DSouza - Life after Death: The Evidence

Table of Contents

For Pete Marsh
Visionary, Mentor, and Friend

Who hasnt wondered, What happens after death? It would be both unreasonable and foolish to live your entire life never considering and being unprepared for an event that we all know is inevitable. The mortality rate on earth is 100 percent.

This book by my friend Dinesh DSouza is a brilliant investigation of the fascinating and crucial issue of what happens when we die. It is an inquiry conducted on the basis of scholarship and reason, and it provides a convincing answer that is explosive in its impact.

It has often been stated that we are not ready to live until we are prepared to die. The truths in this book are not meant simply to prepare you for eternity; they are foundations on which you can build a meaningful life of purpose.

In The Purpose Driven Life, I pointed out that the Bible teaches that our time on earth is essentially preparation for eternity. We were made to last forever, and this life is like a warm-up act, a dress rehearsal, for the real show in eternity. Once we fully grasp this, it makes all the difference in the world, affecting our choices, values, relationships, goals, and how we use our time and resources. We reorder our priorities and start emphasizing the enduring, important things over temporary things that ultimately wont matter.

So where can we learn the truth about the afterlife? We have two choicesspeculation or revelation. Throughout history philosophers have conjectured about it, but even our brightest minds are just guessing. The better alternative is to discover what God has revealed in Holy Scripture. Of course, today weve seen the rise of an atheistic secularism that denies all revelation. But the objections of the so-called new atheists are not really new at all, and they have been soundly discredited by scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians for centuries. Unfortunately, most people dont read the classic apologetics, so they become quite gullible in believing that the atheists arguments are new and irrefutable.

Thats why this book is so important. It clearly and boldly exposes the fallacies that are often accepted today without question. The implications of this cultural gullibility are huge. If this life is all there is, there is no basis for any meaning, hope, purpose, or significance to life. Everything in your life would simply be a random change of fate at best, or an accident at worst. Your life, and your death, would not matter at all. The logical end of such a life is despair. Moreover, we can forget about being decent or ethical, with no basis for human dignity, rights, or liberty. Even the American constitution points out that our inalienable rights are endowed by our Creator, not by the government or any other human source.

My friend Dinesh DSouza is an outstanding thinker and a first-rate scholar. For most of his career he was a secular policy maker and influential think-tank intellectual. His previous book Whats So Great About Christianity follows in the line of other great thinkers like C. S. Lewis. In this book, he has turned his considerable talents to an even deeper issue. Even atheists like Christopher Hitchens have acknowledged that DSouza is a world-class advocate for theism and the Christian faith.

This is also a book for genuine seekers of the truth, not for those who are simply looking to reinforce their bias. The word prejudice means to pre-judge. As you read this book, I hope you will lay aside all your prejudices, and with an open mind, consider the facts, the evidence, the logic, and the implications of life after deathnot just for our culture as a whole, but for you personally too.

Id love to hear your reaction to this book.

Dr. Rick Warren
The Purpose Driven Life
pastorrick@saddleback.com
twitter @rickwarren

But at my back I always hear
Times winged chariot hurrying near.

The year before I met Dixie, the woman who was to become my wife, she was involved in a harrowing car accident. She told me about it on one of our first dates. At the age of nineteen she was driving from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., to enroll in a journalism program. Due to some unmarked construction work, the highway narrowed and her car hit a groove and spun out of control. Dixie saw her Saab Sonnett careen off the highway and plummet into a ravine. On the way she felt the bump, bump, bump of the car hitting trees. Finally the vehicle flipped over, crashed, and landed upside down.

At this point, things got a little strange. Dixie saw a man running up to the car; he was a truck driver who had apparently witnessed the accident. He rapped on the glass and called to her. Soon some other onlookers crowded around the site. Dixie could hear one say, How is she? Is she dead? Dixie told me that at this point she freaked out. The weird thing, she said, is that I was looking at the whole scene from outside my body. I was somewhere above, and I could see the crowd and the car and myself inside it. I tried to open my mouth and scream that I was still alive, but my body wasnt moving and I couldnt hear any sounds coming out of my mouth. Eventually the ambulance arrived and extracted her from the car. She sustained some broken bones and a concussion, but I should have been dead, Dixie told me. Even now when she recalls the accident, she says, I consider it a miracle that I survived. The incident struck me as bizarre at the time, and only many years later did I realize that my wife had had an out of body experience. In retrospect, however, I think it was one of the first specific things that kindled my interest in what happens at the point of death.

Two other vivid incidents have made me confront death. The first occurred in the year 2000. I was going about my normal life when suddenly I had a phone call that my dad was in the hospital and being given shock treatment to keep him alive. A few hours later he was dead. My dad was my hero, and even a decade later the shock of his death has not fully abated for me. Then, a couple of years ago, my best friend Bruce went in with a routine medical complaint and was informed that he had kidney cancer. Man, I was not ready for that, Bruce says. No one is ready for that. Every single thing I was doing before that, all my plans for my business and our investments and our house and everything else just became irrelevant. For two days after I heard the news, I couldnt eat or sleep. I just walked around my house in a daze.

These experiences have brought to center stage for me the issue of what, if anything, comes after death. I have thought about the question for many years. I am aware that it is a big taboo, but I think it is time to confront it. Is death the end, or is there something more? This is the ultimate question. It has been the defining issue for entire cultures from the ancient Egyptians to the present. And in truth, there is no more important question that any of us will face. It is the issue that makes every other issue trivial. If you have doubts about its significance, go to a hospital or a funeral or talk to a parent who has recently lost a child. You will discover very quickly that the apparent normalcy of everyday life is a sham. Death is the great wrecking ball that destroys everything. Everything that we have done, everything we are doing now, and all our plans for the future are completely and irrevocably destroyed when we die. At bottom, we already know this. Only teenagers live in that state of temporary insanity when they believe themselves immune from death. But as we get older, especially when we move beyond the midpoint of life, starting our way on the downhill slope, we begin to acknowledge our mortality. Our life is a loan received from death, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer writes, with sleep as the daily interest on this loan.