The difference between an atheist and a theist is that the atheist understands that the question of whether or not there’s a God, has an attractor.

An attractor is a point toward which something will evolve given sufficient time. The hole at the bottom of a large funnel is the attractor for a marble propelled within it; the marble will move in different patterns depending on the way it’s thrown in, but it will always tend to move – as a function of the funnel’s geometry – toward the point at the bottom. The attractor of the ‘whether or not there’s a God’ debate is this: the concept of ‘God’ only begins to make sense as the definition of God approaches ‘the laws of physics’; but when you define God as ‘the laws of physics’ you define God out of existence.

There are many different conceptions of God, but the slow and relentless action of reason will bring the debate inexorably toward this conclusion. Reason is the best faculty we have to understand the world, and all conceptions of God – apart from the definition above – disintegrate in the light of reason. Different individuals and groups will move in different patterns and take different amounts of time to get there, but the tendency for the debate to move toward the atheist attractor is inevitable.

The pre-eminence of reason is the basis of rationalism, and the default setting of the rationalist is one of sceptical scrutiny. An attitude of skeptical scrutiny, applied in a manner that is both friendly and firm, will serve us better than any other attitude, in science, journalism, religion, politics, and philosophy.

While rationalists believe in the pre-eminence of reason, they understand that reason isn’t our only faculty, and a fully functional person will also be capable of lateral or creative thinking, and many will experience instances of ‘insight’ or ‘intuition’ that appear to arise separately from the reasoning portion of their mind. But however valuable these other faculties might be in a creative context or making emotional judgements, they cannot be relied upon to teach us how the world works. They provide new points for reason to work towards, or backwards to a starting point, but they need to be validated by reason and evidenced wherever possible, before they can be accepted. Even if reason is eventually supplanted as the best faculty for understanding the world – by a fully developed and evidenced intuition, for example – the atheist attractor would remain. The only thing that intuition would change – if it were to supplant reason as our highest faculty over time – would be to enhance our understanding of the beauty and enormity of the laws of physics.

Rationalism doesn’t stop us imagining or speculating, it just makes us label it as such. It doesn’t stop us changing our mind as additional information comes forth, and it doesn’t stop us being wrong. What it does, in the first instance, is give us pause. It keeps us from false and dangerous beliefs, it makes us use our mind, and makes us stand on the firm foundations of science. It makes us reject things based solely on faith, it makes us look for the most probable explanations, but it doesn’t prevent enquiry in any direction. Most importantly, rationalism makes us ask ‘why’, and ‘why’ again. Rationalism doesn’t suck the fun out of life; quite the contrary, it frees the mind and opens up whole new vistas.

Which is exactly what happens when reason is applied to the question of an afterlife.

For religious people, the afterlife is a promise made by God, with heaven a reward for faith, and hell a punishment for sin. For atheists, the afterlife is a fiction bestowed by a fictitious God, an invention of sun-struck prophets to avoid the reality and finality of death. Both theists and atheists see the concept of an afterlife in a religious context, and accept or reject it accordingly. The word ‘afterlife’ has therefore become synonymous with ‘religious afterlife’, and the phrase ‘non-religious afterlife’ seems awkward, if not self-contradictory.

It’s not surprising that the concept of an afterlife has been hijacked by religion. All religions affirm the existence of an afterlife; and what would we find there if not the descriptions of the scriptures, and who would administer it if not God? But letting religion control the concept of an afterlife is just as unacceptable as letting religion control science, medicine, and education, as it did during The Early Middle (or 'Dark') Ages.

The religious position on an afterlife, like all religious notions, offers no evidence, no logic, and no analogy. It is inconsistent with known law, and its promulgation of concepts such as a Hell for non-believers is an abomination. The general atheist position, on the other hand, dismisses the afterlife as a religious concept, and dismisses religion as the greatest fraud ever perpetrated. But the afterlife can be removed from its religious context, and examined on its own merit. This book is the result of prising the concept of an afterlife out of the steely grasp of religion and applying rational thought to the subject without prejudice; that is, neither accepting it on faith, nor dismissing it as a religious notion.

Ever since the Enlightenment, science and rational thinking have been taking the creation of the universe and the development and diversity of its life forms out of the hands of God. God is an invention to explain life’s mysteries, and as the light of reason and science illuminates one mystery after another, the gaps filled by God have reduced in size and number. The afterlife was God’s last bastion, and most people probably imagined that fortress would never be breached.

The Atheist Afterlife describes a non-religious and rational afterlife, an afterlife that needs nothing more than physics. Religion no longer has a monopoly on the afterlife, and atheists have a viable non-religious alternative – whether they like it or not. God’s last bastion has been breached … and what do we find when we scale the wall and look over the battlements? We find what we always find: that the ‘God of the Gaps’ is nowhere to be found.

It was always going to be philosophy that moved this debate forward and offered a rational alternative to a religious afterlife. Religion has its set views and its texts aren’t changing, and science has more practical and realizable challenges to address. Philosophy, on the other hand, has never grown tired of reasoning through the issues of the relationship between mind and body – the relationship that either supports or demolishes the possibility of an afterlife. Philosophy has never been comfortable with a religious afterlife because philosophers seek wisdom, and wisdom is not found in faith; but philosophy has always known that lack of sensory evidence for something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Philosophy has had one arm tied behind its back by the absence of a law to prohibit an afterlife, and the other arm tied behind its back by the absence of any logical mechanism to support an afterlife.

Until now.

The Introduction continues here.