The End of Christianity (44 page)

Maria and the Shoe

Dinesh D'Souza is deeply impressed by NDEs, saying, “On the face of it, they provide strong support for life after death.”
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Few researchers in the field have gone so far.

D'Souza tells us of the case of a Seattle woman named Maria who experienced an NDE after a heart attack. She told a social worker named Kimberly Clark that she had separated from her body and floated outside the hospital. There she saw a tennis shoe with a worn patch on the third-floor ledge near the emergency room. Clark checked the ledge and retrieved the shoe.
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However, there is no independent corroboration of this event. We only have Clark's report. No one could ever track down Maria to corroborate her story. We have to take Clark's word for it. Later investigators found that Clark had embellished the difficulty of observing the shoe on the ledge. Placing one of their own shoes in the same position, they found it was clearly visible as soon as you stepped into Maria's room.
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The Blind Shall See

Probably the most sensational claims in NDE research involve blind people reporting out-of-body experiences in which they were able to see. I told the story of one such case in my 2003 book
Has Science Found God?
, but it bears repeating.
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Physician Larry Dossey is the author of several popular books that promote spiritual healing such as prayer; I have clashed with him on occasion.
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In
Recovering the Soul
, Dossey claimed that a woman named Sarah had an NDE in which she saw

a clear, detailed memory of the frantic conversation of the surgeons and nurses during her cardiac arrest; the OR [Operating Room] layout; the scribbles on the surgery scheduling board on the hall outside; the color of the sheets covering the operating table; the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse; the names of the surgeons on the doctors’ lounge down the corridor who were waiting for her case to be concluded; and even the trivial fact that the anesthesiologist that day was wearing unmatched socks. All this she knew even though she had been fully anesthetized and unconscious during the surgery and the cardiac arrest.
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And, on top of that, Sarah had been blind since birth!

Ring and Cooper report that, when asked by other investigators to give more details, Dossey admitted this was a complete fiction.
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Susan Blackmore also uncovered Dossey's fabrication.
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Ring and Cooper state that Blackmore “reviewed all the NDE evidence and concluded that none of it holds up to scrutiny.” According to Blackmore, “there is no convincing evidence of visual perception in the blind during NDEs, much less documented support for veridical perception.”
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Ring and Cooper's later investigations also provide no veridical evidence.

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES—RECENT DATA

Recently a new book on NDEs has appeared:
Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death-Experiences
, by MD Jeffrey Long “with” journalist Paul Perry.
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Thanks to considerable media hype, this book moved quickly to the bestseller lists. Long is a radiation oncologist, and, with his wife, Jody, he gathered thousands of accounts of near-death experiences. They did this by setting up a website asking for personal narratives of experiences. Besides providing their personal story, respondents filled out a one-hundred-item questionnaire “designed to isolate specific elements of the experience and to flag counterfeit accounts.” The result is the largest database of NDEs in the world with over 1,600 accounts.

Long claims that medical evidence fails to explain these reports and that “there is only one plausible explanation—hat people have survived death and traveled to another dimension.” After studying thousands of cases, Long concludes: “NDEs provide such powerful scientific evidence that it is reasonable to accept the existence of an afterlife.”
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In fact, there is little or no science in Long's book. It is based totally on anecdotes collected over the Internet where you can find limitless unsupported testimonials for every kind of preposterous claim. I do not insist that all anecdotes are useless. They can point the way to more serious research. But when they are the
only
source of evidence they cannot be used to reach extraordinary conclusions. To scientifically prove life after death is going to require carefully controlled experiments, not just a lot of stories. The plural of anecdote is not “data.”

The question raised by near-death experiences is whether they provide evidence that mind and consciousness are more than just the product of a purely material brain. Such a conclusion contradicts the mass of evidence gathered in the neurosciences and will be accepted only when the data are totally convincing.

PROBLEMS WITH NDES

There are several excellent books and papers presenting strong, detailed arguments showing why the data from NDEs do not provide any evidence for an afterlife. Besides Susan Blackmore's
Dying to Live
and Gerald Woerlee's
Mortal Minds
, there is
Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience
by Mark Fox.
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In 2007 Keith Augustine, the executive director of the Internet Infidels,
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published an exhaustive three-part series of articles in the
Journal of Near-Death Studies
.
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Each of these articles is accompanied in the same volume with several criticisms from researchers in the field followed by a response to those criticisms from Augustine. An updated, unified, and abridged version of all three of Augustine's papers is available on the Secular Web.
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Let me mention just a few of Augustine's observations, along with those of other researchers, that I found particularly compelling. I refer you to his papers to get the details and references to the original work he relies on.

• Eighty percent of those who come as close to death as possible without dying do not [recall having] an NDE, so it is not a common experience.

• Existing research presents no challenge to the current scientific under-standing of NDEs as hallucinations.

• NDE studies, taken as a whole, strongly imply that whatever these experiences are, they are characterized by features that one would expect of internally generated fantasies, but not of any putative “disembodied existence.”

• As encounters with living persons repeatedly crop up in NDEs (one out of ten times), the less NDEs look like visions of another world and the more they appear to be brain-generated hallucinations triggered by a real or perceived threat to the experiencer's well-being.

• The only NDE experiences that are common among all cultures are encountering other beings and other realms. Otherwise, all the details depend on culture.

