Is it just a question of faith?
An earlier post I made ended with a question: why should the existence or not of an afterlife matter to you if you don’t believe it, even if it matters to me who does. Why on earth should you consider believing what I believe?
Let’s see if we can make some progress on that one.
Some people believe there is an afterlife and I am now one of them, though it was one of the more difficult things I had to accept when I investigated the spiritual life. After all why should beings so imperfect have an immortal soul? We hardly seemed entitled to such a privilege. To be honest, as a former atheist, I found it easier to believe in God than in an immortal soul.
The Bahá’í Faith is clear on the issue:
The soul is not a combination of elements, it is not composed of many atoms, it is of one indivisible substance and therefore eternal. It is entirely out of the order of the physical creation; it is immortal!
(‘Abdu’l-Bahá: Paris Talks: pages 90-91)
It is also clear that how we live now will affect the kind of afterlife we have. This is to do with how well we have fed our souls. When our spirit goes from the narrow womb of this world to the vast expanses of the next we will need all our spiritual faculties in the best possible order if we are to cope.
And just as, if human life in the womb were limited to that uterine world, existence there would be nonsensical, irrelevant — so too if the life of this world, the deeds here done and their fruitage, did not come forth in the world beyond, the whole process would be irrational and foolish.
(Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: No. 156)
I needed help with coming to terms with this improbable hypothesis and found it hard to take it simply on trust, though I did try.
I’m going to be basing a strong case to support the idea that beliefs in transcendence and the afterlife are the strongest possible motivators to building a better world. There is a problem with that though as an argument to defeat people who are sceptical. They could concede the point while still saying that there is no afterlife. There are many examples we could draw on to support the view that mistaken beliefs can be very motivating indeed. People have died and been killed for them – in fact are still dying and being killed. If the only difference is that one person’s belief wreaks havoc while the other one’s creed enhances life, we haven’t moved all that far in terms of truth value: just because a belief seems benign doesn’t make it true.
So if this pragmatic argument were the best one going in support of transcendence and the existence of an afterlife, we’d have to say that the case was at least one wing short of a complete aeroplane! Even high levels of positive usefulness, after all, do not prove truth.
So, before we move in more deeply to the implications for our society of a belief or lack of it in transcendence and the afterlife, it seems a good idea to tackle the evidence issue from another angle.
A Black Swan: the Case of Pam Reynolds
Is there really no evidence for an afterlife and/or the value of transcendence other than indirect and inconclusive notions of how it is better for our society if you believe it than if you don’t?
I think there is. We need to start with the black swan problem.
Taleb has used this as the title for his extremely relevant guide to the inevitability of the market crashes which continue to astonish us despite all the evidence confirming their eventual recurrence, but that is not the point for now.
It’s to Karl Popper that we need to turn. He originated the term in a discussion about falsifiability. If you assert that all swans are white, you cannot prove it even by discovering an extremely long sequence of white swans. You can though falsify it. One black swan will sink the theory.
The same can be said of mind/brain independence. I accept that a near death experience (NDE) which happens to involve the mind apparently functioning without any support at all from the brain does not absolutely prove there is life after death, but it is a necessary if not sufficient condition for maintaining that belief. I believe that this necessary condition has possibly been fulfilled at least once under completely controlled conditions. I think it may constitute a black swan for those that say an afterlife can be ruled out as completely impossible.
What is this black swan?
In Atlanta Georgia, the case of Pam Reynolds was investigated in the 1990s by Dr Michael Sabom (page 184 passim). His account is incorporated into a wider discussion of NDEs by David Fontana, a professor of psychology, in his book “Is There an Afterlife?”. Sabom states, and the surgical team corroborates it, that Pam was fully instrumented, under constant medical observation and completely unconscious as indicated for part of the time by the flatline EEG (a measure of brain activity: flatline would mean no brain activity at all that would support consciousness). It was as close to a controlled experiment as we are ever likely to get, he said on a television documentary on NDEs some time later. The surgical procedure she needed required a complete shut down of brain and heart activity in order safely to operate on an aneurysm at the base of the brain.
None the less, after being anaesthetised for 90 minutes but not as the video suggested when she was flatlined, she accurately observed aspects of the surgical procedure which were either a departure from what would have been the standard order of events or had unusual features, such as the bizarre appearance of the “saw” used, of which she could have had no prior knowledge. The surgeon in the case, and others who commented such as Peter Fenwick, felt that the usual methods of registering visual perceptions and memories in the brain would certainly have been unavailable to her and could offer no explanation of how she could have subsequently had access to the experiences she described.
There is a huge literature on NDEs which many people with a materialist perspective refuse to inspect on the grounds that no amount of evidence can prove the impossible. This is scientism, not science, and I would urge everyone, no matter how sceptical, to investigate this thoroughly for themselves. The arguments parroted by so many that NDEs are the results of material causes such as anoxia or drugs just don’t stand up in this case (or in many others, according to Peter Fenwick).
What is of additional interest here is that the investigations of Ken Ring plainly indicate that NDEs are life transforming. His list of the changes they induce includes: appreciation for life, concern for others, reverence for life, antimaterialism, anticompetitiveness, spirituality, sense of purpose, and belief in God (pages 125-127). These are all things that we will hopefully come back to in more detail in the lifetime of this blog (though for some people it may already seem to have gone on far too long).
That list of Ring’s is a very significant one that paves the way for the next more pragmatic approach to the issue of why it should matter to everyone, why everyone needs to investigate carefully before they jump to the conclusion that an afterlife is impossible. A sense of the transcendent allied to a belief in life after death does seem to create a different more life- and community-enhancing pattern of behaviour in the individual who possesses them.
Time for a break, I think: more on that next time.
First time I’ve read your blog…
First thing after waking up…
Waking up has been a particularly nasty affair since I went through 11 months of abusive medical drug therapy…
Still, even though your argument was well above “simple” or a “breeze” to peruse, it held my attention; in fact, helped me wake up and get beyond the pain…
I’m a Baha’i and, among the beliefs I take on faith, the Next World is Prime.
Still, a living, breathing awareness of this particular belief has been greatly aided by your arguments.
Thank you!
~ Alex from Our Evolution
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This is an issue with which I have been struggling. More specifically, why bother believing in an afterlife? I have never felt like it is a phenomenon to be labeled “impossible,” but rather the notion has felt so far removed from my reality as to be without meaning for me. I know well the statements of the Central Figures on this matter, but it has been a struggle nevertheless.
The positive point I have reached: regardless of whether or not there is an afterlife, I feel purpose when I act as if there is such. I feel like there is meaning. Right now, that is good enough for narcissistic me. And good enough to help motivate continued service to humanity, however humble that service may be.
Perhaps I will find some time to look more closely into credible studies on NDEs. I’ve always dismissed them as something like the miracles that ‘Abdu’l-Baha dismisses: meaningful only to those who experience them. But perhaps I should take a closer look and come to a more thorough and just judgment.
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Ken Ring’s book by itself might still seem to you a bit like an overdose of miracles, so it’s useful to dilute him with more astringent approaches. Fenwick’s book, which I mentioned, is a good start. Some others I’ve found useful as well are: Mark Fox’s “Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience” (2003), Robert Almeder’s “Death and Personal Survival: the evidence for life after death” (1992) and, for an enthusiastic update from an ongoing research programme, Sam Parnia’s “What Happens When We Die.” Almeder takes a philosophical approach and is not so much focused on NDEs per se, while Fox is a researcher and lectures in philosophy and religious studies.
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