Wrestling with God

There is a story in the Old Testament about Jacob wrestling with God. He was returning from a self imposed exile to the land of his father when he came face to face with a stranger with whom he wrestled all night. By dawn the fight was over, with the stranger having caused non serious injury to Jacob’s hip. However, Jacob would not let him go until he agreed to Jacob’s demand to give him his blessing. According to Jacob, he was in no doubt that the man he fought through the night was God himself. A number of different lessons can be taken from this strange story, but the one I prefer is that Jacob was not prepared to allow God to have things all his own way. Jacob stood up to him and demanded answers. I like to think I do the same.

Of course, being agnostic, you might think that’s hard to do. But Pascal, the French mathematician, physicist and philosopher, had a nice idea. He said that even though God’s existence can neither be proved nor disproved, it would be a good wager to live as though he did exist because then you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. But there’s a flaw in that because if God does exist and assuming he is the blood thirsty fellow of Old Testament times, he knows you are taking this wager and that might not be the best of ideas. However, I’ll take the risk and argue with him anyway.

I’d like to start with looking at the general story most of us were told by our parents and teachers throughout our schooldays and into later life. It goes something like this: God sent his only son down to earth to become fully man as well as remaining fully God. Let’s not get into the theology now, just assume we accept it. Jesus started his ministry (according to the New Testament) in his early thirties. He upset the Jewish authorities by his teaching and actions (he had caused a disturbance in the temple when throwing out the money lenders) and was betrayed by Judas. He was arrested and eventually crucified by the Romans. Three days later he rose from the dead and hence started the greatest religion on the planet.

The human race were quite a bad bunch. They were murdering each other, lying, stealing, blaspheming, committing adultery etc. But because God loved us so much he felt he had to help us to mend our ways. By sending his son down to us and having him die an ignominious and really horrible death, he atoned for our sins and hence redeemed us.

I’m not sure it worked as we are still murdering each other today.

However, the whole idea seems to me to be absurd. Here we have a supposedly omnipotent God who has created the universe and humankind. But something goes awry with his creatures and the only way he can fix it is by killing his son! And then we have to consider the existence of the devil. Apparently Lucifer was a most beautiful angel who got too big for his boots and decided to take God on. But God, being the creator of the universe and everything defeated Lucifer and the angels who took his side and hurled them down to hell. But he didn’t bind them there. He allowed them loose to roam the earth and place temptation in mankind’s way. I ask you what chance did mortal men have? The devil, now renamed Satan or one of his demons comes along and offers you some great deals. You’ve just been chucked out of the Garden of Eden and now have to live by the sweat of your brow and suffer illness and disease and worst of all, death. What are you going to do? You’re a weak mortal and you’re surely gonna accept. So you murder, cheat, lie, steal. But God still has a soft spot for you and still wants to redeem you.

I would have thought that if Satan was the one causing us all to do bad things, couldn’t God have locked him up good and proper? Then he wouldn’t have had to do what he did. But no, he goes ahead with the crucifixion and resurrection idea.

Now not only does he have his only son put to death, but in order to do this, he has to get somebody to betray him. This unfortunate, Judas, has gone down in history as the worst traitor of all time. But it wasn’t his fault! God used him. And if Judas had the guts to say no, then God would have got some other sucker to do his dirty work for him. Why? Couldn’t God have just given the nod to the Romans? And worse, he makes it look like the whole Jewish people are to blame rather than the guys who actually carried out the killing. The Jews were not allowed by their Roman masters to put anybody to death. They could punish people or imprison them, but they had to get the seal of approval from Rome before they could actually sentence anybody to the ultimate penalty. So Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea at the time had to give the authorisation. And so the Jews have suffered throughout history for this crime ultimately committed by God and not them.

Does this make any sense at all? People often say that the New Testament is a great book replacing the blood and thunder God of the Old Testament with Jesus, who came to bring love and peace. But consider that Daddy is still running the show and doles out a horrific death to his son. He is arrested, beaten, spat upon and mocked. He then has a garland of thorns viciously crammed onto his head. He is scourged to within an inch of his life and is then made to carry the crossbeam on his back and walk up Calvary to his place of execution. He falls three times and is then nailed, hands and feet to the cross. He has the mocking sign “King of the Jews” attached above his head and hangs in extreme agony for three hours before he finally dies. This is no quick killing. It is a long drawn out bloodfest. And that is how mankind was redeemed.

