Yesterday I was streaming a debate in which two prominent atheist thinkers and two rabbis discussed the plausibility of an afterlife. In his opening statement, the less erudite of the two rabbis professed that he had always been convinced that humans were more than just “stuff”. I believe the scientific word he was looking for was “matter”. The idea here was that, in addition to our physical forms, there exists within each of us a spiritual component that remains after the moment of death. This is a familiar refrain of those in the theistic camp. It attempts to capitalize on humanity's general aversion to the notion that we are all just agglomerations of tiny atoms. This argument appeals to the desire to be something greater than just the physical matter that comprises our bodies, which is, at its core, a desire for transcendence and meaning.
Unfortunately, although it may be effective as a rhetorical tool, this argument is complete nonsense. It is based on a false dichotomy, which is that, if one rejects the hypothesis that there is a supernatural component to our being, then all we have left is the physical matter within our bodies. This couldn't be further from the truth. One need not resort to magical thinking in order to conceive of the many non-physical, intangible ways in which living things manifest themselves. Furthermore, a scientific worldview is not just compatible with this assertion of non-physical being, rather science demands that for every physical entity in the universe, there exists infinite non-physical attributes to its identity. In linguistic terms, this distinction is often denoted using the phrases "concrete" and "abstract". Much of science can be described as the use of abstract devices such as numbers and equations, to describe and understand concrete, physical entities.
So the question "are we no more than just the physical matter that makes up our bodies?", the answer, even to a scientist, should be “obviously not!”. Ones identity and ones being is comprised not just of her or his physical body, but also ones emotions, ones ideas, ones past. All of these are non-physical, yet profound and consequential manifestations of who we are. I would further argue that who and what we are is as much defined by how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us, as by who we are in any physical sense. In this sense, it may be more accurate to describe an individual as a collection of ideas rather than a collection of molecules. In other words, we aren't merely the source of the images that get conjured when others speak our names, rather we are those images, those, ideas and those memories. So in addition to being a physical organism, every human being is also an abstract concept, an aggregate not just of our physical form, but also of the ideas that we create, and the ideas that we engender and inspire within others.
So while evolution has endowed us with genes that, if we're fortunate, can proliferate long after our own bodies have perished, we are also endowed with an abstract presence that, if we're fortunate, will also live on long after the day of our death.
