Make a note on your calendar: on May 7, one week from today, physicist Sean Carroll and doctor/podcaster Steve Novella will be debating Eben Alexander (author of Proof of Heaven) and doctor Raymond Moody (author of Life after Life) on the issue “Death is not final.” It’s an Intelligence-Squared debate that will be live-streamed at this site starting at 6:45 Eastern U.S. time. The moderator is John Donvan from ABC News.
These debates take a poll on the issue before and after the debate, and you can cast your vote here. At this moment, the results are mostly “against the motion,” meaning “against the notion that Death is not final”—the materialist stand:
Sean seems to be getting more into the debate game these days, and after his sterling performance against William Lane Craig, I have no problems with him doing one. Certainly he and Novella will be having a look at Esquire’s recent article that largely debunked Alexander’s claims of a near-death experience (and a visit to heaven), making Mr. Proof of Heaven look pretty much like a charlatan.
h/t: Derek
I’m still leery of the debate format, but I’ll certainly concede that Sean has put it to good use as an excuse to reach out to people who probably wouldn’t even be aware of his existence otherwise — and that he can more than hold his own in a debate. Mostly, I think, because he’s such a great educator and he just treats the debate like a lecture with a confused student monopolizing the Q&A.
b&
That’s a really good way of describing his debating style. It was very noticeable in his debate with Craig – he was essentially just a professor (with superior intellect and knowledge) explaining how modern science sees the world, all while gently correcting and refuting Craig’s foibles.
Given the combatants, the debate may be like Godzilla vs Bambi.
Oh, I’ll get the popcorn!
Anyone know where to get blood-flavoured popcorn?
Um…ew?
How ’bout I just add extra butter and salt, and mix a few drops of red food coloring (or, better, concentrated beet juice) in with the butter?
b&
Beet juice? Talk about eww 🙂 I’ll have the good stuff: O negative (those who’ve seen the new film “Only Lovers Left Alive” will get it).
Concentrated beet juice, which adds no more flavor to whatever you use it with than red dye #whatever. Basically, make borscht, but keep simmering it and reducing it until you’ve just got a very, very deep dark color — and then use it like you’d use any of the artificial colorings (just a few drops).
Long before all the artificial food colorings, pastry chefs had figured out how to make colorful decorative frostings. Blues, reds, and purples are easy; just use any litmus-based food, like red cabbage, and adjust the pH with vinegar or baking soda. Onion skins make great yellow dyes. Spinach for green, carrots for orange…I don’t remember the rest, but Google does. If you’re a painter and / or know your color wheel, you should have reasonable success mixing base colors as if they were paints, though the chemistry can occasionally be more complex than with paints (as with the litmus colors).
I have a personal interest in this because, when I was very young, I had sometimes-violent hyperactivity that completely went away when my parents eliminated artificial coloring from my diet. I learned pretty quickly that that stuff made me feel really bad, so it wasn’t hard for me to avoid it; I had no inclination to sneak anything, and was most diligent about reading food labels. I probably grew out of the reaction, but I still generally don’t eat those sorts of things — and especially not in the quantities that a young child might — so I really couldn’t tell you how they’d affect me today.
…and, yes: a lot of the places you might find information on natural colorings are full of vegan-flavored woo, and many have incoherent ideas about nutrition. Some even promote some quite questionable pre-packaged “natural” concentrated colorings with vague ingredient lists. But the basic culinary principles work just fine.
b&
I read that as “beef juice”.
Mmmm…French Dip. Yes, please! And don’t forget the horseradish!
b&
My prediction is that both Alexander and Moody will fight it out on the battlefield of reason and evidence … and then fall into a stealth faith position: the evidence is SUFFICIENT for those who are “open” to it, but would never be enough for those who are not. This is a sly move which makes it seem as if skepticism is emotionally motivated and seemingly reasonable demands for better science hide what would only be a constantly shifting goalpost of more demands.
“Look at what we give them — and it’s STILL not enough! Clearly these are people with a materialist agenda.”
