The afterlife

fritzelly wrote: »

I believe in something after death everyone and everything is connected to - no afterlife like religion preaches about, not religious in the slightest. Like to think it is more a collective consciousness more than someone knocking on the Pearly Gates asking to be allowed in.
Had a few experiences in my life that tell me there is more than just being born and then you're dead - we live in an impossible universe inside something that doesn't exist until the universe expands in to it. So I think to say there is conclusively nothing after is a misnomer when we really nothing about anything being like little ants on a planet among trillions of planets that we know of!

Of course no-one can say for certain there is nothing after death, they are only giving an opinion. It's an impossible thing to prove or disprove, unless you are daft enough to believe that mediums are real.

But as for saying you believe something exists after death, why would something not exist before birth by the same logic?

Well, to pick nits, these competing Lutheran ideas that you mention are not different, still less inconsistent, conceptions of God; more differing understandings of creation, or differing understandings of how to read scripture, which is very different. All of the Lutherans you met would doubtless affirm a belief in God, the Father almight, Creator of heaven and earth and of all things seen and unseen. And, while you could doubtless usefully unpack what each of them means by terms like "father", "almighty", "creator", "heaven" and so forth, there'd be a lot of commonality there; they have a substantially common concept of "God". And it's certainly wrong to say that any of them claim that God is "a strict creationist"; we may or may not be strict creationists, but God isn't a creationist at all (in Christian thinking); he's a Creator, which is quite different.

I take your point that it's not useful to treat God, or any particular conception of God, as a given. But the practical reality is that there are culturally-determined conceptions of God which are common. I suggest the "If" statements ("If God exists, he created us") are best understood as meaning, not "the Creator God is the only one that could exist", but rather "I am postulating the familiar concept of the Creator God for the purposes of this discussion ".

Meh. Reincarnation is the only afterlife that makes any sense to me.

Be you a bird, a bee, or a bush.

Humans are one of billions of species existing on this earth. When was the last time you thought that the chicken you ate or the fly you swatted was going to it's afterlife ?

Humans are no more special than any other species on this planet, yet we seem to think that we should be granted something for being here for a few years. You live, you die and nature moves on.

Fathom wrote: »

If reincarnation exists, which also suggests that it applies to all species, then do all species have a reincarnated afterlife?

Yes. If we have no remembrance of the previous life (for the most part), then no storage capacity (brain) is needed. So the species can be what we reincarnate to, and them us. Not sure if time would matter to such a construct, so when (or what) we reincarnate as may not follow a linear timeline. Thus man could become eagle, beetle, or a tree that lives forever, watching the world

So perhaps, if the soul matters, then perhaps we are put into an easier life if we did good?

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Black Swan. I don’t want to pick up on all your points, becasue the conversation will get too sprawling (for me, at any rate), but if I may just pick up on a couple:

Black Swan wrote: »

Yes, science does not prove anything; science only suggests. The natural sciences have more precise and valid forms of measurement than the social, behavioral, educational, business, and related disciplines; i.e., they can be more objective and less subjective than the social "sciences."

This is inherent in the nature of the social sciences, I think. For me, the dividing line between tne natural sciences and the social sciences is that the subjects of the latter include us ourselves; our minds, our thoughts, our actions, our choices. And these are inherently subjective factors. This isn’t a weakness or a fault in the social sciences; it’s just their defining characteristic.

Black Swan wrote: »

Disciplines tend to reduce or eliminate such "choices between alternative epistemologies" by specifying appropriate research frameworks; e.g., biology may differ from chemistry as to their specific application of the scientific method. Of greater influence as to method are the RFPs, where only those that comply with a specified framework may be funded.

Disciplines do this, but I wasn’t thinking of disciplines so much as of individuals. I employ different epistemologies when addressing the questions “why won’t my car start?”, “why do I feel so low today?”, “how am I to deal with this problematic behaviour that my child is exhibiting?” and “how do I make [difficult ethical choice]?”. We all do, and we do this not (usually) as the result of training in any discipline.

Black Swan wrote: »

August Comte, et al, attempted to employ the scientific method to disciplines outside the natural, later relabeling of many disciplines as sciences (e.g., social and behavioural sciences). Unfortunately, the theories, assumptions, and measures appear to have fallen below the rigour of the natural sciences in terms of objectivity and validity. Nevertheless, the attempts away from subjectivity towards scientific objectivity by these social and behavioural disciplines appear to have more merit than armchair opinions.

Ah, maybe not. This isn’t a simple binary.

Consider a social science like, say economics. This is the study of the choices people make about the allocation of scarce resources. Obviously, it’s possible to make reliable empirical observations about relevant objective facts ; when the price of spuds rose by X% consumption fell by Y%. And if we have enough such empirical observations we can start to hypothesize explanations, and to draw conclusions which enable us to make predictions. The problem is that our predictions aren’t based just on the empirical data; they also rest on certain axioms, one of which typically is that people are rational and self-interested. To the extent that people are mostly rational and mostly self-interested, our explanations and our predictions may hold mostly good. But we’re still faced with two problems; first, what rational self-interested people view as being in their own interest may not align with what I view as being in their interest and, secondly, sometimes people are either not rational or not self-interested.

The result of this is that if my prediction lead me to expect X in a certain situation and instead Y eventuates, this isn’t necessarily fatal to the validity of my prediction in a way that it would be in, say, physics. The unexpected result could the outcome of either of the factors just mentioned. This shows that my methodology doesn’t - and probably can’t - produce results which are as reliable as the results that the methodologies employed in physics can produce. But this doesn’t mean that my methodology isn’t substantially reliable; reliable to an extremely useful degree. And it certainly doesn’t allow us to conclude that my methodology has no more merit than armchair opinions.

(Not sure how we got here from a consideration of the afterlife!)

I don't believe in god or an afterlife but I used to, and when I did I sort of figured god didn't so much create the universe as become the universe. God didn't say, "Let there be light" but said,"Let me be light"