Spirits; 0% proof 

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about spirits lately, and what happens to us when we die. Unfortunately for me, the spirits are the out of body kind, not the alcoholic kind, as I don’t drink. I grew up in a deeply religious family and, whilst I’m agnostic myself, I have been left with an aftertaste of wondering what, if anything, happens to us after we die. Perhaps my own advancing years, poor health and mortality also play a part too. Nothing sobers the mind quite like getting a glimpse of the finishing line.

Just so we are clear, in a true conversation killer, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that traditional life as we know it exists after death, but if you’re religious you won’t care much about the science anyway. This is a self-indulgent thought experiment; I am writing to try to think through the possibilities of an afterlife, given what I know. Others, my family included, are utterly convinced they are going to spend eternity in heaven with their loved ones. Their faith is their passport; my agnosticism is my one-way ticket to hell. And let’s be clear about that – there’s no cheating the system here, if you don’t believe, you don’t get in. Apparently I’m doomed. Whatever. If I was a gambler, I’d put fifty quid on the odds that God exists, because, as Blaise Pascal pointed out in his famous 17th century wager, it has good odds. Shame I don’t gamble then. 

My agnosticism means that I admit that I just don’t know. This is not the same as Atheism, which proudly boasts with confidence there is not a God or an afterlife. In my mind, this is just as absurd as saying there definitely is a God. We don’t know and so we cannot say for certain. The standard trope that atheists spin is; I know God doesn’t exist, just as I know unicorns and leprechaun’s don’t exist. But this is a false dichotomy. People claim to have very real, personal experiences of God and have done so for millennia, en masse. God brings people long lasting comfort, joy and inspiration to people. Leprechaun’s don’t do that, and besides, they would be physical manifestations requiring physical evidence. The minute anyone announces they have seen God in the flesh or have witnessed a miracle, I would want physical evidence and so I am sceptical of such claims, because none have been verified. However, belief in God can be viewed as a personal belief and experience, much the same as love is and we all readily accept that. The fact that there are so many people claiming to have similar personal experiences leads me to conclude that either they are having a mass delusion, or there is some scientific explanation we haven’t fully understood, or they are onto something. But I can’t simply flick a switch and make myself believe in something I don’t. I’m not saying God doesn’t exist, only that I know that I don’t know. I will happily keep my mind open to possibilities of a God, so long as you stop thrusting pamphlets in face and force feeding it to my children.

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle … Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. Thomas Henry Huxley

Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it’s time for science to do the same.

So, what have all the really clever people thought about the afterlife throughout history? There are some predominant religious viewpoints on death and the afterlife that come from Eastern, Western and Indian cultures. I’ll skip through the main headlines of these in the interest of not inducing mass comas. According to Eastern, Taoist beliefs, life and death are phases in a cycle of change. When the physical body dies, our essence becomes at one with the immortal universe, much like when Carl Sagan said we are all stardust. Reincarnation is a feature of both Eastern and Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. In these traditions, the soul is eternal and indestructible, undergoing countless cycles of rebirth until it reaches a state of liberation, Moksha or Nirvana. 

In traditional Buddhist belief, life is thought of in terms of a cycle of death and rebirth called samsara; a cycle which must be broken. This enlightenment is gained through achieving good karma, performing good deeds and learning and meditation. Dualists believe that the mind and body are distinct entities. Animists and Panpsychists believe that everything: all the elements, rocks, plants and such like, possess a spirit or form of consciousness. This is echoed by quantum mystics who propose that even fundamental particles are a form of life. 

In ancient Western philosophy, Plato envisaged a soul that existed before, and that continued after death, in a realm of perfect forms that represented the ultimate source of knowledge and truth. Later Christian, Islamic and Judaistic scholars built on Plato’s theories and developed the concept of an immortal soul that survived death. Muslims believe they will stay in their graves until Yawm Al-din, the Day of Judgement. On that day they will brought before Allah and judged on how they lived their Earthly lives. Those who have performed more good deeds than bad will enter Jannah (Paradise). Christians believe that death is not the end of existence. Jesus’ resurrection shapes this belief. After death, individuals are destined for either Heaven or Hell. Christians believe in the Second Coming of Jesus, when he will return to earth and everyone who has died will be judged. Jews have always placed greater emphasis on life today on Earth than on life after death, however most Jews believe in an afterlife to be spent in Gan Eden after a Messianic Age, when the righteous will be resurrected.

