LOOK! NO GOD!

Paranormal Phenomena

The paranormal includes a number of phenomena. The following are considered here.
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extrasensory perception       near-death experiences

telekinesis       ghosts       necromancy       conclusion

Of the above, near-death experiences are widely accepted as real, though any paranormal or supernatural aspect of them is much more contentious. There is anecdotal evidence for paranormal aspects of some near-death experiences and for the veracity of some of the other listed phenomena, but none have been rigorously established.

Even if any are real, they might prompt a modification of the laws of physics or a reassessment of the materialistic nature of the universe. However, none are compatible with the picture painted by any major religion or suggestive of the existence of a god.

Extrasensory Perception

Extrasensory perception (ESP) is the gaining of information that could not have come through the normal senses or logical thought. ESP phenomena are usually divided into three categories: telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition.

Telepathy is communication between two minds.

Clairvoyance is the gaining of information about something in the world like the location of a body.

Precognition is the gaining of information about something that happens after the information is gained and that the person had no way of predicting by normal means, e.g. a plane crash.

Many people believe they have had one or more of these experiences.

I personally have had a couple of experiences which aren't obviously explicable by natural means. In the first, I was working at a children's summer camp in upstate New York. About 8 of us went about half a mile along a track into the woods in the late evening (it was dark, but there was a full moon) and lit a fire to make some drinks and eat marshmallows. We realised we had forgotten to bring something from the camp. So I volunteered to walk back and get it. I asked if anyone else wanted to come, but no one did. After walking for a minute or two, I heard the footsteps of a couple of people running after me. I stopped and waited for them. But no one appeared. Perplexed, I walked back towards the group. When I arrived, they were all still sitting around the fire. I asked if anyone had come after me and explained what I had heard. Two people said that, after I left, they had thought they should go with me and thought about chasing after me, but both had then decided not to.

The second happened when I was a Christian. A friend had, for a few days, been feeling uncharacteristically negative and unenthusiastic about her faith and quite upset about the fact. While at home, thinking about this, I got a brief disturbing mental image of a deep very black hole, like a mine shaft, with flames at the bottom. To me it was obviously an image of hell. That evening I went to church and my friend, who normally always comes with me, chose to stay home. During the service, there was an altar call and I had a deep conviction that I had to go up to fix my friend's problem. I did. And when I got home, she had got over her depression and was back to her normal self. In talking about it, it turned out that she had had an image of a deep black hole about the same time I did, though hers had no flames.

A friend who was doing a PhD in geology, and a very serious person, told me of an incident when he was working in the field a long way from town. On Saturday, he suddenly started to worry about his grandmother. He didn't know why, because he rarely thought about her and there had been no indication of any problem. Anyway, he couldn't shake this worry for the rest of the day and into the next. Then the feeling left him as quickly as it had come and he was back to normal. When he got back to town, he learnt that his grandmother had had a heart attack on the Saturday and died the next day.

Another friend told me that he had been driving along a country road when suddenly everything in his field of view went red for a second or so. He slowed down. As he came around the next bend, he came across a head-on collision which had just happened and in which one of the drivers had died.

Could such experiences be explained in natural terms? Maybe both my friends had lied, though, knowing them, that seems very unlikely and I could see no reason for them to do so. With my own experiences, of course, lying isn't an issue. Maybe everything results from unlikely coincidences or maybe memories are faulty. All in all, though I can't be certain, it seems likely to me that these things did happen and that there was no natural cause for them.

Of course, such phenomena are not really amenable to scientific investigation where experiments have to be be conducted under controlled conditions and where results have to be reproducible. So the standard scientific view is that such things don't happen. Scientists have a fairly well established view of how the universe works and that view doesn't include telepathy, clairvoyance of precognition.

Controlled experiments have of course been done on people who claim to have psychic powers and these have generally come up negative. However, such experiments involve things like predicting the picture on a card that can't be seen. Of course, most reported cases of ESP involve incidents of great emotional significance. It could be that picking a card just doesn't have sufficient emotional impact to initiate any form of ESP.