I always wonder at the last words of Jesus according to the gospels of Matthew and Mark, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” which means “My God, My God, Why hast thou forsaken me?” Did he suddenly realise his trust in God was to no avail? Strange words to say and as they are not the words one would expect him to say, many scholars believe they are authentic.

The passion of Christ as it is called has since played an enormous role in the spiritual and physical life of the church. We are told we should offer our pain up to God in further atonement for our sins, even though this was already done by Jesus. Because of this suffering by Jesus, a lot of saints and churchmen put a lot of emphasis on suffering, even making it into something that is somehow good. Suffering is not good and is one reason why mankind has laboured since the dawn of history towards trying to lessen or do away with suffering altogether. So not only does God expect his own son to suffer but expects all his creatures on this planet to suffer as well. Now what sort of God is that?

This whole idea of suffering is one reason I find it hard to accept the existence of God. If God exists and is omnipotent why does he allow this to continue. I can accept that adults may suffer a bit because it might be some sort of punishment for wrongs done, but innocent children? This I cannot condone. Assuming the existence of God for one moment, this leads to the whole problem of exactly what manner of God he is. If he is all powerful then why does he not stop suffering? Either he can’t which means he is not omnipotent, or he won’t which means he is not all good. Simple logic? Maybe our minds are not intelligent enough to understand God’s ways and it will all become clear in due course. But that is one hell of a leap of faith to take, surely? Okay, I know many do have this faith, but what about those who don’t? Besides, why do we all come into this world with no choice in the matter, go through whatever we go through and then die? Does this not seem like some sort of perverse alien experiment? Hardly the handicraft of a supposedly all good God.

Some say that maybe suffering can make one strong. There are people who have stated that their suffering in life has actually helped them to understand their place on this earth, become strong and appreciate life much more. But if that is so, then it can only happen in the context of being able to understand the suffering. It surely cannot apply to children or animals. And whereas some people may find comfort in their distress, I think it’s a cop out.

Another way to look at the problem of suffering is to ask the question what is evil about a life-saving operation performed without anaesthetic (as was done not so long ago) such as the removal of a gangrenous leg. This, while horrendously painful did save lives. However today we have discovered how to use anaesthetic. And that was mortal man's discovery. How about what a supposedly omnipotent God can do? Why put us through this life in the first place?

I have sometimes looked at the problem of evil by thinking what is a lifetime of pain compared to an eternity of happiness? Maybe we can learn valuable lessons through evil. But I think that is a bridge too far.

Another factor we should consider is the possibility that God could himself be evil. After all where belief in God exists, it is usually assumed that God is good. That is an assumption. Maybe it is wrong. The world itself is not good, at least many of the people in it are not good. And while earthquakes and other natural events can be considered neutral, they leave a trail of evil behind.

The easiest answer is to conclude that God does not exist. But I find that is too easy. There has to be more to it than that? Maybe that is wishful thinking, but that’s the way I feel about it. Then again, maybe the human race is so bad, we don’t deserve redemption. But, hey, we didn’t make ourselves. So many questions and so few answers.

After the time of Christ, many gospels were written about him. We are most familiar with the four gospels which the Church decided to incorporate into the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. However, many more were written which were considered heresy by the early Church fathers and hence were banned. Many were destroyed, but luckily quite a few have survived. In some of these the gnostics as they were called (from the Greek word gnosis meaning knowledge) postulated that the God of the Old Testament, which they called the demiurge, was not a very good fellow at all. In fact this guy was downright evil and not only was he responsible for the creation of evil but he was also created the material world which itself was evil. However, above the demiurge is a supreme, good, but unknowable God who was responsible for sending Jesus to instruct us that the kingdom of God was within each and every one of us and that we could eventually return to that kingdom if only we would open ourselves up to the secret knowledge or gnosis. There were other variations on this theme and the above is only a very sketchy example. But as I’ve said before why would a supreme God go to all this trouble in allowing the demiurge to wreck havoc? Why not just bypass him altogether?

