An Argument Against Eternity
When people tell me that there’s a heaven and a hell, I tell them, “Ah, go to earth,” because the concept of eternity doesn’t make sense to me.
The main reason I don’t believe in everlasting life (whether constant torture or constant joy) is that eternity would be incredibly long compared to temporary life on earth. Even if we say that eternity is a trillion years (really low-balling it) and life is 120 years (a generous overstatement), odds are that anyone at any given time would be living in some form of eternity, if it existed.
And yet here we are, living a short and temporary mortal life instead of being invincible in forever. Add to this that this is the only life we know from direct experience, and a hell where you spend eternity being decapitated and, more painfully, re-capitated for minor crimes seems to me even more doubtful.
So that’s the basic argument: if there’s an eternity, why aren’t we in it already?
I know this logic is flawed.
For instance, let’s say you’ve never eaten sushi before, and the one time you do, you hate it and decide never to eat it again. So you eat sushi only once in your entire life. That’s 20 minutes out of 120 years, God willing.
Odds, then, are against you being in the sushi experience at any given point in your life. So while you are eating that sushi the one time in your life, could you say, “How can I be eating sushi right now if for the rest of my 119 years, 364 days, 23 hours and 40 minutes, I don’t eat sushi? Clearly none of that life exists and all there is is sushi.”
But still, the odds of 20 minutes within 120 years aren’t as bad as 120 years within eternity. And at least in the sushi example, you remember the life you had before the sushi, and as soon as you’re done choking it down, you start experiencing the life after it. So it would be patently absurd to claim that eating sushi is the only possible experience for you just because you hardly ever do it.
The thing about life versus eternity is, we don’t remember any eternity before we were alive, and we can’t guess what happens after… if anything. Odds are, life is all there is.
This argument isn’t all cynical, however. It also makes a case against non-existence. Again, if life is 120 years and non-existence spans forever each way around that, it seems unlikely that we happen to be in the very short moment in which we are alive, instead of the forever minus 120 years when we don’t exist.
Then again, if we didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be aware of not existing, just like the 40 years of Sylvester Stallone’s life when he was frozen for the movie Demolition Man. He started off in 1996 and woke up in 2032, yet because he wasn’t conscious, the 40 years only seemed like a second for him.
So maybe it’s not so strange that we’re alive as opposed to being in that forever minus 120 years of non-existence, because it’s impossible to be at all in non-existence. The odds are against life when non-existence has it surrounded and vastly out-numbered, but at least life is perceptible. Non-existence isn’t, so of course we’re not experiencing non-existence right now.
Still, I’m not convinced that life - as short as it is - is all we know, and yet when we die, we then go spend forever doing something totally different. Which tends, then, to be an argument for reincarnation.
But I don’t exactly buy reincarnation, because if it were true, when you die, you become someone totally different and lose all memory of anyone you were beforehand. So what’s the point of saying that you were the reincarnation of someone before if you have no actual connection to that earlier person?
Yet I have to kind of believe in this if I don’t accept the other possibilities (I’m excluding the theory that there’s a heaven but we come to earth to experience a bunch of different lives to break up the monotony of eternity, since I got that theory from a comic strip).
What I do say to people who are afraid of dying and then not existing is that, well, someone will exist. And where does that person come from? You’ve already defeated the odds to experience life once, so maybe you’ll pull off that feat again.
The real question is how one gets to control the consciousness of someone who is born. That’s a topic for another Idea Province. Maybe in 30 years from now, when I’ve done more research.
4 years ago