Religion and the Life Hereafter
“The crux of religion is indubitably the belief in the life hereafter.” So says Allama Shibli Nomani (1857-1914) under the heading of ‘Life after Death’ in his famous book, Al-Ghazzali. He goes on to say that it is because of this belief that religion has had an impact on human activities. Yet, despite its being the single most important belief in religion, it has been open to question. He quotes a Bedouin poet who, addressing his wife, expresses this most succinctly:
Death, rebirth,
My dear: it is all nonsense.
Shibli feels that the first and most difficult hurdle to be surmounted is acceptance of the fact that the spirit survives as an entity in its own right, quite independently of the body. The materialists for their part think of the soul as being just one more ingredient in the body, in the way that a chemical element is inextricably a part of a compound, or they regard it as being a particular property of the faculties of thought and sense perception, on a parallel with the melody which results when notes of a musical instrument are struck in a particular sequence. Drawing extensively on two of Imam Ghazzali’s books, he observes that the description of the soul and the arguments which Ghazzali has mentioned are all derived from Greek philosophers. Aristotle in his Theology has said the same and Avicenna has reiterated this in his own language. But the strange thing is that Ghazzali has left out the point, which is of prime importance in the discussion of spirit or soul. Soul has no body. It is an essence. Its being purely non-material makes it of the first importance to prove its existence. As Shibli himself observes:
The existence of the soul is a matter of intuition. After pondering over it, we come to know that the faculty of reason is not merely a property of matter. Matter is a lifeless thing. Without reason, you cannot find sublime ideas, arts and sciences and scientific disciplines in matter. These are delicate substances, quite other than matter, which account for creativity in the fields of the arts and the sciences. Matter cannot have a creative faculty. This is an attribute of the soul ... After proving the existence of soul as something separate, the second stage is to prove its survival, that is, its capacity to survive after the death of the body. (pp. 171-72)
As a corollary to this he adds: ‘Though Avicenna has presented lengthy arguments about the existence of the soul, these are nothing but word games—or tautology—just like other Greek philosophic thoughts. If an atheist bent on denying its existence says, “What you have said is just a kind of repetition of your claim. It has nothing to do with the argument but is a reiteration of your initial statement and may be matter is itself responsible for its kaleidoscopic manifesta-tions after combining in a particular way; the working of a machine and the music of a musical instrument are similar things, but without having any kind of spirit. There is no logic by which he can be reduced to silence. That is why Imam Ghazzali did not produce any logical argument about the soul.”’ (p.175)
Shibli Nomani ends the discussion at this point. And of a work dating back to 1901, we could hardly expect more.
Modern research, however, has opened up new vistas of events and realities, so that we can now assert to a certain extent that the permanent existence of the soul, independently of the body, or the survival of the soul after the death of the body is no more a thing which involves blind faith; rather it has become a reality which can be empirically proved.
Science has discovered that the body is composed of innumerable tiny cells, the number of which in an average body is placed at fifteen trillion. These cells disintegrate each moment, but our diet makes up for those destroyed cells and they are replaced with new ones. The body is thus like a building which is composed of billions of bricks, but which is in the process of replacing its bricks at every moment. Now, if the soul is a phenomenon of the body, then with the disintegration or changing of the cells of the body, the soul should simultaneously undergo the same transformation, just as a whole machine is affected when one part of it is broken, or as the breaking of a single string affects the tone of a musical instrument. But such is not the case with the soul. This shows that the soul is independent of the body and has its own existence. That is why a scientist has said, “Personality is changelessness in change,” that is, the human personality is self-existent (as compared to the body), keeping its existence in changeless form amidst continuous changes.
