A Moral Argument for the Necessity of Afterlife

Document Type : The Quarterly Jornal

Author

Associate professor, Department of Philosophy, Mofid University, Qom, Iran

Abstract

There is no one who has never face the question of life after death. Since the prophets and their successors have communicated the divine message of posthumous life to people, in this paper I seek to show that every human being innately apprehends the necessity of this communication, and its recognition is just in need of a closure. Thus, it will be clarified, through a rational method and conceptual analysis, that the optimal order (al-niẓām al-aḥsan) is apprehended when none of its constitutive parts is ignored. If reason grasps the natural world without the afterlife, then it will encounter explanatory gaps when facing the questions of theoretical reason. The explanatory gap has a different story when it comes to practical reason. Not only does practical reason lead and oblige one to moral actions, but also puts the moral world along with the natural world in order to complete its rationality. Reason cannot fully support the rationality of moral actions without a moral world and moral life after the natural life. In this paper, I will draw on moral concepts to argue for the necessity of the existence of another world. The argument deploys premises graspable by everyone in order to turn into a proof. The departing point of the argument is the general notion of the moral concept of “duty.”

Keywords

References

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