To feel much for others and little for ourselves, to restrain our selfish and indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.    
                                                            — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

 

In this essay, I offer an original argument for life after death. This is called the presuppositional argument, and it requires a little clarification to show what kind of an argument it is and how it works. Imagine a detective who cannot figure out how his suspect could have committed the crime by himself. For instance, the suspect was indisputably in one location at the time when the body was dumped in another location. Our Lieutenant Columbo puzzles over this and then it hits him: The man must have had an accomplice. Assume an accomplice, and the otherwise inexplicable facts of the case now make sense. So there must have been an accomplice. And even though we don’t know anything about the accomplice, the detective’s hypothesis is persuasive to the degree that it explains the known facts of the case.

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Here’s a second example. A woman is baffled by the fact that a man whom she has been dating for years keeps delaying his proposal of marriage. The man keeps telling her that he wants to wait for the right time. She agonizes over the question, “Why won’t he commit?” After a while the woman’s friends start telling her, “He will never marry you. He has no intention of marrying you.” The girlfriends have no direct knowledge of the man or his real intentions. Their assessment is, in this sense, purely conjectural. But it has the merit of being able to explain things that the alternative hypothesis cannot explain. How believable is it that the man who has procrastinated for so long will propose to this woman at some unspecified “right time”? It is much more reasonable to suppose that he is simply making excuses because he doesn’t want to get married, at least not to her. In both these examples there is a presupposition of a fact that is not directly known, but the presupposition is convincing because it makes sense of the facts that are known. The facts become, as it were, an empirical test of the validity of the presupposition.

Here is my presuppositional argument for life after death. Unlike material objects and all other living creatures, we humans inhabit two domains: the way things are, and the way things ought to be. In other words, we are moral animals who recognize that just as there are natural laws that govern every object in the universe, there are also moral laws that govern the behavior of one special set of objects in the universe, namely us. While the universe is externally moved by “facts,” we are internally moved also by “values.” Yet these values defy natural and scientific explanation, because the laws of nature, as discovered by science, concern only the way things are and not the way they ought to be. Moreover, the essence of morality is to curtail and contradict the powerful engine of human self-interest, giving morality an undeniable anti-evolutionary thrust. So how do we explain the existence of moral values that stand athwart our animal nature? The presupposition of cosmic justice, achieved not in this life but in another life beyond the grave, is by far the best and in some respects the only explanation. This presupposition fully explains why humans continue to espouse goodness and justice even when the world is evil and unjust.

Notice what the presuppositional argument does not say. It does not say that because there is injustice in the world there must be justice somewhere else. Nor does it say that the human wish for a better world is enough by itself to produce another world that is better. Rather, it begins with the recognition that while science explains much of nature very well, there is a big part of human nature that science does not seem to explain at all. In particular, evolution does a good job of accounting for why we are selfish animals, but it faces immense challenges in accounting for why we simultaneously hold that we ought not to be selfish. Far from facing the facts of life, like every other animal, we continue to cherish ideals that have never been and will never be fully achieved. We are flawed creatures who act as if we ought not to be. We know that we live in an unjust society where the bad guy often comes out on top and the good guy often comes to grief, yet we continue to hold that this is not how it should be. We continue to say things like “what goes around comes around” even though we know that in this world it is not always so. Despite the harsh facts of life, we tirelessly affirm that it should be so. Our ideals, in other words, contradict the reality of our lives. It seems that we, uniquely among all living and nonliving things, seek to repudiate the laws of evolution and escape the control of the laws of nature.