Having said all that, I guess we must accept that the Bible and even the Gnostic texts themselves were all written by men. Not by God. And they were written by men simply trying to make sense of the mysterious world they found themselves part of. In those far off days, they did not have the science or an iota of the knowledge we now have, so they resorted to their own fertile imaginations to come up with plausible explanations of the world and their place in it. And even with all our science and progress today, we still haven’t much of a clue as to the meaning of it all.

There are many areas of the Bible (both old and new testaments) which contain a lot of wisdom and if people adopted the teachings of Christ in their day to day lives, this world would be a lot better for it. The idea that Jesus came down to earth to redeem us seems weird to me. I think a better explanation would be that he came to show us that there was a better way to live our lives than the way we were and that the journey through this life is simply some sort of preparation for an afterlife. His sermon on the mount is a beautiful and marvellous call to change our ways for the better and one really can’t go far wrong with uplifting stuff like that. Whether or not Christ was the son of God is a matter for each individual’s faith to address, but whoever this man was, and I’m convinced he was a real and historical figure, he was way ahead of his time.

I guess that this is no better an explanation than anything else, but it gets rid of the “need to suffer” nonsense. Not that it gets rid of the actual suffering, but that is something which we might eventually be able to do ourselves. After all medical science has already drastically reduced pain and distress at various points in our lives. No reason to think it can’t go all the way. And I think the man Jesus would see nothing wrong with that.

So I continue to wrestle. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say I actually wrestle with God himself, but I sure wrestle with the concept of God. And while I don’t expect to win anytime soon or indeed ever, it is an interesting match.

Has Physics Taken a Wrong Turn?

Just before the beginning of the 20th century, physics seemed to be all sown up. Newton’s laws of gravitation showed that the planets in their orbits behaved in perfect accord with his mathematical laws, except for a small discrepancy in the path of Mercury, the planet nearest the sun. And in the realm of the small, the electromagnetic force seemed to account for all phenomena, again except for one small detail to do with blackbody radiation. Whereas physicists expected radiation to vary in a smooth fashion, it seemed to vary in discrete jumps, like small packets. In fact Maxwell (known for his equations describing electromagnetism) said “…that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals”. How wrong he was!

In the early 20th century two giants of physics, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr came along and totally shattered that illusion. All the problems in physics were not solved at all and in fact are far from solved even today.

In the realm of atoms, Max Planck, a German physicist, towards the end of the 19th century, performed a number of experiments which showed that energy came in little bundles. This is regarded as the birth of quantum mechanics. After Planck came Niels Bohr, a Dane who became a professor at the University of Copenhagen. Bohr made major contributions to quantum theory throughout the course of his life, particularly during the first half of the 20th century. Along with Werner Heisenberg he developed the theory which would become known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. This held sway for many years although today there are many other interpretations of the theory.

On the other hand, in the realm of the very big, Albert Einstein developed two theories, the special and general theories of relativity. The special theory dealt with the speed of light (constant in a vacuum) and his famous energy equation (the amount of energy locked in a lump of matter is equal to the mass of the matter multiplied by the square of the speed of light). This simple equation simply says that not only can energy be transferred into mass and vice versa, but as the square of the speed of light is such a huge number, the amount of energy contained in even a tiny lump of matter is enormous. This led eventually to the development of nuclear energy. The general theory dealt with gravitation solving the niggling problem of the discrepancy in Mercury’s orbit.

However, while in the world of the very large (everything from our everyday knowledge of people, tables and chairs to the universe itself) things seemed to knit neatly into place (however see below), it wasn’t so in the world of the very small, the demesne of the atom. For a start, Heisenberg came up with his uncertainty principle which said that you could not measure two related aspects of a particle, for example, it’s position and velocity, at the same time. If you knew it’s position with extremely high accuracy, you could not know it’s velocity with any certainty and vice versa. And this wasn’t anything to do with the accuracy of our measuring instruments, it was something fundamental to the nature of particles such as the constituents of atoms like electrons and protons and perhaps even to atoms themselves.

