Resolved: Heaven doesn't exist. A layman's (very flawed?) logic.

Great Debates
1

So last night I’m tossing and turning and I get in these states sometimes where an idea catches in my head and I have to mull it over and over until it practically drives me crazy. Then I fall asleep.

Let me preface this by saying that this is NOT a pro- or anti-religion thread, per se. Instead, it’s more about the chain of logic that I will follow below. Although I am relatively agnostic, I do not wish this to turn into any kind of “religion is for weak” or “atheism is unpatriotic” screaming match.

Also, and this is an important point which I do hope is clarified for me in responses, my idea of “Heaven” is a very simplistic, generic view of your typical Judeo-Christian-Muslim afterlife.

Argument: “Heaven” does not exist (for “us” - any human being)

Assumption #1: “Heaven” is a better place than where we are now.

Assumption #2: “You” are nothing but memories. What any one person knows as being himself or herself is nothing more than a collection of that person’s memories (or experiences and knowledge, which we’ll lump together as “memory”). In other words, there is no “you” outside of what your memories are. Yes, there are genetic/chemical reactions which drive you in certain manners (such as chemical imbalance for depression), but those aren’t “you”, they’re just forces that help mold you. Every future interaction with an object or another person is based entirely upon your memory. I don’t mean in a pre-deterministic manner - there is free will - but the decisions you make when you interact with something will take into account your memories. Look at it this way - let’s say at age 30 you’re entire memory is eliminated. There’s nothing there. You don’t recognize anybody (including yourself) and outside of instinctual actions you don’t know how to do anything. “You” no longer exist. Your body is still there, your mind is still there, but your memories are lost forever. On day 1 of the post-memory-loss event, you have nothing to base what you do upon. But every day afterward will be colored by what happened previously. Now let’s say you live another 30 years. Those new memories you have will create a new “you”, but the old “you” is forever gone.

This may seem stunningly obvious, but I wanted to make clear where I came from for the next points.

Death and Afterlife: Let’s assume we split what we are into three pieces - body, mind, and soul. The body is the physical container, the mind holds the memories, and the soul is some unknown elemental life-force. (Alternatively, you could say mind and body are one, since I think most people do believe memories are actual physical entities).

Outcome 1: There is no afterlife. You die, and your bones become dust, and nothing survives.

Outcome 2: There is an afterlife. Your mind and your body disappear, but your soul does move on to a new place (Heaven). It does so, however, without any memories attached.

Outcome 3: There is an afterlife. Your body ends, but your mind and soul move together, or at least, somehow, your memories are affixed to your soul as it enters Heaven.

For all intents and purposes, Outcomes 1 and 2 are identical. Even if your soul moves on, without memories, there is no “you” there. You will not even know that you (or your soul) has passed on. And if there is no “you” there, then there is no Heaven for “you”.

Outcome 3, however, presents a couple of sub-options:

Outcome 3.a: Heaven is a place of eternal and blindingly bright love. When you pass on, you enter a realm of supreme and utter serenity and love. All negative emotions are eliminated, are not even possible to feel. However, it’s your own personal heaven - there are no other people there.

Outcome 3.b: Heaven is a place of eternal and blindingly bright love. When you pass on, you enter a realm of supreme and utter serenity and love. You are surrounded by all “people” who have been admitted to Heaven, and you can greet them and interact with them and whatnot. All negative emotions are eliminated, are not even possible to feel.

For both of these, I posit that in this case “you” won’t exist, either, or not for very long. Why? Because being awash in an ether of love and serenity will immediately or gradually reduce “you”, with all of your memories, to a simple drone, with the inability to experience anything but serenity and love. The “you” is totally consumed. In fact, if either of these outcomes are the case, what is the purpose of bringing the memories along anyway?

