In case you prefer to listen/watch.
When Samantha was just shy of her fifth birthday—an age when her delight in every manner of living creature was well underway—she noticed a snail on the sidewalk. This was the same snail she had noticed just a few hours earlier, slowly crawling down the front steps of her home. Only now it was lifeless and crushed.
“What happened to it?” she asked.
“It looks like it got stepped on, Samantha,” said her mom.
“But why isn’t it moving.”
Her mom looked at her husband as if handing off the conversation to him. He said, “Samantha, it’s not moving because it died.”
She slowed her walk toward the house and looked puzzled. Then she looked up at her dad and said, “Will you die, daddy?”
“Yes, Samantha, I will.”
“Will sister die?”
“One day, yes.”
“Will mommy die?”
“Yes.”
Tears began to fill her eyes. “Will I die?”
“Yes, Samantha. One day, a long, long time from now you will.”
Now inside the house, Samantha began to cry uncontrollably. When she calmed down just a bit, her dad continued, “Samantha, I know that makes you afraid. That’s okay. But why are you so upset? Are you afraid that if you die you’ll miss mommy?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid you’ll miss your sister?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid you’ll miss me?”
“No.”
She looked up at her dad, eyes swimming with tears, and said, “I’ll miss myself.”
When I first heard this strangely beautiful story from Samantha’s dad, an Anglican priest, it almost took my breath away. Here was a little girl who grasped the human situation in all its sadness. She hadn’t been introduced to any of the strategies that adults use to drown out the terrifying thought of ceasing to be. She saw the truth raw—what most of us have felt at one time or another.
In this article we’ll consider the only answer that would have a chance of consoling Samantha—that, while death will certainly mean missing those she leaves behind, it won’t mean missing herself.
Science is king at public universities like the place where I taught before retiring. Too often it steps beyond its boundaries and claims that human beings are entirely material organisms, nothing more than physical stuff. Too often students emerge from their classes thinking that belief in spiritual worlds and beings is for the weak of mind.
But what a forlorn worldview this is, as Samantha precociously saw. Parents and children all annihilated, reduced to nothingness at death.
As the celebrated atheist Christopher Hitchens said shortly before his death, “When I speak of annihilation, I mean just that the screen goes blank.”
Does the screen really go blank?
Hitchens was rightly distressed at the thought of extinction. So was Woody Allen when he wrote, “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”
Like Hitchens, I’m not capable of believing something just because it’s written in a scripture or promulgated by a religious leader. I need evidence, and in that way we are very similar. Why, then, do we come to such different conclusions? My impression of him is that he didn’t make a serious, in-depth study of the evidence that’s available to everybody.
The eminent English historian Arnold Toynbee was, like Hitchens, a non-believer in survival for almost all his life. But he changed his mind shortly before his death in 1975 and credited research on the near-death experience (NDE) for the shift. The last book he wrote and edited was titled Life After Death (1976).
Since his death the field of psychical research has grown far beyond anything he could have imagined. Not only do we get assurance that there is life after death; we even get hints of its nature—a spiritual world more plausible and attractive than any given to us by the world’s religions.
This evidence will probably not be enough to convince avowed physicalists that they survive death, for they are certain that the brain generates consciousness, so when the brain dies, so do we. My colleagues and I find overwhelming support for a different view: that the brain works with consciousness as its organ while embodied, but that the brain is not necessary for consciousness to exist when free of the body.
Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
I am confident that Samantha’s tears will dry when she’s old enough to appreciate the good news I’ve been sharing with you in these many articles. And if ever our unreasonable fear of death should be supplanted on a planetary scale, the whole meaning of life would begin to shine through, and with it a collective sigh of relief the world has never known before, so clearly.
My most recent book, Guardians of the Afterworld, puts all this on display. An upcoming novel, The Hell Dwellers, will showcase life in the Shadowlands. Meanwhile, let us be a force for good in this world.
Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?, Heaven and Hell Unveiled and his novel, Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is coming in 2026. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.
I watched part of a video on YouTube (less than a minute) where physicist Brian Cox answers the question “Is there scientific evidence of life after death?” with a definitive NO. At least there is no evidence that he is aware of. Studies of NDE’s, mediums, patients with death bed visions are, presumably in Mr. Cox’s world view, unadulterated crap. Pseudoscience. Or it falls under the common rejoinder given to signs outside of churches “interesting if true.” Or, he is completely ignorant of the vast scientific literature or worse, indifferent.
I gather that Cox can’t comprehend how an immaterial soul or spirit could influence the material brain to signal via the nervous system a hand wave, or vocalize a word. Fair enough, but spirits claim that there is an unbroken continuum between the material plane and the state in which they exist. Perhaps there is a form of ghostly matter and etherial energy governed by laws the same or not dissimilar to known laws of physics. Rather than two distinct states, there is a gradual transition between states.
Clearly there is an emotional and irrational component to the outright dismissal of evidence for the hereafter. Its association with religious notions of hell, heaven, demons, and angels allies such evidence, in the minds of rationalists, with the religious types who fight against stem cell research, vaccination, etc. Thus, all notions of a hereafter must be relegated to matters of pure faith and belief that are outside the scope of scientific investigation. Presumably all of the social sciences suffer the same fate as they are heavily reliant on testimony and anecdotes. How can science hope to understand the human condition if reports of subjective experience are rejected out of hand?
Brian is the poster child for materialism. Don’t expect him to change, probably not until he’s dead. And even then … 🙂
Is it too much to ask of popular scientists like Cox and Neil deGrasse Tyson to follow Witgenstein’s dictum “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and when you have a wide following, a grave responsibility rests on your shoulders.
I assume Brian Cox is limiting his views to exact sciences and not including the majority of sciences, i.e., the inexact one, in his conclusions. So much of what we credit to science is inexact. The meteorologists said we would have thunderstorms yesterday, but they didn’t happen. A 90-year-old man is still smoking a pack of cigarettes every day and has no signs of heart or lung disease. It was reported a few days ago that Antarctica gained two billion tons of weight over the past two years when they were expected to continue melting away. How much of science is exact?
Apparently, in 2015, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet calling for reform against publication bias, conflicts of interest, transparency in funding, etc.
said: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue…”