And further, every particle exhibited aspects of particles and waves. Depending on how you measured it, it could appear as a wave or a particle. The well known double slit experiment showed this clearly and became known as complementarity.

Furthermore, in the quantum world, because of the uncertainty principle, you could not tell when an atom would decay. You could only give a statistical average. If you had millions of atoms, you could predict how many would decay over a certain time, but not which ones.

This led to the story of Schrodinger’s cat. Erwin Schrodinger was a physicist who came up with an equation which described how a system of many particles would change over time. In the tale of the unfortunate cat, a subatomic particle is placed in a box along with the cat. The fate of the cat rested on whether the particle decayed or not (which probability was fifty-fifty). If the particle decayed it caused a phial of poison gas to be broken which killed the cat. If the particle did not decay, no gas was released and the cat lived. Because the box is sealed you will not know what happened till you open it. Naturally this is only a very simple illustration of the paradox and leaves out a lot of subtle technical details. But it purported to show that until the box is actually opened the cat is neither dead nor alive but in a state of entanglement of the two outcomes, a sort of dead/alive cat. This of course was a thought experiment and was never actually carried out. But it served as a good example of the apparent absurdity of quantum physics.

Einstein took umbrage at this and even though he had been involved in the early development of quantum mechanics (wave/particle duality for example), he was a forceful opponent of it. Legend are his many arguments with Bohr on the subject and he was never reconciled to the theory, dying in 1955. However, as the years wore on and more experiments were done, they tended to support quantum theory. Many more theories were put forward to try and explain what was going on in the quantum world. One physicist quipped that there were as many different theories as there were physicists.

One really crazy theory is the Many Worlds theory first put forward by a physicist called Hugh Everett. Referring back to our famous cat above, this theory basically said that when something in the atomic world can go in one of two (or more) ways, it actually chooses all ways. The universe splits at this point and in one universe the cat lives while in the other the cat dies. This leads to billions and billions of universes which in my opinion is like cracking the proverbial nut with a nuclear bomb! It’s nonsense, yet surprisingly many physicists say it is the correct theory.

Another major problem we have is the fact that general relativity theory and quantum theory cannot be reconciled together and hence we have two theories of the universe. One of the very large and one of the very small, a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. One of the reasons for this is that general relativity regards space as continuous while quantum mechanics does not. If you try and put the mathematics together, you get infinities popping up and this is a serious flaw.

So for many years physicists have been working on trying to marry the two theories together. What popped up was string theory which eventually was able to cope with both general relativity and quantum mechanics within the constraints of the one theory. This was great except for one detail. String theory then (it was first muted around 1970) and string theory today has not one shred of experimental evidence to show for itself. It is purely a mathematical theory. While it may be a beautiful piece of mathematics, it nonetheless remains moonshine. Maybe one day, it is possible, we may find some evidence for it. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the biggest particle accelerator in the world, which began operations late last year, will be searching diligently for evidence of strings, but even when it reaches it’s full energy capacity sometime next year, it will still be far short of achieving the energies necessary to show evidence for strings. There may be hints but that is all which can be hoped for.

String theory basically replaces all particles with tiny vibrating strings of energy and depending on their frequency of vibration can reproduce every known particle. This may sound grand, but unfortunately these strings do not exist in normal 3-dimensional space (or 4-dimensional if we add time as a dimension). They exist in 11 dimensions. Other string variants can exist in different numbers of dimensions but 11 seems to be generally agreed. But it doesn’t really matter how many dimensions we speak about because there is no evidence for any of these extra dimensions and besides we are really getting into the realm of science fiction, at least in my humble opinion.

So what is happening? Have we really come up against it when trying to figure out the detailed workings of the universe? Is it too big for us? Can our puny human brains handle it? Since the age of the industrial revolution (and even before) men of science have made great strides in understanding the universe and how it works. They have come a long way in a relatively short time. And the progress has been accelerating all the time. Until now. While great things are still being discovered and achieved in other areas of science, physics seems to have come to a dead stop. The standard model, as it is called, has been with us since the 1950s and 1960s, and while it has been improved and refined, it is still with us. And it only encompasses the theory of the atomic world and does not include general relativity which stubbornly remains outside it’s scope.