Further proof of the truth of this concept is provided by the discovery in the field of psychology of the ‘unconscious’ or the ‘subconscious’—a major part of the human brain. It has been established that the thoughts stored in the unconscious remain in exactly the same condition until death. Freud writes in his thirty-first lecture:
The laws of Logic—above all, the law of contradiction, do not hold for processes in the Id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralizing each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise. There is nothing in the Id, which can be compared to negation, and we are astonished to find in it an exception to the philosophers’ assertion that space and time are necessary forms of our mental acts. In the Id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time, no recognition of the passage of time, and (a thing which is very remarkable and awaits adequate attention in philosophic thought) no alteration of mental processes by the passage of time. Conative impulses which have never got beyond the Id, and even impressions which have been pushed down into the Id by repression, are virtually immortal and are preserved for whole decades as though they had only recently occurred.
The processes of the Id being independent of time shows that the unconscious has its own independent existence; it has been established that the body is subject to the laws of time and space and that it is in space and time that all its actions take place. Now if the soul is simply an extension of the body, then, like the body, it too should be subject to the laws of time and space. Since observation has shown that this is not so, there is the inevitable inference that the soul by its very nature is something separate from (though not extraneous to) the body and that it exists independently. The relation of the soul to the body is not comparable to that of a machine and its movement, nor to that of a musical instrument and the music it produces. Had there been any basis for this comparison, the same laws, which apply to the body, would have affected the soul.
A branch of modern psychology which makes an empirical study of man’s supernatural faculties—psychical research—does establish the existence of life after death at a purely observational level. What is most interesting is that such research does not establish mere survival; rather it establishes the survival of exactly the same personality—the entity that was known to us before death.
Man has possessed many other analyzable traits right from the very beginning, but it is only comparatively recently that they have been analyzed scientifically. For instance, dreaming is one of the oldest known activities of man. But ancient man was unaware of the psychological relevance of dreams, the facts of which have come to light only after recent scientific research. Even more interesting are quite other manifestations of the human spirit, the recent facts and figures of which give strong indications of the existence of extra-sensory perception and of the objects of this perception.
The first institution to conduct research in this field was established in England in 1882. It still exists today under the name of “Society for Psychical Research.” It began its work on a large scale in 1889 by contacting 17,000 people who were asked whether—when they believed themselves completely awake—they had ever had a vivid impression of seeing, or being touched by a living being (who was not actually there) or inanimate object which moved apparently of its own volition or of hearing a voice which, so far as they could discover, was not due to any external physical cause. Many other countries followed suit and, by means of various experiments and demonstrations, it was shown that even after bodily death, the human personality survives in some mysterious form.
In his book A Philosophical Scrutiny of Religion, C.J. Ducasse observes:
These facts strongly suggest that the universe, and the human personality, each have a dimension additional to the material one so capably and successfully explored by the natural sciences. (p. 422)
Many other scholars who have objectively examined the evidence furnished by psychical research have felt compelled to accept the life hereafter as a matter of fact. C. J. Ducasse, Professor of Philosophy at the Brown University, has made a philosophical and psychological scrutiny of this concept. He does not believe it in the sense in which it is presented by religion, yet he holds that apart from the dogmas of religion, such evidence do exist as compel us to accept the survival of life after death. After making a general survey of various investigations in the field of research, he observes:
“Some of the keenest-minded and best-informed persons, who studied the evidence over many years in a highly critical spirit, eventually came to the conclusion that, in some cases at least, only the survival hypothesis remained plausible. Among such persons may be mentioned Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, F.W.H. Myers, Cesare Lombroso, Camille Flammarion, Sir Oliver Lodge, Dr. Richard Hodgson, Mrs. Henry Sidwick and Professor Hyslop, to name only a few of the most eminent.”
This suggests that the belief in a life after death, which so many persons have found no particular difficulty in accepting as an article of religious faith, not only may be true but is perhaps capable of empirical proof; and if so, that, instead of the inventions of theologians concerning the nature of the postmortem life, factual information regarding it may eventually be obtained.
That, in such a case, the content of this information will turn out to be useful rather than not, for the two tasks which it is the function of religion to perform, does not, of course, automatically follow.
The author, while accepting life after death as a reality, has refused to accept the religious nature of this same phenomenon. This is only a matter of his own personal predilections. The truth is that if life survives after death, there can be no interpretation other than a religious one.
