FYI: My blog post "Words, Words, Words," a list of recommended titles on evidence for the afterlife, has been reprinted in the Windbridge Institute's newsletter, Winds of Change. If you'd like to take a look at the newsletter, please click here and then open the PDF file linked on that page.
In a recent comments thread, a couple of readers - Michael H and Filip - recommended an article by Neil Grossman called "Who's Afraid of Life after Death?" which appeared in the journal AntiMatters. This link takes you to the table of contents where the article is listed. If you click on "PDF" next to the the title, the article will download in Adobe format.
It's a very interesting piece that makes some good points, but I disagree with parts of it, and I think that my areas of disagreement may help to clarify my doubts about the value of using the scientific method to explore the question of postmortem survival.
First, Grossman briefly recapitulates some evidence for the afterlife, concentrating on near-death experiences. He writes,
Consider, for example, the kind of case where the NDEr accurately reports the conversation occurring in the waiting room while his or her body is unconscious in the operating room. There is no way for the relevant information, conveyed in sound waves or light waves, to travel from the waiting room, through corridors and up elevators, to reach the sense organs of the unconscious person. Yet the person wakes from the operation with the information. This kind of case -- and there are lots of them -- shows quite straightforwardly that there are nonphysical ways in which the mind can acquire information. Hence materialism is false.
Now, I happen to agree that cases like this are legitimate and that information can be acquired by paranormal means. However, I don't think that such cases constitute irrefutable scientific evidence. A skeptic can always say that the case is merely anecdotal, and that anecdotes are not proper evidence. The fact that I think the sheer number of such reports, and the high quality of some of them, are indicative of an underlying reality is irrelevant in strictly scientific terms. My personal conviction is not the same thing as scientific proof.
Grossman then describes what he calls the "smoking gun" case of Pam Reynolds. Unfortunately, his description of this case is inaccurate and undercuts his argument. Like many other authors, Grossman is under the impression that Pam Reynolds had her near-death experience while her bodily functions had been stopped -- that is, while both her heart activity and brain activity were flatlining. In fact, however, the verifiable part of Reynolds' near-death experience took place before either her heart or her brain had flatlined. When Reynolds observed the procedures in the operating room, she was under heavy sedation, blindfolded, with molded earplugs in her ears -- all of which renders a non-paranormal explanation problematic. Nevertheless, she was not clinically dead. That part of the operation happened later.
After this, Grossman discusses the general reluctance of mainstream scientists to examine the evidence for life after death. He notes correctly that, all too often, scientists reject even the possibility of valid evidence in this area. He cites a conversation with a materialist who said that even if he had a near-death experience of his own, he would still believe that it was a hallucination because nothing could ever convince him that the mind can exist independently of the brain. As Grossman points out, this sort of person confuses science with materialism. Science is a method of inquiry, while materialism is a philosophical position. The two should not be conflated, but very often they are. Debunkers, Grossman writes,
believe that they are being "scientific" in ignoring and rejecting the evidence against materialism. They claim that the evidence is weak, that it is not compelling, that it can be easily explained away by the materialist paradigm. But when asked what kind of evidence it would take to convince them that materialism is empirically false, they are, like my colleague, usually at a loss for what to say. If they are not familiar with the data, they will come up with a criterion of evidence that in fact has already been met. When it is pointed out to them that there exist many well-documented cases that satisfy their proposed criterion, they will simply make their criterion more stringent, and at some point cross the line between the reasonable demand for scientific evidence and the unreasonable (and unscientific) demand for logical proof.
Grossman points out that an empirical hypothesis is never proven absolutely; it is simply shown to be more probable. For this reason, the demand for absolute proof in the area of the afterlife research is unscientific, because absolute proof of a theory is something that science cannot provide. He writes,
The fundamaterialists [i.e., hard-core, fundamentalist materialists] will not accept the hypothesis of an afterlife until it is "proven" beyond a logical possibility of being false. That is, they use a concept of proof that belongs in logic and mathematics, not in science.
