As mentioned a couple of weeks back, I’m currently writing a book exploring the evidence for an afterlife – which you can help me out with, by pre-ordering eBooks, or signed paperbacks/limited edition hardcovers. One of the reasons for this project is to correct some of the misinformation that is spread by scientism-ists and the mainstream media, and I haven’t seen much more of a better (worse?) example than this article in Washington Monthly, in which Art Levine ‘channels’ the spirit of Christopher Hitchins to debunk any idea of an afterlife. In doing so, he seems to take particular aim at the near-death experience (NDE):
What was clear enough before my death was that visions of an afterlife were no more verifiable than any other bedtime tales designed to offer false hope to toddlers frightened of the dark. They are the ultimate embodiment of the solipsism at the heart of all religions. This infantilizing fiction comes in various guises, from orthodox religions with their fabricated consolations of fairytale heavens — whether it is the Islamic fanatic’s seventy-two celestial virgins or the Christian fantasia of winged angels — to the modern pseudoscientific “research” into so-called near-death experiences (known with ridiculous technicality as NDEs). These hallucinatory claims, originally popularized by a Dr. Raymond Moody for Me Generation readers of the 1970s, rest on numerous banal and repetitive testimonials about floating above one’s body, hurtling through a tunnel toward a bright light, vividly reviewing episodes from one’s past as if watching a holiday slide show, and encountering various beings lit up with an unearthly glow. These latter apparitions can range from one’s surprisingly youthful-looking relatives to an omniscient spiritual guide, including the ubiquitous Jesus if you’re a Christian, not-so-coincidentally matching your own faith or lack thereof.
There’s nothing in these visionary tall tales that can’t be either simply explained through an understanding of basic science or discounted as the unprovable “revelations” of individuals with no legitimate claim on our belief. That was my position before I experienced my own peculiar hallucinations after death, and I have seen no evidence since then requiring me to recant my position. Was I wrong on the afterlife, as so many among the bien-pensant brayed for me to admit that I was wrong on Iraq? Plainly, no.
As the psychologist Susan Blackmore has persuasively shown, the near-death experience is a product of the dying brain and shaped by the individual’s cultural expectations. The temporal lobe is especially prone to inducing hallucinations, memory flashbacks, and other visions after death when undergoing anoxia, or oxygen deprivation. In concordance with this understanding, virtually every one of the phenomena I experienced after my own death has a clear-cut neurological or biological cause or an obvious cultural antecedent. As Blackmore wrote recently in the Guardian, “If human consciousness can really leave the body and operate without a brain, then everything we know in neuroscience has to be questioned.”
I really don’t know where to start with the sheer number rebuttals this thing demands, and the book is definitely where you’ll see me detail all of that. From the anoxia explanation, to claiming that Susan Blackmore has “persuasively shown” the near-death experience is a product of the dying brain, Levine gets everything wrong apart from the final statement in the blockquote above.
I should remark though that the book will *not* be a simple propaganda job for the afterlife conclusion. The goal will not be to assert that any particular conclusion is “true” – just that, on the current evidence, any rational person could certainly ‘believe’ that there is some sort of existence beyond death, and so perhaps we should all be discussing this possibility.
Support my book project (seriously, don’t let apathy rule – I need your help!) at IndieGoGo.