And then they will shift the discussion to values and emotions and the problems with a scientism which denies both when it ignores personal experience.
But to the objective observer, Carroll and Novella will nail these guys to the wall. And I like to think that inside every person-who-wants-to-believe there is an objective observer trying to get out. A teeny weeny tiny one, maybe.
In every religious person, objective or not, lies a coward, puzzled by the undiscovered country. Not a simple coward, but one who really wants the party to go on. There is nothing wrong with wanting that, but to so many it ruins the beauty of this life.
I think calling every religious person a coward is skating very close towards that “strident atheist” position that we are all accused of being. Granted, we all should avoid arguments from authority, but the body of human knowledge is so vast today that no one had the time to investigate every truth claim we encounter. Plus, when everyone you know agrees that you are on a knife-edge between an eternity in heaven or in hell, how likely are you to even suspect that they all might be wrong? Failing to be properly skeptical of what your whole society tells you may not be cowardice, but simply due to an utter lack of an outside perspective.
I feel it is much better to argue the scientific merits of the question, and leave aside the name calling, except in those cases of specific individuals who show a pattern of lying.
I did not think to be strident or scientific, simply a reflection of life; maybe only my own. My conscience makes me a coward at times, it is then that I avoid what is challenging. I am certainly no better than any other person at times and probably a coward more than I would like to admit. In this sense, coward more akin to unnecessary or benighted fatalism…the thought that ‘I could never make a difference.’ This, I do not normally believe. I think we are all worth a lot more than we know.
And there is a problem with this, just where?
I suppose a clearer expression would be that I (and, I suspect, Kevin) have not met a Goddian who hasn’t expressed some fear of dieing and unwillingness to accept it’s reality and permanence. Theoretically I grant the possibility of such a being. But they seem to like hiding in herds of invisible pink unicorns, and may be considerably outnumbered by them.
When my chopper goes into the sea(*), I’d rather have a rationalist sitting beside me and filling his survival suit with the brown and smelly stuff, because I can predict his responses quite well. A Goddian, of whatever stripe, may well freeze, or block my exit route by trying to point himself towards Mecca and rub woad into his belly button, or whatever other irrational rituals he’s made up out of whole cloth and old papyrus.
(*) Statistically, the particular event most likely to imediately precede my death.
Because it makes the common, arrogant, and narcissistic mistake of attributing someone else’s failure to agree with your conclusions as a sign of mental shallowness or defect. And you see this all over, not just in religion. For example, it’s also common in politics that one person with strong views assumes that anyone who doesn’t share those views must be arriving at their political opinions out of stupidity, selective reasoning, or selfish-emotional reasons.
All of this is closely connected to the fundamental attribution bias, which all of us have. In short, all of have a self-serving bias to think we are better than our opponents or competitors. We downplay their successes and opinions, do not give them credit where its due, and we do the reverse for ourselves. So, given that we know humans have this bias to some extent or another, including ourselves, I think the wise course of action is to check yourself when you find yourself making “all [opponent group who doesn’t agree with me] are [insult or negative personality trait].” Because when you make statements like that, the odds are very much in favor of the bias being yours, not theirs.
It is one of those odd foibles of human nature that different adult human brains, functioning perfectly normally and with good information, often still arrive at different conclusions. Get used to that idea, its a much more realistic cause of disagreement than thinking everyone who disagrees with you must be an idiot or coward.
“….due to an utter lack of an outside perspective.”
I can relate to this observation. When one is so steeped in a particular story of the way things are, a story that includes a dark super-power trying to deceive you at every turn, it really does take a certain amount of bravery to begin looking outside of that story for answers to your questions.
You can communicate the same information without using the word “coward”, which is highly judgmental and intended to hurt someone’s feelings.
The word “fearful” conveys sufficient meaning without being insulting.
Coward was strong in this context, though it was pulled from another…
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all
…and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied oer with a pale cast of thought.
