In summarizing neuroscientist Erik Hoel’s views on the difficulty of explaining human consciousness as a property derived exclusively from our brains, science writer Denyse O’Leary has observed at Mind Matters News:

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that human consciousness isn’t a material phenomenon like any other; it has one foot in time and another in eternity.

As a physicist and as a human being, I am fascinated by the pervasive human hope in life after death. Is the hope rational? Perhaps the answer can’t be determined from a focus on only one line of reasoning, but from a cumulative case, drawing on scientific fields including my own.

Life Itself

The very existence of life — the fact that we are here at all to the pose the question — calls for something more than physical nature. The inexplicable complexity of living organisms, from single-celled bacteria to advanced mammals and humans, defies explanation from considerations of matter alone and its various interactions. The four forces of nature that physicists identify do not have it in them to orchestrate the specific arrangements of elements of matter into the complex interacting molecules necessary for even the simplest organismal forms. 

And yet life exists, not as a poor outpost on the fringes of the natural world, but (at least on Earth) in multifarious profusion, demonstrating beauty, vibrancy, outrageous diversity, co-existent and interdependent in tightly knitted ecosystems. We can only conclude that if nature cannot explain life, then the existence of life points to a source, a potent reality, beyond our common understanding of nature.

And then there are the immaterial aspects of our own human existence — our consciousness, our sense of self, and our intelligent minds. While modern physics calls for the reality of nonphysical aspects of this universe, such as electromagnetic fields and quantum wave functions, to describe these natural phenomena as conscious, self-aware, or intelligent is a stretch beyond our current physics. So, again, the immaterial aspects of living things suggest a source other than particles of matter interacting according to the known principles of nature.

Life exhibits creativity, functional complexity, purpose, consciousness, intelligence, and independence of choice. Since none of these attributes are derivable from our scientific study of nature, we can rationally conclude that the source of life hails from beyond our realm of space and time. Moreover, the source of life necessarily possesses all these qualities of life in vibrant fullness.

More than Just Anecdotes

While not so well-documented as the physical complexity of living things and the immaterial aspects of mind, the evidence of near-death experiences (NDEs) also calls for attention. More than just anecdotal testimonies, NDEs present a convincing cumulative case for the continuation of life beyond the death of the physical body.

John Burke began his career as an engineer. After studying more than a thousand NDE accounts over the course of 35 years, he concluded:¹

Although no two experiences are alike, and some outlying details should be skeptically questioned, there are amazingly common elements to the core near-death experience described by young and old, across cultures, in different languages.

Experiencing a “separation of consciousness from the physical body” is one of the most common elements of NDEs, accompanied by intensely positive feelings and heightened awareness. If consciousness were only an emergent phenomenon resulting from neural complexity based on biochemistry, thermodynamic decay of the brain at death would be expected to produce attenuated awareness, collapsed consciousness, and faded feelings.

The Evidence from Beauty

Turning to an intangible attribute of nature, beauty manifests attributes in its deepest form that transcend physical explanations. 

Classically, the concept of beauty is captured in words such as harmony, proportion, and radiance…. Radiance could be described as the difference between a doll’s face and the laughing smile of a human child. The doll is hollow, but the radiance of the child’s face manifests an inner depth.²

Appreciating the radiant aspect of beauty, uniquely recognized by a mind of sufficient intelligence, distinctly overlaps with the human ability to discern meaning in language-based messages.

…the quality of beauty known as inner depth is found in greatest measure in systems with a high information content, in living things…. Depth of beauty appears to be — in its manifestation, creation, and appreciation — the purview of a mind attuned to beauty.³

It may be that the view of nature prevalent in the Western mindset, which strictly divides the natural from the supernatural (and then dismisses the latter), fails to actually describe reality. A physicalist view, perhaps drawing support from Newtonian mechanics (although see Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis for a deeper understanding of Newton himself), is arguably a recent development in human history. 

However, ongoing biological research is leading to a reevaluation of organisms as organic machines, as recently reported in an article here by Emily Reeves. Science writer Philip Ball notes, “Comparing life to a machine, robot, or computer sells it short.” Discovery Institute evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg has gone so far as to question the purely material nature of the genome. If the “immaterial genome” hypothesis is right, then the “machine” metaphor for life falls even farther short. 

As Dr. Reeves observes, “In biology, evidence of purpose abounds.” Meaning and purpose are increasingly understood as defining characteristics of all living things, from simple to advanced. Trying to tease out “meaning and purpose” from particles of matter or from the forces that govern their interactions is a non-starter according to the laws of physics. Here again, we find something unexplainable by nature, but perfectly understandable from the point of view of super-nature. 

In this brief article, I have touched only the surface of many arguments relevant to our topic. Biological life, consciousness, near-death experiences, beauty and its perception, and the meaning and purpose found in living things offer a composite of evidence consistent with a conscious existence beyond death. Belief in the continued consciousness of loved ones who have passed away has, it seems, a rational basis. There is “hope of eternal life.”⁴

Notes

1. John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2015), 46.
2. Eric Hedin, Canceled Science: What Some Atheists Don’t Want You to See (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2021),197.
3. Hedin, Canceled Science, 203-4.
4. Titus 1:2 (ESV).