THE QUESTION LIBRARY MIND & MORTALITY
What the great traditions teach, what near-death research can and cannot test, and why the deepest part of this question lies beyond science.
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Nobody knows yet, and science may never be able to say. Science can study the dying brain and what people remember after being revived. But everyone in those studies survived, so science cannot test what happens after death itself. Many religions teach that life goes on, through resurrection, judgment, rebirth or release from rebirth. Many other people believe death is the end. Whether anything of us lives on is beyond science.
The Voyage of Life: Old Age, painted by Thomas Cole in 1842. Artists have long pictured hope beyond death. A painting is not evidence, but it shows how deeply people have cared about this question.
WHERE THE EVIDENCE STANDS
WHAT WE DON’T KNOW YET
Nobody knows whether awareness can continue without a working brain. Studies can include only people who survived, and so few survive cardiac arrest that tests with hidden targets are hard to run.
WHAT WOULD CHANGE THIS ANSWER
If people revived after cardiac arrest could reliably name hidden targets they had no normal way to see, that would change what science says about awareness near death. Even that would not show what happens after death that cannot be undone, so the main question would stay beyond science.
Nobody knows yet, and science may never be able to say. That is the honest answer. Science can study people who came close to death and lived. It can study the dying brain. But it cannot follow anyone past death itself and report back.
If you are asking because someone you love has died, please go gently with yourself. This is one of the oldest questions people ask, and grief makes it feel urgent. Whatever you believe, or hope, you are welcome here.
Many of the world’s great religious traditions teach that death is not the end. Christians look for “the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come,” in the words of the Nicene Creed. Islam teaches that God will judge each person, with heaven for those who lived righteously. Jewish tradition speaks of the resurrection and the “world to come,” while the Hebrew Bible puts its main weight on this life. Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh traditions teach rebirth, shaped by karma, with the hope of release from the cycle. Many people who are not religious believe that death is the end of the person. Others are simply unsure.
Belief in some kind of afterlife is common in the United States. In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 73% of U.S. adults said they believe in heaven. About one in six said they believe in no afterlife at all.
What about science? The best-known research studies people whose hearts stopped and who were brought back. Some of them describe vivid experiences, such as peace, bright light or a sense of leaving the body. These experiences are real and worth studying. But every person in those studies survived. So the research tells us about the edge of death, not about what lies beyond it. For more, see our answer on near-death experiences.
So we label the big question Beyond science. That is not a dodge. It means evidence of the kind science uses cannot settle it, in either direction.
Here is a brief, respectful sketch. Each tradition is large and holds many views, so this is a starting point, not the final word.
Christianity. The Nicene Creed, said in many churches, ends: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” The St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology notes that Christians agree the resurrection of the dead includes the resurrection of the body, but do not agree on what that means. Christians also differ on who will be raised to salvation.
Islam. As the Pew Research Center summarizes it, the Quran states that God will judge each person by his or her deeds, with heaven for those who lived righteously and hell for those who did not. A Day of Judgment is one of the traditional articles of faith. In Pew’s surveys of Muslims in many countries, belief in heaven was nearly universal in South Asia and Southeast Asia.
Judaism. According to the St Andrews Encyclopaedia, the Hebrew Bible puts its weight on life in the present, and its references to life after death are understated. Later rabbis spoke of bodily resurrection and of olam haba, “the world to come,” and their views were never set out as one system. Jewish thinkers have held a range of views ever since.
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. These traditions, which began in South Asia, teach that beings are reborn again and again. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, rebirth is governed by karma, meaning that good and bad actions bring good and bad results. The goal is release from the cycle of rebirth. In Buddhism, that goal is called nirvana, the end of suffering. Belief also varies inside traditions. In Pew’s 2021 report on India, reincarnation is called a mainstream teaching of all four, yet only 40% of India’s Hindus said they believe in it, while 77% said they believe in karma.
Nonreligious views. Many people believe that a person’s life simply ends at death. Philosophers call this the termination thesis: when a person dies, that person goes out of existence. The Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry on death shows that philosophers still debate even this, partly over puzzles such as whether a dead body is still, in some sense, the person.
Science works with what can be observed and measured. That lets it study the dying body and brain, and what survivors remember. It is much harder to see how it could study a person after death.
Start with how death is defined. In the United States, as the Stanford Encyclopedia explains, a person is legally dead after the irreversible loss of heart and lung function, or of all brain function. By that standard, a person whose heart suddenly stops (cardiac arrest) and is then restarted was not legally dead, because the loss turned out to be reversible. That is a point about definitions. It says nothing against how real or how deep their experience was. But it is why research on near-death experiences, however moving, cannot tell us what happens after death itself.
A leading recent study is AWARE II, led by Sam Parnia at NYU Langone Health and published in 2023. At 25 hospital sites, the team studied 567 people whose hearts stopped in the hospital. Only 53 (9.3%) survived, and 28 of them completed interviews. Of those 28, 11 (39.3%) reported memories or perceptions that suggested some awareness. Six (21.4%) described what the team calls a “transcendent recalled experience of death.”
The team also built in a test. During resuscitation, a computer showed a test image and headphones played a test sound. If people were truly aware of what was going on around them, some might later name them. Nobody identified the image. One of the 28 identified the sound. Brain recordings also found something surprising: brain waves like those of a conscious person appeared as late as 35 to 60 minutes into CPR, even though the brain was badly short of oxygen.
So the science is real and growing. It shows that some people have vivid, meaningful experiences at the edge of death. It has not shown that the mind can leave the body. And it cannot, by design, tell us about life after final death.
From one side comes this objection: “The mind depends on the brain, so when the brain dies, the mind ends. Science has already answered this.” That is a serious argument. Our answer Is the mind the brain? looks at the evidence that the mind depends on the brain. But a strong reason to doubt is not the same as a test that settles the question. No experiment observes what happens to a person after irreversible death.
From the other side comes the opposite objection: “People who nearly died saw heaven, so we know.” Those accounts matter to the people who lived them. But the people who reported them survived, and the image tests have not yet shown awareness from outside the body.
Both objections ask science to settle a question it cannot reach. That is why we use the label Beyond science.
“Science has proven there is no afterlife.” It has not. Science can say a great deal about how bodies and brains die. It has no way to check what, if anything, follows.
“Near-death experiences prove there is an afterlife.” They do not. They are real experiences of people who survived.
“Feeling a loved one’s presence means something is wrong with me.” This experience is common. In the same 2021 Pew survey, 44% of U.S. adults said they have felt the presence of someone who has died. People make sense of it in many ways, religious and not.
For more on the science and on living with mortality, see our stories What Happens When We Die? and What Do Near-Death Experiences Tell Us?, and our answer on making peace with dying.
The answer stays the same after all this detail. Nobody knows whether there is life after death. Science can study the edge of death, but the question itself is beyond science.
THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER
Next on the path “When someone has died, or you’re afraid”
What are near-death experiences, and what do they tell us?
Near-death experiences are real experiences, reported by about 10 to 20% of people who survive a stopped heart.
See a mistake? Report a problem. Corrections are made openly.
CONTINUE THE THREAD
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Labels describe the evidence for a claim, not the people who hold it.
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