And enterprises of great pith and moment in this respect their currents turn awry,
and lose the name of action.
(from memory, so I may have garbled it a little… strange what things stick more than 30 years later)
Oh – nice use of a literary allusion!
So much more polite than printing it out on a sheet of paper, wrapping that around a brick, and then hitting them with it. The words that is.
The brick would probably be more effective though.
I agree. Carroll and Novella will win the debate with solid arguments but the woomeisters will hide from the soooo mean materialist/scientism. Still, like Sastra mentionned, maybe, just maybe someone will think and start questionning his/her beliefs in an after life.
That voting result does not reflect the general belief in the afterlife in the US populace. Either the Intelligence Squared readership is significantly more skeptical than the general population, or the double negative of the “against” position confused people. Or both.
Alexander may be a charlatan, but I think pointing that out is considered bad manners in a debate. Ad hominem attacks are off limits even if the person deserves it, but perhaps theres a gentler way of pointing out the discrepancies in his story.
Fair comment is not defamation. Alexander’s character seems very pertinent to this matter and it would not be an ad hom. to point this out.
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Whether or not its a good idea, Caroll/Novella are hands down my debate dream team. A good cosmologist and a neuroscientist, both well acquainted with skepticism and the whole shebang, and lots of experience with cranks, Novella even with an episode pf Dr Oz under his belt, they will be formidable.
I have never listened to a Carroll debate where his tone of voice reflects impatience or more severe criticism. Novella’s fuse, however, is sometimes pretty short.
When he loses patience with the boneheaded obstinate ignorance inherent in his opponent’s silly claims — going out on a limb, here, I predict this will happen less than halfway into the program — the belief audience will be offended and butt-hurt big time by what Novella says, yes. But his counter-arguments will be too sound to argue against.
It is Novella’s tonal inflection that will be criticized post event, similar to the way Dawkins gets it after some of his debates. I anticipate few attempts at honest argument rebuttal, but the usual personal slanders: angry, superior, strident, shrill, etc.
A debate with Don Novello* instead of Novella would be fun.
*Fr. Guido Sarducci
That is no joke. But it looks like Fr. Guido wanted to have it both ways. He sure showed a mean accommodationist streak there at the Survival of the Fittest Saloon.
Ha! I’ve never seen that one.
When we get a guy on al Jazeera playing a mullah taking a both ways approach (and who doesn’t get stoned at the end), we’ll know that progress is being made.
I have a feeling that whole cast of “Fridays” got stoned before writing and performing that skit.
BTW, there’s a much younger Michael Richards and Larry David in there. Some vintage badness. I think they learned a LOT about comedy writing in those years. (…as did the producers learning about producing — not to attempt live TV, merely to show up the SNL people)
“Esquire’s recent article that largely debunked Alexander’s claims of a near-death experience (and a visit to heaven)”
I was curious about that; whether the debate would stick to the issues in general, or whether Alendar’s personal claims of evidence are open to attack.
Frankly I hope they don’t bother. While the Esquire article does paint a very bad picture to Alexander’s claim, I’d rather see Carroll and Novella stick to science; the scientific understanding of life and how it works, and the complete historical failure to detect anything nonmaterialistic about it like a soul.
I would favor a debate format patterned after courtroom proceedings where each side would have a counselor to object to logical and informal fallacies and other questionable tactics and a trio of judges would sustain or overrule the objections.
My greatest frustration with the debates I’ve seen is that the scientist never has sufficient opportunity to rebut every single shot whenever the creationist resorts to firing a blunderbuss instead of making the effort to attack the specific point the scientist makes.
But weren’t you even chagrined by his agreement with Craig on the issue of free will?
Of course there’s life after death.
All these little microscopic critters and worms metabolize your flesh and reuse your stuff’es to grow and divide and make all new life.
Unless you get cremated and have your ashes launched into space. Then, yeah. It’s final.
