Here is an excerpt from my latest work, a 32-page hypertext titled "Summa Contra Theologica." The full text can be found here.
If you currently believe in--or at least don’t fully discount the idea of--a god, you have this marvelous security blanket of an afterlife to keep you from crying your eyes out that your beloved (parents/child/friend/hamster) has died. You can bathe your fears in the soothing pool of faith. Faith that you’ll see them again, someday. And even better, faith that the same inconceivable fate won’t happen to you.
That’s why I am so reluctant to relax my mental fingers from those last few grass tufts of belief, and let myself fall into the bottomless pit known as atheism. In my more clingy moments, when I find myself mentally grasping for an eternal afterlife, or at least a non-speaking part in an off-broadway production of one, I find myself grasping at some rather pathetic straws: like, isn’t it possible that the reduction of entropy in the universe that is due to my brain will somehow be perpetuated after I die? Couldn’t my life experiences get absorbed into some kind of cosmic entropy field that we don’t know about yet?
Here’s another straw: a spiritual-mystical-fuzzy thought I find appealing, an “out” for anyone freaked by the cold, indifferent universe who you never mattered to and who won’t miss you when you’re gone. It goes something like this: no one knows why some energy, some photons moving at the speed of--well, photons--voluntarily chooses to trap itself in some kind of well and take the form of matter, that sluggish, finite, subject-to-entropy form of existence. My mental image is that of the Christian concept of tiny little perfect angel souls in heaven voluntarily coming down to Earth to eat and shit and fuck and die before being admitted back into the pristine glory of Heaven. In other words, maybe there’s eternal life in every one of the atoms that make up our bodies?
Well, shoot, this was supposed to be a chapter on the fallacy of believing in a god just to avoid the unpleasantness of eternal non-existence after we die. But instead I’m giving you my straw-man arguments as to why that may be wrong. And I’m about to lay a third straw on you. It’s a complex one, so give me a minute to lay it all out.
To begin with, we have little concept of how and why, in the oceans full of amino acids that abounded in the early days of Planet Earth, somehow miraculously an RNA molecule formed. Or how this new species of much more complex molecules got it in their head--well, not head, but coding, maybe--to form the first living organism. It seems like a pretty huge leap to go from a molecule to a living being. Like, what was the law of physics that made that happen? We can only guess, and so really that means that any nihilist or atheist or whatever is taking this HUUUGE leap of faith that life will just spontaneously create itself, if given enough time. But it’s illogical to believe in this bootstraps creation of life, since we’ve never seen it happen in the laboratory. No one has any reason to believe it can happen, except that it fits a certain religion called “atheism.” In other words, if you are committed to finding a non-creationist explanation for the existence of life then you have to believe that life will spontaneously create itself. And yet there is a mysterious grace in whatever power froze massless energy and created matter. There is even more inexplicable magic in the life contained within a single cell. And therefore in each of the billions of living cells that make up your body.
Here’s yet a fourth straw in my strawman argument against nihilism: you are not a unitary being, a single entity. You are an entire ecology of beings. Of the cells in your body, sure, but also the microorganisms that you play host to. And if this super-organism that they all combine to form, against all likelihood, in opposition to the universe’s dreary march toward increasing entropy--that is, you--will not continue to exist as a unitary being after you die, even if your body is cremated and every single living cell that once inhabited you has been incinerated, the very atoms that made you up still go their merry way and move on to their next role in the super-super-organism we call Earth.
There, don’t you feel better now? Have a granola bar.