Outcome 3.c: Heaven is not a place of eternal and blindingly bright love. Instead, it’s much like earth, but with only one (really big) church, where the Big Man sits. You interact with everyone there, just like you would on earth. There are negative emotions. In fact, it is just like your previous life. In some respects, however, it could be worse. What if you awaken in this Heaven, and lo and behold, there’s Mom, and your younger brother who perished in a traffic accident, and over there there’s Granddad and Grandma. But…where’s Dad, who died when you were twenty? He wasn’t a bad person at all. But he’s not here…and there’s only one other place he could be. How would “you” feel about that?

Outcome 3.c., then, means that Heaven is no different than earth, and therefore (by assumption #1 at top) doesn’t exist.

Conclusion: Heaven doesn’t exist for “you”.

(You may ask “well, what about 3.d - ‘Heaven isn’t entirely awash in serenity and love, but there’s a greater abundance of it’?”. I would respond that in effect that is still no different than earth, where there are some places more “serene” than others, and if you keep increasing the serenity-and-love ratio to eliminate those non-serene places, eventually you’ll cross the boundary into Outcomes 3.a or 3.b)
Now, I have a most shallow understanding of logic, even less when it comes to philosophy, and religion probably comes in below those two. I probably shouldn’t even be venturing in these waters :slight_smile: . But know this board is full of people far smarter than me, and way more knowledgeable when it comes to these matters. And I need to get a full night’s sleep tonite, so have it.

2

AARGH! I meant to change my thread title.

I am not saying that Heaven doesn’t exist. I am saying that Heaven doesn’t exist for “us” as we know “us”.

3

Yes, “self” is just a unique string of memories, formed from birth.

Yes, mind and body are both physical.

I believe a “Soul” is an unnecessary entity to introduce in an Ockham’s Razor sense.

I no more believe in an afterlife than a beforelife - I certainly wasn’t me for those 13 billion years before my birth.

I might wish to believe in these things, but that would be wishful thinking.

4

The trouble with applying logic to what are essentially tenets of faith is that you need to start with solid definitions.

You are discussing the existence of Heaven. Which is what, exactly?

Your assumption “Heaven is a better place than here” is insufficient.

A Hawaiian beach is better than where I am now, but that obviously is not what you had in mind.

You regard heaven in the more-or-less generic sense, which I will take to mean: “Where we go when we die if we are good”.

So in that case heaven is:

[list=a]
[li]in a box underground, and from there into the food web[/li][li]in an urn and a cloud of smoke and steam[/li][li]in the stomach of a predator and scattered in its immediate environs and then to the food web[/li][/list]

etc.
.
.
.

If your assumption is that any of these is better than where you are now, I will chalk it up to a matter of taste, and recommend therapy. There is an immediate flaw in the logic there as well, because the good AND the evil end up in these places after they die, so you could not even say that Earth is heaven, because you have implied by your definition that only good people end up there.

“But”, I hear you cry, “what I meant was that I subscribe to the philosophy of the body/soul duality, and that it is our SOULS that go on to somewhere else.”

Wow. OK.

So now you need to define the soul as something separate from the body. These days, you’ve got a lot of evidence stacked up against you. There’s any number of instances where it has been shown that the physical state of the body has a direct effect on the state of the mind/soul (it’s never been clear to me just what the soul is, separate from the mind). I am convinced that there is no duality, that the mind arises from the body. So in that case, we must argue that the pattern of electric interactions that is the mind can somehow be preserved by and transferred to some physical system apart from the body at the time of death.

A neat trick, and one that I am not sure I can say CAN’T happen.

But the question remains, WHERE does this “soul” go that constitutes heaven? Or hell, for that matter?

Dante had his ideas, but, for example, recent analysis of world seismic activity has failed to indicate a large internal cavity of the type described in the “Inferno”.

I attempted a thread about a month ago to address updating our concept of where heaven and hell might reside within our new knowledge, but got no takers.

