Imagine There's No Heaven, It Isn't Hard if You Try

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

 - Mark Twain

In an interesting NPR post by Adam Frank on death and dying  ("Embracing Life and Death", November 19, 2013), I could not help wincing at the final line of this paragraph:

The arguments about what happens after we die are manifold. Some religions are quite explicit about what to expect after death. They provide us with visions of heaven or hell, depending on the choices made in this life. Many atheists are pretty explicit, too, about their expectations, or lack of them, for what lies beyond. As a scientist, however, I have always been unimpressed with both positions.

Atheists have no dogma of course, so there is no such thing as a fixed position on the afterlife or lack thereof that anyone has to believe.  I don't think it's accurate to call it a "position" and then to express disapproval with it "as a scientist."

If I do not pack a winter coat for a summer vacation in Florida, I am not taking a position as much as responding to reality as any of us can measure it.  Yes, it could snow in Florida in July and that extremely unlikely event is orders of magnitude more likely than a heaven or hell as medieval Christians imagined them, but there should be nothing to be impressed or unimpressed with about this observation. 

What atheists (or the ones I know and read) reject is the idea that anyone can tell us with any certainty what waits after death. People are certainly free to speculate in the absence of contrary evidence, but the default hypothesis is that an organism that is no longer able to move, respond to pain or pleasure, eat, copulate, or even maintain bodily integrity is, for lack of a better word, dead.  Maybe there is some soul or other ghostly entity that floats around invisible and without any evidence whatsoever of its existence but to speak of invisible things with certainty is dishonest.  To point out this dishonesty is not a "position" but a commonsense reflection on what is.

I cannot prove that there is no heaven or hell anymore than I can prove that if I purchase a lottery ticket that I will win some kind of jackpot.  Of course, there is the tiniest of probabilities that this is the case, but it would be irresponsible to plan my life around the certainty of such a jackpot.  Christians do just that, forgoing certain earthly experiences and shaping their behavior in anticipation of winning an eternal lottery.  Since most of these behaviors are identical to those of people who do not believe that they will get a grand prize if they do not lie, cheat, steal, or murder (I avoid those behaviors simply because they are wrong and would make me feel terrible, no god or afterlife necessary), the extreme anxiety that comes from conjuring up some fiery pit is gratuitous and warped.  Describing its existence in as much detail as Dante did, for example, is ludicrously dishonest from an intellectual and "scientific" point of view.  No atheist has ever made up such an absurdly detailed fabrication of the experience of non-existence (what the Hindus call Nirvana and the Buddhists believe we achieve when we finally get things right and no longer have to be punished with the cycle of rebirth and death). 

And as with any sort of prediction, the more details you add, the greater the probability that it is untrue - it is far more likely that I will develop cancer than that I will develop cancer of the pancreas which itself is exponentially less likely than my developing cancer of the pancreas at age 50 the day after my birthday.  Create tomes filled with these sort of lurid details and the probability that they are true approaches that of a serial lottery player winning the jackpot each time in several thousand games.  It is not unreasonable to point this out and pointing this out is not a prediction in itself with which anyone should be "impressed" or not.

So atheists - again, the ones I know, I cannot and will not speak for all - are not predicting that you will lose the lottery, only that you are a fool or worse to bet heavily on it.  Those who might by some fluke win cannot have known beforehand that they would, nor could they have done anything differently to affect their chance of winning (the Puritan idea of predestination comes close to this, although it states that the lottery winners are predetermined, their names written down in a book somewhere before they are even born).  Anyone who says otherwise is lying. 

This is not a radical position.  It's not even a position, really, as much as a conservative acceptance of the null hypothesis.

There might be some sort of consciousness beyond our individual deaths but what is 100% clear is that we have no mechanism of perceiving such an existence (imagining, yes, having sensory awareness of it or credible reports by those who died and communicated with us there non-non-existence, no), so perhaps we should let such metaphysical speculation go.  Even the Christians at their most honest admit this, which is why they say you need faith - the capacity to believe something for which there is no evidence.