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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating !, March 27, 2009
This review is from: The Atheist Afterlife: The odds of an afterlife - Reasonable. The odds of meeting God there - Nil (Paperback)
"At first, I was a bit frightened by the title of this book. After all, I was born and raised in a traditional Catholic home. A home where beliefs in an afterlife were based on Heaven and Hell. This book bases an afterlife on reason.
It gives insight to some propositions I knew very little of. The concept of Dualism and the Inside-Out Theory were well explained with the excellent use of analogies. Major points were discussed in detail and were brought back together in a reader friendly method throughout various points in the book.
For myself, this was an entirely different look at the possibility of an afterlife. An afterlife without any religion or God. An afterlife of reason. One book that is worth the read...though at moments I thought my
head was going to explode! Well, it didn't .... as for the title of the
book, no need to be frightened."
Richard,
Dallas, TX
USA
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Too many bits of speculation presented as a logical consequence, April 17, 2010
This review is from: The Atheist Afterlife: The odds of an afterlife - Reasonable. The odds of meeting God there - Nil (Paperback)
"The Atheist Afterlife" rests upon something David Staume refers to as his "Inside-Out Theory", where our currently known form of consciousness is but one in a 4 stage process of reincarnation. How he justifiably arrived at 4 is a little beyond me, saying only that it seems like we have 3 kinds of thoughts that make up our consciousness(emotion and concrete thought, abstract thought, and intuition), and so therefore, the only logical conclusion, that is we go through phases of each turning ourselves "inside-out", first living and dying as a live consciousness as we know it, then progressively externalizing the other 3 in a process of reincarnations until we're completely "inside-out", and then the reverse till we're reincarnated in a new physical body, starting the cycle anew.
This conclusion, especially the insistence on cyclical reincarnation, never mind the rather arbitrary insistence on it being a 4 stage process, is entirely unsupported by the rest of the book, which lays out the speculative ground work for consciousness simply persisting after the death of the physical body. He just jumps right into it saying, "obviously, life after death means reincarnation". There's nothing obvious about it.
My second major objection comes earlier in the book, where Staume is first laying the groundwork for admitting the possibility of consciousness persisting after death by referring to the Law of Conservation of Energy, comparing consciousness to energy to say it never actually disappears, it just transitions to a different type. To me at least, this sounds more like an argument *against* posthumous consciousness rather than for. If consciousness is energy in a manner analogous to how kinetic force is energy, then the comparison demands that just as kinetic energy transforms into heat energy (namely, it is no longer kinetic), then cessation of consciousness as we know it would result in the "consciousness energy" would transition into energy that is no longer consciousness. This is the standard rebuttal to the "consciousness as energy" argument, and Staume makes no attempt to address it, treating the argument using the Law of Conservation of Energy as though it were a new one.
While there are other, smaller issues that I could nitpick, these two I considered to be the most glaring that prevent "The Atheist Afterlife" from being a genuinely thought providing text but rather a series of either previously rebutted or easily rebuttable arguments that conclude in a non-sequitur.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Wildly speculative, to put it mildly., February 22, 2010
This review is from: The Atheist Afterlife: The odds of an afterlife - Reasonable. The odds of meeting God there - Nil (Paperback)
On 10 January this year, David Staume gave Sydney Atheists a talk based on this book. I was there but wasn't entirely convinced. I thought if he couldn't convince me the slightest in an hour, he didn't have a point. Sadly after 164 pages, my position still holds. This book is entirely speculative. Staume made it clear the book was about 'if there is an afterlife, this is how it is.' Throughout the book he used hypothetical words such as 'could' and 'if it were true'. That is fair enough. However, he also jumps to conclusions based on assumptions. As much as my atheist mind thinks the religious afterlife false, Staume's reasoning doesn't cut it. He reveals his shaky position with the following steps
1. if my theory is true... ramifications
2. if my theory is true... ramifications
3. if my theory is true... ramifications
Then on another page, he says 'my theory proves...'
Some of the arguments used are themselves hypothetical, for example string theories' (note the plural as there are lots of strong theories) additional dimensions. I love string theory as a whole, having read four books on it. But I find his confidence disproportional to what current evidence suggests. I especially dislike the line 'Trust me. I am a philosopher.' which he used in the book.
Having personally met Staume, I find it embarrassing to be brutal. Therefore I'll leave this conclusion. In a nutshell, this book is speculative and disappointing in equal parts.
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