.
To be clear, I'm not saying science explicitly denies the existence of the afterlife. But it does provide a way of thinking that is not informed by the biases of human emotional needs. Those emotional needs are themselves products of evolution, and the universe is under no obligation to conform to them. In my view, the afterlife is but one example of our human emotional needs distorting our view of reality.
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