Darwinian Thinking About Life After Death

Darwinian science can explain the evolved natural desire for religious experience as a manifestation of the uniquely human evolved capacity for symbolism--for imagining symbolic worlds that can include life after death, perhaps with eternal happiness in Heaven for the saved or eternal torment in Hell for the damned.  We have an instinctive desire for preserving our lives, and our powerful imaginations can project our lives into an endless future after death.  

We create the symbolic reality of the afterlife by collective consent--by agreeing with one another that this symbolic world exists.  That is to say that we must persuade one another that it's real.  That also means that we can persuade ourselves that it is not real.  For example, as I have argued, the four possible ways of achieving immortality--staying alive forever, being resurrected after death, living forever as a disembodied soul, or living forever though one's legacy (fame or progeny)--can all be shown to be incoherent illusions, because a deathless existence could never preserve the personal identity of any human being.

But then if we were persuaded that the symbolic world of the afterlife is not real, we would have to learn to live with the inevitability of death without that knowledge ruining our lives.  We could do that if we could see that living forever is not as good for us, and death is not as bad for us, as we might think.  We would need to see that living forever cannot be really desirable because a deathless human life could not be a truly human life, a point beautifully conveyed in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning," which teaches us that "death is the mother of beauty."  We also need to see that fearing death makes no sense because the dead know nothing, and no living human being can ever be dead, an argument that has been advanced by Epicurus and by Epicureans like Lucretius and Montaigne.

We might worry, however, that morality requires the cosmic justice of Heaven and Hell.  Do good people need to hope for eternal happiness in Heaven, while bad people need to fear eternal damnation in Hell?  Or does our moral conduct depend on the rewards and punishments that come to us while we are alive?  How we answer such questions might decide whether we can agree on the symbolic reality of Heaven and Hell.

Charles Darwin thought that there was a natural moral sense that could move people to moral conduct without any belief in heavenly rewards or hellish punishments.  He claimed that "a man who has no asssured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward" could still derive moral guidance from social praise and blame and from his own rational judgment or conscience.  And yet he also thought that "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality." 

Darwin agreed with the Epicurean denial of life after death, even though he rarely spoke about this in his public writing.  He was led to this both by his evolutionary science of life and death and by his personal experience with death, particularly the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie in 1851.  She died of tuberculosis (known at the time as "consumption").  Darwin's way of understanding and dealing with the death of his child was to keep a careful record of her childhood and her sickness and to preserve his memories of her--particularly, the "joyousness" of her character--in a written memorial essay.

Darwin looked forward to the day that scientists would understand the natural causes of her sickness and perhaps the remedies for it.  He was excited, therefore, when in 1877 he saw an article by Dr. Robert Koch with the first photographs of bacteria, along with Koch's argument that such microorganisms could cause diseases.  Darwin said that it would be the "greatest triumph of Science" to discover the origin of infectious diseases such as the one that killed Annie.

In March 24, 1882, Koch announced that he had identified the cause of tuberculosis as a bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  This was only a few weeks before Darwin's death on April 19.  Over the next forty years, scientists developed antibiotics for treating tuberculosis and a vaccine for preventing it.  In 19th century Europe, 25% of all deaths had come from tuberculosis.  So this medical advance contributed to the remarkable lengthening of the average human lifespan.

Of course, this prolonging of human life by natural science cannot secure life after death.  Unlike his wife Emma, who was a Universalist Unitarian who believed in the universal salvation of all human beings in Heaven after death, who could therefore seek consolation in the thought that she could someday see Annie in Heaven, Darwin saw no reason to believe in the orthodox Christian doctrine of Heaven.

But Darwin and Emma did agree in their rejection of the orthodox Christian doctrine that most human beings would suffer eternal torment in Hell, which Darwin called a "damnable doctrine."

In fact, many Christians like Emma had been persuaded to deny the symbolic reality of Hell as eternal torment as a morally incoherent idea contrary to the scriptural texts of the New Testament.

Over the past fifty years, a growing number of Christians have been led to this conclusion, particularly by people like David Bentley Hart.  In my next post, I will reflect on this as a dramatic example of the cultural evolution of human symbolic thinking about the afterlife.