As I’ve written before: Most arguments for spiritual belief that I encounter are so bad, they don’t even count as arguments. But some believers in religion or spirituality do try to make real arguments for their beliefs, and try to defend them with evidence and logic. This evidence and logic are never very good… but they are sincere attempts to engage with reality instead of ignoring it. So I want to do these argumemts the honor of taking them seriously… and pointing out how they’re completely mistaken.
Today, I’m taking on, not an argument for God, but for some sort of soul, separate from the brain and the body, that sparks consciousness, animates life, and survives death. More specifically, I’m taking on the argument that near- death experiences are evidence of this immortal soul.
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Thus begins my new piece on AlterNet, Why Near-Death Experiences Are a Flimsy Justification for the Idea That We Have Immortal Souls. To find out why, exactly. this supposed piece of “evidence” for the immortal soul doesn’t hold water, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!
I see you have some nut cases who can’t be bothered to fact check their assertions arguing against you there.
‘Sisterlauren’ leaps out as a particuarly bad example. She starts by saying you represent a ‘european’ view without the minimal effort to check where you are from which would reveal you are from the US.
In a later commment she says in reference to the Americas “First we started off as a continent where war was almost unheard of for thousands and thousands of years”
I wonder how anyone can take such a comment seriously.
You might be misreading sisterlauren. She might be saying “european” as in “white”, especially when combined with that second comment. I’ve seen my fair share of people who believe that the Americas before Europeans arrived was a kind of “lost Eden” of perfect peaceful harmony. It fits in with the myth of the ‘noble savage’. Yes, it’s kind of ridiculous, but it appeals to some people’s egos.
Sisterlauren was commenting on the last alternet post; she’s a kook. Belongs to a THC church and apparently has overdone the sacrament.
In your post, you did not distinguish between Near Death Experiences and one particular set of related claims posited as evidence, Out Of Body Experiences. (Variously abbreviated as OBE or OOBE). The latter are included among the evidence for NDE and dualism, and sometimes for psychic powers.
In an OOBE, the “self” (soul, mind, whatever) leaves the body and ventures out. In NDE situations, it is sometimes reported that the self floats up to the ceiling of the hospital operating room. There are several reasons not to credit such accounts.
1) Conflict with established scientific knowledge. We know how people see things. Light bounces off an object, enters the pupil of the eye, gets focused by the lens onto the retina, where an image is picked up by photoreceptor cells, and so on. We know that people cannot see without their eyes, or when their eyes are adequately covered. And yet, in cases of OOBEs, the eyes remain in the body. There is no known mechanism by which the disembodied “soul” could see things; and in a similar fashion, no known mechanism by which a disembodied soul could hear, or expedite other ‘bodily’ senses.
2) Experiments into OOBEs which point to perceptual illusion rather than actual exit from the body.
Brain probe triggers out-of-body experiences
In this 2002 experiment, probing a patient’s right angular gyrus, an are of the brain, with an electrode repeatedly caused OOBE perceptions. The patient, who was being prepped for surgery to treat epilepsy, was not near death, and remained conscious to report during the entire procedure. The patient consistently reported seeing her own legs in an odd perspective, as if seen from above. And yet, she was never able to report seeing anything not visible from the actual location of her eyes. This evidence, which is much better controlled than actual near death episodes, in which the patient is supposedly unconscious and in the midst of life-saving procedures, points to OOBEs as a perceptual illusion, not a real phenomenon.
I made the mistake of reading the Alternet comments, too. When will I learn???