The Large Hadron Collider has now been operating for a year or so and has only been ramped up to about half it’s design energy. So far the standard model has been confirmed, but no new physics has been seen. But we will probably have to wait till the LHC reaches it full operating energy next year sometime.

So what are some of the outstanding questions we need to answer in particle physics and cosmology? The usual questions are still with us in quantum mechanics. For example, what is meant by a measurement and does this measurement cause the cat, for example, to leave the dead/live stage and become either dead or alive? Does the act of measurement split the universe into two or more universes (the many worlds theorem)? Is the universe 4-dimensional (including time) or multi-dimensional? Are the smallest items of our universe made of particles or strings? Or maybe something else?

Of course there are also questions still to be addressed in the world of the very large. For example, how did the universe begin? For many years there were two different theories, the Big Bang and the Steady State theories. The Big Bang simply stated that the universe began in a massive explosion from a point millions of times smaller than an atom. Not only was all matter we see around us created in that moment, but also spacetime as well. Before that moment nothing existed, not even time. The joke goes that when St Augustine, one of the early Church Fathers, was asked what was God doing before the creation of the world, he answered that He was preparing Hell for people who asked such idle questions. Of course he didn’t answer so glibly. He actually said that time was a property of the universe that God created when he created everything else, so he wasn’t so far from modern ideas here. On the other hand the Steady State said that the universe always existed and that continuous creation was ongoing to fill out the vacuum left as space expanded. However, this idea was shelved when the radio echo of the Big Bang was discovered coming from every point in the sky.

Once it became generally accepted that the Big Bang was the start of our universe, the questions then became what happened before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang? If one Big Bang could occur, where there others? Is there more than one universe? It seems that with every new answer followed a myriad of new questions.

And today, it appears that not only is the universe expanding, but instead of slowing down from the initial kick from the Big Bang, it is actually accelerating. A mysterious substance called dark energy is proposed to be responsible for this acceleration and hence we need to ask what is dark energy. Nobody knows. And to make matters worse, there is also another substance in our universe called dark matter. This is to account for the fact that galaxies should not hold together with the present mass that they contain. At least that we can see and measure, so there must be more mass. This is the dark matter. In fact, our universe as we understand it today consists of 70% dark energy, 25% dark matter which leaves 5% for all the rest, the stars, planets etc. That means we haven’t a clue as to what 95% of our universe is composed of and what’s more, we can’t even see any of it.

And with all our equations, theories etc. there are still many anomalies in our understanding of physics in areas we thought we knew everything about. Like Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. A pair of unmanned spacecraft called Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were sent on a reconnaissance mission of the planets Jupiter, Saturn and interstellar space, having been launched in 1972 and 1973 respectively. According to known laws of physics, these spacecraft are not where they are supposed to be. They are falling behind in their projected travel by about 5000 kilometers per year. This needs to be explained and much work is being done to address the problem, including adjusting our present theory of gravitation. However, no answers are forthcoming as I write.

Another interesting anomaly is the so called horizon problem. This is asking the question as to how the universe is so uniform no matter in which direction we look. The microwave background radiation which fills the whole universe is at the same temperature everywhere. As nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, there is no way this radiation could have travelled between the most distant parts of the universe to even out the hot and cold spots created in the Big Bang. One wild solution to this was suggested by a physicist called Alan Guth when he came up with an idea called inflation. This says that the universe expanded incredibly rapidly just after the Big Bang in the order of billions of times in billionths of a second. A hairy conjecture which only opens up more questions as to how this might have happened etc.

So it seems to me that the progress (or lack of) modern physics makes, the weirder the answers become. Many worlds, extra dimensions, dark energy, string theory etc. And many of these are pure conjecture with little or no evidence to back them up. Not that I despair of modern physics, it is a most fascinating subject. But it looks like the days are gone (or at least are in abeyance) when new particles were being discovered regularly and theory and experiment went hand in hand. Now experiment is lacking severely behind the theorists who continue to astonish us with their new forays into the unknown.