In the West, after the enlightenment, philosophers such as Nietzsche questioned traditional religious beliefs about the afterlife and emphasized the importance of creating meaning in this life. This was very much following on from Aristotle who is often credited as being the first scientist. He believed that the fate of the soul after death was tied to the fate of the body. He reasoned that, since the soul could not exist without the body, it would also cease to exist upon the death of the body. 

It’s important to state that there isn’t a single scientific consensus on whether an afterlife exists at all. Science isn’t a belief or a creed, it is merely a process by which thoughts and opinions are formed. Conclusions are derived from empirical evidence; experiments and observations that are peer reviewed in order to ensure their validity. And, since the afterlife is not a tangible, measurable entity, there are few verifiable experiments that can be made about life after death. This leaves people feeling bereft of comfort and reassurance, especially in times of grief. This is where Spirituality comes in. Spirituality claims there is a dimension beyond sensory and physical experiences, and that connection to it requires self-improvement, meditation, contemplation and an acceptance of an interconnectedness with others and the world around them. The upside of spirituality is that you don’t have to go to church or mosque, and you don’t have to worry about redemption day or being punished. The downside is, it isn’t regulated, so people believe all kinds of diverse practices from the sublime to the ridiculous. To summarise then, some people think of an afterlife as pertaining to a God, some in reincarnation, others who aren’t so religious, but still believe in an afterlife, might call themselves spiritual, while others reject an afterlife all together and try to focus on the life they have. 

Philosophers have developed quite a few opinions on life and death over the ages, but essentially they boil down to questioning if physical matter is all there is, or if life has a supernatural extra dimension. One of the biggest dilemmas philosophers have is: ‘is the mind purely made of material stuff – is it purely a physical thing, or isn’t it? If the mind is not material (if it’s a spirit), how can it make your body move? If the mind is a physical thing then it’s difficult to understand what consciousness is, because our consciousness appears to be different to being only biological impulses in our brains. Most neuroscientists I’ve read, argue that consciousness can absolutely be described by physical processes, whereas others argue that qualia, for example, cannot possibly be described in that way. Qualia are the qualities of things we encounter with experience. They are the profound wonder some of us feel when we see a sunset, or the joy of looking at a work of art, or the ecstasy of hearing a symphony. Are these just a few chemicals swirling around some neurons? It is hard to imagine it, but that is what the science tells us. 

So, deciding which side of the religious/philosophical fence you are on is crucial to making a choice about whether the afterlife exists or not. Mind you, most people don’t give it much thought until they are at the end of their days, so I wouldn’t worry. 

It’s death Jim, but not as we know it

Anyway, I’ve spent a bit of time poking around into the science of life after death and this is what I’ve come up with. Firstly, there is plenty of new scientific evidence to show that death , as we know it, is not the end we once thought. It seems as though the great carbon cycle in the sky has some peculiar twists and turns. For example, it takes a considerable amount of time for a body to shut down after death (some organs take around 4 weeks to fully stop working), and some cells take on new forms after we die. Certain cells, when provided with nutrients, oxygen, bioelectricity or biochemical cues – have the capacity to transform into multicellular organisms with new functions after death. Called xenobots, these multicellular organisms are a kind of third state of life. They can move around and even self-replicate. 

Michael Levin, at the Department of Biology, Tufts University says that traditional concepts, such as body, organism, genetic lineage, death, and memory are not as well-defined as commonly thought, and need considerable revision to account for the possible spectrum of living entities. Work from another team at Tufts University also produced anthrobots, biologically engineered ‘robot’ cells from deceased human lungs that have the capacity to move and to repair scratches in human tissue.  All of this is interesting of course, but it tells us little beyond what we already know – that when organisms die they decay; bacteria and fungi break them down into simpler carbon compounds compounds, which end up in the soil, ready to be reused by other organisms in the great life cycle. It is life after death, and even perhaps a form of reincarnation, but I don’t think my local medium speaks to earth worms, so it isn’t much use to anyone. 

