34
. Deepak Chopra,
Life After Death: The Burden of Proof
(New York: Harmony Books, 2006), 72–73.
35
. Ian Stevenson,
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974).
36
. Leonard Angel, “Reincarnation and Biology (Book Review),”
Skeptic
9, no. 3 (2002): 86–90. (A review of Ian Stevenson,
Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).)
37
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 60.
38
. Paul Edwards,
Reincarnation: A Critical Examination
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002).
39
. Janice Minor Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds.
The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation
(Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009), 1–16.
40
. Raymond A. Moody,
Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death
(Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1976).
41
. Susan J. Blackmore,
Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993).
42
. Gerald Woerlee,
Mortal Minds: The Biology of Near Death Experiences
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).
43
. Holden, Greyson, and James,
Handbook of Near-Death Experiences
, 16.
44
. Ibid., 27.
45
. Ibid., 186.
46
. Ibid.
47
. Ibid., 209.
48
. Ibid., 210.
49
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 64.
50
. Kimberly Clark, “Clinical Interventions with NDEs,” in Bruce Greyson and Charles P. Flynn, eds.,
The Near-Death Experience: Problems, Prospects, Perspectives
(Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas, 1984), 242–55.
51
. Hayden Ebbern, Sean Mulligan, and Barry Beyerstein, “Maria's Near-Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,”
Skeptical Inquirer
20, no. 4 (1996): 27–33. See discussion of this incident and these claims by Keith Augustine and others in the
Journal of Near-Death Studies
25, no. 1, and 26, nos. 1 and 2 (see note 62).
52
. Stenger,
Has Science Found God?
297.
53
. Jeffrey P. Bishop and Victor J. Stenger, “Retroactive Prayer: Lots of History, Not Much Mystery, No Science,”
British MedicalJournal
329 (2004): 1444–46.
54
. Larry Dossey,
Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search
(New York: Bantam, 1989).
55
. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper,
Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind
(Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999).
56
. Blackmore,
Dying to Live
, 131–32.
57
. Ring and Cooper,
Mindsight
, 9.
58
. Jeffrey Long and Paul Perry,
Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
59
. Ibid., 44.
60
. Mark Fox,
Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience
(New York: Routledge, 2003).
61
. Internet Infidels (accessed December 11, 2009).
62
. Keith Augustine, “Does Paranormal Perception Occur in Near-Death Experiences?”
Journal of Near-Death Studies
25, no. 4 (2007): 203–36; “Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features,”
Journal of Near-Death Studies
26, no. 1 (2007): 3–31; “Psychophysiological and Cultural Correlates Undermining a Survivalist Interpretation of Near-Death Experiences,”
Journal of Near-Death Studies
26, no. 2 (2007): 89–125. See the papers following in each volume, which present criticisms and Augustine's responses to them.
63
. Keith Augustine, “Halluncinatory Near-Death Experiences,”
Secular Web
,
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/HNDEs.html
(accessed December 7, 2009).
64
. Dannion Brinkley and Paul Perry,
Saved By the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received
(New York: Villard, 1994).
65
. Wikipedia (accessed December 9, 2009).
66
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 167.
67
. Ibid.
68
. Ibid., 168.
69
. Ibid., 171.
70
. Ibid., 172.
71
. Ruth Miller, Larry S. Miller, and Mary R. Langenbrunner, “Religiosity and Child Sexual Abuse: A Risk Factor Assessment,”
Journal of Child Sexual Abuse
6, issue 4 (1997): 14–34; Michael Franklin and Marian Hetherly, “How Fundamentalism Affects Society,”
Humanist
57 (September-October 1997): 25. And there may be other evidence supporting this conclusion: see Richard Carrier's next chapter on morality in the present volume.
72
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 172.
73
. Many other pressures will have had the same effect (e.g., sexual selection; differential advantages of cooperating over noncooperating groups; etc.). See recent surveys of the evidence in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, ed.,
Moral Psychology, Volume 1: The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
74
. Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
75
. Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
46 (1971): 35–57.
76
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 176.
77
. Ibid., 177.
78
. Michael Shermer,
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule
(New York: Times Books, 2004), 235–36. See related discussion and notes in Richard Carrier's next chapter, “Moral Facts.”
79
. Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene
, 3, 201.
80
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 181.
81
. Ibid., 195.
82
. Ibid., 199.
83
. Ibid., 204.
84
. Ibid.
85
. Ibid., 203.
86
. Ibid., 206.
87
. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Twilight of the Idols
(New York: Penguin, 1990), 80–81.
88
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 208.
89
. Shermer,
Science of Good and Evil
, 25–26. For a thorough survey of the history and cross-cultural evidence for this, see Jeffrey Wattles,
The Golden Rule
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); see also David Eller, “Christianity Does Not Provide the Basis for Morality,” in Loftus,
The Christian Delusion
, 347–67.
90
. See, for example, Richard Carrier, “The End of Pascal's Wager: Only Nontheists Go to Heaven,”
Secular Web
, 2002, at
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/heaven.html
.
91
. This is especially noticeable in India, where the most wretched people blame themselves; that is, their previous lives, for their wretchedness rather than rising up against their oppressors.
92
. Yoichi Chida, Andrew Steptoe, and Lynda H. Powell, “Religiosity/ Spirituality and Mortality,”
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
78, no. 2 (2009): 81–90.