I should note that I have only scratched the surface of this amazing subject, there is so much more that I could have mentioned. In the meanwhile, we wait for experiments to catch up with theory and hopefully the LHC will ramp up to full energy sooner rather than later. But will it be enough?

Death

Death. The word smacks of finality. An end to our existence, at least in the mortal world. Books have been written about it. Poems have been written about it. Films have been made about it. But what exactly is it? We can only really speak about it from this side of the grave as nobody has ever come back from the other side to tell us what it was like. Okay, I know plenty of people will feel their hackles rising at this point but I’ll get to all that later.

There are many definitions of death depending where you’re coming from. Medically, it used to be when the heart stopped beating, but today people can be sustained on life support systems and actually recover. However, it is probably when brain activity ceases. From that point on the body becomes paler, the blood settles in the lower portions, the temperature drops, the limbs become stiff and eventually decomposition begins. At this point the body is placed in a coffin and buried or cremated.

All neatly done and dusted and everyone can go home, bringing with them their fond and maybe not so fond memories. Somebody said if the Irish had half the respect for the living as they do for the dead, this would be a great place to live. Well, I agree with that and is one reason why if I didn’t like somebody when they were alive, their death ain’t going to change my opinion of them.

Why do some people fear death so much? Personally I don’t fear death at all, but having said that if I were put up against a wall right this minute with a gun pointed at my head, I’d be quakin’ in my shoes. And who knows, if I ever get to lie on my death bed in the full knowledge that I’m about to quit this mortal coil, I’ll probably be pretty scared too. But at this point in time the only qualms I have are about suffering. Nobody wants to suffer. After all death is a part of life, albeit the final bit. I have no fear of the afterlife (if there is one) either. Being an agnostic, if it turns out that God meets me, I’ve no doubt (due to my belief in science and reason) that such a being is benign and would quite agree with me that it was the mind and reasoning powers He provided me with which led me to my agnosticism.

Another reason I might fear death is the awful possibility of premature burial. Now, that is really scary. Image waking up and finding yourself in a coffin from which there is no escape. Or worse still, waking up as the coffin is about to enter the furnace if you’re being cremated. However, I believe that medical science is sufficiently advanced these days that this doesn’t happen anymore. At least I sure hope so. I remember a woman waking up in the morgue in Dublin in the 1960s. The attendant got as big a fright as she did.

Some fear death because, not believing in anything, just don’t want to leave this world. They don’t want to die into nothing and therefore “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, as Dylan Thomas’ poem expresses so well. But if there is nothing there, they are not going to know. They’ll be dead! And it’s hard to imagine that anybody is so certain that there is nothing after death that it should scare them so. But I guess there are all sorts of folks in the world.

Some fear death, because they haven’t exactly lived a good life and they realise that finally they might meet with some justice. Well, I don’t think they should worry too much as I doubt God is waiting with a big grin on his face to grab their souls and haul them off to Hell. As I don’t believe in the devil, there’s no point even discussing such a nonsense concept. I could be wrong, and at the end of the day if God does exist and allows the existence of such a monster as Satan, then even the good need to be terrified.

Maybe others fear death because it is so unknown. And that’s probably the biggest fear of mankind: the unknown. What’s out there and what can it do to us? But surely, death must be the most exciting adventure any of us can undertake? This is the one time we really are all alone as we step over the threshold. What’s there? If there’s nothing, we’re not going to know. A bit of a letdown really. But how about if there is an afterlife, I mean what kind of trip would that be? Let’s think about it.

If it is like most people in the Western World have been told, then we get to come face to face with God. This incredible powerful being, who not only made the whole universe (just think about that!) but also each one of us. That’s a mighty potent piece of engineering. Then we get to spend eternity doing, I’m sure, very interesting things. I doubt we’ll all be bored out of our minds sitting around on clouds singing songs of praise all day. And I’m pretty sure we don’t have to consider going through a spell in Purgatory. That was something dreamed up by the Church in the 12th century as they couldn’t conceive that anybody might be pure enough to enter Heaven immediately after death and we all had to spend some time getting purged first. And Hell? All I can say if there is such a place, then God is a tyrant after all and we’re all screwed. Which leads to the interesting question as where evil people go. This is a topic in it’s own right and all I can say is with Mahatma Gandhi “love the sinner, hate the sin”. Not an easy thing to do at all and probably something quite impossible to do by anybody but a very, very forgiving person. “Forgive your enemies,” said Christ. Easier said than done. So having said that, I leave this topic to another day.

