Examining the Evidence Gap Why We Can't Prove that Life After Death Exists Yet
Afterlife.
Life after death. Heaven. Hell. Paradise. Purgatory. A rose by any other name…
Whatever you want to call it, it’s a controversial subject, and if you ask any random person on the street if they believe in life after death, the reactions you’re going to get are as nuanced and as varied as the subject itself. But at the heart of all of it is a legitimate question that all of us ask whenever we’re faced with the departure of a loved one (or, I daresay, ourselves!): is there life after this?
All of us, from the most religiously devout to the most stoic of atheists, want our lives to matter. Examining life as part of a larger whole - a piece in a greater puzzle, if you will - helps us categorize it and assign value to its length and depth. And grief is an experience we will likely all encounter at some point in our journey. These two reasons alone provide us the motivation we need to further our discussion on what happens after we die. As a species, we’ve increased our advancements in science and technology exponentially over the last 100 years. These days, our mobile devices have more computing power than all the greatest supercomputers through the turn of the 21st century. Advancements in healthcare have - in some cases - eradicated once-fatal diseases that took many lives. Wartime technologies are rendering obselete much of our historical methods of battle. We’ve made incredible strides in a lot of fields. But the mysteries of life after death still loom out there as a great unknown, and we currently have no evidence to indicate - in one direction or another - whether life continues beyond the point of biomechanical death.
I want to make it clear that the lack of evidence for this is on both sides of the argument: we cannot prove that there is more after death, and we cannot definitively prove that there is not. It may, in fact, represent the greatest mystery we currently face on any frontier. We are arguably more familiar with outer space than we are with the end-of-life horizon. Why is this?
Well, the answer to that question isn’t so easy, I’m afraid.
In Westernized nations, death remains taboo - it is viewed as something to be suffered, an event that is to be feared and hated rather than embraced. And since the advent of globalization, Western ideals have spread globally, so that now, too, in nations whose histories were once rich with traditions surrounding end-of-life celebrations we see holistic approaches to end-of-life events replaced by more mechanized, sanitized processes. In the process, death has turned into something of an industry: one wherein large sums of money changes hands for the privilege of grieving the passing of a loved in the “proper” Western way: with pomp and circumstance, and no-expense-spared approaches to corpse preservation and monument installation. In fact, the funeral industry in the United States is big business! To say nothing of Western healthcare and its disease management model which is geared toward preventing death without making anyone whole. These economies are all a part of the myth of progress after all - and capitalism’s wheels turn on revenue and profit.
This is the reason why any studies designed to elucidate an understanding of the processes and events surrounding biomechanical death are marginalized. Fear generates big dollars in the Western economy (the COVID pandemic may very well have been the largest transfer of wealth in our nation’s history) and if we remove the taboo from death - if we demystify it until we see it no longer as an event to be feared or avoided, but rather one no more significant than eating a sandwich or changing one’s socks - then these dollars do not flow, and progress is impeded. The modern religion of progress depends on well-stocked temples (banks) and ever-elusive but often-promised rewards (dollars), and if instituions that maintain this infrastructure fail, chaos ensues.
So our evidence gap will continue for the forseeable future. Funds that could be allocated to offer serious scientific rigor toward the understanding of what comes after death will for now be allocated elsewhere. The death industries in the United States (which include healthcare and the funeral industry, but they aren’t the only ones) will continue to flourish, and we will continue to fear our of this event until….
And yet, there is still hope.
The bravest of scientists are slowly martialing their resources to change the discourse around human consciousness and what it means about biomechnical death.
Just to name a few:
and likely many more whose work has not yet made widespread publication.
The scientists represent a variety of disciplines whose work lends itself to the exploration of the frontiers of neuroscience, consciousness and human development.
We’re only at the very beginning of understanding the processes that surround biomechanical death, and while our modern religion of progress may prevent significant large-scale discoveries for now, eventually - when the march of progress slows or halts - we will realign our focus, and perhaps then we can reimagine death as an event like any other - one to be tolerated or even embraced as part of the natural order of cycles we experience on the timeless backdrop of infinity.