So far, so good. But when he gets deeper into the question of scientifically exploring the afterlife, Grossman begins to get himself into trouble, at least by my way of thinking. He writes,
I think even the most die-hard materialist ought to grant the following argument: If souls are real, that is, if nonmaterial objects exist, then it should be possible to study them, to acquire data about them, to construct generalizations and theories about them, and so on; which is to say, it should be possible to study them scientifically.
The problem here, as I see it, hinges on the word "real." Let us grant that "souls are real." I believe this to be true. But I believe it to be true in the sense that souls participate in an order or level of reality that is different from the reality we experience every day. In other words, souls belong to a higher, or at least different, plane of reality. And it is not at all clear to me that science, a set of empirical methods designed to explore this reality, is cut out to explore some other plane of reality that may be fundamentally different from our own.
Grossman then discusses the general resistance of philosophers to empirical evidence for the afterlife -- an interesting topic, but one that is not particularly germane to our discussion here. After this, he quotes William James on the logical fallacies committed by skeptics who, in their zeal to debunk the paranormal, throw their intellectual training out the window.
Asking why mainstream scientists are so eager to dismiss evidence of life after death, Grossman comes up with three factors: "resistance to paradigm change... intellectual arrogance... social taboo." He also implies a fourth factor, which I think is among the most important -- simple fear of the afterlife. Some people would rather just cease to exist than face the prospect of an unknown and largely unknowable future in some new and strange dimension. To these reasons, I would add another one -- the sense that the afterlife is simply "too good to be true." Many people, understandably enough, are skeptical of any claim that sounds impossibly wonderful. I suspect this goes back to childhood, when a small child discovers that in real life, things don't always end happily ever after and that there is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy. Some children, upon becoming acquainted with these facts, feel betrayed and cheated by the stories their parents told them, and they make the resolution that they will never, ever be fooled again.
In developing his points, Grossman presents a fictional scenario that he describes as "by no means far-fetched." And here is the heart of my disagreement with him. I'm afraid I find this scenario extremely far-fetched. He writes,
Further near-death research confirms in great detail what has already been established, many more cases of verified juridical perceptions while "out of body" are collected and documented, advancing medical technology makes possible many more "smoking gun" cases of the type discussed above [i.e., the Pam Reynolds case], longitudinal studies on NDErs confirm the already observed behavioral change in behavioral changes aligned with their newly acquired (or recently reinforced) spiritual values, and so forth. The studies are replicated in different cultures, with the same results. Eventually, the weight of evidence begins to set in, and scientists are ready to announce to the world, if not as fact, then at least as highly confirmed scientific hypotheses [that] there is an afterlife [with all that it entails].... When this happens, the fallout will be revolutionary.
Maybe I'm the one being cynical now, but I don't see anything like this happening in the foreseeable future -- and by the foreseeable future I mean my lifetime or the lifetimes of children being born today. The evidence that Grossman cites is certainly sufficient to persuade me that there is an afterlife, but it is not going to overturn the assumptions and belief structures of the scientific establishment. Even if "many more cases of verified juridical perceptions" are collected, skeptics will dismiss them as anecdotes. The "smoking gun" case that Grossman cited earlier is not as strong as he believes it to be, so collecting more such cases will not strengthen his argument as much as he hopes. There is no doubt that people who've reported an NDE do exhibit long-term behavioral changes, but to a skeptical mind this does not prove that the NDE itself was a metaphysically real event. Replication in different cultures will suggest, to skeptics, only that the same neurological or psychological factors are at play across the board.
In short, no amount of empirical evidence, no matter how carefully collected, is going to upend the apple cart of scientific materialism. The newspaper headlines that Grossman imagines are fiction. I might like to believe that such a paradigm-shifting event will occur, but I don't.
Scientists and scientifically minded amateurs have been collecting evidence of life after death for at least 150 years and have amassed an impressive library of case studies. But the mainstream scientific world remains unimpressed. Given this track record, I think is very unlikely that the situation will change anytime soon. Collecting empirical data certainly has its place. It can give some measure of respectability to the subject, and it can motivate people to explore further on their own. But it cannot shift the paradigm. Or at least, it hasn't done so yet, and I see few signs that it will do so in the future.
When a given approach has not yielded its objective after a century and a half of assiduous effort, it may be time to recognize that it's the wrong approach.