Today is a good day to die

The latest science then, raises the consideration of what is death? It was traditionally thought that once patients had flat-lined on ECG heart monitors they were dead, but new research by Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health, shows that the brains of such patients can experience ‘after-death’ activity as shown on EEG brain monitors long after flatlining. Around 40% of patients demonstrated some form of consciousness, even after an hour of CPR. Many had first-hand knowledge of what was happening in the room around them and could recount experiences of thoughts and visions. This gives some scientific credence to people’s accounts of near death experiences, because it seems as though parts of the brain can live on much longer after death than we once thought, even when starved of oxygen. I’ve heard stories of people being pronounced dead from drowning, only to be revived and to subsequently have memories of an afterlife. Parnia’s work fits this mould – near death experiences, your life flashing before your eyes, and visions of tunnels and white lights, are probably vestiges of the brain before it shuts down completely. His hypothesis, is that the brains braking systems, that usually prevent us from having an awareness of all of our thoughts and memories, stop working and allow everything to come flooding in. All that said, some people have been able to describe in detail things they couldn’t possibly have known while in a flatline state, and so it may very well be that this is evidence of life after death – that these experiences are indeed a bridge between our lives and an afterlife. It’s not for me to say, but my agnostic bones aren’t convinced by the evidence I’ve seen so far. 

What does it mean to be alive?

All this talk of anthrobots and xenobots, third states of life, and repairing dead tissue makes me wonder about what death might mean in the future. I’m fairly certain that augmented brain chips will become as common as smart phones one day. You’d get a chip fitted to your temporal lobe or wrist and it would supplement your brain to give it access to further knowledge and operate computer devices. And, as organ and limb transplants, and even face transplants, become more and more commonplace, it is surely only a question of time before whole body transplants are realised. Whether this is ethically sound I’m not sure, but if it’s ok to receive a heart, a lung, face or a hand from a deceased person, why not a whole body? With all these changes to our traditional bodies, it makes me wonder at what point do I end and a new being begins? 

This is called the Ship of Theseus paradox and it is one that ancient and contemporary philosophers have wrestled with. Can a ship be said to be the same ship, if every timber has been replaced? Philosophical arguments aside, you would have to say yes, since every cell in our bodies is replaced every seven years anyway, and I assume you think of yourself as being the same person. But how about if you could grow a new body upon death and have your consciousness transplanted into it? That is not something I would want to be part of, but it may one day be possible, and it raises whole new questions about what is life and what is death? 

There is also a thought experiment called the philosophical zombie, where the zombie person is identical to a normal human being, but does not have a conscious mind, with feelings, emotions and intrinsic, first-person experiences. The experiment is used as an argument against physicalism and materialism, which say there is nothing over and above the physical. It is saying that what makes us human cannot be fully explained by physical properties like mere atoms, neural circuits, flesh and blood. I’d love to think otherwise, but my own knowledge and understanding of human creativity and imagination tell me that it absolutely can.

Imagination is the foundation of all inventiveness and innovation. It is believed that imagination derives from a genetic mutation that occurred 70,000 years ago. It is uniquely human, and with it, we have been able to think, design, conceive, construct and develop our whole human society. Imagination is a much broader capacity to rationalise things we can’t see directly. Imagination is a manifestation of our memory. It enables us to interpret past and present events in new ways or to reconstruct them into hypothetical scenarios. I understand how amazing human creativity and innovation might seem, but as a creative, I haven’t seen anything in human creativity that cannot be described and defined by physical processes. What’s more, I think it should be celebrated that human beings have accomplished all of this from mere atoms. It’s astonishing really. So, in this debate at least, I’m with the physicalists. 

