God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (33 page)

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. Not 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 (or even ordinary) 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 so far in the neurosciences (see
chapter 10
) and will be accepted only when the data are totally convincing.

PROBLEMS WITH NDES

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 impossible to prove anyway. But even a flat EEG does not signal brain death, as many people mistakenly believe, since it just responds to the outer portions of the brain and does not catch activity deep inside 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.

There are several excellent books and papers presenting strong, detailed arguments showing why the data from NDEs does not provide any evidence for an afterlife. Besides Blackmore's
Dying to Live
and Woerlee's
Mortal Minds
, there is
Religion, Spirituality, and the Near-Death Experience
by Mark Fox.
⁴⁸
In 2007, Keith Augustine, then executive director of the Internet Infidels,
⁴⁹
published an exhaustive three-part series of articles in the
Journal of Near-Death Studies.
⁵⁰
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 version of all three of Augustine's papers is available on the Secular Web.
⁵¹

Let me mention just a few of Augustine's observations, along with those of other researchers that are particularly compelling. Refer to Augustine's paper to get the details and references to the original work on which he relies.

• 80 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 understanding 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 the details depend on culture.
  
• Electroencephalograms and imaging techniques indicate that epileptic activity in the temporal lobe of the brain, specifically the TPJ, or temporo-parietal 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 are 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 their alleged 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.
  ⁵²
  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.
  ⁵³
  But not one of Brinkley's predictions came to pass.
  

Many NDE researchers still hope to find evidence for an afterlife despite their own sincere 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. While the great majority of NDE researchers are no doubt honest and do not hide data that fail to confirm their beliefs, they are hardly disinterested in the question of survival after death. Who wouldn't be motivated by the possibility of discovering an afterlife?

Several authors have suggested that those who have NDEs cannot distinguish whether a private experience is a brain-based hallucination or a peek into the afterlife; therefore, the afterlife hypothesis is not falsifiable. This is wrong. These authors are like those who say science can never prove God exists. The existence of a realm beyond matter could be easily demonstrated by one returning from an NDE, OBE, or other religious experience if that
individual has important information about the world that she or no one else could possibly have known; such knowledge could be verified scientifically. With millions of such experiences yearly you would expect a few to result in verifiable knowledge, if such experiences had anything at all to do with an immaterial reality. So far none have. Once again we have the absence of evidence
that should be there
if a certain phenomenon exists, which can be taken as evidence that the phenomenon does not exist.

REINCARNATION

The scientific study of reincarnation is a minefield of unsupported claims and lucrative hoaxes, such as the infamous fifty-year-old case that resulted in the bestselling book
The Search for Bridey Murphy
by Morey Bernstein.
⁵⁴
Although thoroughly debunked,
⁵⁵
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 Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist and University of Virginia professor. Deepak Chopra, in his 2006 book about immortality titled
Life after Death: the Burden of Proof
, cites Stevenson as providing strong empirical evidence for reincarnation.
⁵⁶

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.
⁵⁷

Leonard Angel has written a review of Stevenson's monumental two-volume tome
Reincarnation in Biology.
⁵⁸
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.”
⁵⁹

INVESTIGATING THE PARANORMAL

For more than 150 years, attempts have been made to find scientific evidence for special powers of the mind that violate the principles known to science. These purported powers came to be classified into three types of
psychic
or
paranormal
phenomena: (1)
extrasensory perception
(ESP), in which minds communicate outside the normal physical channels; (2)
telekinesis
, in which the mind can move physical objects; and (3)
precognition
, in which minds predict the future.

While the observation of any such violation might still be explicable in terms of some new natural principle, as is usually done whenever a conventional scientific experiment or observation cannot be explained with existing knowledge, the motivation of paranormal researchers, now called
parapsychologists
, has always been something even more profound and world-shaking. They want to prove the existence of the soul. This is clear from their personal musings, which are strongly spiritual in nature.

In my 1995 book
Physics and Psychics
, I reviewed the history of psychic phenomena, or simply
psi
, from a physicist's viewpoint.
⁶⁰
For a philosopher's perspective, read
The Transcendental Temptation
by Paul Kurtz, published in 1986.
⁶¹
While much has been written on the subject since these books, there is little that is new.

The scientific search for the soul began in the late nineteenth century with experiments on so-called spiritualist mediums conducted by prominent physicists William Crookes and Oliver Lodge. Since then the history of paranormal studies has been a series of extraordinary claims of convincing evidence for psychic phenomena, enthusiastically reported in the news media, followed by the collapse of those claims under the scrutiny of skeptics, and, more important, the failure of such claims to be independently replicated. To the present day, paranormal studies have been plagued by those flaws that arise in any investigation whenever investigators who have an emotional interest in a particular outcome fail to take sufficient care to rule out other, usually more mundane, possibilities.

Rather than going over old ground, allow me to discuss a recent claim that, like most paranormal claims, attracted considerable media attention before fizzling out, which is typical of the whole history of the subject.

In 2011, Daryl J. Bem, a psychologist at Cornell University, published a paper titled, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect” in the peer-reviewed
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
.
⁶²
Quoting from the abstract:

This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “time-reversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results.

In
chapter 5
, we saw how a direction of time cannot be found in the fundamental principles of physics, classical or quantum. Our everyday, familiar “arrow of time” is a statistical effect that results from the fact that we and our surroundings are composed of trillions of particles that move around largely randomly. When we are dealing with a few particles at the quantum level, time reversibility can occur, and, in fact, this helps explain a lot of “spooky” quantum behavior.
⁶³
But Bem's subjects and their brains are macroscopic objects in which quantum mechanics plays no significant role (see
chapter 11
). So the observation of reverse causality at the macroscopic level would constitute a dramatic violation of our best understanding of the natural world.

Other psychologists immediately jumped on Bem, disputing his claim that his results were empirically significant. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and three collaborators at the University of Amsterdam reanalyzed Bem's data using a statistical technique called the “Bayesian t-test” and concluded that “the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent.”
⁶⁴
The authors urged the whole psychology community to use better analytical methods.

Jeffrey N. Rouder, of the University of Missouri, and Richard D. Morey, of the University of Groningen, also performed a Bayesian statistical evaluation of Bem's data and found that the data “yield no substantial support for psi effects of erotic or neutral stimuli.” Some of Bem's other data tested positive, but they were insufficient for the authors to be convinced of the viability of psi.
⁶⁵

Researchers Stuart J. Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman have rerun Bem's experiment and failed to replicate his results. The
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, which published Bem's paper, rejected this failure to replicate. According to the British science journalist Ben Goldacre, the reason given was that the editors of that journal “never publish studies that replicate other work.”
⁶⁶
This is very strange, since the result was not replicated. In all my years of research I have never previously come across a case where a failure to replicate an extraordinary published result has been refused publication in the same journal where the original result appeared.

In a detailed article in
Skeptical Inquirer
, University of Toronto psychologist James E. Alcock has carefully examined Bem's claims. After discussing many methodological and analytical problems in the nine experiments, Alcock concluded,

Overall, then, this is a very unsatisfactory set of experiments that does not provide us with reason to believe that Bem has demonstrated the operation of psi. All that he has produced are claims of some significant departures from chance, and these claims are flimsy.
⁶⁷