Victor J. Stenger
Apr
14, 2012. Greer-Heard Forum New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
IÕm a
retired physicist who spent forty years doing research in elementary particle
physics and astrophysics. During that time I was
involved in a number of major discoveries, as just one collaborator among many
on experiments in major laboratories around the world. In my last experiment
before retiring, I collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that
reported the first evidence that neutrinos have mass. The Japanese leader of
the experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery.
So, I think I
have a good idea of the kind of evidence needed to demonstrate the reality of
any extraordinary claim. And surely, life after death is an extraordinary
claim.
I have not read
every published report on near-death experiences and other types of phenomena
that claim evidence that humans contain some
immaterial component that makes our immortality possible. There are thousands
of such reports. But I have looked at many, the ones claimed to be the best.
None—not a single one--stands up under the same scrutiny that is applied
in any science whenever an extraordinary claim is presented. I will tell you why,
but first let me give some background.
We spent the bulk of our time on last night talking about near-death
experiences, so let me begin with them. I have an discussion of near death
experiences in my latest book, God and
the Folly of Faith. Unfortunately we donÕt have any
for sale here, since the book just came out, but you can get it now on Amazon. God and the Folly of Faith contains
details and references so you can follow up with your own research.
Reports of near-death experience events have attracted a
large number of investigators who have a their own peer-reviewed journal called
the Journal of Near-Death Studies. The
research goes back 40 years. LetÕs look at the history.
By the early 1970s, resuscitation technology had advanced to
the point where more people were being brought back from the brink of death
than ever before in history. A small minority of about one in five reported seeing
a narrow, dark tunnel with light at the end, which they interpreted as a glimpse
of Òheaven.Ó Some said they met with Jesus (Buddhists met Buddha) and departed
loved ones. No doubt, those having these experiences were deeply moved and many
said it changed their lives.
The near-death phenomenon began to get the attention of nurses
and physicians who attempted systematic studies. However, the thousands of
reports published over four decades are virtually all anecdotal. Let me mention
some notorious examples that received considerable media attention.
The first is, I think, the same as one Gary mentioned last
night. At least itÕs similar. In the 1980s, a Seattle woman named Maria reported
a near-death-experience after a heart attack. She told social worker 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 her
room. Social worker Clark checked the ledge and retrieved the shoe.
However, there is no independent corroboration of this event.
And this is typical of so many of these reports. We only have ClarkÕs report.
No one could ever trace down Maria to verify her story. We have to take ClarkÕs
word for it. Later investigators found that Clark had misrepresented the
difficulty of observing the shoe on the ledge. Placing their own shoe in the
same position they found it was clearly visible as soon as you stepped into
MariaÕs room.
For my second example, let me refer to a report by Larry
Dossey, a physician who is the author of many popular books that promote spiritual
healing such as prayer. In one book, he claimed that a woman named Sarah had a near-death-experience in which Dossey says she saw,
Òa clear, detailed memory of the
frantic conversation of the surgeons and nurses during her cardiac arrest; the
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 in the doctorsÕ
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.Ò
And, on top
of that, Sarah had been blind since birth!
When asked by investigators to give more details, Dossey admitted
he had made up the whole story.
Gary mentioned a number of other reports of blind near-death
experiences. None have been independently verified.
In 2010, a book appeared called Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of
Near-Death-Experiences, authored by radiation
oncologist Jeffrey Long and journalist Paul
Perry. Thanks to considerable media hype, this book moved quickly to the
bestseller lists. Long had gathered thousands of accounts of near-death
experiences. He did this by setting up a website asking for personal narratives
of such experiences. The result is the largest database of near-death
experiences in the world with over 1,600 accounts.
Long announced that
medical evidence fails to explain these reports and said
Òthere is only one plausible explanation—that people have survived death
and traveled to another dimension.Ó
In fact, there is
little or no science in LongÕs book. ItÕs based totally on anecdotes collected
over the Internet where you can find limitless, unsupported testimonials for
every kind of preposterous claim. Now, I donÕt 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 unsubstantiated stories.
