I have a question: What happens to me when I die?

Not what happens to people in general, or good people, or religious people, or other people, or my relatives, or people in other countries, or whatever: What happens to me when I die.

Considering the fact that each person will die, I am amazed at how little material is available for those of us confronted by death. The government spends huge sums of money developing the food pyramid, and researching the FTC's list of common scams, but there is no similar publication about death. I know I am more likely to die than to fall victim to some half-baked scam. If the government is going to publish useful information, wouldn't the "ultimate statistic" (i.e. every person dies) be a logical place to start? (I am not advocating favoritism towards any religious or philosophical point of view, but instead suggesting something like I've written here which lists the known possibilities to guide people as they make decisions about what to believe.) In modern America, personal death is almost totally ignored. Impersonal death is the stuff of entertainment, and of the news. But people don't seem to give any thought to personal death. I am left to try to glean answers from human history, mostly from the religious traditions of humanity.

Based on my research, the human race has produced three views on what happens after death. Every culture and people group throughout time has had different rituals for and approaches to death, but in terms of the core beliefs about what will happen to me when I die, I find only three basic ideas.

In a sense, there is a fourth view, that of the agnostic. This would be someone who says no one can know what happens after death. There are two slightly different versions of agnosticism: one says we can speculate on alternatives about death, but never know which is correct; the other says we can know nothing whatsoever about what happens after death. Either way, the agnostic position is hardly a satisfactory answer to my question about death. In my research, I have found three clear, easy to understand, and orthogonal (i.e. none overlap) possibilities. Because these views are orthogonal, I am confident that one must be correct. (Or that none are and there is a view I have not discovered.) Because I have exhausted the possibilities, I am able to make an informed decision.

The three views on death:

• NIHILISM
• EARNING SALVATION BY SELF-EFFORT
• SALVATION BY GRACE

NIHILISM

When I die, whatever is "me" (a distinct individual) ceases to exist, period.

There's not much else that can be said about this view.

The nihilist view is typically found in secular philosophies, such as naturalism (or, materialism) which says only the natural, material, physical world exists and that any sort of spiritual or supernatural world can't exist. Obviously, when a person physically dies, that's it. A dead person is dead, and will never regain whatever made the person a distinct individual.

The nihilist view has trouble in explaining where the idea came from of life that continues after death. Naturalists can dismiss it as superstition from a dark and pagan past, but that isn't the question. If we only learn about the physical world from our natural senses through what we perceive, and there is no supernatural, how did the idea of eternal life ever occur to anyone? We should not have ever known that eternal life was a possibility. All living things die in our physical world of reality. There is nothing we will ever encounter which is alive that won't die in some way. Given the naturalist view that we learn only from our senses as they explore the material world, the idea of life after death should never have occurred. The old pagan religious ideas concerned the cycle of death and life through the seasons, but from that it is just as obvious there is a cycle where every living thing will die. Something more than only naturalism turned these early religious thoughts towards a death and life cycle, rather than a life to death cycle.

A similar problem is human beings believe that there can, and should, be a meaning to life. In a naturalistic world, which sees only life ending in death, how did this idea ever occur? Life should quite obviously have no meaning, other than inevitable death. What we do in life doesn't matter. So where did this idea come from that life should have meaning? People believe life is meant to fulfill some purpose, but this idea should never occur in a naturalist world.

Another problem with nihilism is Death's Wager, a variation on Pascal's Wager: If I am annihilated at death, what difference does it make what I believe? Life is in its totality utterly meaningless, because life is a death march to annihilation. If nihilism is true, then why should I not turn to religious beliefs to, if nothing else, anesthetize myself with false hope to make the journey to annihilation more bearable? At times when humanity has removed this false hope, it is interesting to see that the human race degenerates into a charnel house of slaughter, as the atheistic regimes in the 20th century proved. People were put to death as quickly as possible in world wars, concentration camps, and nuclear explosions, as if the human race lost the collective ability to function when its false hope of religion was removed, and the only thing anyone could agree on was accelerating the pace of death.

Although nihilism is largely the domain of naturalistic philosophy, the religious beliefs of Zen Buddhism come extremely close to the nihilist position. The most pure form of Therevadan Buddhism is also nihilistic, because it does not have any idea of the individual continuing to live after death. In Therevadan Buddhism, the individual accumulates karmic impulses which are released upon death, but there is no real concept of the individual surviving.

EARNING SALVATION BY SELF-EFFORT

Some part of my distinct individualness will live after death, and I am able to either make the life to come better, or to make the life to come worse, by my own self-effort during life. What happens to me after death depends on what I earn in this life.

I have found that all religions believe in salvation by self-effort. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Roman Catholicism. This includes branches from these beliefs, and splinter groups, where the fundamental core of belief is not different. Even among Protestant Christians, there has always been an unofficial embrace of this belief as conventional wisdom, even though it is not an official doctrine. Most of the groups which have split with traditional Protestant Christianity have done so to re-introduce this belief. (Including most of the traditional "cults" such as Christian Science, Jehovah's Witness, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventists, etc. which all teach salvation by works.) Anyone who makes up a religion from scratch tends to believe this, such as Scientology. Secular humanists tend to believe in self-effort, even if they do not believe that the individual survives death. This is without much doubt the single most pervasive human belief.

