Philosophy Life After Death Analysis Essay Research

Philosophy: Life After Death Analysis Essay, Research Paper

To what extent does it make sense to talk about life after death.

Nobody likes the idea that we are going to die. It’s one of those things that pop into your head whenever you get comfortable, possibly as a subconscious motivational tool. Just in case you ever get really, truly at ease with your life it strikes you that it will all come to an end (possibly quite horribly) without your say-so or even prior notification. Many people find this not only rude but also decidedly inconvenient, and refuse to accept that their lovely lives could ever end. Others are content to allow existence is occasional bout of poor manners and go quietly. This essay is about the main ways people accept their demise, or rather (as it is in most cases) do not.

Materialism

With science fast becoming the newest rock and roll, you would think more people would be zealous advocates of materialism, but this is not the case. You would think that the belief that you are nothing more than a soulless (although organic) piece of machinery, rambling aimlessly with only the purpose of reproducing and a brain minutely to advanced to accept this would have most people jumping at the chance to support it. Perhaps this is because materialism falls under the umbrella of reductionism, and as Richard Dawkins says, “in some circles, admitting to being a reductionist is comparable to admitting to eating babies”.

Conveniently for this paper however, there has been a long and steadfast tradition of Materialism, the primus inter pares of which is a Mr Gilbert Ryle. In 1949 when psychology was a young and nubile science, seen (as all new sciences are seen) to hold the Holy Grail to understanding the human mind, Ryle published “The Concept Of The Mind”. In this he dismissed the soul as a category mistake, or as the lay would say a misuse of language. He even went so far as to coin a scornful phrase for his nemesis “the ghost in the machine” – a beautifully elegant term as it embodies both his belief of the body/mind (as for Ryle, the mind is physical organ and so part of the body) as a machine and the soul as the long jibed-by-science notion of ghosts. Ryle implored us to consider the poor foreigner who asks why the team spirit is late for the sports match, only to be mocked by those of us who understand that “team spirit” is merely a romantic term for the collective banter of many men – not a separate entity of its own. Ryle saw talk of a soul in a similar fashion, as a way to describe the way a man behaves in the world and acts around others and that to say a soul is something separate is trying to justify something that simply isn’t there.

Unfortunately for Ryle he was speaking shortly after a very bloody war, to a nation who had just lost many friend and loved ones, who were not really all too willing to accept they had simply been thrust into oblivion by the Nazi war machine. However we live in an altogether different time, far from any front line where we can keep the idea of death at a hypothetical arm’s reach. So enters Richard Dawkins.

Dawkins appears to be the classic godless heathen atheist, holding totally to his beliefs in the science of genetics and conviction that they hold the complete explanation for what we are. Following from Charles Darwin who came up with the idea of natural selection as a mechanism for our existence – the first credible one that didn’t use one god, many gods or any other intangible divine apparatus. This didn’t go down too well with theologians of the time, notably William Paley who wrote an entire text against it (including a metaphor which provided Dawkins with the title for a book of his own). Paley’s metaphor was one comparing a rock to a watch, one being a purposeless lump of raw ore and the other a well-defined, precise piece of machinery capable of performing a function. He held that the distinction between these two is that one has a designer and one does not, the wider implication of this being that the universe’s/human being’s innate complexity was evidence of design. Dawkins attacks this idea in “The Blind Watchmaker”. Dawkins gives us the sense of a force of evolution capable of creating human beings in all their complexity and beauty, at once doing away with notions of the divine background that give strength to our claim on a soul. Evolution is the blind watchmaker of the title, the ultra-slow cumulative selection filtering system that weeds out miscreant creations through a process of statistical averages across mind-bogglingly huge lengths of time.

This theory is now so tight and well accepted that the pious peoples of the intelligencer have declared war on it. Some of their focus is sadly misdirect against cheap shots on Dawkins himself, where he makes categorical errors of his own. These include the idea of “memes”: a reality tunnel Dawkins used to illustrate both the pollination of the human genome and the accelerated spreading of knowledge due to the advent of global communication. This has been attacked as “smuggling” in genetic precepts to explain human behaviour (thus further reducing us to a material level), but I suspect it has been taken out of context. There are, however, some very important things to be said against modern materialistic thinking (not just against Dawkins, but the ideas he argues). Firstly, it ignores innate human feeling an