"Atheists ought not to be offering consolation," asserts Christopher Hitchens in Mortality, his account of his dealings with esophageal cancer (from which he died in December of last year at the age of 62).  Though it is difficult to determine precisely what point Hitchens is making here, perhaps he is saying that, given an atheist's contention about the irredeemably terminal character of existence, there really is no need to offer a traditional form of consolation to his survivors.  Most forms of traditional consolation come as assurances to the survivors to the effect that even though their loved one is gone from this life, he is doing much better in another one.  Life does not end with the grave.  Yet such thoughts do little for an atheist:  he has no belief in an afterlife.  When this life ends, that is it.

     So what is left?  Very little.  For an atheist, however, this is not so much depressing (as it would be for a person who believes in an afterlife) as it is bravery.  It is far braver, the atheist would argue, to face the fact of absolute nonexistence upon death head on than to set one's hopes in what they believe to be the unprovable possibility of an afterlife.  To do the latter is to commit intellectual and emotional suicide.  It ignores an incontrovertible truth of existence:  people live, people die, and never, ever do they live again.  Death is final, totally and frightfully final.
     However laudable this bravery may be, however, it overlooks one very important point.  Although no falsifiable evidence exists to demonstrate definitively that there is no afterlife (how would we know?!), there is ample evidence that the opposite is true.  Time and space had to begin somewhere, and they had to begin in something much richer and longer lived and, spatially and chronologically (in an infinite sense), bigger, in scope, than they, something that we might call eternity.  And if there is an eternity, chances are very good that there is eternal life, a place where space and time originate and have their ultimate purpose and meaning.
     (We say this quite apart from the testimony of the New Testament that in dying and subsequently rising again, Jesus of Nazareth affirmed for all time the fact and presence of a real and genuine afterlife, a life in which he invites all of us to join him.)
     So we are entirely justified in offering the consolation of another life to those who have lost loved ones.  The universe (and even the most ardent evolutionist will eventually admit to this) simply cannot be without, in some form, an eternity.