ARGUMENT FOR THE LIFE HEREAFTER

Argument for the Life Hereafter ~ 191 ~ the short span of his life. If a man does not experience bodily ‘death’ five times in a row at tenyear intervals, how are we justified in believing that, on the ultimate occasion, he will have ceased quite finally to live? Those who find this argument unacceptable—and modern philosophy is, in the main, opposed to the concept of the soul as an independent entity —will insist that the mind, or the internal entity, that is called man does not, in fact, enjoy any independent existence. Man is simply the outcome of the interaction between the body and the outer world. All feelings and thoughts in man develop in the course of a material process, just as friction between two pieces of metal causes heat. Sir James Jeans is of the view that consciousness is merely a function or a process, and contemporary philosophers maintain that consciousness is nothing more than a nervous response to external stimuli. According to this concept, once a man dies, that is, when he biologically disintegrates, there can be no question of his survival, because the nerve centres which interact with the outside world and produce a set of responses which we call ‘life’ no longer exist after