In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

It’s not remotely likely, but then neither is anything. If the force of gravity were even slightly weaker, stars wouldn’t be dense enough to cross the Coulomb barrier and start thermonuclear fusion. It would be a completely dark universe. If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn too hot and fast, and there would be no life. If the attractive force between electrons and atomic nuclei were too weak, electrons couldn’t orbit; if it were too strong, atoms couldn’t bond with each other. Either way, there would be no molecules. There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be ten to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are. Given that existence itself is almost infinitely unlikely, what if there were some kind of post-death existence? What if the dead were not entirely gone, in the sense that we understand that word, and the living were not entirely bound by time and space? What if the great mysteries of the world—the spirits and ghosts and coincidences and telepathy and predictive dreams and everything else that humans have always noticed but couldn’t quite make sense of—actually had a rational expl...