Although ESP is not compatible with the standard models of how the universe works, it could be that our models are just not complete. Afterall, if ESP occurs only in situations like someone dying, then it would be very difficult to investigate scientifically. The fact that scientific models don't include it could be a reflection of the fact that it hasn't been systematically investigated rather than that it doesn't exist.

At the turn of the 20th Century, we had no idea of quantum physics or that particles could be in multiple states at the same time. Even now, quantum entanglement seems, at first glance, to defy relativity and certainly defies classical mechanics. Two particles, even lights years apart can be expressions of a single wave function, making them dependent on one another. Minds could be connected in a similar way, even if most of the time, we see no evidence of it.

Materialism is the belief that everything in the universe is controlled and explicable in terms of the laws of physics. Our knowledge of the laws of physics may not yet be complete. If other aspects are added that allow ESP and the like, they will still be the laws of physics and so a world with ESP can still be understood and explained in materialist terms without souls or gods.

So, what implications does all this have for religion? Most mainstream religions say nothing about ESP and so the existence of ESP would not provide any evidence for or against religion. A materialist view with no souls or gods is quite compatible with the existence of ESP if it does turn out to exist.

Near-death Experiences

Near-death Experiences (NDEs) are widely reported and have remarkably consistent features across people of different cultures, different religious or irreligious beliefs, different ages (including very young children) and different historical eras (including Ancient times).

It is generally accepted that somewhere between 10% and 20% of people who suffer a cardiac arrest and are resuscitated report a near-death experience.

Many thousands of such cases have been recorded and investigated, meaning that there exists quite a lot of data on them. There is an extensive database of descriptions of NDEs at the Near-death Experience Research Foundation website for anyone who is interested.

The Nature of NDEs

Most NDEs are very positive experiences, though maybe 10-20% are negative.

Positive NDEs

Positive NDEs tend to have one or more of the following components:

• An out-of-body experience - a sense of being outside of one's body, often floating above it and looking down upon it, and sometimes watching medical teams working on it
• Passing through a tunnel
• Encountering a brilliant white light, the light often being benevolent, though featureless, people or spirits
• Being engulfed in a feeling of total unconditional love, acceptance and reassurance, often in the form of the light beings, and the realisation that love is all that really matters, not worldly possessions, career etc.
• Being in an idyllic rural environment with meadows, flowers, woods etc. and seeing flowing threads of coloured light, often in a river of such light
• A feeling of peace, freedom from pain and an extreme clarity of perception, thought, understanding and consciousness
• Meeting loved ones who have died and sometimes receiving advice from them, often telepathically, the advice frequently being that one needs to go back because it's not one's time yet or because there are still things one needs to do, like taking care of loved ones
• Reliving past life experiences very quickly (seeing one's life flash before one's eyes), and sometimes perceiving them from the viewpoint of other people that one's actions affected
• A sense of being in another realm which feels so good that there is a reluctance to return to normal life
• A boundary which, if one crosses, there is no return

NDEs often seem more real than normal life and the experiences tend to be very persistent in memory, often remaing very fresh decades later. Many who experience NDEs are permanently changed. These changes most often include:

• A reduced fear of death and a more positive outlook on life
• An increased compassion and concern for others
• A reduced attachment to material things
• An increased spiritual awareness and understanding and a greater sense of purpose

Negative NDEs

As mentioned above, it is estimated that some 10-20% of NDEs are negative, some being very distressing or frightening. Bad NDEs seem generally to be one of three types: inverse, void and hellish.

In the inverse type, people experience similar things to what is experienced in the positive NDEs, but they find it all distressing. For instance, they might look down to see their body being taken care of, but know that what the carers are doing is wrong and yet are unable to communicate this, leading to panic.

