Afterlife without God

 

Afterlife without God

“Such is the nature of these things. Now when the dead have come to the place where each is led by his genius, first they are judged and sentenced, as they have lived well and piously, or not. And those who are found to have lived neither well nor ill, go to the Acheron and, embarking upon vessels provided for them, arrive in them at the lake; there they dwell and are purified, and if they have done any wrong they are absolved by paying the penalty for their wrong doings, and for their good deeds they receive rewards, each according to his merits. But those who appear to be incurable, on account of the greatness of their wrongdoings, because they have committed many great deeds of sacrilege, or wicked and abominable murders, or any other such crimes, are cast by their fitting destiny into Tartarus, whence they never emerge. Those, however, who are curable, but are found to have committed great sins — who have, for example, in a moment of passion done some act of violence against father or mother and have lived in repentance the rest of their lives, or who have slain some other person under similar conditions — these must needs be thrown into Tartarus, and when they have been there a year the wave casts them out…” (Plato, Phaedo 113-114, source: https://topostext.org/work/91 )

The above quotation is from one of the dialogues of the Greek philosopher Plato (d. 347 BC c.a.), the Phaedo, in which he speculates about the immortality of the soul and its fate after death. As far as I understand, Plato didn’t embrace a classical theist perspective in the sense of a belief in a Personal Creator God even if he did seem to believe in an impersonal Deity as a source of all things (the Form of the Good) and accepted the existence of gods.

In the quote above Plato asserts that many people will be punished after death. Significantly, he makes a distinction between those who will be punished forever and those who will be punished temporary based on their souls being, respectively, incurable or curable, in a manner that is surprisingly similar to how Pope Benedict XVI (1927-2022) depicted the inner status of those condemned to hell and purgatory[1]. So, punishments, for those who can be ‘cured’ are educative and purificatory whereas for the incurables they seem to not have this kind of function.

In the absence, however, of a Personal God we might ask why the ‘afterlife’ states must, in any way, be linked to the moral character of one’s life. Indeed, as in the case of, for instance, the great non-theistic religion of Buddhism – in its various forms – we might legitimately ask why, in the absence of a Personal Source of all things, there is some kind of moral order to the world.

Of course, in the case of Buddhism, beings are trapped in ‘Samsara’, the terrifying cycle of death and rebirth – due to delusion. And, hence, the whole ‘justice system’ of samsara is based, ultimately, on such a (self)-deception. Still, however, most Buddhist traditions are obliged to ask their followers to avoid speculations of the possible beginnings of samsara. A beginningless samsara would imply that all beings – or their ‘minds’ - are trapped in samsara without any reason.  But if samsara is truly beginningless one might ask how a Liberation from it is even possible. The problem, here, I believe is that if all that we (or our ‘mindstream’) has always experienced is delusory it is hard to think how one might find the way out of such a state. Conversely, we might say that if all sentient beings have been trapped in a beginningless samsara, then no being could have known anything different from samsara and, due to that, it becomes unclear how even one being could even find liberation.

All of this makes more sense, I believe, if we assume that – rebirth or not – there is a Personal God, who can provide the necessary aid for salvation and to create a ‘just’ world where wrongdoings and good actions are, respectively, punished and rewarded. If there is a Personal Creator, then, all the statements about an ‘afterlife’, salvation etc become plausible.

To go back to the case of Buddhism, the problem is, I believe, quite serious. Buddhism doesn’t accept the existence of a Personal God and, yet, its ultimate aim is Liberation. We are told that the Buddhas teach the ‘way to liberation’ and they have themselves been taught the ‘Dharma’. Indeed, the ‘Dharma’ will be taught and forgotten in the course of time. But, it seems to me, that its ‘reappearance’ is always contingent on a previous teaching of it. So, this logically seems to imply either an infinite regress of discoveries and teachings of the Dharmas or to a first point. However, the infinite regress doesn’t explain anything except that, perhaps, Liberation has always been a possibility for sentient beings even if nobody taught the Dharma to them. In this case, however, one might ask why there is a samsara at all, i.e. why, that is, the ‘minds’ of sentient beings aren’t just ‘naturally pure’.

So, if something like the Platonist or the Buddhist cosmologies were true, there are many features in them – afterlife rewards and punishments, the possibility of liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth and so on – that, in my opinion, seem to indicate, ironically, the necessity of a Personal Creator. Such a world would be incredibly ‘fine-tuned’, so to speak, to being not a creation of a Personal Deity.

In other words, in the absence of a Personal Creator, how, in the first place, would afterlife rewards and punishments, liberation and so on be even possible?

 


[1] See his discussion on purgatory and hell in his encyclical Spe Salvi, 46-47: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20071130_spe-salvi.html

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