And this is an excellent metaphor of what you seek behind mere “argument for an afterlife”. The physical, material “bomb” or actual, “look it’s there” proof of the afterlife is not one and the same as argument for an afterlife which is comprised of just words expressing an idea without immediate or eventual connection to a hands-on “bomb”. Got it.
When it comes to the afterlife, unfortunately, there is no “actual existing bomb”, so all we have on this side of the grave are words, thoughts, and ideas for and against.
There are certain things, like bombs, for instance, that by the very premise of the idea of a bomb is an idea of something that can present itself to human sensory perception. Then there are things that are ideas of things that cannot present themselves to human perception. The afterlife, the Multiverse, and mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception are of the latter.
The Afterlife in terms of the idea of what it looks like is usually thought of from the third-person, but any third-person idea is seen from the point of view of the person having the idea. But the true idea of the afterlife should be considered in regard to the existence or non-existence of the person who died and may or may not be experiencing it.
Why?
Because the afterlife is an idea derived from and is an extrapolation of the “actual existing bomb” of an actual first-person subject of experience. You have an “actual existing bomb” of your first-person subjective experience and I have an “actual existing bomb” of mine, as I sit and type at 5:10am in the morning on a keyboard in Austin,Texas.
But from my point of view (solipsism be damned as it makes its point), your consciousness to me is simply an idea or “point” that may or may not exist for all I know, as I can only experience my own consciousness. I cannot render the objective truth of your consciousness or anyone’s consciousness save mine, there can be no connection between points given in support of the existence of your consciousness and the actual, hard evidence of it, as it is something I cannot experience and can only believe objectively exists.
The afterlife, if it exists, comprises the consciousness of everyone that has deceased from the beginning to end of man. In the same way I cannot experience your consciousness, the living cannot experience the consciousness (if they exist) of those that have “gone on”, and can only have and express ideas for or against the survival of these consciousnesses that we can never experience. The point being, there can never be any new discovery that can demonstrate to oneself the consciousness of another person (one could make an argument for isomorphism, in which two beings share the same identical experience, but this would be “identical twin” experience from two separate perspectives and points of view, not one person intermittently becoming another person, such that only one experience between persons exist).
Thus any connection between points and the objective truth concerning the afterlife may never manifest in sensory perception. Why? Because the metaphor between the bomb and the idea of the bomb does not apply to the idea of the existence of the consciousness of another person and the ability to see another person’s consciousness from your consciousness. One will not be able to produce or objectively demonstrate the consciousness of another person, living or dead.
Thus the metaphor fails, and will continue to fail, when asking for a demonstration of the afterlife because when asking for a demonstration of the afterlife one is asking for demonstration of the subjective experience of other persons, whose subjective experiences are commonly believed to have ceased to exist. But this is the same, really, as asking for a demonstration of the subjective experience of a living person.
The bomb is a sensory object that presents itself in the (believed to exist) artificial realities of several persons who have built the bomb and are looking upon the sensory object. The afterlife is the idea of the first-person experiences of persons and what they invisibly experience in the afterlife if consciousness continues after seeming cessation of the brain, itself another aspect and event of the artificial reality that is human consciousness. Asking if the evidence of the bomb is equivalent to evidence of the afterlife is like asking if evidence of a bottle of water is equivalent to your evidence of my consciousness.
Ideas are ideas, but what do ideas represent? Do they represent things that can appear to the senses, that can appear before an observing first-person subjective point of view and reported by other first-person subjective points of view as the thing observed by the first? Or is the idea about the first-person subjective point of view itself, and what that point of view experiences for itself that cannot be reported as observed by other first-person points of view? The afterlife is of the latter.
Does this mean the latter cannot or does not exist because the experience of a first-person subject of experience in the afterlife, if the person and afterlife exists, is incapable of demonstrating its existence and experiences to those still inside the artificial reality of having a biological body in an artificially contrived world containing experience of the body? No. To deny the existence of persons surviving death and their experiences following death is akin (in principle) to denying the existence of the consciousness of another person.
Existence just is. It exists for no other reason than that it happened to exist. Things exist for no other reason than that, out of everything that could or might have existed in its place, the thing that exists happened to win the “lottery” of existence.
As consciousness is an artificial reality with nothing behind it to ground it (according to my belief), the age of the universe is an imaginary fiction invented or placed in the mind by something, other persons, or a Person outside the human mind. I don’t think matter can evolve into consciousness, as it involves a magic in which that which is not subjective experience suddenly stops being what it is to magically transform into something it previously essentially was not. I don’t think that sort of magic exists, nor do we need that magic or the magic of creation ex nihilo to arrive at consciousness.
I think subjective experience doesn’t have to come from something that wasn’t subjective experience, and that we don’t need subjective experience to start from something or have anything to do with something other than itself. It can simply be eternal, and can easily eternally exist for all time in the form of a Person that imagines other persons, that themselves while residing in the mind of the Person bear the substance of this naturalistic Novelist* (borrowing the Novelist’s own subjective experience which inwardly forms their own).
Those imagined by the Novelist come into existence when the Novelist happens to invent them within the mind, with the substance of the Novelist forming a “consciousnesses within a consciousness” (as it is commonly believed that the people we imagine or dream about are philosopher’s zombies without an inner consciousness of their own) that have their own private experiences within the Novelist and die when the Novelist closes their individual stories and stops thinking of them. An afterlife in this simple scenario of the eternity of consciousness would entail the Novelist ceasing to think of certain persons as punishment for the person’s evil within the mind of the Novelist, and to eternally think of a joyful existence for those who please the Novelist within the Novelist’s mind.
(*Novelist=Judeo-Christian God)