No, there’s not. In order to believe otherwise, you would have to be willing to radically alter our fundamental understanding of physics on the basis of almost no evidence. Which I’m not willing to do. But others feel differently! So we’re going to have a debate about it tonight — to be live-streamed, see below.
This is an Intelligence Squared debate, which is a series of Oxford-style formal debates that are held around the world, often with quite impressive participants. Four people, two on each side of a resolution. Seven-minute opening statements, round-table discussion, then two-minute closing statements. No slides or other visual aids; just bare-knuckle combat in the gladiatorial arena of ideas.
The resolution simply reads “Death Is Not Final,” and it will be affirmed by Eben Alexander and Raymond Moody, both of whom have written best-selling books along these lines. Alexander, in particular, is a neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience and now claims to have proof of the existence of Heaven. (For a skeptical take on Alexander, see this Esquire profile.) I’ll be negating the resolution, along with my partner Steven Novella. Steve is a practicing neuroscientist who is also active in the skeptic movement, blogging at Neurologica and leading the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast.
Festivities begin at 6:45pm Eastern Time. It will be broadcast on various NPR stations around the US, but you should also be able to see it live-streamed right here:
If you can’t catch the live-stream but still want to watch, I presume it will go on YouTube eventually, but I don’t know for sure.
To get a feeling for how an Intelligence Squared debate goes, you might check out Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens persuading a large group of people that the Catholic Church has harmed the world.
How long ago did you die, Tony? Do you get to see Jesus’s face pretty frequently there in heaven? Is heart-to-heart in heaven what brain-to-brain is on Earth? Is heaven located on the Earth side of Voyager, or does Voyager still have a ways to go before it arrives up there in heaven where you and Jesus are?
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@Richard
You will find out when your time comes.
Tony, I have an attorney at work on a contract designating me as your business representative for all things celestial. I think you will love it, and nobody will beat it. A lot of agents/managers receive 10% of gross right off the top, some even more. My contract proposal will state that all I ask is a measly 0.05%.
Why so low, you wonder. He must be planning a fast one. What is the catch, Richard?
I’m glad you asked. No catch, Tony. This is a legit offer.
Think it through with me. You died and went to heaven, and when you got there (where is it again? you forgot to say) you and Jesus had a heart to heart. I don’t know what that means, exactly, and I can’t wait to find out.
That is the point. If I, an atheist, am on pins and needles to finally have evidence of an afterlife, just think what the reaction will be from other non-believers, or of people who currently believe in Hinduism and stuff like that, who suddenly have to get real familiar in a big hurry with something that proves their deal has been wrong all along. And the Christian True Believer flock! This bunch is gonna go nutso. You are a draw, my friend. The box office draw to end all box office draws with the exception of the Trinity incarnate itself. Them-self. Whichever.
We will be booking you at any venue you agree to show up in, including 100,000 seat stadiums. Daily if you choose. Rock stars – what do they get for a gig? Say the highest paid draw for any entertainer, rock or pop or country or opera, is it $250 a ticket, maybe? That’s chicken feed for us, baby. That’s a nosebleed seat. That will maybe get you a spot for the car in the parking lot at a Tony gig. You are gonna be bringing in a mil or so a week for as long as you decide to do it. Easy. Maybe double that. I’ll get busy with the calculator in a bit, here.
And we aren’t even talking tv appearances yet, movie and video rights, self-help cd’s – brother, you are gonna OWN the self-help market, books, cd’s, video’s that fly off the shelves. Note to self: buy shares in FedEx and UPS. You will have a web page that gets so many hits we’ll need to by Comcast or somebody just to handle the intertubes traffic.
And wait till you get the Nobel Peace Prize. That’s gonna jack up revenue big time. Sure, we’ll have to sacrifice the occasional lecture date so you can go settle international disputes and the like, but that Prize is huge free advertising, my friend, which is always beaucoup money in the bank.
Eben Alexander tops the best seller list today, sure, but about a week after you come down from heaven his name will be forgotten. He’ll beg you to mention his name. Hell, you’re gonna be so famous the Pope will offer to kiss your ass on Christmas Eve dead center in Vatican Square just to get a little attention for himself for a change.
It’s gonna be all “Tony! Tony! Tony!” on everybody’s lips all around the world. The first person who died, met Jesus, and returned from the dead to tell about it.
My little 1/2 of 1 percent is gonna make me the second richest person in the world, only exceeded by my boss Tony.
I’ll do it for half of what Richard’s charging.
Get stuck in Sean. You’re on a roll, breaking hearts and taking names.
To all the mugs still bleating about the afterlife. Sit down and shut up. You already have 1 life which continues to astound me, why do you need another? How about stop indulging your collective fantasies, praising non existent deities and falling antiquated incoherent unfounded reprimand-able moral laws and do something useful with your life.
Tony what a load of absolute rubbish. Stop playing with words and think substantively. The “supernatural” effects the natural world all the time (at least according to fools like you) these effects should be detectable, study able and eventually decipherable to lead back to the “spiritual, mystical, supernatural” realm you claim exists and are betting all your hopes of salvation on.
God assaults the multivers
The discussion so far has not considered the possibility of certain elements of an individual’s personal consciousness *recurring* after a cosmic interval of time. It all depends on the correct underlying theory of space/time/matter.