Through the Wormhole had an interesting episode on consciousness that introduced something like the opposite conclusion: that the conscious you “dies” regularly even while your body lives. Specifically, every time you sleep. Given that we understand consciouness to be a pattern of brain activity, when that pattern goes away, your conscious self is not simply filed away for later reactivation, in a very real sense it ceases to exist. Then it is rebuilt by the brain, slightly differently, every time you wake. So while death is the ultimate discontinuity, we already experience such discontinuities, when it comes to our consciousness, on a daily basis. The “you” which is your sentience does not have the continuous existence it thinks it does; the feeling that you are continuous is an illusion.
Now, this doesn’t have a lot of ramifications for real science or life after death, but it does have some ramifications for sci-fi-like scenarios where downloading/transmitting/copying people’s personalities is a thing. In most such stories, there is some angst associated with the question of whether the copy is the “real” person. The paragraph above points to an answer to this question: yes, its the same, becaues our brains already perform the equivalent process of “creating a copy of our previous self” every day. To the extent that technology can ever copy us with the fidelity that the brain works, the copy will be unequivically us.
That Esquire article by Luke Dittrich is fascinating from beginning to end.
the results are mostly “against the motion,” meaning “against the notion that Death is not final”—the materialist stand:
Yes, a very sloppy framing of the vote on the motion, creating a double negative.
That double negative…
Another standard woo trick is to interweave supernatural claims with personal/private information, and then to react indignantly when the private stuff is disputed or “disrespected” (i.e. failure to accept it purely out of politeness).
This meshes nicely with the standard appeal to revelation — “I experienced all this personally. G-g-g-god s-s-s-spoke to me…” –Nope, that’s your interpretation of a memory of a subjective experience.
And of course there’s be plenty of “science can’t explain (but I can)” arguments, and surreptitious attacks on the “materialist ideology” of science.
Actually the supposed “debunking” of Dr. Eben Alexander by Esquire magazine (one writer in fact) was nicely rebutted by Robert Mays and endorsed by Dr. Alexander. This is well known.
Rebuttal is not refutation!
And Mays is hardly impartial.
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Sometimes the addition of a phrase like, “this is well-known”, gives me the impression the author is being nothing more than manipulative. Whether a rebuttal is well-known has no bearing on its validity for there are famous rebuttals that are rubbish (infamous is more apt).
I found Mays’ rebuttal decidedly unconvincing. Below is a link to it.
http://iands.org/news/news/front-page-news/970-esquire-article-on-eben-alexander-distorts-the-facts.html
Hardly! He focuses on a rainbow for far too long, one who’s existence is only verified by Eben’s immediate relatives. (I wonder how much they benefit from the book sales). Then on whether Eben was capable of crying out something while intubated. (Notice in this section he’s trying to debunk this premise ‘Eben couldn’t have spoken while intubated’ whilst the actual article takes issue with Eben’s description of his own words as ‘loud, clear and articulate’. So Mays entire second point is irrelevant. His third point is just quibbling over what exactly a coma means, and him dismissing the quoted doctor and substituting one whose opinion supports the ‘heaven’ theory.
Hardly a blistering rebuttal.
“This is well known.” = rhetorical smoke screen in the absence of evidence
Careful with your wording next time, Alan, your claim comes off as serious instead of snarky. Irony is too heavily cloaked in its reality guise.
I read “endorsed by Dr. Alexander” and “This is well known” as intended flippancy.
You do intend facetiousness, do you not?
It’s now 72% against.
(Probably thanks to posters at WEIT, unless some other bloggers have picked up on it)
Carroll is featured on a video where he explained that the upshot of finding the Higgs boson is that we can definitively say there is no afterlife.
There’s no mechanism for it within the standard model of particle physics.
I’m sure the others will try to woo-woo their way around it.
“It’s supernatural”. How then, is it tied to a human being?
“It’s dark energy.” No, it’s not.
I think much hilarity will ensue.
Where are Eben Alexander’s brain scans? PET, CAT, MRI, FMRI – something, anything?