Ask an Atheist: What if you’re wrong?

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By Jim Downard 

What if you’re wrong and there is a heaven?

Then I’ll be wrong.

The same question would, of course, be faced by many religious people should their versions of an afterlife turn out to be wildly mistaken. If the atheist view is correct though (and bearing in mind afterlives even then are not ruled out in some naturalistic context, even though very unlikely) then believers will never become aware of the afterlife they never end up getting to.

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About Jim Downard

Jim Downard is a Spokane native (with a sojourn in Southern California back in the early 1960s) who was raised in a secular family, so says had no personal faith to lose.

He's always been a history and science buff (getting a bachelor's in the former area at what was then Eastern Washington University in the early 1970s).

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