Q & A with Dinesh D'Souza about his new book, “Life After Death: The Evidence.”
Troy Anderson: After defending Christianity from the onslaught of attacks by the New Atheists in your bestselling book - "What's So Great About Christianity" - you're now taking on the question everyone ultimately faces: What happens when we die? What prompted you to turn your attention to this fascinating topic?
Dinesh D'Souza: Well, in a way, the topic of life after death is broader than Christianity because it's something that every religion asserts and it's something that everybody at some point wonders about: Is this life the only life, or is there something more? In this book, I set aside the faith-based argument and I say, "Okay, let's look at reality and lets see what modern knowledge and scholarship has to show." And the beauty of this approach is we find that modern scholarship and knowledge - far from undermining the idea of the afterlife - provides some important supportive corroboration for it.
Anderson: Although you point out in your new book - "Life After Death: The Evidence" - that 80 percent of Americans affirm life after death and the percentage is closer to 100 percent in non-Western cultures, the New Atheists tell us there is no afterlife. Why do you believe they are wrong?
D'Souza: First of all, the New Atheists are at the tip of a certain kind of social iceberg.
They are the most aggressive advocates of a view that many intelligent people have in our culture. This is what I call the Enlightened People's Outlook. Historically, these people may be a minority, but they are very confident of their view because they believe that they are supported by the evidence of science. Their view is reductive materialism, which means there is really only one kind of stuff in the world and that's material stuff. If that is all that we are then there is no life after death. So the core of my book is to refute this materialist idea and to show there actually are positive arguments for the afterlife.
Anderson: In the book, you offer three key arguments in support of the afterlife: one from neuroscience, one from philosophy and one from morality. Would you tell us why they offer a persuasive legal brief for what happens when we die?
D'Souza: The first one is called, "Why It Matters?" Why is the issue of life after death important?
Second, "Why It's Possible?" and here I show that physics and biology offer no obstacles to the religious understanding of life after death, and specifically the Christian understanding. Then, in the third section, I show "Why It's Probable." In other words, why this is not only possible, but it's actually makes sense. Nevertheless, I concede that it's a topic in which you can't have complete certainty. And therefore I bring in practical arguments for believing in life after death.
Anderson: Let's start with the first argument. What does neuroscience tell us about the possibility of life after death?
D'Souza: Well, in a sense, modern neuroscience is based on an effort to refute an old argument that was made really 2,500 years ago by Socrates. The argument from Socrates is very interesting because it shows that life after death isn't a merely a religious doctrine, but it's also a philosophical doctrine. Basically, what Socrates says is look, "We humans are made up of two kinds of stuff. We are made up of material stuff like arms and legs and we're made up of immaterial stuff like thoughts, feelings and emotions and most importantly ideas." Socrates says when we die the material stuff we are made of does indeed deteriorate, but the immaterial stuff does not. My argument is in a sense a rehabilitation of Socrates' argument. I show that this modern effort to equate the mind with the brain has proven to be a complete dead end.
Anderson: What is your argument from philosophy?
D'Souza: Interestingly, in this argument, I use as my guide an atheist, which is the (19th century) philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, building on Immanuel Kant, makes an argument for life after death on reason alone. What he is getting at is when you look at the world, the things out there – an apple, a tree, the Empire State Building – we assume that we are seeing reality. Schopenhauer says, "Wait a minute. Where is this reality? Is the Empire State Building out there, or is it really in your mind?" We can actually prove this because if we didn't have minds we wouldn't see it at all. Now the reason this is critical is it really shows that there are two worlds and only one of them do we really have full access to. What Schopenhauer argues … is the real world has qualities very different than this experiential world of ours. And Schopenhauer argues when we die - sure our unreal world of experience ends - but that's not because we disappear. It's because a part of us lives on in the real world that was always there and we were always a part of even though we were too blind to see it.
Anderson: Would you tell us about the pre-suppositional argument –the argument for life after death from morality?
