Book Review: Life After Death

by Ait Chapel

Dinesh D'Souza, author of the 2009 book Life After Death: The Evidence, is by no means a believer in the paranormal. He admits to being dubious about it, and chooses to exclude the paranormal from his book altogether. He even includes several sections to dismiss claims about mediums and reincarnation due to the absence of evidence, methodological flaws in specific studies, and the possibility of fraud. His personal feelings about the unlikelihood of such phenomena are due to what is sometimes referred to as the principle of parsimony, or the least complex explanation for an observation. For these reasons, one could say that D'Souza is a skeptic of the paranormal, dismissing such claims for the same reasons many atheists would. Unfortunately, D'Souza does not apply such reasoning to claims of a Christian god or the Christian notions of the afterlife.

The absence of evidence for the existence of an afterlife is not sufficient evidence for the absence of the afterlife or of a god. According to D'Souza, there is ample evidence for the existence of an afterlife and god, which for him are inevitably of the Christian variety. In the first chapter of his book, D'Souza claims that this evidence is not based in Scripture or "appeals to the Supernatural to account for unexplained natural phenomena," but based in neuroscience, philosophy, and morality. However, by the second chapter, D'Souza begins to invoke "divine revelation" as a "plausible source" to have faith in, and, by the end of the book, he is putting forth the story of Jesus' resurrection, as found in Scripture, as a historical case study of someone rising from the dead. In the space between, most of D'Souza's arguments and evidence simply come down to the idea that because science might not be able to fully explain something right now, it never will, and therefore we should look elsewhere for answers, invoking unmoved movers, fine tuners, intelligent designers, and cosmic law givers.

Beyond rehashing the god of the gaps classics alluded to above, there are a couple of places where D'Souza talks about dark matter, dark energy, quantum mechanics, string theory, and the possibility of a multiverse, while seeming to imply that god might be made of dark matter or dark energy, or that heaven and hell may exist in another universe or dimension. In a chapter on philosophy, D'Souza encourages his readers to make similar inferences when he speaks of how despite being able to assess the phenomenal world with our senses and scientific methods of evaluation, the world of reality remains off limits to us, and therefore may contain something spiritual. But, with this said, he never explains why these mysterious or spooky-sounding areas of physics and philosophy are so much more likely to prove Judeo-Christian concepts as opposed to Eastern ones, or the beliefs of paranormal enthusiasts, other than the arguments already discussed, which work equally well against the Judeo-Christian notions of god and the afterlife that he is trying to prove.

Ultimately, Life After Death: The Evidence is not a book about evaluating the scientific research concerning life after death-for those interested in such a book, Mary Roach's far superior Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife does an excellent job of taking on that task. Instead, D'Souza's book is largely a recycling of some of the ideas D'Souza put forth in his previous work, What's So Great About Christianity, although now with a greater fixation on rebuking prominent atheists. Here D'Souza does not so much present evidence for his claims, but uses Christianity to fill in various blanks due to what seems like nothing more than a personal preference. If you do not find this reasoning convincing, D'Souza says that shouldn't matter. His response is to think of the alleged practical benefits that come with Christianity: hope, meaning, morality, and health, saying in that "If others stand to benefit from lives full of hope, purpose, and charity, why not you?"

by Ait Chapel