In Christian funerals, we hear promises of heaven from John 14: 'In my Father's house are many rooms.' In Islamic traditions, the Quran assures the righteous of Jannah (Paradise), gardens beneath which rivers flow (Surah Muhammad 47:15).
Family members clasp hands, whispering prayers, some reciting the Lord's Prayer, others the Fatiha (opening chapter) of the Qur'an, hoping to ease the soul's journey. For a moment, the raw ache of loss softens. The bereaved breathe again, sustained by a picture of reunion, peace, eternal light.
We have told ourselves these stories for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians stocked tombs with goods for the journey through the Duat.
Plato, in the Phaedo, argued the soul's immortality as a philosopher's certainty. Across millennia and continents, humanity has refused to accept death as final silence. Some await resurrection and final judgment, souls from 2,000 years ago, perhaps, resting in a divine holding pattern until the trumpet sounds.
Others envision cycles of rebirth, the wheel of samsara (or wheel of life - a symbolic Buddhist diagram illustrating the cycle of death, rebirth, and suffering) turning until the state of perfect peace. Still others picture only eternal sleep, consciousness dissolving like mist at dawn.
Yet for all the vivid testimonies, near-death experiencers returning with tales of blinding light, dark tunnels, or encounters with long-lost relatives, no one has brought back verifiable proof. Science explains many such visions as surges of brain activity under extreme stress: oxygen deprivation, endorphins, temporal lobe firing.
No resurrected person has returned with a clear, undisputed map of what lies beyond. Even in Christianity, which believes Jesus rose from the dead, some things cannot be fully explained or proven. These are called 'mysteries of faith,' like the Trinity (God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), and what exactly happens in eternity. We believe, the Church says, not because we fully comprehend, but because we trust.
So why does imagining the afterlife matter more than proving it? Because what we picture beyond the grave quietly steers how we live on this side of it.
Philosophers have wrestled with this for centuries. Blaise Pascal, in his famous wager, argued that reason alone cannot settle the question of God or immortality, so we must choose how to live as if the stakes are infinite. If heaven and hell exist, the prudent soul chooses virtue. If they do not, the virtuous life still yields dignity and community, nothing truly lost.
Immanuel Kant went further: he believed practical reason demands we act as though the soul is immortal, because only an afterlife could guarantee perfect justice, virtue ultimately rewarded, evil ultimately corrected. Without that horizon, morality risks becoming mere calculation.
German Friedrich Nietzsche saw the danger from the opposite shore. When he declared 'God is dead,' he warned that removing the scaffolding of eternal consequence might leave humanity adrift. If there is no final reckoning, why not seize power, pleasure, whatever we can grasp? History offers grim footnotes: regimes that officially denied any afterlife often justified atrocity on a staggering scale, as if this life were the only ledger.
Yet Nietzsche underestimated something. Even without certainty, the idea of accountability lingers in the human psyche like a half-remembered dream. Psychologists have found that belief in an afterlife correlates with lower anxiety about death and greater resilience in grief.
Viktor Frankl, neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, observed that prisoners who sustained a sense of transcendent meaning, often religious, were more likely to endure. More recent studies show that imagining a loved one in peace helps bereaved spouses and parents rebuild shattered lives. Hope, it turns out, is a powerful antidote to despair.
Of course, the picture is not entirely rosy. Some research suggests that uncertain belief, fearing hell without confidence in heaven, can worsen grief. And secular societies like those in northern Europe demonstrate that empathy, justice, and generosity can flourish without widespread belief in divine judgment. People still build hospitals, forgive enemies, and raise children kindly, motivated by love, reason, and the desire to leave the world gentler than they found it.
But remove every trace of transcendent consequence, and something shifts. When a society truly believes this life is all there is, short-term thinking can creep in: exploit now, consequences be damned.
The imagination of hell has, for all its terrors, restrained countless hands that might otherwise have struck. The vision of heaven has inspired cathedrals, hospitals, and acts of quiet heroism. Reincarnation has encouraged compassion across communities and species. Even the atheist's eternal sleep can motivate us to make this fleeting moment count, to plant trees whose shade we will never enjoy.
We need not resolve the unresolvable to live well. Worrying endlessly about what we cannot control, whether souls from antiquity still wait, whether light or darkness or nothingness awaits, drains the precious present. The wiser path is to ask: What kind of story do I want to inhabit today? One that makes me kinder, braver, more generous? Then let that story guide my steps.
In the end, the afterlife we cannot prove may be less important than the one we choose to imagine. Picture justice restored, love enduring, every tear wiped away, and you may find yourself treating strangers as future companions in eternity. Picture only void, and you may still choose goodness, simply because it is beautiful.
Either way, the vision guides how we live, and that may be the greatest miracle of all.
Théophile Niyitegeka
Source : https://en.igihe.com/opinion/article/why-imagining-the-afterlife-matters-more-than-proving-it
