Life after death: some notes to help you with GCSE

Here are a few notes and links to back up the sessions I've done for Year 11 on "life after death". I hope you'll find them useful! Remember I'm in and out of St Peter's each week, and am always happy to help anybody with this stuff; so if you have any queries, or further information you'd like, get in touch via your teacher, and I'll do whatever I can. The better a grade we can help you achieve, the happier I'll be!

Ghosts and apparitions

What we said

Although many people argue that all ghost reports are just fanciful thinking or deliberate falsehood, there are so many millions of reports, stretching over so many centuries and cultures, that it seems to me there must be something going on. I don't believe it's a case of dead people who are really there, though; because

The Bible says, "It is appointed to humans once to die, and after this to face judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). The notion of dead people being "stuck" between worlds doesn't fit with a biblical view. You're either here, or you're in the next life; not flitting between the two.
There's no consistent pattern that would allow us to interpret the sightings of ghosts as dead people hanging around. The reports seem to point towards either optical and sensory illusions, either created by your brain, or by some natural mechanism we don't understand yet.

So when we look at the evidence, we find two kinds of phenomenon:

A ghost behaves a bit like a YouTube clip being played back. It doesn't pay any attention to you; it just parades in front of you. It may look see-through, and it may walk through walls (especially if a long time ago there was an old doorway which has since been bricked up, right at the point where they go through it). If it stands in front of a mirror there will be no reflection, and it won't cast a shadow on the floor. A ghost may look like someone who died centuries before.
An apparition is quite different. It will look solid, and you will probably think it's just another living human. It has a shadow, and a reflection. It will talk to you, quite normally, and if it leaves the room it will use the door, turning the handle! You will often see apparitions of people who are still living (but somewhere else at the point when they are sighted), or who have died fairly recently; but you will never see an apparition of someone who has been dead for years.

We probably need two different theories to account for these two different phenomena. Ghosts seem to be a kind of "movie" recorded somehow by the place in which they appear, and locked in there; so that when the conditions are just right, the "movie" will be played back. We have no idea how this could work, and that's the weakness of the theory! But it does seem to happen when (a) an action is performed on the same spot repeatedly - e.g. someone sitting in the same chair reading the paper, every day for years - or (b) a dramatic action is performed on that spot (e.g. somebody being killed, or discovering something tragic).

There are other possibilities, however! Infrasound is one of those. If there's a malfunctioning piece of electrical equipment (a fan or air-conditioning unit maybe), it's possible that it will create a vibration which your ear won't hear, but your mind will be affected by. So you'll experience feelings of panic or distress, or of being watched by somebody just out of your sight line. You may feel cold, or imagine that something dreadful has happened in this spot in the past. When the infrasound is dealt with, all of these feelings disappear! (Vic Tandy at Coventry University was the researcher who discovered this.)

Less likely: it has been suggested that we can experience a "time-slip", in which we're temporarily transported back to another period of history, and that can explain ghostly things that happen. This raises all kinds of insoluble questions about the nature of time (a bit like the "Back to the Future" movies!) but there are some intriguing stories. The best-known is probably that of Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jouradain, two English academics who visited the Palace of Versailles in 1901; the Wikipedia page contains a good, factual, detailed account which is quite neutral; science writer Brian Dunning has written an entertaining investigation which tries to debunk the whole thing.

Poltergeists

The name comes from the German for "unruly spirit". A poltergeist happens when you have strange things happening in a house: typically, people are thrown out of bed, or thrown downstairs; objects take off from surfaces and levitate, or change positions unaccountably; noises are heard in the walls, or in the garden overnight. It can be quite scarey, but poltergeists never do any serious harm (for example, they never break the bones of people thrown downstairs). For that reason, many researchers suspect that this phenomenon has nothing to do with dead people at all; it may come from inside the person concerned, who doesn't really want to harm himself or herself.

What could it be? Many researchers have noticed that there's usually one person who is the centre of the whole thing. And typically this is a young person who is passing through puberty, and perhaps not adjusting very well to the bodily changes which are going on. So having a poltergeist has been described as "having a nervous breakdown outside your own head". Instead of bad things happening in your mind and thoughts, you are taking it out on the environment.

Of course, this theory would mean that psychokinesis is true (the word means "being able to change things in the physical world by the power of your mind"). And we have no proof of that. So it's just a theory, but it does seem to explain lots of the things which go on. And it would explain why a few months later - when the young person's crisis is over - the poltergeist happenings simply fade away.