In my opinion, if there is an afterlife, I would think it unlikely that we are brought full blown into it. I would assume that we enter a spiritual sphere and live a life there, no longer physical but spiritual. And once again we die in that life and move on to an even higher mode of existence. I don’t know for how long this might continue or how many higher levels of existence there might be. Maybe infinite. This might be one answer as to what evil people might face as in this spiritual dimension they would have to face their own evil. But this is getting too speculative.

I also find it strange the number of people who don’t want to discuss death. They think it is morbid or ghoulish. Personally I find it fascinating and like it or not, we are all going to face it one day. And not only that, we’re going to be alone when we do so. Oh, you can say there will be people with you at the end gathered around your death bed. If we go like that, then notwithstanding the fact that there may be people around you, you still go into that good night alone. Nobody else in that room is going to volunteer to come with you. I remember my father on his death bed. According to my mother afterwards he knew he was dying but didn’t want to talk about it. Okay, I accept his right not to speak about it, but I thought it was a great pity. I hope I’m not afraid to speak about it if I find myself in such a situation or the doctor has given me so long to live. It would be a shock, but you get over shocks and hopefully come to terms with it.

Above I said that nobody has ever come back from death to tell us about it. Many people will have something to say about that. I’ll try to give my point of view in what follows.

Of course, the main objection I suppose is religious. We have been brought up to believe in God and if we live a good life here on Earth, we will gain our reward in Heaven. But who told us this? It started with our parents and then our teachers. We were children. We knew no better. We believed everything our parents and teachers told us. We were bombarded with information about God, and how He looked after us, even supplying a personal guardian angel to guide us through our lives. Less emphasis was put on the demon who also accompanied us through our lives tempting us to commit sin. Sin, that awful word, which was bound up (at least in our earliest years) with some mysterious and dreadful deeds more awful than lying or murder. We would be somewhat older before it was equated with sex!

And if we did lead a good life, of course we went to heaven when we died. If the Christian Brothers were to be believed, there were many cases when the souls of the faithful departed did in fact come back to regale us with stories of the afterlife, usually with dire warning to avoid bad companions in this life or face the prospect of an eternity in hell. But these were only stories. Nobody came back to visit me, which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen to others. But I have never come across a definite case where it has happened. Oh, people have told me about their ghost stories and so forth, but when I begin to question them more closely, I can quickly see that is all it is, stories. And if I ask where exactly is the particular house which is definitely haunted and where I’m guaranteed to see a ghost, the answer becomes vague or I’m told the house has been sold and besides don’t I ever take anybody’s word for it. Quite frankly, no, I don’t.

What about séances? Can’t we communicate with the dead? Don’t mediums work? Oh, you’ll get a lot of charlatans playing at this game. But I believe mediums and such have been exposed so many times, it is amazing, at least to me, why anybody in their right mind still believe the garbage that they say. The American magician, James Randi, among many others have shown how mediums conduct their business many times. It is called cold reading. This is a technique easily learned. Next time you attend a session where the medium says they are contacting the dead, or even see it on television, pay close attention. Typically with an audience they might start by saying something like “I’m hearing from somebody called James, does anybody know a James?” Well the chances are that in any reasonably sized audience somebody will have a relative who has died called James, or Jimmy, or Jim. They never say they are being contacted by somebody called Zacharias, for example. “Now this James”, the medium will continue, “died from some illness.” Oh yes, big deal. What else did they die from? Laughter? “I’m getting the word cancer,” they’ll say. And so they’ll continue and when they have narrowed down one gullible in the audience they’ll concentrate on them. “James is telling me to tell you he is happy and not to worry about the money.” Maybe at this point the person whose relative is speaking to them from the other side (the other side of what, I ask cynically) says they don’t know what James is talking about. Watch closely how the medium quickly says something to cover up, like “No, it’s not money. Not in that sense. Did he leave a house?” And most likely they are back on track again. Yes, there was a house. And this goes on till the unfortunate person from the audience is in tears really believing that this shyster is really talking to their relative James. Shame on them. They always get things wrong, but quickly change the subject. What don’t people notice this?