5

Yeah, I have thought about this afterlife stuff. I used to sort of believe it when I was like 8 years old. Then I realised that I am ME because of 1. genetics and 2. experience. Genetics without experience would just make ME a lump of unrealised potential. When you wipe out my experience, you wipe out ME. And going to heaven without ME doesn’t make sense. OTO, going to heaven with ME means that I will carry over all my evilness and imperfections, making me quite unfit for heaven. Heaven must be a very lonely place.

Basically, the OP states exactly why I cannot believe, does not believe, and will not be convinced to believe, that heaven exists.

6

I’m not even sure I can grant this assumption, because it’s not necessarily universally agreed upon. If it were possible to, say, mindwipe someone and imprint all of my memories onto his brain, would he be me? If not, what would make us different people?

It also seems to me as if your definitions of various heavens are kind of convenient insofar as they lead you to your conclusion. For example, why are the only two possibilities that heaven is either a place of blinding love or exactly like earth? Why isn’t there a middle ground? Why couldn’t it be a place of blinding love where you were still able to feel negative emotions? Even if the place were so amazing that you never had reason to feel bad about anything ever again, couldn’t you still remember things that happened to you during your life and feel bad about them?

If Heaven is supposedly a paradise (and I know absolutely nothing about religion, so someone feel free to tell me to shut up), then some would see the inability to feel negative emotions at all as incompatible with that idea. And even if your definitions of heaven were correct:

I’m not sure why you’re no longer “you” just because you never feel anything bad. If the circumstances surrounding someone change such that they never have an occasion to feel any negative emotion, I’m not sure how we’ve changed the person himself, and that would seem to suggest that our surroundings play a part in our own identities. If I go three days without thinking or feeling anything negative, was I myself for those three days?

I think the big thing, though, is that your conclusion hinges on Heaven being what you say it is. It might be more accurate to say “Heaven, as I define it, cannot exist for ‘us’” or something.

7

shyguy and scotandrsn both bring up good points, which I realized myself even before posting. I am basically seeding my answer with the assumptions I make. Especially assumption #1, which is so vague as to be almost useless.

But I guess part of me wanted to see what other people defined Heaven as, or if there was any generally accepted consensus as to what Heaven is like. In other words, does the Bible or [insert religious tome here] specifically state something like “Heaven is full of meadows and small houses and everyone floats on clouds” etc.

The other weak argument I make is Outcomes 3.x - in fact, I basically forced myself to come up with a way to get the answer I wanted. I don’t know if I necessarily believe that the absence of negative emotions means you lose “you”, assuming you keep your memories pre-Heaven.

As to Assumption #2, scotandrsn, I can’t answer the mindwipe thing. I do state that your internal genetics/chemicals do play a part in determining you, but aren’t necessarily you. For instance, if you are prone to depression, that could color your memories (either upon implantation - the way you view something as you experience it - or upon remembering - the way you view an experience as you recall it). So, if you implant memories in a new body, it may not view those memories in the same manner - therefore, it isn’t longer “you”.

Which of course leads to what happens if you go to Heaven, with memories intact, but you’re no longer in “human” form? Are you still “you”?

Just trying to get a sense of what people believe happens if you go to Heaven (those who do believe), and trying to tie it back somehow to our current physical state, and see if it makes any logical sense.

Of course, dealing with faith in general doesn’t really follow any strict logical sense, I suppose.

8

So, we believe heaven is obviously fabricated.

So let us analyze why people would believe in such an outlandish idea.
(assuming that a belief in the christian god is also a belief in the existence of heaven)

People believe in (god) heaven because:
1.) They don’t understand how the brain works.
2.) They can’t deal of the thought of nothingness after death.
3.) Because they can’t stand of thought of being alone.
4.) Because otherwise it would mean that their relatives were wrong.
5.) They had a mystical experience involving the spontaneous release of DMT (near-death-experience).
6.) They would like to be rewarded for all the good things they’ve done.
7.) They would like bad people to be punished.
8.) There are some things that can’t be explained, therefore god is the culprit.

I believe that the belief of a heaven just overlies some other, deeper, motivations for such an idea.