Eternal Life! (No Matter What!)

Humans really seem to have a tendency to be hopeful.  I think that is why they developed an afterlife – because they really want to live on. 

Even after I knew there was no afterlife, I found I still had those hopeful tendencies.  I thought I might exist, somehow.  Many secularists do think there might be some life “in another realm” or “a force for goodness” or “my atoms will incorporate with other atoms and I will live again”; but the evidence is not as rosy.

According to Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, "The mind is the brain.  The brain is made of atoms.  We know how atoms work.  The laws of physics relevant to the atoms in your body are known and there is no room for new laws of physics that would affect how the atoms in your brain actually work.  When you die, your brain decomposes, and atoms eventually decompose, with all that information that was “you” stuck in those atoms, and there is no way for the information to leave your body, or to persist after your death."   Oh, thanks, Sean.

Then Sean goes on and destroys all hope, by telling us the fate of the universe.  Even though there may be multiverses, our universe will burn out one day, billions of years from now and even the black holes will disappear.  Our universe will then exist as nothing – no time or space or anything – just nothing.  Just stab me, why don’t you, Sean!

Yet, I still feel I might escape!  (That is the human condition at work!)  I imagine that one atom of mine (that somehow has all of my personality and my looks contained in that one atom) escapes out a porthole into the universe next door, and I live on! 

Isn’t that funny how we just do not want to die and we cannot allow ourselves to fully accept that we will not live on.  We keep hold of the slightest hope that we will live eternally – and without arthritis!  Just like in the movie, Cocoon, “You’ll never get old, and you’ll never die!”