Can Survival after Death Be Proved?

The question of whether or not survival after death exists is an anomaly of modern times. To a large degree doubting survival or rejecting it altogether is the long-term result of the Enlightenment, when science began carving an identity for itself in opposition to religion. It took a few more centuries before scientists in the predominantly Christian West would dare to question an afterlife openly and even longer before they would adopt the stance of its being little more than religious drivel. Such a stance was tantamount to denying the existence of God and the central tenet of Christianity, the resurrected Christ. By the turn of the last century, the question of survival had become a legitimate and robust area of inquiry, preoccupying some of the most prominent scientists, scholars, and political figures of the time, from Nobel Prize–winning physicists to prime ministers.

By the dawn of the atomic age, the split between science and religion had become severe. Science 's chief distinction from religion was its reliance on materialist explanations for how reality works, in which spiritual forces, primarily divine will, play no role. A second major distinction was its refusal to consider survival after death, the linchpin of all religions. In those heady days of atomic bombs and sending men to the moon, scientists believed that they alone could uncover the true nature of the universe, promising rational explanations based on objectivity and proof rather than on religion's subjectivity and faith. Human nature, which is too untidy for pure science to objectively observe and mathematically describe, was left to the softer sciences. Even there, the materialist view seeped in. Archaeologists, for example, founded "New Archaeology." Although they still studied man-made cultures, they gave archaeology a scientific gloss by reducing the human saga to dreary strings of statistics and plotted climatic shifts. The cultural monuments of myth and ritual were treated like poison.

The notion of objectivity itself suffered a crushing blow when physicists discovered that the observer influences the outcome of tests at the most fundamental level of existence, the quantum level. Heinz Pagels, former president of the New York Academy of Sciences, stated, "There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space ... independent of actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it.... Reality is in part created by the observer." Until observation, then, it is not a "real object"; it has no objective existence or location in space or time. It seems, then, that we live in a subjective universe that sits on the razor's edge of matter and nonmatter.

I would not argue, as some do, that spirituality is the province of religion rather than science. To me, spirituality and materiality are not opposites; both are manifestations of the inner workings of reality, the study of which belongs to everyone. There is plenty of room for the desanctification of spirituality, just as there is for the dematerialization of hard-core positivist views of reality. On the other hand, the idea that hard science should have the last word is popular, and many today look to it for unequivocal answers about survival after death. This odd expectation supposes that the afterlife can be proved as an abstract law of nature, perhaps formulated mathematically and discovered at work inside an atom or at the core of a dying star or hidden somewhere in the massive, brooding stew of dark matter. Yet no one would expect science to provide proof for other invisible, unquantifiable aspects of reality, such as love. Although love cannot be proved, few scientists would deny its existence.

So far evidence for survival has come from the softer sciences, psychiatry and psychology, as well as medicine and biology, with specific, potentially revolutionary hints in neurobiology, quantum biology, and genetics. Survival evidence has been steadily mounting over the past century, largely because of medical advances that allow for more resuscitations. There is also much more awareness among physicians, more and more of whom are admitting to a belief in life after death, and especially among hospice personnel, so that more phenomena involving near-death experiences and nearing-death awareness are recorded and better documented than ever before. In addition, technology and engineering play a significant role in documenting the presence of the dead in sound and image.

In part I, we will look at the evidence from a number of standpoints. First, we'll explore the now-defunct materialist view of the universe. Materialists are people who believe that if you can perceive something with the physical senses or at least measure it, it's real. If you can't, it's imaginary. Hence, the brain is real, but the mind is not. A person in a body is real, but one without a body is not. We will then move on to the more conventional routes taken in search of proof: near-death experiences, after-death communication, and reincarnation. Given that the evidence is mostly composed of individual, somewhat isolated phenomena that do not submit to the scientific criteria required for proof, objective observation and replicability, later in this chapter I will briefly define the slippery line between proof and evidence as well as the especially tough problems parapsychologists face. In the interest of "objectivity," all of part I is based on the findings of other researchers, not my own. My job in this section is to present the evidence and evaluate whether or not it meets the standards of proof.

Typically, proof of survival is held to standards that are rarely met in other areas of research, the hard sciences included. Much of what the hard sciences present as proven is more extrapolation from a set of effects than fact. If this and that are observed to happen, why they happen is deduced. From these deductions, a workable hypothesis is formed and then tested. We don't know for sure, for instance, if there was ever a Big Bang, that stunning first moment in no-space, no-time, when something infinitely smaller than an atom exploded into what 13.7...