WHAT LIES BEYOND

Michael Martin and Keith Augustine (editors).  The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against Life After Death.  Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

As the editors point out, there are plenty of books arguing the case for an afterlife but few that examine the case against.  This collection of thirty articles in over 650 pages does just that.
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It is organised into four major parts; the first examines the findings of neuroscience which show that consciousness and human personality are wholly dependent on the embodied brain; the second part examines philosophical arguments against and afterlife, the third critiques theological views of the afterlife as heaven and hell or the eastern view of karma, the fourth examines the evidence given by psychical research which is said to prove survival.

The first and fourth sections are the most accessible; and the collection of nine essays in the first section shows how numerous malfunctions of the brain due to injury, illness or substance abuse can profoundly influence consciousness now just in gross ways but profoundly subtle ways as well. In some of these the patient is unaware of the deficit, arguing against all the evidence that they are not blind, or that a paralysed limb is properly functioning. Changes to specific portions of the brain lead to specific deficits or specific changes in personality.

There is a fair amount of repetition in these papers, an occupational hazard of compilations of essays, but this do seek to hammer home the conclusion that there is absolutely no evidence from neurology that mental functions have any independence from the physical brain, and indeed such an idea when critically examined makes no sense. Those who argue otherwise do so against the evidence and based only on religious or philosophical beliefs.

The eight essays in Part Four address a range of alleged evidence from psychical research dealing with ghosts, out of the body experiences, Ian Stevenson’s studies of allegedly reincarnated children, and Gary Schwartz’s studies with mediums. The two papers on Stevenson, one by a former research assistant, show the many errors and assumptions that went into his studies, for example peoples’ speculations were often presented as fact, many were recorded long after the events, assumptions were made about peoples’ behaviour which sometimes based on cultural ignorance, for example the argument that noone came forward to challenge this or that claim, without realising that such a challenge might have been regarded as highly impolite in some cultures.

The third section which deals with philosophical problems connected with survival is in parts quite challenging though often worth persisting with. The arguments deal not with the sort of survival envisioned by spiritualists but those imagined by religions such as Christianity, so we don’t just get discussions dealing with the impossibility of truly disembodied existence or the lack of evidence for astral bodies, but also with assumptions to do with the traditional Christian view of bodily resurrection. Which generally comes to the conclusion that if this some new body modelled on the old one then we are dealing with a replica not the original person, and that if one copy can be made so can any number of replicas .

To get round that, in perhaps what is close to one of the strangest ideas ever proposed by a respectable theologian, Peter van Inwagen, has come up with the notion that when you die God snatches away your body to somewhere else and then substitutes a replica corpse in its place to rot away. Compared with that idea Phillip Gosse’s notorious Omphalos appears eminently sane.

Various contributors also demolish the line of argument which compares consciousness to a TV programme and the brain to the set, but no matter what we do to a TV set we cannot change the plot of a soap opera from the one that was broadcast.

To refute these criticisms supporters of survival will have to take on board the findings of modern neuroscience and not wave it away (even the most superficial critics of psychical research usually deal with its evidence better than paranormalists’ treatment of mainstream science) and not to rely on personal abuse and populist rhetoric. Personally I suspect that arguments involving real time survival involving some kind of spooky extra stuff over and above the quotidian things of the world has no traction.

Those who want get-out clauses might try either subjective survival, the idea that brain events lasting only a few seconds might generate subjective experiences lasting for vast periods of time; the possibility that the quotidian things of the world including brains, bodies, chairs, TV sets, computers , motor cars and rocks are not what they seem to be, or the idea that in a truly infinite universe people might be born complete with your memories just by chance. The odds against the latter are of course unimaginably greater than astronomical. Of course in a truly infinite universe these extraordinarily unlikely events would still occur an infinite number of times. 

• Peter Rogerson.