Good question. I'm going to respond to this comment from your first attempt that the OP:
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.
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.
-
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, 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.
If I had a million dollars, I'd buy you a monkey.
Haven't you always wanted a monkey?
-- The Barenaked Ladies
™ Version 4.2
