SPIRIT OF ISLAM APRIL 2O18

33 Spirit of Islam Issue 64 April 2018 LIFE AFTER DEATH Soul Eternal I S there any life after death? The answer to this tends, nowadays, to be in the negative because we are so used to thinking of life in terms of all the material elements of which it is apparently composed. We think of life developing when all the aforesaid elements are arranged in a particular order, and, as a corollary to that, we think of death as shattering that order and, in consequence, obviating all possibility of life after death. T.R. Miles regards the concept of resurrection as a symbolic truth and refuses to accept it literally: It seems to me that there is a good case for regarding ‘People have experiences after death’ as a literal, factually significant assertion capable in principle of being verified or falsified by experience. The only difficulty, in that case, is that, until we die, there is no means of discovering the true answer. Speculation, of course, is possible. It might be argued, for instance, that according to neurology awareness of the space occupied by our bodies (and of spatial relationships in general) is possible only when the brain is functioning normally, and that after death, when the brain disintegrates, no such awareness will be possible. But there are certain other assumptions which suggest that disintegration of material particles in a body does not bring life to an end. And these assumptions carry considerable weight. We should be prepared to recognize that life has a distinct and independent identity which survives in spite of the change in material particles. It is known that the human body is composed of certain specific elements called cells. These are the fundamental units of living things, and are composed of microscopic particles with a highly complicated structure. A man is made up of more than a billion cells. It is as if cells were the tiny bricks of the human construction. But whereas, real bricks remain the same as they were at the time of building, human cells undergo a constant process of transformation known as metabolism. There are certain assumptions which suggest that disintegration of material particles in a body does not bring life to an end. Life has a distinct and independent identity which survives in spite of the change in material particles.