Of course, this is the Christianity of theologians, not the faithful in the pews. Nevertheless I am on the same page here with D'Souza, who is trying to justify life after death on rational grounds. Atheists can agree to discard (and stop ridiculing) popular notions of an afterlife featuring eternal harp music in heaven and eternal bagpipe music in hell.
However, D'Souza is not willing to give atheists similar leeway. He asserts, “Contrary to what atheists say, the belief in the afterlife is not merely a Western idea; it is a universal idea.”
22
What atheists say this? Once more he quotes none and gives no references.
Of course atheists know that life after death is an Eastern as well as Western idea. D'Souza admits that they are quite different, so somebody must be wrong. He correctly notes that a “new” understanding of Hinduism was instituted in the Upanishads, a philosophical work from 2,500 years ago called Vedanta or “post-Vedic” Hinduism:
According to the Upanishads we live in an unreal world that we mistake for the real one….But this is the trick of “maya,” or illusion, and it is a trick that uses the mirrors of space and time. Actually, reality is entirely different from what our senses perceive. We experience objects in the world as differentiated and we think of ourselves as individual souls separate from the world. But if we could see behind the mirrors of experience, if we could somehow lift the veil, we would realize that reality preserves none of these distinctions. In reality, everything is one.
23
So, in the Upanishads, we break out of the endless cycle of reincarnation by realizing that “our individual souls are identical with the oneness of ultimate reality.”
24
At least this solves a lot of problems, such as “Where do all those souls go?” They all merge into one.
Buddhism adopted the Hindu notion of reincarnation, which is yet another idea of an “afterlife,” for souls that hadn't yet “achieved enlightenment” (and thereby merged with the One). While it changed a lot of details, Buddhism recognized that “the very concept of ‘I’ is illusory.”
25
This is also an important insight that most of the world, including many Buddhists, never learned.
26
Although D'Souza says, as I quoted above, that belief in the afterlife is a universal idea, he has to admit it is not unanimous. After all, at least a billion and maybe two billion living people don't believe in it. He identifies three rival perspectives: (1) survival without the body; (2) survival of the whole person, body and soul together; and (3) denial of an afterlife. I would split (1) into two further perspectives, East and West. As we saw above, we have the Eastern view of the disembodied soul undergoing reincarnations in new bodies and then eventually merging into a single ultimate reality, while in the Western view the soul, even without a body, remains individually differentiated. Christians who don't believe in bodily resurrection but in a heavenly realm beyond space and time still expect to meet their departed loved ones and pets there as individual souls. Interestingly, this difference between East and West is a characteristic of their cultures, with individualism a prime trait of Americans and Eurasians, while East Asians place more emphasis on everyone harmonizing with their culture.
This illustrates how religious beliefs are heavily determined by culture, making their connection with any ultimate truth problematical. Even Asian beliefs in heaven or hell (such as in Confucian religion) correspond to their cultural expectations and thus differ substantially from Western notions. In fact, all beliefs in an afterlife have plausible origins in evolved features of the brain, which naturally cause us to separate minds from bodies conceptually (because it is practical to do so), and then we erroneously attribute this conceptual distinction to physical reality.
27
An error we make because of natural evolutionary developments cannot support the conclusion that what's erroneous is true.
Now it is time to talk science and examine the claimed empirical evidence for life after death.
PROBLEMS WITH THE PARANORMAL
A huge literature exists claiming scientific evidence for life after death. This literature suffers from all the same problems we find with paranormal studies in general.
28
Much of it is anecdotal and virtually useless scientifically since we have no way of checking the veracity of such testimony. Only carefully controlled experiments that provide risky tests of the hypothesis of life after death will convince the scientific skeptics, and until the skeptics are convinced, the hypothesis will remain unproven. Despite the common charge, skeptics in science are not dogmatic. They will readily follow where the evidence leads.
While paranormal studies often involve controlled experiments, few meet the stringent standards found in the basic sciences. For example, positive effects are often claimed at such a low level of statistical significance that a simple statistical fluctuation would reproduce the observation as often as once every twenty times the experiment is repeated (as happens when
p
= 0.05). In this case, one must accept the more parsimonious explanation that the effect was a statistical artifact rather than the occurrence of a miracle. While
p
= 0.05 is often used in biomedical research, such a weak criterion is unacceptable in those sciences that deal with extraordinary phenomena.
29
For example, in physics a claimed new effect is not publishable until it is shown that it would not be reproduced as a statistical artifact once in ten thousand cases (
p
= 0.0001). While I can sympathize with the need for medical researchers to try any promising therapy in order to save lives, I still think that they would do better and avoid useless effort by setting their limit to
p
= 0.01.
Attempts have been made to use a technique called
meta-analysis
to try to glean statistically significant results from individually insignificant data.
30
This is like Ronald Reagan's old joke about the kid on Christmas morning digging through a pile of horse manure saying “There has to be a pony in there somewhere.” The procedure is totally unreliable and a waste of time in searching for a phenomenon not evident in individual experiments.
31
While meta-analysis can be useful for discerning trends, it must be used with great caution. I cannot think of a single major discovery in science that has been made with meta-analysis.
For over 150 years, investigators have claimed evidence for paranormal phenomena, such as extrasensory perception or mind over matter, without a single positive result that has ever stood up to the same critical scrutiny applied in the mainstream sciences whenever an extraordinary event is observed. Observing evidence for life after death would be extraordinary indeed. Needless to say, none of the dead have ever communicated any verifiable knowledge to us. If they did, then we would all be believers.