In the void type, the person experiences a vast emptiness where there is nothing but themselves, alone and isolated. Sometimes, not even their body is there. There may be the feeling that eternity is going to be spent in this state, a state of horror and misery. They might look for help from their god or some other being, but realise that there isn't going to be any.

In the hellish type, the person is taken to a dark and frightening place where there might be other souls with grotesque appearance and with whom there is no chance of interaction. The scene might be accompanied by mournful wailing and groaning. In some cases, the experiencer is tormented painfully by grotesque beings.

People who have these negative experiences often do not communicate them to anyone for many years or indeed ever. They react afterwards in different ways. Some manage to dismiss it as psychosis; others turn their lives around so as to hopefully avoid such an experience after death. Yet others are permanently disturbed by the experience, reliving the associated feelings over and over.

The Cause of NDEs

From a Religious Perspective

It is tempting, from a religious perspective, to see an NDE as a glimpse into the afterlife, and in fact this is one of the most common interpretations. As such, NDEs are often taken as evidence for an afterlife and for a religious world view.

The trouble is that, if one takes say a Christian perspective, one might expect that NDEs for Christians would be positive experiences and those for non-Christians negative experiences. But this is not the case. There is no consistent relationship between one's prior religious belief or disbelief and the pleasantness or otherwise of the NDE.

If anything, it seems to be the other way round, where the religious are more likely to have a bad experience. In an analysis of 443 NDEers, amongst the catholics in the sample, 13% of the NDEs were negative. Amongst the protestants 9% were negative, amongst the Jews 8% were, amongst the agnostics 6% were and similarly amongst the atheists 6% were negative.

Neither is there an obvious relation between how 'good' a person is and the type of NDE: murderers serving life sentences have reported blissful NDEs, while good, kind people have had hellish ones.

Attempts have been made to find other traits which are common to people who have bad NDEs. It seems that those who have inverse NDEs tend to be people who need to be in control of everything in life. The loss of control in the NDE is frightening to them and casts a negative pall over the experience. However, sometimes, the patient reaches the point of being too exhausted to maintain their attempts at control. They then relax and, from then on, the experience becomes a much more pleasant one.

People who have hellish NDEs appear nearly always to be people who have been brought up in religious contexts where the existence of hell and the fear of hell are important parts of their thinking.

Amongst those who have positive experiences, people who have had a Christian upbringing, or even just lived in a society with a dominantly Christian culture, often report seeing angels, Jesus or God, but, in the same way, people with other religious backgrounds see figure related to their religions. It seems rather that the images seen are interpreted in terms of one's expectations.

Furthermore, what people see in NDEs doesn't generally correspond with what their religions says they should expect after death. It would appear that, if there is life after death, and if an NDE is a preview of that life, then that life does not correspond to what is taught by any major religion.

Of course, it may be that the NDE is just a preliminary to the afterlife and that the real afterlife isn't seen until one crosses that boundary of no return. And of course no one had done that and come back to tell us about it.

From a Materialist Perspective

A second common view is that NDEs result from physical and chemical changes in the brain when blood circulation stops and oxygen levels drop.

Electroencephalograms (EEGs) record the electrical activity of the brain produced by the fring of neurons. There are many instances of EEGs being used to record brain electrical activity as people are taken off life support and allowed to die. Electrical activity decreases quite rapidly after the heart stops and blood circulation to the brain ceases. The EEG generally flatlines within a few seconds.

However, in a few cases, after the cessation of blood flow and the cessation of normal electrical activity, there is a surge in high-frequency (>25 Hz) gamma wave electrical activity lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes, very occasionally for over an hour. Gamma waves are normally associated with wakefulness, concentration and awareness.

It has been theorised that this activity could give rise to conscious experience even when most of the brain's normal activity has ceased.

Of course, these patients don't live to tell the tale, but it may be significant that the proportion of people in whom this gamma wave surge occurs is similar to the proportion of people who report a near-death experience after cardiac arrest.

