"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

(I'm gonna have to get this shit on a clipboard LOL)

There is no hard scientific evidence that proves there is an afterlife. The concept of an afterlife is a human coping mechanism for death.

• There have been some instances in which people have claimed they have seen heaven or a sort of afterlife. In some cases, the stories were admitted to be fake, but in other cases, people really did believe they saw a glimpse of the afterlife.
• These visions of heaven/afterlives are likely due to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems acting cooperatively during death. Usually, the sympathetic nervous system is responsible for excitement or arousal whereas the parasympathetic nervous system acts to settle those nerves. During death, both systems are working at once, which means that visions of heaven are likely merely chemical and neurological events that occur during death.
• Humans have feared death for a very long time. The lack of understanding of what comes after has lead to the creation of myths and legends surrounding the afterlife in order to comfort us when we lose someone. I personally have found the concept of an afterlife to be extremely comforting when I lost family members, or my beloved dogs. I have no idea if it exists, and the rational part of me suspects there is no afterlife possible. However, the idea of an afterlife, whether it be real or not, can bring peace of mind to many.

I think more than anything this question is probably just forever unknowable to us. Hard scientific evidence would most likely not be possible in the case of any kind of afterlife, anyway.

• There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of NDEs, and there definitely can be lots of scientific explanations for what might be happening in the brain during these times, as mentioned elsewhere. But some researchers have made compelling cases for, if not the soul, necessarily, then the possibility that consciousness does something different, at least in the brief period of time immediately after death.

• NDE researcher Jeffrey Long has studied the phenomenon for a long time.

• Of particular interest are accounts of people being able to report on specific information from the short time they were clinically dead that they should not have been able to know. There are many stories like this, although, of course, it's not possible to know whether they are true or what they necessarily mean. And a large amount of them have not held up to materialist standards. But it's interesting that there are at least many reports of doctors and nurses being totally baffled by the information that their patients report back after nearly dying.

• The other really intriguing thing to me is that some cases seem to indicate a possibility that consciousness expands after death. There are many accounts where people experience a breaking down of space and time, an ability to see and experience timelessness or from all angles at once, feelings of moving at super fast speeds the likes of which they have never experienced before, and other kinds of things like that. (For how long after death this would happen, no one knows. Even assuming all this were true, we would still never know for how long the continuity of any kind of "self" the person would recognize to be their own self would last after any initial "expansion", anyway.) But some researchers and scientists do consider the possibility of a universal consciousness possible, if not even likely---a sort of panpsychism that could be expressed in so many different ways. One example might be that we are a focused, local version of a more universal type of consciousness, and that's what NDErs might be experiencing near death: a return to that different sort of sate. In that case, the brain acts as a sort of filter for consciousness, but the real thing is more expansive than we could understand.

Time seems infinite, and infinity minus a human life is a long time to not exist.

• Time seems endless. We can not say when time began, nor can we say when, if ever, it will end. If there is no afterlife, then we are alive for an average of 73 years, out of a total of infinite years.
• There is so much about the world that we do not understand, the idea that time did not begin and cannot end seems unfathomable. So who am I to say that the afterlife cannot exist either? A infinite number of years seems like a long time to not exist. For all we know, we could begin and end with time. The thing is, we will never know.
• My point is, time is infinite, we do not know what the world is capable of. So, there very well might be an afterlife.