And then again I’ve spoken to people who have visited a fortune teller and they will tell me how many things they got right. But I like to ask them how many things they got wrong. People only remember what they want. It’s human nature, I suppose. The chances are that I can tell somebody I never met before ten things about themselves, and I’m bound to get at least two or three correct. Professional charlatans (or indeed illusionists who tell you they are using trickery and not supernatural talent) have honed their craft well and using a lot of other tricks, like body language etc. will get a lot more things correct.

The great Houdini spent many years going to séance after séance in the hope of being able to contact his deceased mother. After a short while he realised the futility of such an enterprise and turned his talents to exposing these mediums. He exposed every medium he ever examined. He even offered a cash prize to any medium who could show that contact with the afterlife was possible. Nobody ever collected the prize.

Even today, the illusionist James Randi has similarly offered a cash prize which nobody has been able to collect. He has exposed all who tried.

Another proof of life after death offered by some is the Near Death Experience or as the yanks like to say, NDE. I’m sure you are familiar with the scenarios, one of which describes a person who dies on an operating table. Their heart stops and they find themselves floating above the operating room and being able to see their body surrounded by doctors, nurses and medical machines. They see the team frantically trying to resuscitate their heart and seeming to fail. In the meantime they float on up through the operating room ceiling and become aware of a long tunnel at the end of which there is a very bright light. There are various descriptions of this light, but those who experience it feel more strongly than anything they have ever felt before, that they have to get to that light. It is drawing them to itself and they experience a wonderful sense of peace and happiness. Suddenly as they are about to reach it, they are drawn back and find themselves back in their body, the surgical team having successfully revived them. And in many cases this experience changes their lives, they feel closer to nature and God and often end up living a better life, free of mundane care.

However, as with everything else, there are a number of proposed explanations for this phenomenon, including recollection of the birth experience, effects of drugs or medicines, oxygen starvation, a flood of endorphins (a type of morphine) released by the dying brain, and hallucinations among others. Scientific investigation into NDEs has shown that oxygen starvation for example can produce very similar sensations. And the experience does appear to be the same across different cultures implying a common cause (human brain?). However it seems to me that it is not necessary to postulate an afterlife as an explanation when the answer could well lie in physiological or biological mechanisms.

And of course the biggest proof if you like of an afterlife is in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So if you believe in Jesus and Christianity, you believe in an afterlife. However, it is no proof that an afterlife exists. It is a matter for faith alone and I can’t quibble with that.

But do we always have to demand evidence? Why not just accept it on faith? Many people do so and if that’s what they have decided then who am I to argue. I’m sure they have good reasons, maybe even had a theophany. However, I simply cannot do that. My logical, scientific, rational mind cries out against it. And I have never had a vision or an encounter with a supernatural being (you might like to check out my article below on Ghosts). I have, along with many others, no reason to accept what others say about such an important topic. Surely, if God exists, He knows how I feel and think and would do something about it. I’m not looking for lightning bolts from heaven but maybe a nod in the right direction. I have often gone into a church at times when nobody else is there as I find them places of quiet, peace and solitude. There is an atmosphere which I have not found elsewhere. I sit quietly near the altar and observe my surroundings. Statues and pictures depicting scenes from the bible or representations of Christ or his mother and other saints. A hush hangs in the air imbued with a scent of incense. You can almost hear the silence. A faint sense of mystery beckons. I look at the various pictures and wonder which bible story they are relating. Sometimes I know, other times I don’t. Then I try and blank my mind. I succeed for a very short time and in that moment try to let God in. But then thoughts come crashing through as if abhorring a vacuum. I become aware of my surroundings again. The quiet sounds of a church. And then intrusions of other sounds, a car in the distance, a gentle snap as the building settles, a door opening somewhere. And then the silence falls heavy again. Nothing stirs and I get up and leave.

I guess in this life there is no way we’re going to find out anything about the next one. We’re just going to have to go there and see. And I, for one, am in no hurry.