Poltergeists are more common than most people imagine; the Wikipedia page (which is pretty good at the moment, although of course it may be re-edited by some idiot before you see it!) contains links to articles on many of the most famous cases. And History Today has an interesting article about historical cases. However, it is also relatively easy to fake a poltergeist, and there have been lots of disghonest claims. Also, we believe that in some well-known cases there may have been something genuine happening to start with - but then the people concerned started to like the attention they were getting, and started claiming things that weren't true. This may have happened with the famous Enfield poltergeist in 1978.

My conclusion is that, whatever they are, poltergeist phenomena tell us absolutely nothing about life after death. And probably most researchers would agree.

Spirit communications

In March 1848, an 11-year-old girl and her 15-year-old sister were living in a cabin in Hydesville, New York State, when a poltergeist started making rapping noises in the walls. (For the full story see here or here.) They quickly worked out a way of communicating with it; and this became the start of modern spiritualism - the religion which claims we can communicate with the dead.

The idea is that dead people go to "the Other Side", where they live a similar life to this one (only much better), make spiritual progress in various ways, and can still contact those they have loved on this side. The two most common ways of contacting the dead have been mediums (each of the Fox sisters, and their older sister too, began holding sessions where they would go into trance and attempt to bring back messages for their "sitters" from spirits who wished to contact them) or ouija boards, a method invented by a Baltimore cabinetmaker in 1869. It's basically a piece of wood with the letters of the alphabet written on it, on which supernaturally words will be spelled out and messages delivered.

After studying all the evidence, I believe spiritualism is misguided and dangerous. There's certainly something there that needs to be explained: mediums often come up with messages which contain information they couldn't possibly have learned elsewhere, and ouija boards, too, can deliver disturbingly accurate messages. But in a century and a half of messages, we haven't really learned any useful information about the Other Side; instead there have been lots of contradictory and incoherent statements. The impact of mediumship on somebody's life can be extremely negative (lots of leading mediums have ended up with horrifying personal problems - drink, drugs, dependencies of different kinds) and sometimes receiving messages can have bad effects on the recipient too. Ouija boards in particular are notorious for the way they may change people's lives for the worse.

I think there can be other explanations for where the messages come from.

Some are clearly drawn from the minds of other people, and it's possible that in trance a medium may unconsciously "pick the lock" of a sitter's private memories, by some kind of telepathy, and then relay that information back to the person concerned in the form of a message. The same thing may happen with ouija boards.
It's also been the case sometimes that messages have come through from people who claim to have been real human beings, but turn out never to have existed. So imagination may play an important role in this whole business. Sometimes, too, messages which contain some truth will also contain a number of falsehoods or mistaken claims. It looks very much as if the message is not coming from a dead person, but from the mind of the medium.
There have been so many cases of fraud and falsehood in spiritualism that it's difficult to establish truth anywhere. Even Eusapia Palladino, star psychic of the nineteenth century, warned researchers, "Watch me or I'll cheat - John King makes me cheat." John King was the name she gave to her "control spirit".
Some of the most impressive results come from sneaky research beforehand (medium Arthur Ford left behind several books of news clippings and notes which he would use in sessions) or "fishing" for information from gullible sitters. This BBC3 clip amusingly exposes the efforts of three psychics to pretend knowledge of a tragedy that never happened.

So it seems to me that there is little evidence to suggest that "survival can be proved", as the National Spiritualist Union claims. This whole industry tells us nothing solid about life after death at all.

Spiritualists, of course, would disagree, and you can learn more about their religion at a good BBC site, or from their own web pages.

Reincarnation

Have you lived before? Here are some of the kinds of evidence which people suggest:

Detailed memories which obviously don't come from this life - such as the dreams of James Leininger, whose family believe he was once a World War 2 pilot. How could he remember all those things unless he'd actually been there? Or there's Shanti Devi, whose story we told in the lesson.
People under hypnosis who start speaking as if they were someone else, who lived a long time ago. There are videos of "hypnotic regression" here and here.
Birthmarks in significant places on the body, which may be marks left by injuries from a former life; that's one reason why Jeffrey Keene believes he is a reincarnation of an American Civil War general. (NB: this movie clip does not make it clear that the general was not killed in the battle of Antietam, but lived on for another forty years. That damages the story just a little!) This Express article is pretty awful - slackly written and sensationalist - but does contain a good quotation from Ian Stevenson (the most careful reincarnation investigator ever) about his research into birthmarks.
Deja vu experiences (when you recognize your surroundings... or feel you've experienced something like this before... but you know it's never happened to you in this life). If, for example, you're climbing a hill in a part of the world you've never visited before, and you just know that there will be a castle and a white-painted inn just over the hilltop - and then you reach the brow of the hill and see exactly what you expected - how can that be explained unless you were here before, in a previous existence?