Life is Vital

So, what about ghosts, poltergeists and things that go bump in the night? The best explanation I can think of for this are electric fields. More and more research is being done into the bioelectrical rhythms inside living organisms, but it is still a new and emerging field. In her book The Spark of Life, Nobel prize winning scientist Frances Ashcroft outlines the way in which bioelectrical signals govern everything we do, think and say. They inform a plant whether a leaf has been lost naturally, or is being eaten by a predator, and they exist in us, from our conscious brains to our beating hearts. All living organisms are, quite literally, alive with electrical and magnetic fields. 

In the 18th and 19th century, the thinkers of the time believed in Vitalism – a philosophical life force that permeated all living organisms They believed this force could not be explained by physical or chemical laws of nature. (We are back to that same old argument again!) Scientific developments in the last twenty years or so, have shown that, although we do indeed have a life force, it is one that can absolutely be described by biological laws. The electricity inside living organisms is highly dependent on elements such as sodium, potassium, calcium, hydrogen (all positively charged) and chloride (negatively charged) and ion channels. Ion channels are located within the membrane of certain cells. They are narrow, water-filled tunnels that allow only ions of a certain size and/or charge to pass through. Ion channels are hugely important to the life force in living organisms because they govern almost everything we do. 

Ion channels are truly the ‘spark of life’ for they govern every aspect of our behaviour. From the lashing of the sperm’s tail to sexual attraction, the beating of our hearts, the craving for yet another chocolate, and the feel of the sun on your skin – everything is underpinned by ion channel activity. Frances Ashcroft

The great consciousness illusion

When we think of our conscious selves, we tend to assume we are a master controller, directing our own thoughts, orchestrating relationships between us and the outside world, and making independent inferences from what we perceive. However, neuroscientists haven’t found any such place in the brain where this master controller exists. György Buzsáki, a neuroscientist at New York University says that our brains work from an Inside-Out model, where the brain blindly works to achieve homeostasis using whatever information it gleans from our senses. It is literally functioning purely to keep us alive, using whatever means it can, and without anyone at the helm. As scary as it sounds, we don’t need a pilot, because we have a great onboard team who can all do their own jobs really well. 

Far from being a separate soul or spirit, this sense of self we experience then, is an illusion – a projection if you will, manifesting from neural activity, in much the same way that we construct our sense of vision from the limited information we receive from our eyes. The great vision illusion is that the brain fills in the gaps of vision perception from the limited light we take in, constructs the world we see inside our brains, then makes us believe it’s all external to us. Of course, everything is external to us, but our image of the world is sitting inside our heads, not outside of us. I think in this way, consciousness and vision are very similar. They remind me of a magician that performs an amazing card trick – I know it is a trick, but I’ll be damned if I can see how it’s done. 

We believe we are an independent Self, a person, floating somewhere just behind our eyes, making choices, decisions and actions, when in fact, those choices are driven by biological needs; internal desires driven by memories, and intentions steered by environmental concerns. Consciousness and free will are all part of the illusion of a Deterministic universe. When the body can no longer maintain this consciousness illusion, what happens to it? Does it go to the great magic circle in the sky, or does it just quietly fold up its table and put it away? Sadly, I think the latter, though it’s not as romantic to say so. 

Am I saying that we are all robots, walking zombie-like through a world where everything has been decided? No, because we can’t know what is to come, we don’t have an insight into the future and so, to all intents and purposes it may well have not happened yet. The great consciousness illusion is much like being a kid, living at home with your parents. You think you are a fully independent person leading your best life, but when your Mum tells you it’s time to go to bed, you have to obey. In much the same way, I can be out at a party, having a great time Dad dancing and having fun, but when I run out of energy and my biological clock tells me it’s bedtime, I have to obey. There isn’t another state of life lurking in us, it’s just all a load of smoke and mirrors. 

