Is There an Afterlife?

I went to a private catholic school for six years. During my high school classes I began learning more about theology from my teacher, Mr. McGrath. Mr. McGrath was adamant about the fact that science and religion should never cross paths when discussing how life forms came about. Was it an act of God, did one thing lead to a giant bang and we all appeared or did we evolve from primates? All of these questions puzzled me but something I always wondered was, is there a heaven, an afterlife? As a Roman Catholic, I have faith that it does but I wanted proof.

I am a big fan of Grey’s Anatomy and during the course of the show many patients die, get revived, and then recount seeing loved ones greeting them towards the light. What is this light? Does it happen when we die or only when we have a near death experience? Medical science has explained near-death experiences as the result of a gradual shutting down of the brain. This
is predominately shutting down the neocortext which controls cognitive functions like hearing, memory, emotional responses and our thoughts. So it could be a possibility that when we are dying, our brain is just giving us one more surge of life by showing memories, and our loved ones before we shut down. However, I still cannot believe that we can live so many years and then one day it is gone.

This is challenged by an article on repsonsiveuniverse.me which states a very important law in science: Energy cannot be created or destroyed- it can only change form. This article then states that it is possible that some humans continue to live on quantum energy, coalescing and regenerating throughout the Cosmos. Quantum energy  is the smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently. There is no way to prove this, though. So I believe that is why so many people are skeptical about an afterlife. No one can conduct an experiment about the afterlife because you cannot take an anecdote as evidence.

There is a difference between fact and faith. Although some researchers say an afterlife is impossible or inconceivable this does not make it true, they can’t know that until they experience it and once they do, they can’t come back to report it. It looks like we will all just have to wait and see.

5 thoughts on “Is There an Afterlife?

  1. Jada Baity

    I often find myself wondering if an afterlife does exist but then I always feel guilty for asking such things due to my religion and the faith Iv’e been raised to have. But there at least has to be a scientific explanation for what happens to our brain as we are in the process of dying. I think that the claim that our brain surges forth a last burst of memories is very possible. But I don’t think that these memories are a sneak peek into heaven or whatever you want to call the place you go after you die. I think that these memories are one of the many amazing things our brain can do right before it shuts down. But a slideshow of our memories is not the only thing our brain is capable of doing before we die. This article explains some of the things that people experience when it comes to their near death experience and this list alone makes you wonder just how powerful our brain is to be able to make us see and feel certain things before we die. But are these things necessarily proof that there is an afterlife? I don’t think so. I think that the things people experience when they die and come back to life are simply the amazing capabilities of the brain that they experienced when their heart stopped beating for a little while.

  2. Shannon Elizabeth Kress

    I went to a private, Christian, school my entire life, so this post was very interesting to me. I agree that faith and fact are different. I have often wondered about the way religion and science cross paths, or don’t cross paths. I think it would be amazing if there was some way to conduct an experiment to see about an afterlife, but like you said there really is no way. I believe there is a heaven, but it would certainly be interesting to see the proven.

  3. Chane Jeter-Smith

    I’ve went to Sunday school for a few years when younger. After doing so, I too had a Science teacher talk about our existence and our nonexistence afterwards. My teacher had us for a month discuss the science way of explaining this all such as Evolution and a Big Bang. But when it came to the “afterlife” part of the lectures, it seemed that the discussion started to pick up and the Science began to die?? So yes, I agree that this becomes a fact vs faith topic once afterlife is beginning to be discussed. It is quite strange to conduct research on a something that can’t be proven once you figure it out. But I guess people have their own opinions. And there’s nothing we can do! But I did find this post personally interesting. It definitely puts Scientist in a unfortunate predicament with a study with no way for answers!

  4. Jose Ignacio Arango De Diego

    Awesome post. I read somewhere that when we are dying it takes 5 minutes for our brain to shut down completely and during these five minutes our brain takes us on a trip through all of our memories and life experiences.

  5. Kylie Dachowski

    I also went to private Catholic school my entire life and I agree with your teacher: science and religion should be kept separate. In one of my junior year theology classes, we had a very similar discussion to this though, and even though we all had different beliefs on the after-life, we all agreed that there is no scientific proof that it exists.

Comments are closed.