Month: May 2024

Life, Death and Consciousness

The post explores explanations for our complex universe, body, consciousness, and free will. It compares materialism and biocentrism, touching on consciousness, multiverse, and freewill. The author rejects the deterministic nature of materialism and embraces the spiritual dimension, referencing the Bible’s distinction between body, soul, and spirit. Jesus’ sacrifice offers hope for an eternal, heavenly existence.

What explains our experience of a complex and vast universe? What explains our complex body and the experience of being self-aware and having a free-will? Many religious, philosophical and scientific explanations have been advanced over the centuries. Do they work, do they have proof, and how did we arrive at these ideas?

The current scientific orthodoxy has a certain philosophical point of view. Materialism (not to be confused with the lust for money and property) is a philosophical point of view that says only the observable is real. Ironically, observation makes this philosophy doubtful.

One area of struggle for materialism is our consciousness. We can observe brain activity and even artificially create certain experiences within the brain, but the theory fails to explain our ability to choose in a satisfactory manner and seems somewhat desperate in its attempts to explain away Near-Death Experiences.

A more fringy and somewhat pseudo-scientific philosophy that has got a little attention is something called biocentrism. My take on what little I know about biocentrism is that it is trying to take some ideas (true or not) from the current mainstream of science and propose a largely unprovable theory of consciousness. I am interested, as well, as to how observable and tested ideas from science come into contact with information that we have by revelation from God. Consciousness obviously plays into the topic of this blog.

Biocentrism asserts that our consciousness is actually the energy within the brain. This is subtle difference from mainstream science which says that our consciousness is an illusion created by the interaction of our brain cells which is both chemical and electrical.

Where biocentrism rolls into the slightly more bizarre is how it uses the idea of a multiverse, which is strictly the desperate idea of theoretical physics to explain how we can have a fine-tuned universe that supports life. There isn’t great or any (to my knowledge) evidence for the multi-verse; especially not the version utilized by biocentrism. Their use of the multiverse is that we exist simultaneously in an infinite number of universes playing out an infinite number of choices at once. That idea tries to solve the freewill issue. We actually are not free, we are just playing out one set of possible circumstances. The odd conclusion is that since we may die in one universe, but death is an illusion since we must still live in others. The only thing unifying the multiple versions of ourselves is our brain energy. If we can train our brain energy to be more aware, we transcend the perceived problem of death.

Call me skeptical. I reject the idea that our choices are simply the product of inevitable brain chemistry. I also reject the idea that we are only an evolutionary product of the laws of nature. Getting at the true nature of what we are is hard if not impossible for scientific inquiry. At some point, we must be told what we are by someone who transcends creation–the Creator Himself.

The Bible speaks of our Earthly body, our Heavenly body (1 Corinthians 15:40, 2 Corinthians 5:1), our soul and our spirit. See https://afterdeathsite.com/2024/03/26/your-body-soul-and-spirit/ I think the Bible comes close to some of the ideas above, but remains significantly different. Our consciousness is not brain chemistry exactly. Our Spirit creates the consciousness which interfaces with the brain as chemistry and energy. Our Spirit is not limited to this universe, but is connected to it for now.

Death is a real thing, not an illusion. It is the consequence of being a sinful being that has rebelled and diverged from how God created us. That said, a human, is an eternal and potentially multi-dimensional thing. We are where God put us now, but we are created to be an eternal creature. Our life is not playing out in a different fashion in another universe, but we can have an existence in another universe. Which “universe” depends on our interaction with God, who wants us to have something good. If God can connect us by faith to Jesus, then our universe will be Heaven and eventually also a rehabilitated version of this universe.

Jesus’ death and resurrection were performed to give us that inheritance after death. Our body and spirit will separate but our soul will engage with another body in Heaven (probably another not a parallel universe). That is what completes the explanation of what we are, and that is a hope that we all can hang on to.

Does Life After Death Have Proof?

The only undeniable proof of life after death is experiencing it. Belief in God and the Bible’s promises is crucial. Jesus’ miracles and resurrection offer insight into the afterlife. Near Death Experiences (NDEs) provide further evidence. Denying the existence of an afterlife due to lack of proof is self-deception and disregards the love of the Creator.

In the end, the only thing that will constitute seamless proof of life after death proof is experiencing it yourself. Once that happens, you had better hope that it is positive life after death because there probably isn’t a way to change course. Promises made in the Bible, experiences documented in the Bible, and more recent Near Death Experiences constitute the proof that you can have. God has put a premium on having faith. In this instance faith means, confidence that He exists (see my last blog entry), confidence that what the Bible records about Jesus actually happened, and confidence that God can and will deliver on His promises. Faith is confidence in something you cannot see.

What is your default belief about life after death and why? Some think it to be more intelligent and educated to only believe something they can experience first. To me that seems like a dangerous position, and I doubt that you follow it consistently. Must you see germs to believe in their existence? I think not. Must you die to believe it will happen to you? We need the experiences of others and sometimes revelation from God to fully understand what we are, what will happen to us, and what (if anything) exists beyond death.

Jesus demonstrated that He was not just an ordinary being. He did it through miracles and even bringing back people from the dead. People saw these things and were profoundly changed. Jesus gave a couple of pieces of insight into life after death to be noted here.

13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man

John 3:13 (ESV)

You may suspicious of someone who claims sole authority over the topic of the existence of Heaven, but Jesus wasn’t just some crazy person without evidence of His claims. He also said,

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

John 14:1-3 (ESV)

His testimony is that there is eternal life with God after death. He states that if this life is all we get, He would have said so. Trust Him or not.

Then there is Jesus’ own experience. To win a favorable outcome for us after death, Jesus had to fulfill some legal requirements. We are sinners. To deserve a place in Heaven on our own merits we would have to be sinless. The Bible’s testimony is that the default outcome for a human being upon death is bad–very bad. Jesus’ came so that there would be one route to something much better. To fulfill the “legal requirements” Jesus had to be human, live a sinless life, and pay for an already accumulated sentence on human sin. That included experiencing being damned while hanging on a cross and a physical death. His death was guaranteed and certified by professional executioners and was more than obvious to observers. Yet in three days He rose from the dead and was observed by over 500 people.

If that is not enough, then you must deal with the experiences of now thousands of people who have been clinically dead, experienced an out-of-body experience and then were revived. Recent studies have shown that our brain has a storm of activity right before it has none. It is tempting to attribute NDE’s to that storm and claim that they are just an illusion created by that storm. I would advance a different theory. That the “storm” is our soul separating from our brain. Not unlike the arcing seen when slowly pulling out an electrical plug. The storm is not the creator of the out-of-body experience.

Near Death Experiences include both Heaven and Sheolhttps://afterdeathsite.com/2021/08/17/examining-near-death-experiences/ , https://afterdeathsite.com/2023/11/14/how-is-sheol-different-than-hell/

Remaining confident that death is the end because there is no “proof” is a form of self-deception in my opinion. If someone doesn’t want God to exist, doesn’t want dependency on Jesus, doesn’t want judgment on sin, doesn’t want to change their worldview, they can tell themselves that proof for eternal life is not ironclad. They can also ignore the giant holes in the proof of their worldview. That will be throwing away the love of their Creator and a tremendous existence.