The denial of personal survival after death, held by atheists and humanists as a consequence of naturalism rather than as a separate doctrine. The position is that a person is what a living body does, so that the question of where they go afterwards is malformed. Humanist writing generally treats this as a reason for urgency rather than despair: the finitude of a life is what makes its span matter, and consolation is sought in what a person leaves behind rather than in what awaits them. It is the belief most directly at issue between the non-theistic worldviews and almost every religious tradition in the Atlas.
Facts
Belief
SubjectSourced to the subject's own accountDeath, rebirth and destiny 1 Category of BeliefSourced to the subject's own account Status
Status Within the TraditionBinding, without a formal definition 1Tradition: Secular Humanism Sourced to the subject's own accountA person is what a living body does, so death ends the question Learn More
This Life Is the Only Life
Atheists and secular humanists affirm that this life is the only life there is, that there is no afterlife, reincarnation, or survival of a soul beyond death, and that a person's existence is bounded by birth and death. Death is understood as the permanent end of the individual, and hopes and fears of a hereafter are set aside. Rather than diminishing life, humanists hold, this recognition heightens the value of the time one has and directs concern to the well-being of oneself and others in the present world.
The classical statement of this conviction is Epicurus's Letter to Menoeceus, which argues that death is nothing to us, since while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist, so that the wise person has no reason to fear it; Epicurus held that most human anxiety and superstition traces to unfounded fears of divine punishment and of conscious suffering after death, and that dispelling those fears through correct understanding of nature is the actual path to a tranquil life, an ancient argument modern secular humanists and atheists frequently cite as an early statement of essentially the same this-life-focused position they hold today. Epicurus's argument survived antiquity chiefly through Lucretius's Latin poem De Rerum Natura, a copy of which the Renaissance scholar Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered in a German monastery in 1417 after it had been effectively lost for centuries, a rediscovery historians credit with carrying Epicurean this-life philosophy back into wide circulation.
Living Fully in the Present
The denial of an afterlife follows from philosophical naturalism, the view that the universe is a natural system with nothing beyond it, and it shapes the humanist emphasis on making the most of the one life available and on securing human welfare here and now. It stands in clear contrast to the traditions that centre on salvation, rebirth, or eternal life. The affirmation gives secular and atheist ethics their strong this-worldly focus, and it is presented here as the conviction its adherents hold.
The mid-twentieth-century existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre pressed the implications of a single, finite life further than most classical naturalists had, arguing that existence precedes essence, that because there is no God and no predetermined human nature or afterlife, a person's meaning and values are not given in advance but must be freely created through choice and action; while Sartre's broader existentialism is not identical with secular humanism, his insistence that the absence of a hereafter places the full responsibility for meaning on human freedom rather than divine assignment has been influential on later humanist thought about how to live meaningfully within a single, bounded life.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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