If there is nothing after death how do we find out?

[Angrboda]

How about we put the question like this:
If there is something after death, how do we find out?
How did some guy in the bronze age come to find this out?

Souls are a another powerful part of the rhetoric of religion. Without an intuitive belief that we possess an immaterial essence instead of just a biological brain, threats of hellfire or promises of paradise would hold little persuasive value. Again, we can look to developmental research with children to see the most intuitive default thinking in humans:

[Jesse Bering] put on a puppet show for a group of pre-school children. During the show, an alligator ate a mouse. The researchers then asked the children questions about the physical existence of the mouse, such as 'Can the mouse still be sick? Does it need to eat or drink?' The children said no. But when asked more 'spiritual' questions, such as 'does the mouse think and know things?', the children answered yes (Brooks 31).

Belief in souls requires a dualistic conception of human beings where the mind of an individual is conceptually separable from the body. Unlike a scientific, monistic view of individuals where the mind is an epiphenomenon of the living brain, a dualistic conceptualization sees individuals as having a soul that "is typically represented as the conscious personality" (Bering, "Souls" 453). The alligator-and-mouse experiment bears this out. From an early age human beings (across cultures) conceptually separate cognitive and biological processes, and even though we learn that biological bodies die, it is much more difficult to conclude that immaterial personalities die (Pyysiainen 94). There are several reasons for this difficulty. Bering's "The Folk Psychology of Souls" cites a study conducted with 5-month-old infants ascertaining their ability to reason about the law of continuous motion as it applies to human bodies:

Like any material substance, human bodies cannot go from A → C without first passing along the trajectory B (a continuous space between two points). For inanimate objects, infants are surprised (i.e., look longer) when the object disappears from behind one barrier and then seems to emerge from behind another adjacent barrier. In the case of a human who violates the law of continuous motion, however, 5-month-olds are not surprised (i.e., they do not look longer at this event than the non-violation event) (454).

Infants, it seems, already have the foundations for thinking of humans (at least in part) in nonmaterial ways. Their intuition seems to be that while inanimate objects cannot violate the law of continuous motion, animate objects can because they possess agency (an immaterial property) and can exhibit goal-directed behavior. If this intuition is carried into adulthood, it becomes obvious why human beings can entertain the notion at a funeral that "he's up there smiling down on us" when the inert decedent is really in a casket. On Justin Barrett's account there is evolutionary logic behind this way of thinking: "Requiring a body around to think about its mind would be a great liability" (Brooks 31). And the subjective experience of dreams, where the "person" "leaves" the sleeping body, also seems to (partly) explain why the human mind naturally demarcates between the (seemingly) immaterial cognitive and material biological aspects of human beings.

— Why Religion is Persuasive: How Religious Rhetoric Taps into Intuitions Underlying Religious Thought by Adam Lewis ( (2011)



(See also, The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering, and Religion Explained .)