• Electroencephalograms and imaging techniques indicate that epileptic activity in the temporal lobe of the brain, specifically the TPJ or temporoparietal junction, consistently results in out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Furthermore, many of the experiences reported by epileptics and those who have had their temporal lobe electrically stimulated match those of OBEs. Since the TPJ is a major center of multisensory integration of body-related information, it is not surprising that interfering with neural processing or cerebral blood flow in this area, or providing conflicting somatosensory inputs, results in dysfunctional representation. This provides strong evidence that OBEs are brain-induced and localized in the temporal lobe. As mentioned, OBEs are often but not always associated with NDEs.

• Despite repeated assertions of quite frequent paranormal abilities (healing powers, prophetic visions of the future) manifesting after NDEs, often endorsed by NDE researchers, no experiencer has had an allegation of psychic powers tested in a controlled experiment. The prophecies have been either vague or dramatically wrong. For example, in
Saved by the Light
, Dannion Brinkley reports his NDE and makes many predictions about the future.
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The book was adapted in 1995 for a Fox Television movie starring Eric Roberts and was one of the highest rated television movies in that network's history.
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Not one of Brinkley's predictions came to pass.

Many NDE researchers still hope to find evidence for an afterlife despite their own honest admission that the data, so far, are simply not there. Augustine is careful to note that NDE researchers’ beliefs are not to be confused with their actual findings. From my own reading I would say that, while the great majority of NDE researchers are honest and do not hide data that fail to confirm their beliefs, they are hardly disinterested in the question of survival of death. Who wouldn't be motivated by the possibility of discovering an afterlife?

Several authors have suggested that NDEs cannot distinguish if a private experience is either a brain-based hallucination or a peek into the afterlife, and therefore that the afterlife hypothesis is not falsifiable. I claim this is wrong. They are like those who say science can never prove God exists. The existence of a realm beyond matter could be easily demonstrated by someone returning from an NDE, OBE, or other religious experience with important information about the world that she or no one else could possibly have known, and then have that knowledge verified scientifically. With millions of such experiences yearly, you would expect a few to result in verifiable knowledge if they had anything at all to do with an immaterial reality. So far none have, making this a strong, empirical argument
against
the existence of such a realm.

THE MATERIAL MIND

Considerable evidence exists for the hypothesis that what we call mind and consciousness result from mechanisms in a purely material brain. If we have disembodied souls that, as most religions teach, are responsible for our thoughts, dreams, personalities, and emotions, then these should not be affected by drugs. But they are. They should not be affected by disease. But they are. They should not be affected by brain injuries. But they are. Brain scans today can locate the portions of the brain where different types of thoughts arise, including emotions. When that part of the brain has been destroyed by surgery or injury, those types of thoughts disappear. As brain function decreases we lose consciousness, as when under full anesthesia. Why would that happen if consciousness arose from an immaterial soul? There is no objective evidence that brain function stops entirely during a reported NDE. That an NDE actually occurred during a flat EEG (rather than before or after) is often impossible to prove anyway. But even a flat EEG does not signal brain death, as many people mistakenly believe, since it just reacts to the outer portions of the brain and does not catch activity deep in the brain.

If the properties traditionally attributed to the soul reside solely in the material brain and nervous system, then this is sufficient to rule out life after the death of the brain.

COSMIC JUSTICE

One of the major reasons so many people seek an afterlife is that they want to believe the universe is just. In the East this is called the law of karma. Since life in this world is obviously unjust, with many rewards for the wicked and few for the virtuous, reincarnation makes it all come out even. In the West, justice is served not by a succession of lives but by a last judgment.

D'Souza has convinced himself that he has proven that humans occupy two domains of reality, the material/phenomenal and the spiritual/moral/ noumenal. He interprets one of these realities to correspond to the way things are and the other to the way things ought to be. Science and its physical laws, he says, concern themselves only with the way things are. Moral laws tell us how they ought to be. Cosmic justice, according to this view, cannot be achieved in this world but only in another world beyond the grave. The recognition of this fact explains to D'Souza “why humans continue to espouse goodness and justice even when the world is evil and unjust.”
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D'Souza asserts that humans are unique among entities in the universe, living and nonliving, in seeking “to repudiate the laws of evolution and escape control of the laws of nature.”
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Why do we do this? Because we have made “the presumption of an afterlife, and the realization of the idea of cosmic justice makes sense of our moral nature much better than any competing hypothesis.”
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D'Souza calls this a “presuppositional argument.” According to D'Souza a presupposition is a hypothesis that says, “This is the way things have to be to make sense of the world.” It is tested by asking, “How well does it explain the world?”
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The specific hypothesis is: “There has to be cosmic justice in the world in order to make sense of the observed facts about human morality.”
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So he is cleverly turning the morality issue into a scientific argument, which is fine by me because it puts the argument on my home ground. Forget what religions say. Forget what moral philosophies say. Observations of human behavior are going to be used to provide evidence for the existence of cosmic justice. And, since justice is obviously unavailable in this life, it follows that there must be an afterlife to provide it.

It seems to me that D'Souza has the argument turned around. If people believed in cosmic justice in an afterlife, you would think they wouldn't have any need to worry about justice in this life. On the other hand, people who don't believe in cosmic justice in the afterlife would have a strong reason to see that justice is done in this life. Thus beliefin the afterlife has a negative impact on society. This hypothesis makes much more sense of observations than does D'Souza's hypothesis. No people are more fervent believers in life after death than Muslims, and in no societies will you find less justice, especially for women, than in Muslim societies. In Christian societies, the more fundamentalist the family, the greater the incidence of spousal and child abuse.
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