The heart generates an electromagnetic field that reaches several feet outside your physical body

Any conscious, afterlife entity, would require the transference of our chemically-oriented, bioelectrical circuits from a physical form into thin air, and they would need to maintain their existing cognitive shape and patterns if they were to retain our sense of self. A life force that has left a body would not be able to look down on anyone, or hear their prayers or speak to them, because it would not have the faculties to enable them to do that, so it would not have senses with which to interact with our world. It would not have the necessary neural circuits in the brain to hold the electrical ions it needed to make thoughts and actions because it wouldn’t have a brain; it would not have the sodium and potassium chemical transfers with which to create signals in our nervous systems, because it wouldn’t have a nervous system. A ghost that could talk and interact with us therefore, sounds completely implausible to me, but, while there is no evidence it can be done, there is lots of science behind electrostatic forces in the atmosphere, so let’s look at that. 

The earth’s atmosphere itself has an ion flow from the positively charged atmosphere, to the negatively charged earth’s surface. Typically, the earth’s atmospheric potential gradient is approximately 120 V/m, but tall objects protruding into the atmosphere can increase the electric field strength, and these variations in electrostatic forces are detected and emitted by organisms such as plants, animals and insects. Bees use the hairs on their body to detect fluctuations in electrostatic fields emitted by flowers in order to locate them. Migratory birds and turtles use the earth’s magnetic fields to navigate. Honey bees have the ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field using iron granules in their abdomens. Life on Earth is governed and orchestrated by electric fields and magnetic forces then. And, while this does not prove that the ion channels that create human consciousness can exist outside of the body, it also makes me think that there is much we don’t understand. For example, NASA have recently reported the first successful detection of Earth’s polar wind – an ambipolar electric field: a weak, planet-wide electric field as fundamental as Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields. 

If consciousness can exist outside of the body it is likely to be in the form of an electrical field, and this would tell us something about its behaviour. Electrical fields are easily blocked by walls and windows which is why you are safe from the effects of overhead power lines while you are indoors. Would this explain why some reported spirits are present in certain rooms or buildings? However, magnetic fields can pass through walls, which is probably why bees and insects come inside your house so readily. 

Another property of an electrostatic force is that objects that have been electrically charged can make other things move without touching them. Might this explain why things go bump in the night? Could a deceased conscious entity have a connection to its place of death and some remnants of memories, even emotions, be able to connect via electrical fields, especially if death occurred in traumatic circumstances? Doesn’t this describe what most people experience of ghosts and the afterlife? Bumps in the night, moving objects and strange sensations or feelings? Again, there’s no evidence of this, so it is entirely speculative. But. Friends have told me that objects have moved, and peculiar things have happened, in rooms where deceased relatives passed. Who am I to say they must be mistaken? 

‘No ghost was ever seen by two pairs of eyes’ Thomas Carlyle

Ghost hunters typically use an array of devices to track their prey, including digital, thermal and full-spectrum cameras, thermometers, Electro Magnetic Frequency meters to track energy spikes, voice recorders, motion sensors and even laser grid scopes. With all this equipment at their disposal, you’d think that concrete evidence of ghosts was in abundance, and yet nothing so substantial has been found that it has undergone the rigorous scrutiny of two pairs of eyes, let alone a scientific peer review. 

Or has it? Most scientists are closed off to anything in the world of ‘woo-woo’, for fear of damaging their careers. And, simply put, people who claim to have experienced anything supernatural are dismissed by scientific convention. Yet, there are many occurrences that cannot be easily explained. Both myself and people close to me, have experienced supernatural things that I cannot explain rationally. My own mother had premonitions and visions in her dreams for many years. I would come down to breakfast on many mornings, only to find her in a terribly anxious state. Some things she would recount were quite mundane things. In the pre-internet days around the late Seventies, she described to us a church that she said had been transformed into a pub, complete with an alter for the bar and a DJ where the organ pipes were. She said the pews had been turned into seats and tables and that there was even an old-fashioned, red public phone box in the middle of it. My father, who worked away from home, rang up a few days later and said he was in the strangest pub he’d ever been in in his life – and went on to describe the exact pub. She had a dream about a ship that sank with everyone on board, and even described cars and lorry’s floating in the water inside it, with people desperately trying to climb up the sides to reach a hole to escape. A few months passed and we heard of the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. She had many more experiences like this that are not easily dismissed. You would have to call her, and all of her family, liars, or deluded. And, I’ve heard of other people who have had similar experiences, so my Mum was not alone. My own theory behind this is that large, traumatic events set off delta waves that are picked up during the slow-wave sleep of people who are susceptible. We know from Einstein that time is relative, not linear, and so the fact that something hasn’t happened in our timeline yet is not a factor.

