I wrote a big book called "The Resurrection of the Son of God" (2003), and I have another one, smaller and more popular level, called "Surprised by Hope," coming out soon. Yes, of course I believe in life after death, but the New Testament is much more interested in life AFTER 'life after death' -- i.e. bodily resurrection following a period of being bodily dead. For that to happen, as all C1 Jews and Christians knew, meant that between bodily death and bodily resurrection there would be a period of 'life after death' in a disembodied state, for which e.g. Wisdom 3 uses the language of 'soul'. John Polkinghorne, that great scientist-turned-theologian, says somewhere that God will download our software onto his hardware until he gives us new hardware to run the software again for ourselves.
All cultures, ancient as well as modern, have been more or less familiar with the fact (as I take it to be -- lots of empirical and cross-cultural evidence) that people we love who have died (sometimes when we don't even know yet that they have died) can and do appear to us.
C.S. Lewis, famously, appeared like that to J.B. Phillips. I have a friend whose daughter was murdered, and her fiance a thousand miles away received a totally unexpected 'visit' from her before he'd heard the news. And so on.
For many people, this is a hint, a nudge, that there is indeed 'something beyond'. But for Christians such experiences shouldn't be the decisive factor. And, after all, the genuine Christian hope -- of the whole world remade, reborn (Romans 8, Revelation 21, etc etc) -- indicates that God is passionately interested in THIS world, this cosmos of space, time and matter which he is redeeming, rather than encouraging us to discount it in pursuit of a nebulous afterlife which is as nothing compared to what we're promised after that again.
Easter is the key to it all. And don't be fobbed off by those who say that we can't believe in it now that we know about modern science etc. Face it: Homer, Aeschylus, Pliny and the rest all 'knew' that dead people don't rise. We didn't need Galileo or Descartes or Voltaire or Darwin to teach us that. What matters is belief in the creator God who has promised to set the world right in the end -- and has begun to do it by raising Jesus from the dead.
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