Life After Death: The Evidence Book

As a Philosophy Major in a University Philosophy Department that is inherently reductive materialist, I find this book to be chicken soup for the rationalist's soul.

I find the book title to be very misleading, since I find that D'Souza does not spend as much time on Life after death than discussing Scientific method and philosophy, where I find his most convincing arguments are made. I have yet to find Near-death Experiences as conclusive evidence for an afterlife since they are ethnocentric and anecdotal in nature.

What I got from the book is that those who espouse science as the ultimate source of value, meaning, and knowledge is false. Science can only describe how things in the world act and do, but cannot give the prescriptive statement as to why things, objects and persons are the way they are. For instance, Scientists can how evolution works, but they can describe why Evolution is the way it is. I find his arguments on the Verification Principle and Logical Positivism to be valid, since he debunks that sense perception is not the final determination of truth. Since things are the way they are in this tiny corner of the universe, it does not mean it will hold true for every part of the universe, since light may travel at different speeds in other galaxies.

This argument is very much in line with Nietzsche's Death of God and his objection to science as the ultimate source for truth, since sense perception and scientific knowledge can change over time, and that the Atheist has misunderstood the death of God since God was the source of all value and meaning in the universe, and science cannot make up for the lack of meaning in the wake of the Death of God.

I find this book to be a critical handbook for me as I debate my peers and teachers in my university philosophy department. This book has answered a lot of the similar arguments they give to me when I question them, and I find this book to be so helpful that I want to buy it and memorize it so that I can have my rebuttals to these arguments.

To be a good philosopher, it does not take tremendous brain power, but having a lot of arguments as ammo to respond to commonly made arguments. This book has given me that ammo.