REINCARNATION
Recently the subject of reincarnation has attracted scientific attention. Like psychic studies, we find in this area a minefield of unsupported claims and lucrative hoaxes such as the infamous fifty-year-old case that resulted in a best selling book
The Search for Bridey Murphy
by Morey Bernstein.
32
Although thoroughly debunked,
33
Bernstein's book has gone through four editions, the most recent appearing as late as 1991.
The reincarnation debate was taken to a more serious level by the work of psychiatrist and University of Virginia professor Ian Stevenson. Deepak Chopra, in his 2006 book on immortality,
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
, cites Stevenson as providing strong empirical evidence for reincarnation.
34
Over the years Stevenson collected thousands of cases of children in India and elsewhere who talked about their “previous lives.” Many seemed quite accurate, and sometimes the child had marks or birth defects that corresponded closely to those of the deceased person the child claimed to remember.
35
Leonard Angel has written a review of Ian Stevenson's monumental two-volume tome
Reincarnation and Biology.
Angel says, “Close inspection of Stevenson's work shows that time after time Stevenson presents tabular summaries that claim evidence was obtained when, in fact, it was not.…Stevenson's case, irreparably, falls apart both in the presentation of evidence and in his analysis of evidence supposedly obtained.”
36
Even D'Souza is skeptical of Stevenson's results. He remarks that, growing up in India, he can easily see how “families might conspire to produce the appropriate ‘evidence.’ Their religiously anointed children become celebrities.” He concludes, “[R]eincarnation is possible but unlikely.”
37
For a complete critical analysis of reincarnation, see the book by Paul Edwards,
Reincarnation
.
38
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES—HISTORICAL DATA
Apologists such as D'Souza put much more stock in the results of studies involving
near-death experiences
(NDEs), which have attracted a large number of investigators and even a peer-reviewed journal, the
Journal of Near-Death Studies.
Janice Miner Holden, EdD; Bruce Greyson, MD; and Debbie James, MNS, RN; have provided a comprehensive handbook on NDE research. They begin with a review of thirty years of research on the subject, which I will briefly summarize.
39
By the early 1970s, resuscitation technology had advanced to the point where many more people were being brought back from the brink of death than ever before in history. Perhaps 20 percent reported experiences of what they were convinced was another reality, a glimpse of “heaven.” These reports began to get the attention of nurses and physicians. In 1976, medical student Raymond Moody published a book about these phenomena called
Life After Life
where he coined the term “near-death experience,” or NDE. Moody's book became a sensational bestseller, with thirteen million copies sold by 2001.
40
Holden et al. list a number of earlier references in popular, medical, and psychical research and many publications since 1975. Almost all of these reports are anecdotal (a designation the authors avoid in favor of the term “retrespective”) and are hardly likely to convince skeptics and mainstream scientists that they provide evidence for an afterlife. However, it can be safely concluded from these anecdotes that the near-death experience itself is a real phenomenon, somewhat like a dream or hallucination, but perhaps not exactly the same. The issue is whether they provide any real evidence for an afterlife.
In her 1993 book on near-death experiences,
Dying to Live
, psychologist (and reformed parapsychologist) Susan Blackmore proposed that the phenomenon was the result of loss of oxygen in the dying brain.
41
Many features of the NDE can be simulated with drugs, electrical impulses, or acceleration—such as during rides in a centrifuge used for training fighter pilots. Professional anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee thoroughly confirms these findings (and confirms other mundane causes) in his 2003 book,
Mortal Minds.
42
Despite finding no reliable evidence, Holden et al. are not quite ready to give up their quest of the afterlife. In their summary of the handbook, the editors say
If it appears that the mental functions can persist in the absence of active brain function, this phenomenon opens up the possibility that some part of humans that performs mental functions might survive death of the brain.
43
Nevertheless, they have to admit, “no single clear pattern of NDE features has yet emerged.”
44
Veridical NDEs
From my viewpoint as a research scientist, only veridical NDEs are worth studying. These are NDE experiences where the subject reports a perception that is later corroborated.
45
Researchers also define
apparently nonphysical veridical NDE perception
(AVP) as veridical perceptions that apparently could not have been the result of inference from normal sensory processes.
46
These would provide the kind of evidence for consciousness independent of the body that we might begin to take seriously.
In
chapter 9
of their handbook, editor Holden reviews the attempts to verify AVP under controlled conditions. You would think the setup should be simple. Place some kind of target such as a card with some random numbers on it facing the ceiling of the operating room so that it is unreadable not only to the patient on the table but to the hospital staff in the room. Then if a patient has an NDE that involves the commonly reported sensation of moving outside her body and floating above the operating table, she should be able to read that number. These out-of-body experiences (OBE) are not always associated with NDEs, and they are treated as independent phenomena that also imply the existence of a soul independent of the body.
Holden reported that this ideal situation is difficult to achieve, with the operating room staff often glimpsing the target information, thus compromising the protocol. She reports on five studies that were conducted with proper controls. She concludes, “The bottom line of findings from these five studies is quite disappointing: No researcher has succeeded in capturing even one case of AVP.”
47
Note that Holden reveals her personal desires in this quotation. If she were a skeptic, she might have called the result “gratifying.” In either case, it's best to keep an open mind.
Holden tells of receiving an e-mail from prominent NDE researcher Kenneth Ring:
There is so much anecdotal evidence that suggests [experiencers] can, at least sometime, perceive veridically during NDEs…but isn't it true that in all this time there hasn't been a single case of a veridical perception reported by an NDEr under controlled conditions? I mean, thirty years later, it's still a null class (as far as we know). Yes, excuses, excuses-I know. But, really, wouldn't you have suspected more than a few such cases at
least
by now?
48