Ella S.
Well-Known Member
I do not. The Buddhist concept of Naraka, for instance, can be believed in without any deity's involvement. It is also easy to conceive of some form of underworld without believing that said underworld is actively sentient, as some Atheopagans might.
No, I do not believe in an afterlife.
I do not believe in an afterlife because the afterlife is nomologically impossible. It is incompatible with what psychiatry and neuroscience have revealed about the brain and it would necessarily violate several laws of physics, as all of the information and energy within our brain is accounted for under physical models. There's simply no room for a spirit, subtle body, soul, or even the survival of consciousness after death.
An afterlife is metaphysically possible, as far as alethic possibility goes. Our understanding of the natural world is likely to change, and therefore so might our understanding of what counts as nomologically possible.
However, the fact that our minds are merely an abstraction of our physical brains is so well-attested to by over a century of study that it is highly unlikely that we will ever discover something to contradict these findings. It is more likely that our universe is a simulation than that there is an afterlife, because it would not violate the laws of physics for the universe to be a simulation despite it being extremely improbable.
So it depends on what form of possibility you mean. In the narrowest sense of "possible," the afterlife is possible. In the more general sense, which I find to be the more important and pertinent one for virtually all contexts, the afterlife is impossible and there is not even a remote possibility that it might exist.
