What is in the great beyond? Death is the fundamental mystery of life. It is certain for all and yet we do not know what it means.
The mystery can be reduced to simple dilemmas. When we die does everything end for us, or is there some way that we go on?
Is there nothing more to us than the sum of our material parts, or does the soul exist?
Is the notion of the soul a figment of human psychology, or perhaps an invention of religion, or could it be something wonderfully real?
Science, which can weigh, measure and assess the corpse of a dead person, is powerless to tell us whether anything spiritual occurs after death.
A widely held assumption of science, though it is by no means unanimous, tends to be that there is no soul, and that 'dead means dead'.
Some scientists promote such views as though they are facts that have been empirically tested. Yet there are no facts here, only assumptions that cannot be proved.
Indeed, the case made in this area by scientific materialism is religious in nature Since it expresses a passionate belief in the non-existence of the soul, but has no evidence to support that claim.
Religion presents the opposite case equally passionately on equally flimsy grounds.
There is no scientific proof of the existence of the various religious heavens and hells and afterlife realms.
