On a spring day last year, three months after the death of my younger son, Max, I opened my front door and saw a butterfly resting on the steps—an Eastern tiger swallowtail, I later determined, a species native to the Northeast but not one I remembered seeing before in the middle of Brooklyn. The date stuck in my mind because, as it happens, it was also my birthday. The butterfly, with its otherworldly beauty and silence, is, of course, a common metaphor for the soul. Its emergence from entombment as a chrysalis may have inspired ideas about human resurrection. In the newsletter of the Compassionate Friends, a support group for bereaved parents, the sudden appearance of butterflies (and birds, cloud formations, and particular songs on the radio) is sometimes cited as evidence of communication from beyond the grave. So let me be clear about where I stand: not only do I not believe it, but I can't understand why anyone would take comfort from it. I would hate to think of Max, with his fierce intelligence and tenacity, reduced to sending mute signals by way of insects.
I was put in mind of this by reading a new book by Dinesh D'Souza, provocatively titled Life After Death: The Evidence, and I can't help wondering what D'Souza, a well-known conservative political commentator starting a second career as a Christian apologist, would make of my experience. To be consistent, he would have to say nothing at all: it is what scientists call anecdotal evidence, useless by definition, and D'Souza's book attempts to build a case on unshakable scientific grounds for the survival of consciousness beyond death. Ghosts, mediums, and miraculous cures by the intercession of saints play no role in his argument, which draws instead on quantum mechanics, neuroscience, and moral philosophy. Life After Death, along with other recent books including mathematician David Berlinski's The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, physicist Frank J. Tripler's The Physics of Christianity, and The Language of God by the director of the National Institutes of Health, the geneticist Francis S. Collins, constitutes an effort by believers to confront the so-called new atheism on its own intellectual turf, without benefit of scripture or revelation. D'Souza, who likens this to fighting with one hand tied behind his back, is a frequent debating opponent of prominent atheists including Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) and Sam Harris (The End of Faith). He regards the emergence of such enemies as a God-given opportunity to bring Christian apologetics into the new century. "C. S. Lewis addressed issues from his own era, such as the Holocaust," D'Souza notes, "but today we have new questions—about Darwin, brain science, modern physics, and Islamic terrorism. The new atheists have done believers a favor by putting the issue of faith on the agenda. If I'd written this book 10 years ago, people would have asked, 'why?' "
Some people may still ask. D'Souza takes it as given that we are all consumed with wondering what will happen to us after death, the way all Europeans were in medieval times, and D'Souza himself still is. Believers, of course, need no convincing on the subject of life after death, so D'Souza must address himself to skeptics, who presumably have made their peace with the expectation of personal annihilation. Skeptics may object to D'Souza's mode of argument, which is to state a proposition, present the evidence for both sides with an elaborate if spurious show of impartiality, and proceed briskly to the conclusion that his own preference is obviously the winner. But on some level, D'Souza believes, even skeptics would like to be convinced.
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