In addition, a broader (perfectly scientific) question may be asked about human destiny and individual and collective objectives in the context of a ‘naturalistic’ and scientific framework. An expansion of pantheistic philosophies (and of course, more fundamental scientific theories) could help in better understanding of the relation between the ‘self’ and the universe.
My take on that kind of phenomena ( NDEs, UFOs, Bigfoot ) is that science should at least investigate just to be sure there is not something to it. In the small likelihood there is something to it it would be a huge discovery.
I am not saying that I believe in these phenomena, but refusing to at least investigate sounds counter-scientific to me.
I noticed in this debate, and Sean’s previous article ‘physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul’, that if there were a soul or life after death, that physics would have to be completely rewritten. That gave rise to some thoughts: 1, every physicist knows that the laws need rewriting (though not in relation to souls), as QM and relativity contradict each other when describing each other’s territory. That doesn’t imply that souls exist, but one can’t simply say that rewriting the laws is already a no-go sign. Incompatibility would be an issue, but that leads to: 2, The probabilistic nature of QM is glossed over. Consider a light source, a 50-50 beam splitter and two photodetectors. Turn the light intensity down to approx 1 photon per second. Which photodetector will fire next? Physics has no answer to this question, even though it is a physics question with a definite physics answer (one that can be answered by waiting to find out!). This lack of ability to predict leaves a huge hole at the core of QM and string theory (which has the same behavior). What is the explanation for this? What is it that *actually* decides which one will fire next? How come there seems to be a freely available ‘choice’? What does the choosing? The standard answer that it is ‘random’ remains unsatisfactory. Where is the random number generator? What is it made of? By what mechanism does it operate? Do actions happen for no reason? Physics is missing something that has physical consequence. The implication to me is that there is ‘universal mind’ whose job it is to make these decisions – something not made out of particles but that can interact with particles. By itself, that doesn’t then imply consciousness or souls, but there seems plenty of room for compatibility.
I just stumbled across your great website and then enjoyed reading the comments regarding this article. Then, I realized something…comments marked “Hidden due to low comment rating” all seem to be similar in the fact that they disagree with the presumed wisdom of the moderator and the groupthink of other commentators. Very disappointing on a site which seemed, at first blush, to be dedicated to pursuit of knowledge rather than defender of status quo.
@DG
Uh, this site is definitely NOT a defender of the status quo. You might take a closer look, something you don’t seem to have done so far. And in connection with that, you should’ve also noticed that you can actually read all the hidden comments just by clicking on “Click here to see.” Get a grip, man!
Eben Alexander have given 0 arguments except his own experience….
Even I can do better.
I don’t know if there is but I found some theories (wrong or not I don’t know) of afterlife.
First we have all that psi/ESP/reincarnation stuff of people like Brian Josephson, Daryl Bem and Ian Stevenson.
It goes along with idea of panpsychism and the conscious self aware universe of theoretical nuclear physicist Amit Goswami.
Now we have more scientist stuff like the notion of quantum mind and non-computable quantum consciousness.
The most famous is of course the Orch-Or theory of physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesist Stuart Hameroff. Japanese scientist Anirban Bandyopadhyay have found quantum vibration inside of neuron microtubule so of all quantum mind theory, Orch-Or have some proofs.
Quantum physicist Henry Stapp have another version for quantum consciousness: for him quantum wave functions collapse when conscious minds select one among the alternative quantum possibilities. It is related to the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Less known: quantum brain dynamics of physicist Hiroomi Umezawa who postulate that memory is stocked in a quantum field.
Know we have holonomic brain theory of neuroscientist Karl Pribram and theoretical physicist David Bohm. According to them the brain is an holographic storage network.
Biocentrism of stem cell biologist Robert Lanza (consciousness is in the center of the universe).
Many-worlds interpretation/many-minds interpretation and quantum immortality of quantum physicist Hugh Everett. A lot of people agree on MWI but few agree with Everett that when you die, your consciousness always go in a spontaneously created universe where you don’t die.
Then we have all that stuff with NDE and work of Pim van Lommel.
http://www.near-death.com/evidence.html
For the last we have the non-materialist and dualist neuroscientist Mario Beauregard who have made som strange works with analyzing people praying…. and concluded that mind and body are separated.
Bob Iles,
You might want to take a look at the research:
“We therefore designed and analyzed a large-scale randomized experiment on a social news aggregation Web site to investigate whether knowledge of such aggregates distorts decision-making. Prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6146/647
@James Cross
You might want to take the time to figure out that what you’ve quoted is totally irrelevant to this blog. Like I said before, get a grip!
It is amazing how inept science is against “god”. You people are seriously trying to prove what happens after death. Science is a wonder of defeatism against the cause of all human decline, the bible.
God is not the issue. Christians are not the issue. That which is the cause of all problems in the human race is theology, & in America that means the bible.
Science will remain in absolute irrelevance & ineptitude forever about this. They will debate it, they will stand up with theologians & do anything but rid the human race of its destruction.
No one on the “–against god” side actually wants to get rid of the bible. That much is painfully obvious. They are afraid to define the bible. They are afraid to test the bible. & they are more afraid than anything of getting rid of the bible.
It is a monumental task in their minds that is not worth any real effort.
Science today could not be more pathetic.
I bet $10.00, right now, that nobody besides UniversalMind has any idea what he is trying to say with his comment, other than his concluding opinion of science. An opinion not worth $00.10, by the way.