Science and the Afterlife Experience - Review

Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness by Christopher David Carter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, two late night existential, mortality crises later, and here I am. I have MANY thoughts on this book, and will have a fuller review later. For now, let me say this. He makes some good philosophical points. For one, skepticism implies doubt pending evidence, not absolute denial of phenomena we don't understand. His overall thrust is that scientific materialism as practiced today can be it's own form of fundamentalism, pre-disposed to denying any evidence that doesn't point to a soulless, purposeless, mechanistic universe. Furthermore, that maybe it's possible to walk a middle path with regard to some paranormal phenomena that neither believes blindly or denies evidence. Having said that, he does seem a little too ready to believe some of the stories in this book. Although I will say he had a spectacular point about skeptics in pointing out that they are mostly psychologists, not physicists, and they are relying on out-dated physics to defend their skepticism, with no apparent awareness of the questions about consciousness raised by theories like quantum mechanics (this is a loose and potentially problematic statement, i know). And also just in pointing out that even materialists still don't have a tremendously sound definition of consciousness, although that particular claim I would like to research more.

There are many stories here submitted as evidence for reincarnation, supernatural apparitions and contact with the other side through mediums. They are well sourced generally, and he tends to pick phenomena witnessed by many people, researched by skeptics who failed to provide a definitive debunking, and in some cases became believers, where witnesses were cross-examined to see if their stories held up. He works though the possible explanations for each event, including fraud, and for many of these stories narrows it down to: evidence for survival of consciousness. He certainly acknowledges that fraud has existed in all of these areas, but takes great pains to deliver only evidence that seems to have removed the possibility of fraud. The most interesting of all these cases to me is the paranormal investigator who dies in 1903, and then, if the evidence is to be believed, sends cryptic messages from beyond through several mediums around the world which make no sense until all of them are put together. I'm not sure I believe that one, but it's an interesting idea. But that's what all this comes down to, doesn't it? You either believe that people saw ghosts, can channel living human consciousness from behond the grave or are reincarnated, or you believe the reports are bunk, that people are excitable, or impressionable, or deluded or just flat-out liars.

I'm not sure what I believe on this stuff (and I know it's not proper in this day and age to not declare all of the paranormal debunked and reassure my readers that the only mysteries the universe has left to reveal are relatively mundane time and space mathematical formulas), but I did enjoy reading this attempt at looking for evidence of the afterlife with as little prejudice as possible. The degree to which you believe the stories inside and how much the author succeeded in abandoning his biases, will still probably entirely depend on the level of skepticism you have going into it.

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