But there are good arguments against all of these things.

Many of the memories which people report could be picked up from elsewhere. There was the famous case of Bridey Murphy, where it became obvious that lots of the memories reported actually came from stories that Virginia Tighe had heard from an Irishwoman when she was young. But also, if mediums can somehow feed off the memories of other people (see above!), the same thing could be happening when reincarnation memories are reported. Yes, it's a true story about someone's life - but not this person, who has just picked it up subconsciously somehow!
Hypnotic regression could be similar. While the mind is stilled, it's possible that someone else's memories may be picked up in a way we don't understand, and fed back as if it was our own experience. Often hypnotic cases get a few vital details wrong, which suggests that the story is being fabricated by our brains, not reported accurately. See the story of Jenny Cockell, and the revealing errors she made.
Birthmarks can be coincidental, although Ian Stevenson calculated the chance of finding a matching birthmarks to a wound on a previous body was about one in 160. He regarded birthmarks as one of the best pieces of evidence he had, but (as we pointed out in the lesson), by the end of his life he still had to admit that the case for reincarnation had not been proved. ("The evidence is not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief. Even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations...")
Deja vu experiences have other explanations. It seems to be simply the way the brain checks out its contents. Alternatively, Robert Efron suggested in 1963 that it's a disrhythmic functioning of the two lobes of your brain: if they get slightly out of sync, you'll experience the same event twice (first with one half of your brain, then with the other) and it will all feel uncannily familiar. Other possible theories are touched on here. There is absolutely no reason to connect deja vu with past lives!

Apart from these objections, there's a philosophical problem too. Exactly what is it that survives? And what is the mechanism that does it, because we don't have a clue about how it works? Furthermore, if you've lived several times before, which "self" is the real you? And if the answer is "None of them, but some kind of super-self which controls them all" - why are we never aware of our super-self and where's the evidence that it exists?

One more problem. How could you ever prove that reincarnation is true? The only way would be to show that a living person had access to information which was only known previously by a person who has died. But how would you prove there was no other way for the living person to pick up this information? And how would you prove the dead person knew this information (if it hadn't been known by anyone else until now)? And how could you rule out the possibility that others also knew, and that one of them was responsible for passing on the data somehow?

For more problems like this, see Psychology Today.

Near death experiences

In 1975 Dr Raymond Moody wrote a book called Life after Life in which he gave details of people who had "died" on the operating table, then were brought back to life. During that time of crisis they had had a strange experience which Moody describes like this:

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a low ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a "body," but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before — a being of light — appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life.

At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences.

However, he returns to his body and when he wakes up, finds that he had almost died, but that the doctors somehow managed to win him back.

Moody's book was very successful and many people now believe that journeys into the world beyond death are possible. The film Flatliners, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Julia Roberts, was based on that idea. People who have had an NDE (near-death experience) usually say that it has taken away all fear of death; they will never be scared at the prospect again. There are lots of NDE reports on YouTube , including this one from an American surgeon whose thinking has been completely revolutionized by his experience.

(It's less common for people to experience Hell in NDEs, but it does happen - try here or here.)

Proof of life after death? Possibly not. Here are some objections that have been made:

Moody's cases were not investigated by him personally. He reported what he had been told by others.
He has been accused of "cherry-picking" - relating the stories that fitted his description, and staying silent about other experiences that didn't fit in.
We can't test any of this; it's happening in somebody else's head, so how do you know if it's real? Especially if their brain is in the process of shutting down? (Recently, however, people have been reporting SDEs - "shared death experiences" - in which a dying person and a healthy person have the same experience at the same time. See this page and scroll down to the section headed "The Game-Changer". This CNN page is also helpful.)
Many people who have not been near death have had experiences that seem identical to NDEs. For example, fighter pilots who experience unusually rapid acceleration may report similar states.
When we have hallucinations, they employ exactly the same brain systems that real experiences do. So something can feel very real when it isn't. Leading sceptic Michael Shermer has criticised one well-known story in his article "Why a near-death experience isn't proof of heaven".

There's a good (but long) Atlantic Monthly article on the science questions behind NDEs, which concludes that we can't write thes experiences off as illusory - yet. "Even if research ultimately shows—as most scientists assume it will—that NDEs are nothing more than the product of spasms in a dying brain, there is a good reason to pursue the investigation... There are no grounds for sneering at people’s beliefs about NDEs until the work has been done to debunk them." Clearly, more work needs to be done.