It would be good to have EEG data for cardiac arrest patients who are resuscitated to see if there is a correlation between the patients who have this gamma wave surge and the patients who report an NDE. But of course, when a patient has had an unintended cardiac arrest, the main concern is for resuscitation rather than recording their brain activity.

If NDEs do have a physical explanation, could the typical experiences be explained in those terms?

The heightened sense of awareness and consciousness could be easily explained by the abnormally high gamma wave activity, seeing as these things are known to be associated with gamma activity in normal waking life.

It is known that oxygen starvation (hypoxia) can induce a temporary state of euphoria. Many people deliberately use strangulation to produce euphoria and enhanced arousal, particularly in the context of sex. Men have been reported to get erections and even to ejaculate after being hanged.

Hypoxia is also known to produce other effects including out-of-body experiences (perhaps through disruption of the normal integration of sensory information), hallucinations, transcendental experiences and shifts in consciousness. The combination of euphoria and hallucination could quite conceiveably be experienced as a feeling of unconditional love and acceptance and being in an idyllic environment. The difference between what is perceived and normal life would likely give the impression of being in 'a different realm'.

Hypoxia has also been reported to cause loss of peripheral vision, perhaps giving the impression of looking along a tunnel with light at the end.

The human brain is considered to contain all our memories. To be conscious of them all at all times would make life impossible. So it seems that the brain has evolved a way to supress all but one stream of consciousness, a filter system that allows memories to be brought to mind only when needed. It is possible that there is some neurological mechanism for this supression, a mechanism which ceases to work when the brain is not functioning properly, e.g. from lack of oxygen as death approaches. Failure of this mechanism in near-death patients could explain the reliving of past experiences.

The same or a similar mechanism might keep emotions and thoughts at a managable level, again failure leading to extreme experience of these.

Meeting dead loved ones could be an expression of deep-seated yearnings which are normally not brought to mind in day-to-day life, but which might surface in situations where the brain's filter system ceases to operate properly.

Suggestions of Supernatural Experiences

There are numerous reports of NDEers seeing things happening that took place while they were unconscious or even dead, and that turn out to have actually happened. The fact that the patient was unconscious at the time with their eyes were closed suggests the possibility of some sort of extrasensory perception, though there is the possibility that they received auditory clues and translated these into visual memories.

A small number of experiments have been designed where messages, pictures etc. are placed in the surgical theatre in positions where neither the patient nor the medical team could see them, but where someone looking down from near the ceiling would see them. However, little data has been collected to date, and no one reporting an out-of-body experience in such a situation has been able to say what these were.

However, there are a few reports of people who have had NDEs recalling things that they could not have perceived through any of their normal senses.

Dr Bruce Greyson recounts a few such stories.

The Spagetti Stain

This incident occurred when Dr Greyson was a psychiatric intern. He was eating in the hospital cafeteria when his buzzer went off to call him to a patient. It made him jump and he spilt spagetti sauce on his tie. He put on a lab coat to cover it up before visiting the patient. The patient was a girl who had overdosed. She was unconscious and unresponsive and a nurse was sitting with her. He was told that her friend who had brought her in was sitting in a waiting room about 50 m along the corridor, so he went to talk to her about what had happened. Being hot, he unbuttoned his lab coat exposing the stain on his tie. He buttoned it up again before returning to the ward. When he got back, the nurse said that there had been no change in the patient's condition.

The next morning he visited the patient to find her awake. He introduced himself. The patient said, "I know who you are; I remember you from last night." The doctor said he thought she had been out cold. The patient said "Not in my room; I saw you talking to Susan down the hall." She told him what they had talked about and mentioned that he had had a stain on his tie.

Dr Greyson was very much a materialist at the time and didn't know what to make of what he was told. But largely as a result of this incident, he later went on to research NDEs, collecting thousands of case staudies, and in fact becoming one of the world's leading authorities, publishing numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals. He is no longer a pure materialist, but is convinced that there is more to the mind than the known physical processes of the brain.

