God Arises
Argument for the Life Hereafter
~ 191 ~
the short span of his life. If a man does not
experience bodily ‘death’ five times in a row at ten-
year intervals, how are we justified in believing
that, on the ultimate occasion, he will have ceased
quite finally to live?
Those who find this argument unacceptable—and
modern philosophy is, in the main, opposed to the
concept of the soul as an independent entity —will
insist that the mind, or the internal entity, that is
called man does not, in fact, enjoy any independent
existence. Man is simply the outcome of the
interaction between the body and the outer world.
All feelings and thoughts in man develop in the
course of a material process, just as friction between
two pieces of metal causes heat. Sir James Jeans is of
the view that consciousness is merely a function or
a process, and contemporary philosophers maintain
that consciousness is nothing more than a nervous
response to external stimuli. According to this
concept, once a man dies, that is, when he
biologically disintegrates, there can be no question
of his survival, because the nerve centres which
interact with the outside world and produce a set of
responses which we call ‘life’ no longer exist after
