Let’s unpack your question. “To my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence of life after death. Why do so many people believe in the afterlife without scientific proof?” There are three issues here. All of the answers so far identify little more than one of the following:
- Although your heart seems to be in the right place, you're not quite understood how good science works;
- Belief generally doesn’t demand evidence;
- A hidden insight we’ll get to in a moment.
I suspect that with (1) you’re in good company. It is possible that many people who think they’re “doing science” actually are clueless about how good science can work, so let’s squander a sentence or two on this.
Science
About 2,400 years ago Plato came up with the idea of this mystical, parallel universe in which there were perfect ‘forms’ of things—archetypes of what it is to be a “man” or a “walrus” or whatever. We may still tend to think in terms of these absolutes if we haven’t quite caught up with what happened in the late 1930s.
In the 1920s the Logical positivists put up the idea that we can build things up from ‘grounded truths’—things that are just true. The problem is that this doesn’t work, as all of our assumptions are based on, well, other assumptions. Their ideas were ruthlessly dissected by philosophers like Quine, and they died out as a movement. But there are still some who believe that we can at least asymptotically approach some sort of Platonic ‘truth’—this doesn’t work either, although it may seem to work!
So what is ‘Good Science’’ then? From above, you can see that we cannot be sure about anything. Ever. So there can be no scientific proof. Not even approximately true! The good thing is, this doesn’t matter.
You see, we can still provisionally accept things as true, test them, and continue to do this, as needed. In order to do this efficiently, we need two things:
- Joined up models that describe what we perceive in the real world—models we can discuss and even agonize over; and
- Ways of testing these models. Our models must of course (a) make internal sense and (b) provide some sort of description or prediction of what we can expect to see. Getting the numbers right is crucial.
We are helped by one extraordinary thing. It is this: we almost always get things wrong—and obviously so. If Nature were accommodating, then things would be even more difficult. But she is unforgiving. It is really hard to make consistent models of anything, but even more tricky to make models that work. This asymmetry is our salvation—for if we have a model that makes sense and works, we can embrace it as something truly remarkable, despite it not being true in any platonic sense.
So, with this under our belts, let’s look at the afterlife. A thousand years ago, it was easy. Our understanding of the workings of the world—our model—was so primitive that we could easily slip in a god, or demon, or indeed an extracorporeal soul. These even seemed natural. Good models, in fact.
Everything changed on September 13, 1848. Phineas P Gage, a foreman on the American railways suffered a dreadful accident, where a huge iron bar was driven through his forehead (Above image from Quora). Remarkably, he survived but is reported to have suffered the changes we now associate with frontal lobe damage. Despite the likelihood that a lot of this may have been exaggerated in subsequent reports, it’s still the case that Gage brought about a sea change. Doctors began to link brain structure and function.
Subsequently, we’ve come a long way. We now understand a lot about how the brain works—and how this mediates our thoughts, our emotions, our behavior, and our personality. Not everything—if we try hard enough, we might still squeeze almost anything into the gaps—but our models are far, far better structured and tested than they were one hundred or more years ago. Again, I emphasize this doesn’t make them right. Just not yet wrong!
Belief
That’s all very well—but let’s face the facts. Most believe is not conditioned by science. As others have pointed out in various guises, there’s more to human belief than ‘mere science’.
A hidden issue
Which brings us to my third, hidden insight. It is this: if your belief isn’t based on both some sort of coherent ‘model’ or ‘description’ of the way things work and tests of this model, then what is it based on?
There are a few possible answers here. One is ‘faith’—but where does this faith come from? Logic might dictate that it comes from simple belief in what others say—but where does their belief come from? Is it acceptable to simply pass the parcel of belief here, back and forth? (Thinks: ‘echo chamber’)
Another possibility is ‘revelation’—for example, divine ‘Damascus road’ experiences like those described by many practitioners of religion. But as we learn more about the brain, we realize that precisely these experiences can be duplicated by stimulating the brain, either naturally (seizures) or artificially, by opening up the skull and poking around. Bzzt, bzzt.
Now, for the same reasons that destroyed the logical positivists, ‘religious rescue’ is still possible. We can say that a seizure is merely God’s way of passing on divine information. We can similarly invoke physiological explanations[1] of “near-death experiences” as a mystical window into the divine. But all of this comes at a cost. The cost is simple:
As our understanding encroaches on the phenomenology of the afterlife, you are forced to choose between science and unreason.
Logic, reasoned models and the data that inform them provide us with a model of brain function that doesn’t require the mystical, the divine or anything other than the statement “The brain contains within itself a complete explanation for our consciousness”.
The problem is that we don’t want to believe this—so we choose unreason instead. If we look around we can usually even find some ‘authority’ to back us up. That, of course, is fine, but once you have stepped into unreason, then it’s quite unreasonable to try to justify your unreason with logic. You’ve crossed the bridge.
This is the mistake of all too many of the posts that have tried to answer your question. Some are stuck on Plato. Some are stuck in a time before Gage. And some may even be hung up on logical positivism.*
For me, neurophysiology is both necessary and sufficient. But of course, in the true spirit of science, I could be wrong. Show me a well-reasoned model, informed by appropriate, robust observations, and I must reconsider.
Now, the broad thrust of your question is correct—that science capably explains away the afterlife as unnecessary and even delusional.
My 2c, Jo.
*Yet others may have completely lost the plot,** some with post-modern interpretations of all of science as a mere sociological phenomenon. Such approaches are of course—in so far as they are coherent at all—at a loss to explain why some things work in real life, but most don’t.
**Perhaps the saddest of all are truly brilliant people like Roger Penrose, who while out of his depth—and wanting to believe—was suckered by Hameroff. This reminds me of Linus Pauling and Ewan Cameron.
Footnotes
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