93
. For this very reason Chida, Steptoe, and Powell warn, “[T]he presence of publication biases indicates that results [like this] should be interpreted with caution,” ibid., 81. Note that the reliability of the methods and some of the results of the Chida study group have been seriously challenged (illustrating many of the problems inherent in meta-analyses generally): James C. Coyne and Howard Tennen, “Positive Psychology in Cancer Care: Bad Science, Exaggerated Claims, and Unproven Medicine,”
Annals of Behavioral Medicine
39, no. 1 (February 2010): 16–26.
94
. Yoichi Chida and Andrew Steptoe, “Positive Psychological Well-Being and Mortality: A Quantitative Review of Prospective Observational Studies,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
70, no. 7 (2008): 741–56 (though see previous note). [Editor's Note: a more recent study similarly found that previous studies showing life satisfaction increases with religious belief were only finding that friendmaking and social networking, not the belief itself, generate the effect: Chaeyoon Lim and Robert Putnam, “Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction,”
American Sociological Review
75, no. 6 (2010): 914–33. Lim and Putnam concluded that “religious belonging, rather than religious meaning, is central to the religion-life satisfaction nexus” (926), which means atheists who feel they belong to a group or movement and participate therein will probably see the same benefits, and given the findings of the Chida study group, this is as likely to be true for health and mortality).]
95
. D'Souza,
Life After Death
, 220.
96
. Ibid., 171
97
. Ibid., 220.
98
. Ibid.
CHAPTER 14
1
. This chapter was peer reviewed by several professors of philosophy who did not always agree with my conclusions but nevertheless approved its publication, including Erik Wielenberg, Matt McCormick, John Shook, and Evan Fales. Their criticisms and advice led to numerous improvements, many unfortunately having to be relegated to the endnotes. I am very grateful for their input. This chapter formalizes the case made in greater detail in Richard Carrier,
Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
(Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005), 291–348. Note that the hypertechnical style of this chapter was made necessary to meet the peer-review standards of logical precision and validity.
2
. Hereafter by “imperatives” I will not mean sentences in the imperative grammatical mood but propositions making a factual claim on our obedience (so that we should think of such “imperatives as statements to the effect that something ought to be done” and not merely as “injunctions expressed in the imperative mood.” Quoted from Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” in
Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches
, ed. Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, and Peter Railton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 313; cf. note 6 below).
3
. By “science” I shall mean any empirical inquiry employing a logically sound and valid methodology. Thus I include methodologically sound history and journalism in this term, as well as any personal inquiry conducted scientifically. But the sciences as ordinarily conceived produce far more reliable conclusions and thus still carry primary authority.
4
. In this chapter I shall only ever mean by “desire” and “want” (and all equivalent terminology) any actual preferring of one thing to another (for whatever reason and in whatever way); though in other contexts the same terms can denote other things (such as in cognitive science, an emotional state of perturbation cognitively and causally associated with a particular relieving outcome).
5
. I will demonstrate the
logical
connection between these two facts in the next section.
6
. A collection of the most famous essays arguing it can be found in Darwall, Allan, and Railton,
Moral Discourse and Practice
(see note 2); a recent demonstration using modern game theory is provided in Gary Drescher,
Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 273–320. Noted philosophers who have espoused the view that moral facts are (at least in principle) empirically discoverable by science include Richard Boyd, Stephen Darwall, Allan Gibbard, Peter Railton, Philippa Foot, and many others, past and present. In fact, contrary to modern myth, even David Hume declared that imperatives not only do, but can
only
derive from the facts of nature, and are therefore proper objects of scientific inquiry: David Hume, “Of Morals,” in
Treatise on Human Nature
(1739), § 3.1.2, more fully expounded in
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
(1751); see note 17 below. Modern scientists who study normative ethics are approaching agreement on this point (and old-guard philosophers just haven't gotten the memo), cf., e.g., Jeff Schweitzer and Giuseppe Notarbartolo-Di-Sciara,
Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World
(Los Angeles: Jacquie Jordan, 2009); Walter Sinnott-Armstrong,
Moral Psychology
, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Owen Flanagan,
The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); William Casebeer,
Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and now most recently Sam Harris,
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
(New York: Free Press, 2010).
7
. For a survey of all the reasons Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland could think of (which are pretty nearly all the credible reasons there are to be had), see Carrier,
Sense and Goodness
, 293–311.
8
. By rational I mean nothing more than deriving conclusions from premises with logical validity (i.e., without fallacy). And by irrational I shall mean nothing more than not rational.
9
. Despite fallacious or empirically groundless claims to the contrary, as demonstrated in
The Christian Delusion
, and works cited therein, and in other chapters in the present volume.
10
. That is, when all measures are compared, there is no significant net difference between comparable societies (e.g., burglary rates in Australia are higher than in the United States but the crime rate in Australia overall is much lower; and the crime rate in Russia is higher than in the United States but the social conditions aren't equal). See: Gregory Paul, “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions,”
Evolutionary Psychology
7, no. 3 (2009): 398–441, and “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look,”
Journal of Religion and Society
7 (2005):
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005–11.html
; Phil Zuckerman,
Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment
(New York: New York University Press, 2008); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart,
Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Michael Shermer,
The Science of Good and Evil
(New York: Times Books, 2004), 235–36. Claims to the contrary are generally bogus, cf., e.g., Carrier,
Sense and Goodness
, 303–308.