The Green caldron - University Library

October, 1960 13
BEING
A Materialist Afterlife
John Marxen
Rhetoric 102, Theme 13
A MATERIALIST AND A SKEPTIC, AND YET, LIKE
every human being, unable to believe in the eventual destruction of
my consciousness, I have tried to formulate out of my reading and
experience a factual basis for this opinion. I prefer not to trust to faith, but
to extrapolate from scientific facts. In this paper I am dealing with the
question of the survival of the soul after death—arbitrarily defining the soul
as the conscious mind, the sum total of a life's memories and the personality
which is their resultant. If the soul should be other than this, it would be
senseless to speculate upon its survival, for this survival would not concern
us.
Since prehistoric times men have debated the questions of the nature
of the soul, of the relationship of the soul to the body, and of the possibilities
of the soul's surviving after death. We have not yet arrived at any sort of
agreement on the subject, and no evidence is available on either side of the
argument. It is conceivable that no answer will ever be found, but it is more
likely that we have been asking the wrong questions. Certain discoveries of
the past suggest that these ancient questions may be rephrased in modern
terms, and may even be answered.
These discoveries have not been in the field of theology or philosophy
philosophers and theologians have not produced a definite answer after
thousands of years of speculation ; perhaps we had better look elsewhere for
the answer. The fields of biochemistry, neurology, and relativity physics
have already provided the basis for a new line of questioning.
That science could solve such an essentially theological question as that
given in the first paragraph may seem unlikely (or even blasphemous) to
many people. But science has, in the past, settled many theological questions
and disproved many dogmatic assumptions about the universe without in
any way lessening the basic truth—if such exists—of a religion's teachings.
The truth is never less awe-inspiring, less beautiful than the superstition.
The general workings of the brain—the operation of memory, perception,
and reason—are fairly well understood by contemporary neurologists ; there
is nothing really mysterious about the brain, it is merely more complex than
any device produced artificially. Our present knowledge indicates that it is
theoretically quite possible to construct a calculating machine that could
duplicate in every detail the workings of the brain. Machines already built
;