God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (32 page)

In sum, the claim that religious practices are beneficial to the health of practitioners is greatly overblown. I have a serious criticism of all these studies. From the reports I have seen, none include a control group of nonbelievers. Thus the researchers have no way of knowing what role religious belief and practice really plays in whatever effects they observe, positive or negative. Perhaps church attendance is of some value, but that can be attributed to the healthy lifestyle that is implied. There is no smoking in church, and no drinking except for the little sip of watered-down wine during Communion.

SPIRITUAL ENERGY

Energy is another physics term that is misused by those who seek a rational basis for their belief in the duality of matter and spirit. Ancient Chinese medicine is based on the concept of ch'i, which is thought of as a vital energy flow in the body. An acupuncturist regulates the flow with her needles. Modern complementary and alternative medicine also bases many of its claims on the imagined existence of human “bioenergetic fields.” In 1998, nursing professor Elissa Patterson wrote in a peer-reviewed nursing journal, “We are all part of the natural harmonious energy of the universe.” According to Patterson, the human energy field is part of this universal energy field and “is intimately involved with human life, often called the ‘aura.’”
²¹

One form of energy healing that was widely promoted in the nursing community late in the twentieth century was called Therapeutic Touch, in which the practitioner claims to regulate a patient's bioenergetic field by moving her hands over the patient's body, without actually touching the body. Therapeutic Touch has been thoroughly debunked by a wide array of researchers.
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Of course, claims of spiritual energy are all said to be based on quantum physics. Veterinarian Joanne Stefanatos, for example, informs us, “The principles of energy medicine originate in quantum physics.”
²³
In response to such claims, veterinarian David Ramey has edited a book titled
Consumer's Guide to Alternative Therapies in the Horse
that challenges the use of energy medicine in treating horses.
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In all these applications, energy is imagined to be some kind of immaterial,
spiritual phenomenon. However, as we have already seen, energy is purely material in nature, a property of physical matter. No special form of biological energy associated with living things has ever been observed. Our bodies radiate tiny amounts of normal, purely physical electromagnetic waves such as those observed in an electroencephalogram (EEG). We also have an “aura” of infrared radiation that can't be seen with the human eye but is easily seen with infrared sensitive devices such as those carried by soldiers on the battlefield. This is simply the black-body radiation that results from us being warm bodies. We discussed black-body radiation in
chapter 6
. There is nothing spiritual about it.
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A rock at body temperature has exactly the same spectrum as a live human. A rock at ambient temperature has exactly the same spectrum as a dead human.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES

Another area where science has something to say about the question of a world beyond matter is in the claims of religious or spiritual experiences. These are very real to the people who have them. They often result in an epiphany that leads to a major change in the life of the one having such an experience.

If these experiences are truly profound, more than just inside the head but reaching out in some way to a separate reality, then they can be tested scientifically. And they have been. Let us review some of the evidentiary claims that have been subjected to scientific testing
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NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: HISTORICAL DATA

One of the major examples of religious experiences for which people claim empirical support is the
near-death experience
(NDE). NDE events have attracted a large number of investigators who have a peer-reviewed journal of their own, the
Journal of Near-Death Studies.
Researchers Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James have assembled a comprehensive handbook
on NDE research.
²⁷
They begin with a review of thirty years of research on the subject, which can be briefly summarized as follows.

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
, in which he coined the term “near-death experience.” Moody's book became a sensational bestseller, with 13 million copies sold by 2001.
²⁸

Holden and her colleagues list a number of earlier references to NDEs in popular, medical, and psychical research and many publications dating back to 1975. Almost all of these reports are anecdotal (a designation the authors avoid in favor of the term “retrospective”) 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 such experiences provide any real evidence for a world beyond.

Psychologist (and reformed parapsychologist) Susan Blackmore, in her 1993 book on near-death experiences,
Dying to Live
, proposed that the phenomenon was the result of loss of oxygen in the dying brain.
²⁹
Professional anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee thoroughly confirms Blackmore's findings in his 2003 book,
Mortal Minds
.
³⁰

Many features of the NDE, especially the tunnel vision, can be simulated with drugs, electrical impulses, or acceleration such as during a ride in a centrifuge used for training fighter pilots. In his 2011 book,
The Spiritual Doorway to the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience
, Kevin Nelson associates NDEs with a blending of two states of consciousness—wakefulness and sleep—that normally remain separate. In the case of pilots, the tunnel vision that is experienced goes away when goggles are used to apply pressure to the eyes, indicating that the phenomenon is related to the lowering of blood pressure in the eye.
³¹

Despite the evidence that NDEs arise from natural brain processes,
Holden and coeditors are not quite ready to give up their quest of the afterlife. In the summary of their handbook they 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.
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Nevertheless, they have to admit, “No single clear pattern of NDE features has yet emerged.”
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Furthermore, they do not make clear how they know that the “mental functions” they write about occurred simultaneously with the absence of brain function.

VERIDICAL NDEs

From my viewpoint as a retired research scientist, only veridical NDEs are worth studying. These are NDE experiences where the subject reports a unique perception that is later corroborated.
³⁴
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.
³⁵
If demonstrated by the data, these could provide the kind of evidence for consciousness independent of the body that we might begin to take seriously.

In
chapter 9
of
The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences
, editor Holden reviews the attempts to verify AVP under controlled conditions. You would think the setup should be simple. Place a 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 the body and floating above the operating table, he or she should be able to read that number. These out-of-body experiences (OBEs) 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 has noted that this ideal situation is difficult to achieve with the operating room staff often glimpsing the target information, thus compromising
the protocol. What's more, they have more important matters to attend to without the interference of experimenters who certainly can't control what goes on in the operating room. Holden can only report 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.”
³⁶
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 sometimes, 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?
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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.”
³⁸
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. Maria told social worker Kimberly Clark that she had separated from her body and floated outside the hospital. There, on the third floor ledge near the emergency room, she saw a tennis shoe with a worn patch. 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 trace 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. By placing their own shoe 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. Physician Larry Dossey is the author of several popular books that promote spiritual healing such as prayer; I have clashed with him on occasion.
⁴¹
In his book
Recovering the Soul
, he 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.
⁴²

And, on top of that, Sarah had been blind since birth!

Kenneth Ring and Sharon 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.
⁴⁴

Ring and Cooper note 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 provided no veridical evidence.

NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES: RECENT DATA

In 2010 a new book on NDEs appeared,
Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death-Experiences
, by Jeffrey Long, MD, “with” journalist Paul Perry.
⁴⁶
Thanks to considerable media hype, this book moved quickly to the bestseller
lists. Long is a radiation oncologist who, with his wife, Jody, 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 stories, respondents filled out a 100-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 more than sixteen hundred accounts.

Long claims that medical evidence fails to explain these reports and that “there is only one plausible explanation—that 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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