This book was originally written in the above spirit: we cannot know anything about an afterlife, but we can experience God’s love in this life, and be filled, as a result, with such joy and gratitude, that we will not even consider worthwhile any other way to live. I intended to leave it at that, because I wanted to make the book as non-speculative as possible; and yet, the more I thought abou...

Death is Not the End: Ancient Egyptian Religion and Art INTRODUCTION Imagine that we have gone back thousands of years. Imagine a land with pyramids hundreds of feet high and a river that floods every year, the birth of an agricultural society. Imagine tens of thousands of people, wearing nothing but loincloths, lugging limestone after limestone through the desert. We are in ancient Egypt, a pl...

o u g a lv es On a routine expedition in 1987, oceanographers in the submersible Alvin were mapping the typically barren, nutrient-poor seafloor in the Santa Catalina Basin, off the shore of southern California. On the final dive of the trip, the scanning sonar detected a large object on the seafloor. Piercing through the abyssal darkness down at 1,240 meters, Alvin’s headlights revealed a 20-m...

Many have tried to draw scientific inferences about the existence or nonexistence of an afterlife from observations undertaken in the natural world. A leading example of these attempts is the common refutation of the hypothesis of reincarnation as being inconsistent with human population growth. This paper demonstrates that the demographic refutation of reincarnation only holds if supplemented ...

It is widely acknowledged among those philosophers and theologians who have given the matter much thought that the fact of animal suffering challenges Theism in a distinctive way. Standard attempts to reconcile human suffering with a perfectly powerful and benevolent deity don’t seem to apply easily to the case of animals. Animals can hardly be said to deserve their suffering or be morally impr...