The YouTube video here includes Dr Greyson's account of this incident between 5:42 and 11:03.

Despite what the above picture might suggest, Dr Greyson is not a pirate.

The Chicken

In another incident that Dr Greyson reports, a patient, under general anaesthetic and with his eyes closed, reportedly said that he had looked down and seen the surgeon flapping his arms like a chicken trying to fly. It turned out later that the surgeon often pointed to things with his elbows so as not to risk contaminating his hands.

The Red Sports Car

A young South African man, Jack, was in hospital with pneumonia and close to death. A nurse, Anita spent a lot of time with him, but took the weekend off and left him with another nurse. During the weekend he stopped breathing and was resuscitated. During that episode he had an NDE. He was in a beautiful pastoral scene and Anita came out of the woods towards him. He knew he was in a different world and was surprised that she was there. She said "Jack, you can't stay here with me. I want you to go back and find my parents and tell them that I love them very much and I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB."

Jack woke up later in his hospital bed. He started to tell the nurse about his experience. It later turned out that that weekend was Anita's 21st birthday and her parents had surprised her with a gift of a red MGB sports car. Anita took it for a test drive, crashed into a pole and died instantly a short time before Jack's NDE.

The YouTube video here includes the account of this incident between 19:22 and 22:20.

Pim van Lommel, a Dutch doctor reports the case of a woman, Vicky, who had been totally blind from birth.

The Blind Woman

Vicky had been born in 1951, very premature, after a pregnancy of just 22-weeks. She was put in a crib with 100% oxygen. I wasn't known at the time that this could damage the sight. Her eyeballs and optic nerves atrophied and the visual cortex of her brain failed to develop properly. She never saw anything, not even blackness, and had no concept of what vision would be like. Her dreams involved no visual impressions, just sound, touch, smell etc.

At age 22, she had a near-death experience in which she saw her body from above. At first she didn't know who it was she was looking at, but then she recognised the ring on her finger which she had only ever known by feel. The experience was somehat frightening as she had never seen anything before. She saw people working on her body, but couldn't communicate with them. So she left: she rose up through the ceiling and saw the roof of the hospital and trees. She moved into an idyllic place where she met her deceased grandmother and a man that she didn't know, but who looked at her lovingly.

10 years later, her mother confessed to Vicky that Vicky had been born out of wedlock and that her biological father was a Jewish man who had been killed in the Second World War. Her mother described the man, and Vicky recognised him as the man she had seen in her NDE.

The YouTube video here includes the account of this incident between 25:45 and 30:13.

Now, you may have noticed an inconsistency in the story in that Vicky was born in 1951 while her biolgogical father had died in the war that ended in 1945. I suspect that this was an error in the telling of the story rather than evidence that the story was made up. Had he made it up, he would presumably been careful to be consistent.

Of course, these are all anecdotal accounts from just a couple of people, and so don't meet the requirements for scientifically established and verifiable knowledge. But they are interesting in that, if they are real, then a reassessment of our understanding of the material nature of the universe would be required.

We Don't Really Know

If knowledge of things that could not have been gained through the senses actually occurs, then this is suggestive of a supernatural origin.

A supernatural origin would imply that there is more to the mind than just the activity of the brain. However, our present knowledge regarding NDEs is not sufficient to say much more than that there may be something more to us.

Of course, NDEs cannot be conjured up at will and are generally not repeatable, so traditional rigorous scientific approaches cannot be used. The collection of more and more reliable accounts, even if they are anecdotal, can help us to progress our understanding.

If we assume that the cases of supposed extrasensory perception are not real, then it is reasonable to consider that all the reported events result from neurophysiological changes in a brain that is being starved of oxygen and is thus ceasing to function normally. However, if the more supernatural aspect of NDEs do turn out to be substantiated, then this does have implications for our understanding of the nature of the universe. As explained in the section above on extrasensory perception, however, this does not necessarily imply that the universe is not purely material or that there are souls and a god.