Ooh, are you a medium sir?

Mediumship is the belief that some, specially trained or gifted people can communicate with spirits of the deceased. They claim they act as a bridge between our physical world and the spirit world. Through mediums, physical mediums, trance mediums, or clairvoyants, people might receive insights and guidance from those who have deceased. In my own experience, many, perhaps most, are just pure entertainment, some are downright scams, but some offer real reassurance and support to those experiencing profound grief. Whether they actually communicate with the dead or not I’m sceptical, because I question the very nature of the large majority of the so-called messages. For example, most of them simply attempt to tell the receiver things about themselves they already know. In an obvious attempt to demonstrate that the medium is genuinely communicating with a deceased loved one, they might tell them whether they are married, how many children they have, or other mundane facts about them. Surely, a genuine spirit of someone who knew us and loved us, who was trying to communicate with us, wouldn’t need to go to those lengths. They wouldn’t nearly know our names – a James or a John, they’d just know them. A medium might claim the message is hard to read, or that there is a lot of people trying to get through, but then most other information is of a similar nature – mostly it’s rambling and vague, with lots of wrong stuff and a few things that sound spot on. The information they give is mostly generic information such as; ‘he’s at peace’, or ‘she’s forgiven you’. Of course, sometimes the information is truly revelatory and insightful. Sometimes, they seem to know things that even Facebook doesn’t know. I cannot explain everything a Medium has said or done, but I personally have never experienced anything so profound from one. If you have, then good for you. I know many people who have benefitted enormously from them, but I’m not convinced. I’ll wait until I have an experience that convinces me otherwise.

Old Father Entropy

In the philosophy of space and time, there is a generally accepted principle known as the block universe (eternalism), which says that all time exists in the same four-dimensional state. In this block universe, the future, present, and past exist in the same way because, as Einstein said, they are all relative to each other. If all time states exist similarly, then everything must be predetermined. We live in a Deterministic universe, everything that will happen has already happened, it’s just that we cannot know what the future is, and so to all intents and purposes we it might as well be unknown. What we know of as time, is actually entropy. The universe started out in a state of low entropy with lots of free energy that is gradually being used up. Entropy flows in one direction and so we cannot make it run backwards or slow it down. Just like the universe, we are born with lots of free energy that is gradually being used up until one day we whither and die of old age. However, it doesn’t sound quite as poetic to say Old Father Entropy, so I guess Time will have to keep its nom de plume. What this means in reality is that, if all time states exist similarly, then everyone we have ever known, everyone who has ever lived, or will live, are alive in the same way we are today, it’s just that, because of entropy, we cannot experience them. Life after death then, becomes meaningless if we cannot truly die. The information we generate in our lifetime cannot be destroyed and I think one day, scientists will find a way to listen in to both the past and the future – not in elaborate time machines that take our physical bodies through space time, but more akin to radio receivers tuning in to event waves that ripple through the universe. 

Except in exceptional circumstances, information cannot be destroyed. …. once your grandmother dies, information about her – her unique way of navigating life, her wisdom, her kindness, her sense of humor—becomes, in practice, irretrievable. Sabine Hossenfelder, quantum physicist 

I’ve come to the end

Which all leads me nicely to the conclusion of my thought experiment – where do we go when we die? We know that our bodies decay and decompose after we die and become part of the great carbon cycle. We know that all the information about ourselves is generated from bioelectrical currents running through ion channels in our bodies and without them it’s difficult to know where this information exists. We know that even our sense of self is an illusion conjured up by our brains; that there is no puppet master pulling strings in our head. Evolution has built us to survive in this life and no more. It hasn’t finely tuned us to switch seamlessly from this existence to the next, like a caterpillar to a butterfly. We seem to just bumble along, living in the moment, doing a bit of thinking from time to time, then wondering what we are going to have for our tea. If we were built for a next life, we would surely see some concrete evidence contained within us – a set of supernatural imaginal discs (cells that caterpillars are born with that develop into butterfly parts). 

