Why supernatural beliefs are at odds with a true understanding of the
afterlife
In this extraordinary book, Mark Johnston sets out a new understanding
of personal identity and the self, thereby providing a purely
naturalistic account of surviving death.
Death threatens our sense of the importance of goodness. The threat can
be met if there is, as Socrates said, "something in death that is better
for the good than for the bad." Yet, as Johnston shows, all existing
theological conceptions of the afterlife are either incoherent or at
odds with the workings of nature. These supernaturalist pictures of the
rewards for goodness also obscure a striking consilience between the
philosophical study of the self and an account of goodness common to
Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism: the good person is one
who has undergone a kind of death of the self and who lives a life
transformed by entering imaginatively into the lives of others,
anticipating their needs and true interests. As a caretaker of humanity
who finds his or her own death comparatively unimportant, the good
person can see through death.
But this is not all. Johnston's closely argued claims that there is no
persisting self and that our identities are in a particular way
"Protean" imply that the good survive death. Given the future-directed
concern that defines true goodness, the good quite literally live on in
the onward rush of humankind. Every time a baby is born a good person
acquires a new face.
