The other day I was on the internet and inadvertently came across a website asking, "Is there life after death?" I was looking to find a certain part for my motorcycle, but I found this subject too interesting to pass up. There was a plethora of information available, but one site caught my interest. It was an article from The Guardian newspaper (Sunday, 15 May 2011) on an interview with Britain's most eminent scientist, Stephen Hawking. The headline read There Is No Heaven, It's a Fairy Story. When Mr Hawking was asked if there was anything that he feared about death, his response in part was "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."
It often strikes me how people will bet their life on a certain belief. As a Christian, I am a man of faith and obviously disagree with Hawking's point of view. I have been reading a book by John Ortberg called Faith & Doubt. In one section he brought into view the opposing beliefs about the existence of life after death. He said,
We may not like the silence; we may not have chosen to have unanswered questions, but we must choose how we will understand them, what we will bet our lives on. I invite you to consider two alternatives and their consequences. One of them, to paraphrase atheist Bertrand Russell, is “you are the product of causes that have no purpose or meaning. Your origin, your growth, your hopes, fears, loves, beliefs are the outcome of accidental collections of atoms. No fire, heroism or intensity of thought or feeling can preserve your life from beyond the grave. All the devotion, all the inspiration, all the labour of all the ages are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system. The whole temple of human achievement must inevitably be buried in the debris of a universe in ruins. That's what we're headed for.”–John Ortberg, Faith & Doubt
Or you can choose this: “You are the uniquely designed creation of a thoroughly good and unspeakably creative God. You are made in His image, with a capacity to reason, choose, and love that sets you above all other life forms. You will not only survive death, but you yourself were made to bear an eternal weight of glory you cannot now even fathom and you will one day know.” . . .
. . . “What do we want to believe?” is one of the most important questions we can ask when it comes to the search for faith. The reason this question is important for us is that if we want to, we can find ways that explain away every reason for faith: The existence of creation; stories of answered prayer; evidence of the resurrection; testimonies of changed lives; the unmatched wisdom of Jesus; and the tugging and longing of your own heart for grace, forgiveness, meaning, wholeness, transcendence , and heaven. If you want badly enough not to believe, you will find a way not to believe. I often find myself wishing, given the damage that doubt can do, that God would just remove it. But He generally doesn’t. Maybe He has a reason not to.
