People since ancient times have always had the hope of living past death, preferably in some veritable paradise or a new life here on earth that is better than their present and past lives.
It is believed by those with secular beliefs that life after death is an impossibility or at least highly improbable. It is their understanding that the advances of science and mathematics have falsified the notion that life continues after death.
They could not be more mistaken!
Let us look at what is required to live more lifetimes after death:
1. We need enough time, preferably infinite time;
2. We need and already have natural laws that have brought you and I into existence;
3. We need and already have the laws of probability and all the opportunities that go with it.
If we have all three of these requirements, then future lives are not only possible, but inevitable. If time never ends, then the laws of probability dictate that all things we imagine can and will happen within the constraints of the natural laws.
Think of your afterlife as a number on a pair of dice. If there is enough time and you keep rolling the dice, eventually your number will be face up. Since the natural laws caused you to exist once, they can do so again in the future. It is really a question of time.
If time never ends, the following will eventually happen:
1. You will first die;
2. All matter, energy, spacetime, forces, etc. will continue to interact according to physical laws;
3. Our planet, sun will die;
4. A new sun and Earth will eventually be born along with a new history that includes a new you. (This may take many Big Bang and Big Crunch cycles. )
If time is infinite, you will live an infinite number of lifetimes. What you failed to do in this life you will no doubt do in at least one of your future lives. The only thing that can stand in your way is limited time. If time ends too soon, this life may be all there is for you.
Therefore, it is imperative that we examine time to see if it will be limited or infinite. If we postulate that time had no beginning and if we could somehow travel back in time an infinite number of years and then moved forward in time, it would take an infinite number of years to reach the present. We could not realistically expect to reach the present. Hence the present would not exist.
The reality is infinity can never be reached. No fixed beginning means no present moment. Thus time had to begin and before time there was nothing. And I mean absolutely nothing, because if there was anything at all, time would also exist.
Einstein showed us via his brilliant theories of relativity that matter, energy, electromagnetism, gravity, space and time are all intrinsically connected. Nothing can exist without time.
So time had a beginning. Does it have an end? Let's assume that it does. Time ends and there's nothing, the universe dies; it can't go on living without time. Now what? Nothing! Game over!
But wait...at the beginning there was nothing--and time and everything else began from nothing. Thus something comes from nothing and the end of time would just cause a new beginning. A new time and universe would begin. That sounds great, since it renews our hope for an afterlife.
Unfortunately we have the problem of infinite regression once again: before our universe began, there was nothing, and before that another universe that began with nothing and so on. As we established earlier, in order for our present moment to exist, time had to have had a fixed beginning...but time also needs an infinite future.
There can only be one beginning and there can be no end. That is the only way to solve the infinite regression paradox. Once something arises from nothing, it can never go back to nothing--a beginning state. It must keep moving forward. No matter how far forward it moves, you always have a finite amount of time that has passed and so the beginning and the present can be traced, are not lost, but are part of infinite time.
Here is to our future lifetimes! Cheers!