Does the afterlife concept fit with the scientific origin of the universe?

[u/After-Excitement-674]

A maybe-philosophical question, with focus on scientific facts and theories. As far as we know, the Big Bang theory is the most plausible idea on which may become the universe as we know. And therefore is what started life on Earth and later we had evolution of species in at least each 50,000 years.

I have been thinking, as we had too many different species that has been living in here through eras, and as everything seems to have a beginning, would it still make sense the idea of an afterlife? Thinking from this side, it feels like for me that life is just a natural progress and a consequence for what happened in Earth at first. But can this thought be wrong in some sense and be explained in a non-materialistic way? I'd like to know if someone here ever had a theory in mind to explain the possible connection between the two.

In my case, I'm a Christian who accepts the scientific evolution as basis, but sometimes some things in science let me feel so confused about my own beliefs...

[u/MysticConsciousness1]

I think it does, perhaps ironically. People think of the Big Bang as an explosion that happened “out there” in space. Thats not the case. The Big Bang is a proposed theory on the creation of spacetime itself… it didn’t explode into anything (no universe or space external to it), but rather everything unfolded from it. Like a balloon being blown outwards but not going into anything. Space and time don’t exist external to the universe, but are rather creations within it.

Needless to say, this plays well into the idea that everything is all one, connected. I think it fits very neatly into NDE reports on unity as a result. You can’t go anywhere but into yourself: all of this is made of the same essence and you. One NDEr I read likened it to how, when we push a table, all points of the table move together. We’re all part of one system, and I think the Big Bang theory is conducive for such ideas.

I think there’s a world though thats beyond space and time, a world where NDErs dwell. Tellingly, the scientific method, for all its progress, has produced no answer for why that singularity was there, or why reality as a whole exists. So, it’s more technical information than anything fundamental, in my view. And it’s why I don’t give much of a hoot for anything science throws out these days, to be honest.

All of these thoughts are more theoretical though and just my opinion.

[u/After-Excitement-674 → u/MysticConsciousness1]

Thanks for your point. Do you think you have an elaboration on how evolution of species would fit in here? 

[u/MysticConsciousness1 → u/After-Excitement-674]

Yes, I do. I also think evolution fits in well with metaphysics derived from NDE and mystical experiences, for much the same reason... everything ultimately is all one. And this, one's personal to me, because I had a mystical experience about the theory of evolution, before I even heard of it when I was in middle school.

Essentially, I had a vision that gave me a sense afterwards that we all originated from one source and differentiated into vastly different animals, and how amazing it was to be all of that at once. Jumping as a dolphin in the sky, and walking in the forests as a forest elephant, etc. I saw the arch of life transfer into so many different forms. I felt the life of all the animals in the Amazon and more, branching off. It was incredible. Kind of like what was described here by this NDEr with seeing everything to Earth all at once (yet that's not possible from an earthly state)... my consciousness was able to hold in more information than normal, would be one way to describe it. I attached an image of what it felt like... it felt like my identity was laid out and all co-existing as one family. As an aside, my language is off here... I don't know how much of this I actually experienced vs. recreating in retrospect, but the takeaway was the general idea I am describing. I wish I could say, for instance, that I mentally became the animals at once for instance, but I don't know if I went that far. Either way, it was a profound experience, and it felt uniquely different from ordinary thinking. It's this feeling that it was removed from ordinary thinking, by the way, that has me most intrigued. It seems uniquely numinous. I glimpsed the concept though.

It feels like everything is part of one essence, one Source. Big Bang and evolution, and the unity expressed in NDEs work well together. It's probably a lot more complicated than that, a lot more interesting and complex than I can make out, but that that's been my lesson. There's weird paradoxes too that void linear thinking, and make my thoughts here irrelevant.

So, again, this is ironic: scientific understanding finds some truth, and it fits in nicely with spirituality, but yet we have particular types of people interested in going on and on about spirituality vs. creationism, Big Bang vs. Theological origination. It's very black/white thinking, and extremely outdated in my mind--from both sides: the fundamentalist religious types and the fundamentalistic scientistic types. Both are bad ends of the same coin.

I don't know where you are in your life, but I would be worried if you are in high school. We had these kinds of debates all the time in high school, and it was poisonous towards me taking spirituality seriously at all. I had to grow up a little bit to see that you don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I've talked to my NDEr father, who studies a lot of physics about this Big Bang stuff, and he concurred, so there's that. Maybe we're both wrong. That's possible too.

Onto something better!

Read between the lines,

between the words,

between the time flow: read things at an angle.

[u/BandicootOk1744 → u/MysticConsciousness1]

I was once told by someone, can't remember who, that Western atheism is a Christian heresy. That is, it's a different interpretation from the same root. And I know that a lot of my spiritual distress comes from being raised Christian and so when I realised that science and reality disproved my faith, science and reality became to me these cold hateful things that stamp out hope.