Atheism and Death

Atheism is the disbelief in the existence of a deity. Although atheism is often associated with agnosticism, it has its own distinct meaning. Whereas agnostics believe that it cannot be known whether there is a god, atheists explicitly reject the existence of such a being. This rejection especially manifests itself in periods of secularization in which the immanent world becomes evermore important at the expense of the metaphysical constellation of god, world, and soul. This does not mean that representations of a transcendent world, such as god, heaven, and afterlife, no longer exist—it means that people in a secularized society may reject these notions as part of their lived reality. Because many people live in a secularized society, atheism is relevant for understanding death from a nonreligious point of view.

Atheism itself gives no meaning to death—it only rejects transcendent interpretations of death. From an atheistic perspective, meaning of death results just from an immanent analysis based upon the profane and worldly interpretation of reality. As a consequence, atheistic meanings of death are defined both by immanent meaning and by the disbelief in a deity. Although immanent meanings of death can go together with a personal belief in god, this is not the case in atheism. In the following, immanent meanings of death are explored by first sketching the main sources for immanent meaning. From there, three immanent meanings of death are presented and future immanent meanings of death are briefly explored.

Immanent Meanings of Death

The main sources for immanent meanings of death are nature and the human being. Naturecentered meanings have roots in the ancient thought of materialism—the doctrine that reality has objective existence that consists of material [Page 80]particles—and have been further developed in the movement of naturalism from the early Renaissance onward. Generally speaking, these immanent meanings represent the idea that nature provides a strict physical understanding of reality, including the reality of death. Human-centered meanings have roots in the ancient thought of immanent idealism—the doctrine that human ideas make up the reality as we know it—and have been further developed in the Renaissance movement of humanism. Generally speaking, these immanent meanings put humankind and its capacity to give meaning to reality in the center of the universe.

The lines of thought from materialism to naturalism and from immanent idealism to humanism present different meanings of death. Naturalcentered meanings of death tend to reduce persons to their complex material bodies. In such a perspective, death does not mean the end of one's existence—persons continue to exist as corpses for a while after they die, whereupon the body recycles into other forms of nature through physical decay. Although this gives meaning to a bodily death, it does not do so for death as a psychological annihilation. Human-centered meanings of death, on the other hand, tend to reduce living persons to their potential for self-realization. For example, many humanists believe that people continue to exist in the contribution they made to create a better world. As such, individual pleasures, ideas, and achievements may transcend death. Although this perspective provides meaning, it regards life rather than death. As a consequence, both nature- and human-centered meanings of death remain limited in their analysis. However, there are exceptions to this limitation. Three of them will be explored in the next sections.

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