What do atheists think of death?

A common train of thought among some of the atheists I know seems to be that the root cause of religion is a fear of death. People generally want to believe that their minds don't just disappear after death and so are more likely to practice a religion that tells them what they want to hear. I have heard conversations between atheists and religious people that go something like this. Religious person: "well what do you think happens after you die"? Atheist: "Nothing, I'll just stop existing. That sucks, but since there's no evidence of the supernatural, that's the most logical outcome."My question to atheists is, assuming you're right and the universe is entirely governed by logic with no supernatural phenomena, why does it follow that when you die you will no longer exist? A counterexample would be that if the universe is sufficiently large or infinite (which is certainly possible according to what is known of current cosmology unless I am well off my mark), then assuming the laws of physics are roughly constant over large distances, it is inevitable that you also exist elsewhere. Then when you die you will still exist, just in a different location.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Changed topic title from "A question for atheists" to "What do atheists think of death?".

OK, your topic title is better than "A question". It's still pretty poor. How about something that actually describes the theme of the topic?Didn't Karl Marx call religion "The opiate of the masses"? In other words, it was something to dull the pain of life and give hope for a better afterlife. As such, the root cause of religion would not be the fear of death; rather it would be the desirable anticipation of death.My impression is that multiple universe considerations is rather a smokescreen, in the context of the topic as a whole.AdminnemooseusEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Changed the Marx quote from "The opiate of the people" to the probably more accurate "The opiate of the masses".

Hello Adminnemooseus. I would be glad to change the title to whatever you think appropriate. Is this something an admin has to do? Perhaps something like "What do atheists think of death"?As for the content perhaps I should rephrase. The topic I intended to address is "If you assume no supernatural influences, is it inevitable that when you die (pick a reasonable non-supernatural definition of 'you') you will cease to exist?" I think this question is interesting because the answer has religious implications, which are what I was trying to get at in my first paragraph. It seems to me that a desire to continue to exist drives a lot of people to believe in the supernatural. But the real content I wanted to address is in the second paragraph. If you don't think that topic is interesting, then feel free to not promote it.As I tried to get at in my first post, I do not think it is at all inevitable that a person will cease to exist when they die, even in the absence of supernatural influences. Only one sufficiently large universe and the laws of statistics are necessary for my counterexample ... having multiple universes would be quite optional.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Footnote from Adminnemooseus - Topic title changes are done via editing message 1. That can be done by the topic originator. In this case, I made the change.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Good question. I'm going to respond to this comment from your first attempt that the OP: It's not particularly common among the atheist comments I read, but I have seen it. Me, I don't agree with with it. When I ceased to be a fundamentalist evangelical Christian and became an atheist, it wasn't the fear of death that troubled me. I was deeply disturbed by two things: to a lesser extent, by the thought that Ino longer accepted an absolute standard for morality, and I wasn't too sure how to handle that. But the main concern that really bothered me was the thought that it was possible that all doesn't end well, that the wicked may get away with their wickedness and die peacefully in their sleep among their ill-gotten gains, that the good may live miserably their entire lives without getting a single break. I suspect that what makes people cling to their religions, even the irrational superstitious ones, are generally far more varied and complex than merely a fear of death.- I, too, think this is the more interesting question.No, I do not think that a disbelief in the supernatural automatically rules out things like ghosts, life after death, fairies, ESP, or anything else that we automatically link with the supernatural. In fact, plenty of science fiction has been written with these things in mind, trying to base them on new, as yet undiscovered science.It could very well be that our consciousness lives on after death in some manner, and perhaps all this occurs as a complex result of the laws of science that we haven't yet worked out, or due to laws whose discoveries still await us. Or maybe there is an entirely different set of laws that govern consciousness -- maybe their are two sets of laws, one that governs the natural world, and a different set that governs things like souls.Certainly, when one looks at the different cultural traditions, in each tradition ghosts, spirits, and souls seem to follow rules. When there are definite rules being followed, a regular and predictable pattern, then this lends itself to study with the scientific method. It is entirely possible for science to study such things and work out the "laws of spirit", as it were.The main reason I don't believe in the after life is that modern neural biology pretty much explains much of our consciousness, and there really doesn't seem to be much left for an autonomous, independent soul to do. To quote Laplace, I have no need for that hypothesis. Also, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of evidence for ghosts, spirits, souls, and an afterlife that can't be explained with ordinary psychology.So, no, I don't think that a rejection of the supernatural means to necessarily reject the concept of an afterlife. (I'll even go so far as to say that I've never understood what "supernatural" is even supposed to mean, or what it's suppose to include.)I think that it is important to note that the main "evidence" for an afterlife comes from various religious dogmas and conclusions based on reasoning that we now realize are irrational.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