In the meantime, the great astronomer and physicist Carl Sagan suggested, back in 1979, the theory which still seems to me the most likely: that in an NDE we simply experience our birth all over again - going down a tunnel and emerging into blazing light. (As you approach death your body produces lots of endorphins, which relieve the pain and create feelings of pleasure, soi maybe that's part of the deal too.) Sagan's theory has been attacked, however:

The experiences don’t really match up.

Is being smashed and struggling inside the birth canal anything like the peaceful, floating tunnel experience people describe in their NDEs? In fact, said baby is usually delivered with the crown of its head emerging first while its eyes remain closed and mashed against the vaginal wall.

In short, Sagan's favored theory never had anything to support it beyond his famous name. Others before me have soundly refuted it. (Most damningly, if Sagan's idea was right we'd expect people born by caesarean to report far fewer, if any, tunnel experiences. But people removed from the womb surgically are as likely to report tunnels as those born by vaginal delivery.)

What do religious believers make of all this?

(Don't miss this section, because at GCSE it's important for you to be able to relate all of this stuff to the claims of world religions...)

I can speak only as a Christian. One main reason that I became interested in this whole area was that clearly my faith makes distinct claims about life and death. And if the Christian claims don't fit with the evidence of the world as we experience it... then Houston, we have a problem...

So I studied it all with as open a mind as possible, trying to see if we were right to say things like this:

Once you die, that's it. You're not going to hang around; you move on to a new place, and there's a "great gulf fixed" (Luke 16:26) between that world and this one. There's no chance of reincarnation either: "It is appointed to humans once to die, and after this to face judgment" (Hebrews 9:27).
Once you die, you can't send messages back. People who try to contact the dead simply end up in the soup: look at the story of King Saul and the medium (1 Samuel 28) or what Isaiah says about consulting mediums (Isaiah 8:19-22).
We don't all go to heaven. Your ultimate destination depends on the choice you have made about Jesus Christ. If Moody's version of NDEs is true, the people whose experiences he recounts have many different religious backgrounds, but they all end up in the same kind of place, and it doesn't seem to depend on what faith they held (or even on how good a life they lived). That creates problems for Christians, who certainly don't believe that whatever you do, you'll get to heaven anyway.
There is a judgment which we all have to face (Revelation 20:11-15). Nobody escapes. And it's not based on whether you've been a good person or a bad person; instead, nobody is good enough; it's based on whether you've accepted God's offer of forgiveness through Jesus - or whether you've walked away from it.

So how do these key beliefs stand up to examination?

It seems to me: perfectly well. If ghosts and apparitions are nothing to do with dead people, but illusions created by our brains, there are no grounds for the idea that the dead can "get stuck" between this world or the next, or hang around to haunt others. The Bible's picture still looks very credible.

If reincarnation can be explained by other arguments, as I've suggested above, and is philosophically incoherent, then actually nobody gets a second shot at living more than once. If so, then again the Bible claim stands up.

If there aren't messages coming back from the so-called "Other Side", but they originate in the brains and memories of living people, then that would support the idea that there's no contact possible between that world and this one. The personal havoc often caused by attempts to communicate with the Other Side would seem to support Isaiah's claim that these attempts produce darkness and confusion, not more understanding.

And if NDEs are not real experiences of the world beyond, then again we can't "lift the curtain" on the other world and have a peek. Moody is wrong to suggest that almost everybody goes the same way into the same world after death. And he has little evidence to support his claim.

Finally, I began the lesson by giving you my basic views on the whole paranormal question:

Some things are real, part of science we haven't understood yet. That's perfectly biblical: God put us in this world to explore and understand it, but at any point in history there's going to be more to discover than we already understand. The great scientist Kepler said that all scientists were doing in their discoveries was "thinking God's thoughts after him".

Some things are deliberately faked. And what's more...

Some things are wishful thinking. Christianity has always believed this too. That's why 1 Thessalonians 5:21 says, "Test out everything; hold fast what is good." It's this unwillingness to be gullible, this desire to put everything to the test, that led Christians to be the pioneers of Western science. (The Royal Society, first elite scientific body in the world, was founded largely by Christian clergymen. Their motto for the new organization was Nullius in verba - which means "Don't take anybody's word for it.") So Christians need to be very careful to sift extravagant claims and work out what's true.

Some things have a genuinely paranormal basis. Christians do believe, however, that you can't reduce everything in the universe to a physical, material basis, as atheists and sceptics would like to. There really is a spiritual world, and it isn't all good. There are powers of darkness out there too, and we have to be careful not to open ourselves naively out to them. That's why playing with ouija boards, consulting mediums, getting hypnotized to explore past lives, etc., etc., are not just pointless activities - but also dangerous.

Hope this all helps! Best wishes for a brilliant final grade!