All in all, near-death experiences are not fully understood. They may or may not fit with the present materialist view of the universe, but they seem not to fit with the view propounded by any mainstream religion either. Admittedly, many who have NDEs become more spiritual after the event, but this doesn't generally translate into participation in any organised religion. Even if they do immerse themselves in a religion, the the one they choose depends primarily on the religion amongst which they grew up. As such, NDEs do not provide evidence for the veracity of any particular religion.

Telekinesis

Telekinesis is the process of causing things to move through thoughts alone with no involvement of physical means.

Telekinesis is not commonly reported or claimed. But Uri Geller made himself famous in the 1960s by supposedly using his mind to bend spoons and the like. His claims were later thoroughly debunked as mere conjuring tricks. Businessman Gerald Fleming offered £250,000 to Uri if he could bend a spoon under controlled conditions. But he didn't take it up.

There is insifficient evidence for the existence of telekinesis for it to be worthy of serious consideration.

Ghosts

Many, maybe most, people who haven't seen a ghost know someone who says they have.

As with ESP, ghosts are not part of the standard scientific model of our universe. Though, as with ESP, science cannot show that there is no such thing. I have never seen one.

Ghosts are one of those things on which we probably just have to reserve judgment.

The non-existence of ghosts is quite compatible with an atheistic materialistic view of the universe. The existence of ghosts is not really comaptible with the claims of Christianity or of many other religions, though it is maybe compatible with some. Neither their existence nor their non-existence lends any support of the claims of Christianity.

Necromancy

Necromancy is the act of communicating with the spirits of dead people.

This was more common in the earlier days of humanity when most people held animistic views and worshipped ancestors. Generally, a shaman would go into an altered state of consciousness or a trance, and communicate with the spirit world. Of course, there is generally no evidence that the messages provided by the shaman actually come from spirits - that has to be taken on faith.

There are people nowadays, who generally call themselves mediums rather than shamans, but who still claim to communicate with the sprits of dead people. Many of these are also fortune tellers because both professions require the same skills of eliciting information in a non-obvious way from the customer and then relaying messages that fit with the information obtained and that are sufficiently vague and ambiguous that at least something in the message might ring true.

Of course, if fortune tellers really could see the future, they would be the ones who win the lotteries and buy the stock market shares that are just about to zoom. None of them ever seem to do that.

Astrologers use the same technique of providing information which can appear to fit many different circumstances, Derrin Brown has a video in which he gives each of a group of people with different star signs a personal horoscope and finds that every one of them found their horoscope to be very relevant and accurate in their personal situation. Then he points out that they all got the same horoscope that was written before he knew anything about any of them. The video is on YouTube and can be viewed here.

Seances have been a popular activity in some circles in recent times, in some cases for serious purposes, though more commonly for a bit of fun. A group of people sit around a ouija board with letters etc. around the edge. They each place a finger on a planchette and together gently push it around to the letters in the hope of spelling out a message. Of course, it is easy for one person to control the movement without anyone else realising it.

There is no good evidence that necromancy ever results in communication with spirits or produces meaningful messages other than those made up by the medium.

Conclusion

While is is possible that there are phenomena that are not compatible with the laws of physics as presently understood, the evidence is far from conclusive. Even if it does turn out that this is the case, none of the phenomena provide any support for the veracity of any mainstream religion. In fact, if anything, they provide evidence against them.

Such 'supernatural' phenomena, rather than contradicting the materialistic view of the universe, would just suggest that there is more to the laws of physics than we presently know.

Image Acknowledgements

Plane crash: Wikimedia Commons
Wave function: Rawpixel
Out-of-body experience: Flickr
Tunnel: Picryl
Void: NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive - GetArchive
Smoke ghost: Flickr
Seance: Pexels