Where is history heading? What happens to us when we die? These are some of the oldest questions people ask, and for all our learning, reason on its own can’t answer them. The end and destination of all things, like their beginning, are wrapped in an impenetrable mist. Anyone who looks to science for the answer eventually has to agree with one modern scholar: what the end and purpose of history is, I do not know, and nobody knows.
Yet people keep trying, either to answer the questions or to root them out of the human heart altogether.
When Death Was Declared the End
Not so long ago, materialism was the fashion. It announced loudly that death was the end of everything and that belief in immortality was folly. One of its spokesmen openly called belief in life beyond the grave the last enemy science had to fight and, if possible, defeat. On this view the visible, tangible world is the only one there is, and it has no origin and no end; it simply meanders on in an eternal maze.
The practical result of this shallow and comfortless doctrine was predictable. If eternity is a waste of thought, enjoy as much of this life as you can. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!
The Sense That We Were Made to Live
Plenty of people still think and live like that. But the mood has shifted. On closer inspection, questions about eternity didn’t look so foolish after all, nor so easy to answer.
The study of the world’s religions showed that belief in immortality is common to all people, even the most primitive tribes. One scholar with an immense reputation in the field testified that the sense of immortality is found everywhere, among all peoples and at every level of civilisation, unless philosophy has undermined it or something else has suppressed it. And everywhere it is tied to religion.
In fact, peoples everywhere act on the conviction that humans are by nature immortal. It isn’t immortality that needs proving; it’s death that can’t be explained. Death is felt everywhere as something unnatural. Many peoples believe it is the work of hostile spirits, and that there was once a time without death, when unbroken life belonged to the human race.
It is not immortality that must be proved, but death that cannot be explained.
Many Pictures of the Afterlife
Pagan beliefs about what happens to the soul vary widely. Some peoples think souls stay with their bodies in the grave, still mixing with the living, influencing them and appearing to them. Others think all souls gather in one great realm of the dead, living a pale, ghostly existence or sinking into unconscious sleep. A very widespread idea is that souls pass straight into another body, a tree, an animal, a human or a higher being, depending on how they lived on earth. Others hold that the good and the evil meet different destinies in different places.
These beliefs shape how the dead are buried or cremated and cared for; sometimes a whole religion becomes ancestor worship. And now and then the vision widens to the end of the world itself, with the recurring hope that good will one day defeat evil, and light defeat darkness.
Old Ideas Back in Fashion
Christianity subdued or purified all of these ideas. But in modern times they have come back and won many followers. Materialism satisfied so few people, and for so short a time, that some swung to the opposite extreme. The human heart doesn’t change, and it can’t live without hope. So the notion that souls live on, appear to the living and pass into new bodies is welcomed in many circles as new and higher wisdom. In some places the dead are again being called on, worshipped and feared. Spiritism is returning in place of the worship of the one true God.
Strikingly, this spirit worship is closely tied to the theory of evolution. That seems odd at first. But think about it: if the living came from the dead, the soul from matter and humans from animals, why shouldn’t humans keep developing beyond the grave? If an animal could become a man, a man might become an angel. One idea seemed to explain everything.
The Knife That Cuts Both Ways
Just as this house of cards was being built, its foundation began to totter.
Those who hold these theories want nothing to do with what Scripture says about death and the grave, judgment and punishment. For them, death is not the penalty for sin but a step up to a better life. There is no judgment except bearing the consequences of what you have done, and no hell, because everyone is caught up in evolution and will eventually come out right.
But ask whether eternal life is possible, a life of undisturbed blessedness and glory, and they fall silent. They were so busy fighting the Christian teaching on judgment that they forgot to ask whether the hope of eternal life would vanish with it. In the heat of battle that hope got lost. The same knife that cut all fear out of the human heart cut out all hope as well.
Always Becoming, Never Arriving
If evolution is the one law governing everything, now and forever, then the hope of eternal life has no solid ground. The idea that everything will turn out well in the end is itself a guess, with no support from Scripture, conscience, nature or history. Even if it were true, it couldn’t last: the same law that produced that happy state would keep pushing people on into something else. Evolution has no resting point, no end, no purpose. An eternal, blessed life is impossible.
That’s why some have revived the old pagan idea of the eternal return of all things. When the world reaches its peak it collapses and starts again: flood tide, then ebb, then flood, endlessly. There is only time, no eternity; only movement, no rest; only becoming, no being; only the creature, and no Creator who is, who was and who is to come.
Without Hope and Without God
All this confirms what Scripture says: those without Christ, strangers to the covenants of promise, have no hope and are without God in the world (Eph. 2:12). They can guess and wish, and they never stop doing so. But they have no solid basis for their hopes. What they lack is the certainty of the Christian hope.