D'Souza: It simply says, "Look, you have this fact in the world – morality." In other words, we live in two dimensions; the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. Every normal human being knows there is another aspect of our existence, which is the way things ought to be. Now, that defies evolutionary explanation. There are a lot of evolutionary attempts at morality, but in the end of the day, all they can try to show – and they don't show it all that well – is why we cooperate, why we help strangers, why we exchange favors, why we are decent. But none of that really explains morality because morality is not about why we cooperate, but about why we ought to cooperate. The essence of morality isn't that I share my food with guys who don't have it, but that this is some kind of binding duty or obligation. I must do it. If I don't do it, I'm in some sense acting wrongly. So my question is where did these legislative standards come from. And I argue the best way to make sense of morality is to presume that there is another world beyond this world in which the actions of this world will be adjudicated or judged.
Anderson: What's the last argument that you make in the book?
D'Souza: I draw here, not on Pascal's famous argument - the Wager - but rather on an older argument … about life after death. One of the associates of the prophet Mohammad was confronting an unbeliever who said, "I don't believe in life after death."' And then Mohammad's associate said, "Look at it this way. If you are right, none of us will be the worse for it. But if I'm right then we shall escape and you will suffer."' And the point we getting at here … is that there is no real risk to being wrong in believing in the afterlife. Let's say you are wrong. Well, it turns out you die, there is no afterlife. Whoops. You made a philosophical error - no big deal. On the other hand, if you vote against the afterlife and it turns out there is one then it's a big whoops. You got essentially the whole thing wrong and you have eternal separation from God because you rejected God.
Anderson: In the fourth chapter, you explore near-death experiences. What do these experiences - some of which were chronicled in Dr. Raymond Moody's 1975 book, "Life after Life," tell us about the possibility of an afterlife?
D'Souza: There shouldn't be even one of them, but in fact there are actually thousands of them and there is a whole body of scholarship and literature on them and there are innumerable testimonies from all over the world about them. My wife, who was in a car accident several years ago, had if not a near-death experience, an out-of-body experience. Her car plunged into a ravine and she was in the car trapped, upside down. And then she said she saw a truck driver running up to the car and shouting from the outside and people congregated around the car. But the most remarkable thing is my wife (we weren't married at the time) said she saw this from outside the car. What's interesting is this is not some paranormal, far-out claim. These experiences are remarkably common. So, what we are getting at is that this has now become a legitimate, scholarly field and there are large numbers of people who have come very close to death and had a remarkably uniform experience – an experience of going through a tunnel, experiencing a bright light, feeling warmth and love, reviewing their life, observing their own dead ancestors or relatives.
Anderson: What is some of the scientific evidence for life after death?
D'Souza: In investigating life after death, I'm a little bit like a detective who has come upon a crime. Now, there were no eyewitnesses, but there are a lot of clues. What I do in the book is I start by saying, "What has to be true for life after death to be?" If there is life after death in the Christian sense then there has to be realms you may say beyond the universe, which can provide a plausible venue for, let's say, heaven and hell. If this universe is all there is, it seems hard to affirm life after death in the Christian sense. Secondly, in Christianity, there is going to be a soul reunited to a resurrected body. And if that body is in some sense material it then follows that all of that matter must be capable of having qualities radically different from any matter that we know. And then I say, "Okay, what does modern science have to say about all this?"
Anderson: In the book, you talk about the fact science has discovered anti-matter, dark matter, dark energy – most of matter is unseen. What does that tell us about the possibility – and you even point out in the book that scientists believe there are multiple dimensions – that there could be a heaven and life after death?
D'Souza: If you lived 200 years ago, the idea that there could be realms outside of space of time, realms that are truly eternal in the Christian sense, the idea that there could be matter that has qualities unlike any matter that we know, the idea of multiple dimensions … all of this would be in the realm of fantasy, or at best science fiction. But science fiction has now become science. In other words, modern physics not only suggests the possibility of these things, but the most cutting-edge of modern physics affirms the reality of these things – the reality of dark matter and the reality of multiple dimensions. But then I say, "But wait a minute. Something that seemed very far out, which is a Christian belief in an afterlife requiring other forms of matter, other realms, other laws, all of this appeared to be flatly contradictory to what is known by modern science. But no longer. Now, all of this fits squarely within the mainstream of modern science and in fact rides alongside some of the most breathtaking and cutting-edge discoveries of modern science." Suddenly, eternal life has become a plausible and indeed very hip concept - one that is not contradicted by science, but actually encouraged by it.
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