Despite having spent years developing a notion of a life after death, Canadian philosopher John Leslie describes himself as an atheist. He is also professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. Leslie says that his main notion of an afterlife, which he calls the "divine mind," is something he began developing 50 years ago, whilst still a teenager.

Canadian philosopher John Leslie describes himself as an atheist, despite having spent years developing a notion of a life after death that includes something that sounds suspiciously like a god.

Pick up a copy of his 2007 book, Immortality Defended, which comes in at fewer than 100 pages, and it becomes clear his is not an easy atheism. In fact, it is not a stretch to call him the most spiritual of atheists.

But do not call him a God-fearing atheist. That would be pushing it.

"The history of that word 'god' is just so complicated and has so many resonances, maybe it would be simpler to drop it," he said. "If it means believing there just happens to be a very powerful magician who created the universe, that it was just his arbitrary wish to do so -- and the reason this [magician] exists is because he just happens to be there -- then I'd say I'm an atheist. I don't believe in a god of that sort. I do believe the real world is there because it ought to be there.

"I [also] don't like this view of the test that we have to pass and those who pass it will go to heaven and those who don't go to hell or are annihilated. I don't think that makes much sense and the view I'm defending here is therefore moving away from that sort of thing."

Prof. Leslie, who lives in Victoria but is professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, said his main notion of an afterlife, which he calls the "divine mind," is something he began developing 50 years ago, when he was 17.

"That's the notion that made me most well known, most notorious. That's the thing which is my own major contribution to philosophy, bringing Plato up to date," he says. "The divine mind is nearest to most people's hopes of immortality. Because they want not just their present life in some way to be eternal, as in Einstein's [theory], but they want their experiences to go onwards after that."

The more complicated part of this approach is contained in what he describes as a general system, which essentially brings the idea of Plato up to date. Plato believed that the reason for the existence of the entire cosmos is because of an ethical requirement, not the moral requirement of something like the God of the Bible.

"Ethics deals with more than just moral and immoral behaviour," writes Prof. Leslie in Immortality Defended. "The ethical need or requirement for the existence of a good world is not, in other words, something that can become real only when there already exists some actual person or object.…The Platonic suggestion runs [that] the actual world of people and objects is a good one and it exists simply because it ought to."

At this point, most of us have to take a long leap to get to the heart of Prof. Leslie's idea: If you take Plato seriously, then there has to be a divine mind who knows everything worth knowing -- not for any particular moral reason, but just because it ought to be so.

One of the things worth knowing, he said, is the structure of a universe like ours. "And if it is known in complete detail, then you can take seriously the idea of your life and mine being just part of the divine mind's thinking. Your thoughts and my thoughts are sub-patterns in an enormously complicated pattern."

This idea of a divine mind relates to two other theories of a universe that has no beginning, middle or end, he said.

One comes from Einstein's idea of a fourth dimension, where you will exist eternally no matter who you are, but only along the time span you actually lived. In other words, if you were born in 1930 and died in 1990, that 60-year lifespan would always exist.

Then there is the quantum physics view "that the universe is just one big thing and all the individual parts are an abstraction."

"The Einsteinian system doesn't give you an afterlife by itself and the quantum physics view doesn't give you an afterlife in the sense that your personal thoughts will continue on. But inside the divine mind it would be rotten to switch us off. That's the only thing worth calling an afterlife."

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on nationalpost.com

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