I have already critiqued salvation by works in detail elsewhere.

SALVATION BY GRACE

I must save myself through my self-effort, but I am unable to, therefore I need a substitute who has taken the punishment for what I have done wrong in life, so that I do not have to earn a place in the life after death, but can be allowed to be part of that life by grace.

The need for grace is not farfetched. Both Christianity and Hinduism, the two dominant religions in human thought (most other religions are either forms of these, or offshoots from them) say that the standard for achieving eternal life with God is absolute perfection. There is no evidence in human history that anyone has come close to being perfect.

In a real sense, true Christianity is a subset of salvation by self-effort. Christian belief allows that someone could, in fact, earn eternal life by self-effort, if they kept all of God's law. But it is equally obvious that, as Christianity says, the world is fallen and infected with pervasive sin, so no one can escape its effects.

True Christianity is the perfect balance of love and justice in our world. Islam is all justice and no love; Hinduism is all love and no justice. Justice without pity seems wrong to us, and love without accountability for our actions seems wrong. Christianity says that justice will be served on those who deserve it, but it also says God is love and has paid the price for those who want to be with God for eternity.

True Christianity is unique among the beliefs of the world in saying that God has already allowed himself to be punished for what I have done wrong in my life, and I can freely (through grace) be accepted into eternal life with God through this sacrifice.

Conclusion

For myself, I have studied this question for many years, and have narrowed down the possibilities to the three I present here.

If I believe in nihilism, nothing matters, and I might as well just die.

If I believe in salvation by my own self-effort, I know beyond any reasonable doubt that I am never going to measure up.

That leaves only the third alternative, grace.

Addition Note: Total Randomness

There is a fourth alternative: What happens to me after my death could be totally random and non-deterministic. Some random process may let me into Paradise, force me to be reborn, end my individual existence forever, or do something else totally unexpected. This process is not determined by anything I do in life or anything under my control.

The closest religious view to this alternative is probably Taoism, which paints the world where nothing is what it seems and rational thought can't be trusted.

I do not think this is a valid option. We happen to live in a universe of sublime mathematical regularity, and the universe is not capricious in its operation. I believe we must reason that this carries over into death, too. Otherwise we are believing that, after death, we enter a universe that does not obey regular laws. To believe that would be to throw out everything we know about the universe.

A long time ago, I said miracles were not violation of natural law, which is one reason naturalists don't want to believe in them. One objection to miracles I see often is the idea that if miracles are possible, there are ways to abrogate natural law. I never got a chance to finish my thoughts on miracles, but I feel like miracles can be analogous to debugging a computer program. A program is completely regular and obeys laws of its programming. But a person who debugs the program (God) can stop the program in the debugger at a breakpoint (the time of a miracle) and change the program (cause a miracle). In a debugger, the program itself (the laws of the universe in which the program runs) is not violated in any way. If God wants to stop the universe at a breakpoint and tweak it, he has not violated his own natural law. We also can be certain all natural laws will work consistently everywhere, because we can't manipulate the debugger ourselves. We have to obey natural law.

Addition Note: Kreeft's Five Views

I'm not sure I even knew Peter Kreeft existed when I formulated my three views on death. I certainly had not read Everything You Wanted To Know About Heaven...But Never Dreamed Of Asking. He has a list of what happens after death, which has five items. It's still largely the same list, but he is categorizing them based on possibilities for consciousness rather than consequences of the life lived.

In this book, Kreeft says there are five possibilities of surviving after death:

1. Nihilism.
2. Ghosts. The Greek or Old Testament idea of shades. I did not consider this a current belief and didn't count it. There is little practical difference between annihilation and becoming a ghost, since the ghost can't do anything. Is there a meaningful distinction between existing in a completely passive manner and not existing? (I don't know!)
3. Reincarnation.
4. Living as pure spirit. The Platonic idea of consciousness as being separate from the body. I don't consider Plato's idea fully formed enough to be a workable theory of life and death. Obviously, Plato was influenced by either Egyptian or Indian via Persia (or both) thought about reincarnation, but never fully worked out the system. (Also, I disagree that angels are "pure spirit", since the Bible, even Jesus, says we are going to be like angels when we die, and as Kreeft himself admits we are going to have bodies; but that's another topic entirely.)
5. Cosmic consciousness. The Self is all that remains, before and after death. Individual consciousness is irrelevant.

These are the five possibilities of what could survive death, but not the ultimate consequences. One could be reincarnated, for example, in Hindu beliefs, or ultimately return to the Self, so the two are closely related.

Kreeft is an Aristotelian thinker (via Aquinas, and I haven't quite puzzled out a Thomist venerating the Platonic thinker C.S. Lewis yet!) and I am a Platonic thinker, so that is also part of the difference. I looked for the ultimate truth behind death, and Kreeft looked for categories.