The pineal gland, long seen as the seat of the soul by thinkers from Plato and Descartes to the present day, has not reaped any conclusive results as a soul, an energy source or chakra, or even as a source of the hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT). It does help you get to sleep though, which is more important I think. What’s more fascinating however, are Self-Induced Cognitive Trances or hyper-focused immersive experiences, and even ordinary meditative states, that have been shown to affect the autonomic nervous system, lower heart rate, and improve respiration, among other things such as mental clarity and emotional stability. The mind is capable of extraordinary things, but mystical?  

If the afterlife is part of God’s plan that asks us to prepare for His kingdom, why would He want to test our faith by making the evidence for it so obscure? After all, He doesn’t need to send messages via third-party visionaries, or even via a Son that didn’t leave a permanent personal record of his existence. He could make His presence abundantly clear, but He doesn’t, He chooses to test us. His testing of us implies that He knows a good proportion of us are going to fail, which in turn implies that He isn’t a benevolent God, because a good shepherd doesn’t want to lose a single sheep. 

Instead, life on earth, is for the most part, a huge arms race, a vicious free-for-all, where organisms battle each other for survival. In this natural war, some despicable, vile human beings enjoy huge financial and public success for their entire lives, while other innocent young children suffer terrible pain and disease and die young. If it is His master plan to make us endure suffering, then there is no logic to it I can see. I don’t rule out the possibility of a God existing, but if She does, She sits on the sidelines, watching the game as a Deist spectator. 

Putting God to one side and looking at it through a David Attenborough, observational lens, life is an incredible, brilliant and awe-inspiring creation that is no less wondrous, even when it’s stripped down to its basic bioelectrical principles. In fact, I think life is more awesome because of this. The great consciousness illusion has fooled humanity since we stepped out of the caves 40,000 years ago and I’ve no doubt that religious and spiritual audiences will be clamouring for tickets to the illusory afterlife long after I’ve gone. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why. Death is brutal. It’s painful both physically and emotionally, especially when it’s your own death or that of the ones you love. So, go ahead and believe in what you will, but don’t ask me to stand in a bowl of water, charging your crystals up by moonlight. I’ll be playing with the laws of electromagnetism in scientifically verifiable ways, courtesy of my Sony PlayStation. 

The cold scientific reality of life and death seems devoid of comfort, especially when it’s you that’s staring down the barrel. And yet, that same reality tells us for certain that all the information about ourselves, everything we have accumulated throughout our whole lives, will live on eternally, that we can never truly die, and that all the people we love are still there, they’re just in a place we cannot access. For now. That isn’t a belief, it’s a well established principle, and maybe it isn’t as romantic as the spiritual ideology, but it’s something precious, something that’s worth holding on to. The afterlife then, is akin to us becoming a brushstroke in the Universe’s great masterpiece. Our lives, our deeds, our actions and our reputations, are tenderly stored like permanent ink on an eternal canvas. We are all unique memorials, hanging on a vast, permanent Remembrance Tree. 

Past civilisations have embalmed their bodies after death, buried themselves in lavish tombs, left elaborate artefacts in their graves, and even fed their deceased loved ones bread and wine, as brilliantly described by Alice Roberts in her book Buried. So, you are personally free to believe anything you wish and it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. It won’t alter the fact that you are ‘brown bread’. But, do I believe my soul will live on after my death, or that there is a God waiting at the gates to welcome me? I just do not know, I don’t think so, but I do leave a door open in the feint possibility that there might be. And, as I get closer and closer to that final day, that conviction, irrational as it may be, grows.