Dan, I've got to say I was very moved by your story. Your right. More often than not, it's not until we finally lose something that we truly appreciate how much it means, and how big an impact it has had on our lives. The leason to learn is to make sure we truly appreciate how blessed we are each and every day, and don't let the moment pass without giving it your best shot. Good luck to you Dan.

I said that I never heard such voices and that was why I did not believe but since she spoke to god, I asked her to ask god to tell her the serial number of the dollar bill in my wallet to convince me that the voice she heard really was god. She looked pained. That would be mocking god, she said. We used to ask this question all the time back in Sunday school and we always got the "it would be disrespectful" answer until the rabbi replied with "G-d is not your monkey. Deal with it." I strongly suspect that the conclusion I derived from this (why would an omnipotent being give a rat's rear what you believed?) rather flies in the face of the proselytizing agenda. --HRK

Prof S.: Consciousness. While I have it on good authority that there WAS a time before my consciousness existed, I have never personally experienced such a phenomenon. Similarly, I have it on equally good authority that there will be a time when I won't exist, but I can't conceive of an existence without myself in it. Therefore, since I know I won't be here, and I have no frame of reference for existence without me, I must exist somewhere else. I don't think that belief in an afterlife comes from claims of communication; I think it's the other way around, and that there really is no way to know. I can feel around the room I'm in, and come to the conclusion that there aren't any invisible unicorns in here, leading to a conclusion that there aren't any invisible unicorns in the world, which is why I agree that the burden of proof should be on the side trying to prove existence (in this case, of the afterlife). But in my opinion, that burden is so high (communication with the dead) that I'm willing to give just enough benefit of the doubt to balance the issue & consider it unresolvable.

Mano, I think that the source of speculations of life after death come from difficulty answering the question, "What is it like for it to not be like anything?" Eric, You said "The universal statement "all cows are 4-legged" rests on having seen 4-legged cows before. The problem with an afterlife is that we have no cows to observe. " I am inclined to disagree here. The term "afterlife" is clearly a modification of the term "life". This means it has something to do regular life, which in this case is our "cow". So I think that we do have cows to observe, and in this case it is ordinary-life. The supposition is that since we don't see any "after-life" type people, they must be whisked off and living somewhere else. In order for this to fit our current understanding of the world, this other-place must be completely inscrutable. As for your wondering about the types of experiments people have done regarding the mind and body, they tend to occur when people suffer brain damage or other forms of debilitating harm. Obviously these take the form of observations because of the obvious ethical problems with intentionally harming someone. However, medical professionals are frequently confronted with people with various problems. Oliver Sachs has written several books that explore how a person's self changes when their "equipment" changes (incidentally, his book, "An Anthropologist on Mars", was the summer reading for my freshman class at CWRU). Other studies have shown that paraplegics have more difficulty feeling emotions than they did before their injury. It turns out that physiological changes in your body (and not just your brain) cause you to feel emotion, contrary to the original model that feeling an emotion causes physiological changes in the body. I.e. the tail wags the dog! Attempting to fit the pieces together leads many to conclude that the "I" or the "soul" or whatever you want to call it arises out of the equipment, rather than something that is separate from and fed input from the equipment. Another way of putting that is that without sensory input, there can be no "I". A good book that deals with this issue well is "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter. If you want to talk about gestalt switches, that book helped me make several and I really recommend it. I hope I am not coming off as condescending or anything; the nature of consciousness is a really interesting question to me, and sometimes I tend to go on for awhile.

Eric, You are assuming that the afterlife is a one-way ticket. Once we go there, we cannot communicate with the people here. But the only reason that people believe in an afterlife is because some people at some time claim to communicate with the dead, so it must allow two-way communication. So if an afterlife exists, why don't the people we know contact us in a way that can be fully established. I agree with you that if it is truly one way, then there is no way to know at all. But then what makes this belief any more credible or worth taking seriously than a belief in any other thing (invisible unicorns)? n the case of land across the Atlantic, people may not have known for sure but it was not implausible to think that such land might exist. After all, they knew of other large bodies of water that had land on the other side. It is like believing in life on distant planets now. If we sent a manned spaceship to find it, they would not come back and we would not know if they found it or not. But there is some reason to think that there might be life out there based on what we know of the nature of the universe in our neighborhood. But what is the source of our speculations of life after death?

Prof. Singham - re: universal vs. existence statements: The problem with applying a burden of proof analysis to an afterlife is that there's no baseline for comparison. In the earlier entry, you pointed out the unlikelihood of a 7-legged cow based on having observed exclusively 4-legged cows. The universal statement "all cows are 4-legged" rests on having seen 4-legged cows before. The problem with an afterlife is that we have no cows to observe. Every paradigm-changing universal statement that's been proven before (Copernican solar system, natural selection, relativity, etc.) has been proven by observation. I have observed evidence to disprove the existence of a god (the existence of suffering in the world indicates a lack of either omniscience, omnipotence, or omnibenevolence); I can't come up with a form of observation regarding anything post-death that still allows you to report your findings. It's like if somebody in Europe 2,000 years ago had proposed the existence of land across the Atlantic. The only way to find out would be to go and observe, and it was pretty much a given that if you did, even if you found something, you weren't coming back to tell anybody.

