Heaven on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia

What drives people’s faith in the afterlife? In this book, Michael Shermer—the science popularizer and well-known critic of dogmatic thinking—turns to the timeless and mysterious themes of death and immortality. It is a bold attempt, in a compact form, to cover vast historical and psychological material—from the dream of immortality that people have had since the dawn of civilization, to the modern, purposeful solutions of medicine and science, such as reversing the processes of aging and increasing life expectancy. The author analyzes ideas of the afterlife expressed in Abrahamic religions, presents views from various fields of science—from particle physics to molecular biology—on the riddles of aging and the possibility of defeating death, and also examines utopian theories of building “heaven on earth.” The common thread running through the many fascinating historical and scientific facts that Shermer throws at readers is a tense search for the meaning of existence in a universe that, as modern pessimistic thinking tends to believe, is meaningless.