fgarb, It doesn't. Any more than if a supernatural creator exists & the universe is illogical. Why must an afterlife exist because a creator does? A creator of the universe may be entirely unaware that life exists at all, let alone a wishfully thought of afterlife.The fact remains that there is no valid evidence of an afterlife. Therefore, we must put the notion on the "no evidence" shelf along with the fairies & unicorns & other stuff we'd like to have but have no evidence for.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

A technical point. Atheists are just people who don't believe in any Gods. That doesn't mean not believing in any supernatural phenomena. Buddhists, Animists and ancestor worshippers might be good examples of groups who may have no Gods, but may believe in things supernatural, including the existence of an eternal soul. I don't see how you could get a replica planet in a replica solar system without the universe being effectively infinite. A few trillion galaxies wouldn't do it.It's possible that in a multidimensional multi-verse, everything might have a replica or replicas elsewhere. But my replicas, if they exist, aren't me, so that doesn't mean "life after death".But my type of atheist doesn't count such things as existence in eternity or even Gods as impossibilities. It's just that belief in things for which there's no evidence is active, and non-belief in speculative suggestions for which there's no evidence is the sensible norm.Theists prove this by not believing in more than 99.9% of the Gods ever invented, and they usually don't believe in other things that, on the basis of evidence (meaning complete lack of it), are just as possible as Gods, like fairies.If we all walked around believing in things merely because they're not technically impossible, our brains couldn't contain the infinite number of concepts that fit that description, so the sensible policy seems to me to be confining belief to things for which there's positive evidence, and always remembering that belief is an active thing.Babies are atheists, and they don't believe in an afterlife, either.

That stands to reason. I probably was putting a bit too simply. Well, perhaps some of those things may be possible using as yet undiscovered science. However, I would argue that continuing to exist after death is inevitable under currently understood science as well if the universe is large enough. I think bluegenes understands what I'm getting at. Let me explain what I mean in more detail.The first question is how do you define yourself? Assuming no soul, a very restrictive definition would be the precise arrangement of molecules that make up your body, where the positions and kinetic energies are specified down to a very high degree of accuracy. By that definition, of course, I am not the same person from one key stroke to the next, but even with such a restrictive definition my argument should still hold. If you could somehow build that same collection of molecules with the same relative positions and energies somewhere else, that collection *would be you* by this definition. It would think it was you, and there would be no scientific way to distinguish it from you.Next, cosmology has not restricted the size of the universe with any certainty as far as I know. If the universe is extremely large (unimaginably larger than the visible universe), somewhere in it these molecules will form themselves into the proper arrangement to be *you*. This would even happen if the only way for it to occur was by the random motions of molecules bumping into each other, although it would be much more likely to develop through evolution on an earth-like planet somewhere else. The probability for this to happen is astronomically small, but not zero. So if the universe is infinite, there are then an infinite number of you's out there. I would not say any of these you's are living in an afterlife, but it is true that when the you on earth dies, you will still exist.Gotta go. I'll have to make the other replies later.

I once made an argument based on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to argue that you will never die.

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If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies

Don't forget the electric potentials of all those nerve cells preparing to fire at all sorts of interesting intervals. That's where the core information of the consciousness and self is to be found.Your question is surprisingly similar to one recently posted at the Skeptics forum -- here: Thought Experiments on Uniqueness of Consciousness - The Skeptics Society Forum (hmm... was that you?). To repeat what I said there: I would agree with the others here that atheism does not entail outright denial of afterlife or extra-sensory anything. It's just that there isn't any evidence that we can "get our hands on" to support these things or indicate their nature. As for your suggestion (similar to the one in the Skeptics thread) about the possibility of a complete "replica" of me existing somewhere else, I don't really see this as being at all relevant to any sort of afterlife issue that would be interesting, either to the faithful or to skeptics/atheists. Given the remoteness of any such scenario, what difference does it make to the "me" that is here now?Meanwhile, there is another sense of "survival of death"... Who says I no longer exist? There are all the patterns (and perturbations of patterns) that I have imposed on my surroundings and on other individuals, there are the genetic selections that I have passed on to my children, there are all the records of my own individual activity that continue to exist after my own active impulses stop and my body gets recycled. Sure, it's incomplete and imperfect, but there's something to it.People (well, not the population as a whole, but an increasing segment of the population) have actually been getting better and better at surviving death, in the sense that the individual is still uniquely recognizable to more people for longer periods after death, by virtue what he or she has left behind. With some effort, you can still get pretty well into the brains of Ovid or Aristotle; lots of musicians, despite all being different from each other, can evoke a vast assortment of long-dead composers as distinct individuals; and of course they can try, but rarely succeed, to replicate exactly what Elvis or Benny Goodman or Bix Biderbeck recorded onto vinyl decades ago. In my book, that's the sense of afterlife that matters. It's not a matter of just fame, it's a question of sustained impact and continued activity by "proxy".This strikes me as a lot more sensible than any promise of afterlife offered up by any variant of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim family of mythologies, and it has the potential for demanding a much stronger moral imperative. (Not that I personally spend all my time maximizing my own realization of that potential -- that's hard -- but I certainly do my best to do no wrong, at least as much so as any theist I know.)Of course, understanding the moral imperative of this view involves accepting the concept of expanding, as far as possible, one's sense of who (and what) is included in one's "home-group" (i.e. what range of interests/concerns does one need to take into account when choosing what action to take).The Hindu/Buddhist notions of reincarnation come close to this in their rationality, but they still end up with sort of a cop-out... You missed hitting the mark this time around? Well, just keep going, your next cycle might be relatively uncomfortable (maybe not), but in any case, you'll probably break out of the loop one of these times, or maybe not... I think it is interesting that reincarnation is the one afterlife scenario I know of where there have been plausible attempts to cite positive evidence, and this is worth more careful attention.

(1) I don't know, and I don't believe for a second that anyone else in the world knows either.(2)What do I think happens to my computer after I turn it off? It stops functioning.(3) Coming up with wistful imaginary scenarios of the afterlife is as useful as playing a video game. Sometimes it's entertaining, but for some people it's downright addicting.

All that the theory that there is another you somewhere out there if space is infinite says is that if space is infinite, there is a probability that in some distant part of the universe, evolution has occurred in the exact same way, down to the last molecule, to produce an exact copy of you.It doesn't mean that that other being is you, it just means that you have some twin out there that looks, behaves, and feels exactly like you do. This is not some scientific phenomenon, but just an exercise in probability. Basically, in an infinite probability space, all possible outcomes must occur over a sufficiently large area or length of time.So if you die, you die, it's not as if you exist somewhere else. Another copy of you exists somewhere else, but you, as yourself, cease to exist. Your argument is like saying that if one twin in a identical pair dies, he or she isn't really dead because the other twin is still alive.

Agreed. I often use "atheist" to mean someone who disbelieves in supernatural phenomena when I really shouldn't. Is there a better term for this? Why aren't your replicas you? If you take my example, where the replicas have a chemical structure where each molecule is arranged with identical position and momentum to yours (down to the limitations imposed by quantum uncertainty), what scientific test could possibly distinguish it from you? I don't believe that this scenario is true. I don't believe that it isn't true either. I found this concept interesting, so I brought it up. Hopefully I won't overflow any brains.

I would very much like to see this. Perhaps you could start or reanimate a thread?

Assuming the positions and momenta of the particles are set up in an identical manner, what you describe will follow, as will all other electromagnetic phenomena. Nope, never been to that forum. As to the quote you pasted, I am afraid I don't know enough biology/chemistry to agree or disagree. If by remote you mean that the replica would be unimaginably far away and have no chance of interacting with you then I agree. If by remote you mean that it is unlikely that a replica would exist then I disagree. It all depends on how large the universe is. In a large enough universe the replica must exist. Since I don't have the knowledge to calculate the probability that the universe has a given size (nor does anyone, I think), I see no reason to assume this scenario is far fetched. As for why it should matter to you, I can't say. There is one particular atheist I have talked to in real life who was convinced that when he died, there would be no more "him" anywhere. He found this scenario interesting. For my part, I think it would be awesome if there were other me's out there, regardless of whether I could interact with them. Perhaps that's just my own arrogance talking. As for the last several paragraphs of your post, I agree with what you say here.