And hereÕs where my criterion of what constitutes evidence
differs markedly from GaryÕs. From my viewpoint as a research scientist, the
only religious experiences of any kind worth studying are those where the
subject reports a unique perception, one that they could not have known
previously, which is then later corroborated. If demonstrated by solid,
repeatable observations, these could provide the kind of scientific evidence
for consciousness independent of the body that we might begin to take
seriously.
Gary claims such successes, but I have not seen them referred
in the expert literature. If the evidence is as good as Gary claims, why isnÕt
it part of the consensus knowledge of science—in the textbooks along with
the evidence for neutrinos and DNA?
Last night we
heard of a simple test setup. Place a target, such as a card with a secret
message, on a high shelf in the operating room, facing the ceiling so that it
is unreadable not only by the patient on the table but by the hospital staff in
the room. Then if a patient has a near-death experience that involves the
commonly reported sensation of moving outside her body and floating above the
operating table, she should be able to read that message.
This experiment has
been tried several times without a single subject succeeding in reading the
message under controlled conditions. I understand that more experiments of this
type are now being carried out, but I havenÕt heard any results yet.
The researchers in the field would love nothing better than
to verify the afterlife. But they are beginning to have second thoughts. One
prominent, long-time investigator, Kenneth Ring, whose name was mentioned last
night, has commented that after decades of research we would have by now expected
more than few positive results under controlled conditions. This is the upshot
of the 40 years of research, agreed to by the editors of the journal of near
death studies in an extensive handbook they recently prepared. They canÕt point
to a single verifiable case in which the experiencer reported something they
could not have known ahead of time. Gary claims there are many. Well, the
people workers in the field admit, to their distress, because they really want
to believe, that there are none.
Incidentally, the same can be said of religion in general. After
thousands of years, there should have been some verifiable scientific evidence
for God or gods by now, at least any god that plays such an active role in
human lives and in the operation of the universe that most believers take for
granted. Gary says thereÕs evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. There even
isnÕt any evidence for his crucifixion. No Roman records, which are extensive,
and not a single Roman historian of the time, including those living in
Jerusalem, mentions Jesus—and they wrote a lot. You can find Pontius Pilate.
But not Jesus.
By the way, there were a dozen eyewitnesses who said they saw
Caesar Augustus rise from the dead.
No doubt, the near-death experience itself is a real
phenomenon, somewhat like a dream or hallucination, although perhaps not
exactly the same. But itÕs still in the brain.
As we heard last
night, many features of the near-death experience, especially the tunnel vision,
can be simulated with drugs electrical impulse, and acceleration. I think itÕs safe
to say that we cannot regard near-death experiences as evidence for
life-after-death.
Furthermore, as
we discussed last night, none of these people retuned from the dead. A flat EEG
us not brain death because it only measures activity on the surface of the
brain. And there is no way of determining that the experience actually happened
during a flat EEG. Most likely the experience happened
before or after, when the brain was highly active.
In any case, after all this effort, the near-death experience
has been determined beyond a reasonable doubt to be all inside the head.
I was going to
talk about claims of evidence for reincarnation, but I donÕt think anyone here
believe in it so IÕm cutting it out to save time.
So, next, letÕs take a look at psychic studies. For over a
hundred and fifty years attempts have been made to find scientific evidence for
special powers of the mind that violate established scientific principles. This
could be evidence for an immaterial, immortal soul.
The scientific
search for the soul began in the late nineteenth century with experiments on
so-called Òspiritualist mediumsÓ conducted by prominent physicists, and devout
believers, William Crookes and Oliver Lodge. Since then the history of
paranormal studies has been a series of extraordinary claims of evidence for
psychic phenomena, enthusiastically reported in the
news media and popular books, followed by the collapse of those claims under
the intense scrutiny of skeptics. More important, all have failed to be
independently replicated. To the present day, paranormal studies have been
plagued by insufficient care taken to rule out other, more mundane
possibilities.
No properly controlled
experiment in almost two centuries of psychic research has provided
significant, replicated evidence for the special powers of the mind that you
would expect if mind had some non-material aspect.
By the same token, considerable evidence does exist
supporting the hypothesis that what we call mind and consciousness result from
mechanisms in a purely material brain. If we have disembodied souls that 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.
