Posted on 10/14/2014 9:48:40 AM PDT by Enza Ferreri
"First hint of 'life after death' in biggest ever scientific study", headlines The Telegraph, going on to say: "Southampton University scientists have found evidence that awareness can continue for at least several minutes after clinical death which was previously thought impossible".
Does this prove that there is life after death and that God exists?
Of course not, but it shows without a shadow of a doubt that there are many phenomena and events that science doesn't explain about the nature of consciousness and of the mind in general.
Someone's answer to that migtht be that science will one day explain everything: but that belief requires a deep faith in itself. Even though the object of that faith is science and not God, faith it is.
What is paradoxical about the way in which atheists - "unbelievers" is a misnomer, as they do believe without empirical or rational foundation in many things -, since 19th-century positivism to today's Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, have associated decline of religion with progress of science is that the advances in the latter, if anything, have demonstrated to us how many things in the universe, life and mind science doesn't understand, most notably their origin. And there are very good reasons to predict that it never will, as they probably require other constructs, other ways of thinking and other kinds of explanantion.
The connection between the brain, a material object, and the mind, or rather how the physicality of the former can produce the non-physicality of the latter, has not become clearer the more it has been studied and researched by science, but in fact the opposite has occurred: the questions have multiplied, while the answers have diminished in proportion.
It's perfectly true that it's in the nature of scientific investigation that every new problem solved, every new question answered gives rise to new problems and questions, which inspired one of the greatest philosophers of science, Sir Karl Popper, to title his intellectual autobiography Unended Quest.
But there is a difference between the type of investigation in which science excels, where satisfactory theories that can survive rigorous tests are reached, and the type of investigation which displays an exponentially increasing discrepancy between problems and their solutions.
What the neo-positivists of the early 20th century, like the Vienna Circle - thinking that they were following Ludwig Wittgenstein but in fact misinterpreting him -, were saying was that questions which cannot be answered by mere logic and empiricism (hence one of their names, "logic empiricists") should not be asked and pursued. Metaphysics and theology were nonsense. This was a way of limiting all intellectual search of knowledge to science.
This position has serious limitations. First a logical one: it is a self-contradictory position. If anything beyond the realm of science is nonsensical, what these philosophers (and their heirs today) are saying is nonsensical too, as it does not limit itself to logic and empirical evidence: they are engaging in metaphysics as well, albeit to oppose another metaphysical view.
And this takes us to its second serious limitation: if even people who have postulated boundaries for intellectual investigation cannot confine themselves to them and remain within them, that by itself is an indication that those boundaries are too narrow and unsatisfactory. And that science cannot provide all the answers that are necessary for a curious mind to be satisfied.
Even more, what if science itself, as it seems to be the case the more it expands and deepens, points to something outside itself?
From The Telegraph article:
The largest ever medical study into near-death and out-of-body experiences has discovered that some awareness may continue even after the brain has shut down completely.It is a controversial subject which has, until recently, been treated with widespread scepticism.
But scientists at the University of Southampton have spent four years examining more than 2,000 people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria.
And they found that nearly 40 per cent of people who survived described some kind of ‘awareness’ during the time when they were clinically dead before their hearts were restarted.
One man even recalled leaving his body entirely and watching his resuscitation from the corner of the room.
Despite being unconscious and ‘dead’ for three minutes, the 57-year-old social worker from Southampton, recounted the actions of the nursing staff in detail and described the sound of the machines.
“We know the brain can’t function when the heart has stopped beating,” said Dr Sam Parnia, a former research fellow at Southampton University, now at the State University of New York, who led the study.
“But in this case, conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to three minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.
“The man described everything that had happened in the room, but importantly, he heard two bleeps from a machine that makes a noise at three minute intervals. So we could time how long the experienced lasted for.
“He seemed very credible and everything that he said had happened to him had actually happened.”
Of 2060 cardiac arrest patients studied, 330 survived and of 140 surveyed, 39 per cent said they had experienced some kind of awareness while being resuscitated.
Although many could not recall specific details, some themes emerged. One in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness while nearly one third said time had slowed down or speeded up.
Some recalled seeing a bright light; a golden flash or the Sun shining. Others recounted feelings of fear or drowning or being dragged through deep water. 13 per cent said they had felt separated from their bodies and the same number said their sensed had been heightened.
Dr Parnia believes many more people may have experiences when they are close to death but drugs or sedatives used in the process of rescuitation may stop them remembering.
“Estimates have suggested that millions of people have had vivid experiences in relation to death but the scientific evidence has been ambiguous at best.
“Many people have assumed that these were hallucinations or illusions but they do seem to corresponded to actual events.
“And a higher proportion of people may have vivid death experiences, but do not recall them due to the effects of brain injury or sedative drugs on memory circuits.
“These experiences warrant further investigation.“
Dr David Wilde, a research psychologist and Nottingham Trent University, is currently compiling data on out-of-body experiences in an attempt to discover a pattern which links each episode.
He hopes the latest research will encourage new studies into the controversial topic.
“Most studies look retrospectively, 10 or 20 years ago, but the researchers went out looking for examples and used a really large sample size, so this gives the work a lot of validity.