Jared's point about evidence supporting the physical model vs. the dualistic model is strong, but I'm kind of wondering how you could experiment this kind of hypothesis - would you have to damage somebody's brain/body to the point where they lost cognitive function, and then repair them to perfect functionality and ask what happened to them in the meantime?

Eric, The statements "I believe in something because there is evidence in favor of it" and "I believe in something because there is no evidence against it" are not equivalent in their level of rationality. The former forms the basis (or should) of most of our useful beliefs. The latter lays one open to any and all kinds of crazy beliefs. It comes down to the question of where the burden of proof lies for existence statements (like that there is an afterlife) and universal statements (like that there is no afterlife). I have discussed that question here.

Yes, I agree. Even if there was no evidence one way or another, why worry about it?

Mano, re asking the lady to ask God to read the serial number on the dollar and her reply that that would be mocking God. I think God is mocking US by being so stingy with the miracles. When Jesus cured Lazarus the leper, that was obviously to show his power and not his benevolence, otherwise, to show that he really cared about the wellbeing of his special creation, he would/could have cured ALL the lepers, or even better, wiped leprosy and all other diseases out of existence. To use such power with such a lack of benevolence certainly points to a cruel god or maybe one who really doesn't have all the power he is claimed to have. In either case, to believe in such a being, much less worship it, is just plain silly for an individual, and potentially harmfull to children and other people who depend on the people in their lives who make decisions based on the existense of this creature.

That... is a very good point. Although, as Heinlein also once said, "Soon enough you'll find out. So why worry about it?"

Eric, Actually, I would argue that there is plenty of evidence against an afterlife/reincarnation. All credible research that I have seen regarding the function of the mind suggests that the physical model and not the dualistic model is correct. That is, the evidence that we have is that the mind is an epiphenomenon that arises from the physical structure of a body. This validates the observation that we don't see people "continuing" on after the physical structure dissipates. Implicit in the words "afterlife" and "reincarnation" is their contradiction with observations. Afterlife indicates a spontaneous reassembling of the physical structure that defines a person, usually somewhere else completely. Reincarnation indicates some form of imprinting of a dismantled (disembodied?) mind (or gemma or soul or what have you) into a new body. Both of these violate all sorts of physical laws. In essence what I am saying is that there really is evidence that dualism doesn't hold, and without dualism reincarnation/afterlife are simply full of contradictions. best, Jared

What about the afterlife, she asked. I told her I did not believe in it. She asked why not and I said that there was not a shred of evidence that there was an afterlife, just like she had not a shred of evidence for god, except for the voices in her head.

To be fair, there's no evidence against an afterlife either, or reincarnation, etc. I think drawing any conclusions on this particular point is premature; by the time you have any solid evidence whatsoever, it's a bit late to share the knowledge. They once asked Heinlein if he wanted to get cryogenically frozen. His response was, "What if it interferes with rebirth?"

Interesting. I know I won't change many minds, but you've confused "religion" and God. Religion is man-made stuff, so it is inherently flawed, and most likely it is those flaws that have put most of you off over the years. Nevertheless, God Himself still loves you and desires you to get to know Him. Doing that will be hard for most of you because of what you have suffered in the past from "religion." My daughter-in-law was the same. She was extremely bitter over something shocking and horrible that happened to her in a small Southern church. Years later, though, she gave God a chance, and she began to learn about Him (yes, from the Bible, among other sources). Finally one day she said to us, "It wasn't God that did that to me, was it?" There is a God, and He loves us because He created us. The only rules He gives are those that protect us and enhance our lives. Everything else is man made legalism. Ignore religion and give God a chance.

Heidi, I am glad that you have other uses for the names! Incidentally, I am been curious as to why Christians, even some quite religious ones, use the names of their god as swear words, in direct contradiction to the third commandment. I don't think people in other religions do that, do they? Do Muslims say things like "By Allah!" or Hindus say "Oh, Krishna!"? At least I have not heard any do so. Strange.

Actually Mat, evolution does not say that "that the conditions of the big bang and all the universal constants and everything else were just right for us to be here now" because that implies that the environment adapts to meet the needs of the organism. It is actually the other way around, that organisms evolve in ways that are best adapted to their environment. So if the Earth had always been much warmer, we would likely have evolved to be able to cope with that, because those less well adapted would have died out. Of course, the "what if" experiments to test this hypothesis cannot be done with humans which is why they are done with insects, animals, and bacteria, or we look for naturally occurring events that test it.

Thank you for giving me unoffensive swear words to use in place of "god!" and "geezus!" Harvey! Melvin! My fundamentalist sister will not be offended. My 3-year-old granddaughter will just get quizzical looks when she repeats what she hears me exclaim. I use "god" and "geezus" to emphasize what I am saying, not usually thinking about how it offends others. With Harvey! and Melvin!, I'll be more acutely aware of the deity (deities?) whose name(s?) I am taking in vain, while my listeners will be less aware or oblivious that I am blaspheming.

On your Goldilocks principle point: You know that whatever limits a God might set for our abilities there would still be strengths and weaknesses. Whether you can lift a stone or a boulder or a mountain might there not be something greater you can't lift? It is all relative. The better question is whether you consider that the way we were made is 'just right' for learning about God or not. The other thing I would add is that the Goldilocks principle is usually argued BY evolutionists explaining why we are here, "that the conditions of the big bang and all the universal constants and everything else were just right for us to be here now." BUT I can see that the creationist you are referencing is suggesting that Allah exists because conditions are right.