As brain function decreases, we lose consciousness, as when
under full anesthesia. Why should that be if consciousness resides in an
immaterial soul? Brain scans today can locate the portions of the brain where
different types of thoughts arise, including emotions and religious thoughts.
When that part of the brain is destroyed by surgery or injury, those types of
thoughts disappear. LetÕs face it, so-called
spirituality is all in the head. ItÕs purely material in nature.
Let me now take a look at some of the arguments for an
afterlife that conservative political author and Christian apologist Dinesh
D'Souza makes in his recent book titled Life
After Death. One of the major reasons so many people seek an afterlife,
according to DÕSouza, is they want to believe that the universe is just. In
East Asia, 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 and multiple lives make it
all come out even.
In the West, justice is served not by a succession of lives
but by a last judgment. In either case, cosmic justice cannot be achieved in
this world but only in another world beyond the grave. If there were any
revealed truth behind these beliefs, you would think they should not be so
dramatically different.
D'Souza claims
that belief in an afterlife explains Òwhy humans continue to espouse goodness
and justice even when the world is evil and unjust.Ó He says, ÒThere has to be cosmic justice in the
world in order to make sense of the observed facts about human morality.Ó
Notice he is trying to make a scientific argument. Forget
what theologians say. Forget what moral philosophers say. Scientific 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.
Now, 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 wouldnÕt have any need to worry about justice in this life—and,
indeed, many donÕt. On the other hand, people who donÕt believe in cosmic
justice in an afterlife have a strong reason to see that justice is done in
this life.
So, belief in the afterlife has a negative impact on social
justice. In fact, this is exactly how religion has excused the inequality of society
throughout history, asserting the divine right of kings to rule over everyone
else no matter how cruel and incompetent the kings may be.
The hypothesis of no afterlife makes much more sense of the
factual data than does D'SouzaÕs 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.
Allow me to list what I see as the liabilities of belief in
an afterlife:
1. You may not take action to seek
justice in this life if you assume it will be provided in the next.
2. You may live in constant fear that
any sin you might have committed will condemn you to an eternity of suffering
in Hell.
3. You may not exercise your own best
judgment in matters and allow yourself to be controlled by others who claim
sacred authority.
4. You may not live your life to the fullest
if you think that you will have another life after death.
5. The idea that you will live forever
gives you a false sense of a glorious self that leads to extreme self-absorption
in this life, which is so clear in America today. Religion is supposed to make
you humble. But what could be more egotistical, more narcissistic, than to
think you are a special creature of God destined to spend eternity with him in
total bliss? Knowing you are not going to live forever restores a sense
of your true place in the scheme of things.
Next, I would like to discuss what I call Òsecular
spirituality.Ó Americans, especially the young, are steadily turning away from
organized religion. A new Gallup Poll says that 32 percent of Americans are
non-religious. Not all, however, are moving directly into fully materialistic
atheism. About half say they are Ònot religious but spiritual.Ó Some have found
appealing a modern form of spirituality that they have been bamboozled into
thinking is based on science.
Since the 1970s, New Age gurus, such as Deepak Chopra, have been
claiming that, according to quantum mechanics, human consciousness can control
reality. They say that we can make our own reality—we can be rich,
beautiful, and healthy— just by thinking about it. In this scenario, we
all live forever as part of one, unified whole, with our souls tuned into a universal,
cosmic consciousness.
DonÕt believe it! The mind has nothing to do with quantum
mechanics. And Deepak Chopra is aging along with the rest of us.
In sum, there isnÕt a shred of scientific evidence supporting
an afterlife and much denying it. Neuroscience has just about closed the door
on the existence of an immaterial component to human consciousness. When youÕre
dead, youÕre dead. Your body and brain, which contain all that is you, dissolve
into dust.
Arguments about justice and morality providing evidence for
an afterlife in fact provide evidence against it. The claimed personal and
social benefits of belief in an afterlife can also be turned around to show
that we all would be better of without this primitive superstition carried down
from the ignorant childhood of humanity.
You often will hear it said, ÒAbsence of evidence is not
evidence of absence.Ó This is not true. Absence of evidence is evidence
for absence when that evidence should be there. If life after death
exists, then evidence should be there. It is not. Life-after-death can be ruled
out scientifically beyond a reasonable doubt.