“There is some very good evidence here that these experiences are actually happening after people have medically died.
“We just don’t know what is going on. We are still very much in the dark about what happens when you die and hopefully this study will help shine a scientific lens onto that.” [All emphases added]
True science is always a friend of the Bible. The best it can do is discover what the Bible has said all along.
Problem is, it’s not after death.
If one “comes back” he was not dead.
Dead is when you don’t come back m
We have assurance, we don’t need this pseudoscience.
and some people though alive have no thoughts at all...
We need to ask Sheldon Cooper about this.
The article used the term, 'clinical death', which is the cessation of circulation and breathing. It goes on to say that the brain typically stops functioning within 20-30 seconds of the heart stopping.
The dead-dead you're describing is the persistence of the condition which began as clinical death.
Yes. Clinical death.
Clinical death is not death so this has zero bearing whatsoever on life after death.
It is of interest in terms of levels of consciousnesses under conditions of minimal brain function.
I'm not sure that's right. Dead is dead. The pronouncement of death occurs because there were no signs of life apparent to the outside observer. Your argument for the patient not being dead depends on future events, which cannot be known at the time of the observation.
If, for example, the patient were dropped into a vat of liquid helium, all electrical and chemical activity would stop. There would be no question that the man in the vat would be dead to any observer. If we adopt your interpretation of death, whether the man were actually dead or not would depend on whether future medical science advances to the point where someone could be revived from being deep frozen, and then whether this particular person was.
Then, if you decide that the person is not dead because he is later revived, you have to ask where was he in the meantime?
“Your argument for the patient not being dead depends on future events, which cannot be known at the time of the observation.”
That’s right.
Are you suggesting a seance to determine the difference in experience between those who come back, don’t die, and those that actually die?
That would be a great study design, but in a practical sense it might be hard to do, or trust the data.
On a broader level, your argument and example of the frozen suspended animation is interesting, but it is philosophical, or semantic, only peripherally related the the question trying to be answered by this study.
Yes, the argument is semantic. We have to first define “death”, or at least the outer the boundary of life, before we can answer the question is there life after death. One of the problems I am pointing out is that under your definition, death occurs only when the subject does not ever recover, we have to know what is going to happen in the future. Since we cannot know what is going to happen in the future, do we then define the state of the subject as 98% dead, based on a probability of 98% that he will not be revived? That argument seems pointlessly academic to me. Then, the other problem is, where is the consciousness located? If the brain is not functioning during the gap between clinical death and the subject’s revival, how can consciousness reside there and yet function?
To do the study the subjects must be alive.
Dead people can’t be interviewed.
There is no percentage or chance, they are alive and can be interviewed or they died.
I am addressing the study. Only people who it turned out weren’t dead can be interviewed.
You seem to have the mistaken impression the subjects are interviewed during their near death experience.
We were all dead before we were alive, so in that sense it’s true.
Obviously, the people are alive when they are interviewed. What you miss (or resist) is that they were dead when they had the experiences they later describe. So far as I understand the article, there was no evidence of life apparent to the observer for an extended period, no brain activity, no heartbeat, nothing. That’s what we would agree to as being “dead”. You want to argue that the state of being dead depends on unknowable future events, whether or not the subject is later revived, and not the state of the subject at the time of the observation.
I don’t miss it.
They weren’t dead. Or they’d be dead.
Dead people don’t come back to life. That’s the definition of dead.
“So far as I understand the article, there was no evidence of life apparent to the observer for an extended period, no brain activity, no heartbeat, nothing. That’s what we would agree to as being “dead”.”
No.
Do not agree and this study proves it.
When there is an assumption or understanding that is proven wrong, here that observable brain activity or heartbeat can define death, then scientifically the understanding is changed.
The definition of no measurable heart activity nor brain activity is shown to not be sufficient for determining death, at least over the short time frame examined here.
Simple and no big deal, and not surprising.
So, only a subject who is clinically dead but later revived can have the consciousness event reported in the article? Does that exclude those who by some chance are not revived? Imagine two heart attack victims in separate rooms. In one room the defibrillator is working, and in the other it is broken. You do not know which is which until you try to revive the victim. By your definition, although both subjects have the same state of clinical death, only the one in the room with the broken defibrillator is actually dead.
Clinical death is not death. That’s why there is the qualifier “clinical”.
In your example, both are alive. One later dies, one is revived (not from being dead).
This addresses the limitations of clinical death assessment, it does not change what death is.
In death, there is a point of no return and that is death.
Of course by this definition Lazarus must be excluded, who by witness accounts was dead for several days and had begun to stink from it, by saying he was not dead. Nor would Christ fit this criteria. So this definition by its very declaration expressly excludes any possibility of life after death.
One could never even consider the possibility of the truth of either of these events, nor any resurrection event due solely to this definition. Even if the witnesses to any such events could be absolutely proven to be both truthful and correct, the definition presupposes the result.
This in itself is a violation of the scientific method. No amount of proof could satisfy, no matter how long the person had been dead, they would not have been dead after arising.
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