Why out-of-body and near-death experiences don’t prove God

May 22, 2011 • 9:32 am

Alex Lickerman is a physician at the University of Chicago who, until recently, was in charge of all primary care doctors at the hospital (he’s now head of student health).  He’s also a secular Buddhist who writes about medicine and matters “spiritual” at his website, “Happiness in this world.” (Alex also helped bring Sam Harris here for his recent talk on morality.)

This week, in “The neurology of near-death experiences“, Alex debunks the religious trappings that attach to the “out-of-body” and similar experiences that occur in conjunction with operations and medical episodes.  In particular, he shows that experiencees such as dreamlike states, tunnel vision, and leaving and returning to one’s body are all phenomena that have well-understood medical causes.  Some of them can even be reproduced by stimulating people’s brains.

The most telling argument against these phenomena being real out-of body-experiences, however, are the tests conducted to see if people really left their bodies.  This is one example of how religious assertions (or assertions about the supernatural; take your pick) can actually be scientifically tested and falsified.  For surely the claim that we have souls that can leave our body, and observe things, is a claim about the supernatural.

One test involves putting pictures face up on the ceilings of emergency rooms, to determine if cardiac-arrest patients who report floating above their bodies can actually identify the pictures.  (One study is being conducted by Sam Parnia in the UK, but the results apparently haven’t been reported yet. I’d bet a few thousand bucks on the results being negative.)

The other set of tests deal with non-medical out-of-body experiences.  As Alex describes:

Neurologists have since recognized that the temporoparietal region of the brain is responsible for maintaining our body schema representation.  When external current is applied to this region, it ceases to function normally and our body schema “floats.”  Further evidence that this phenomenon is an illusion comes from experiments in which people who’ve had out-of-body experiences when transitioning from sleep to wakefulness were unable to identify objects placed in the room after they’d fallen asleep, strongly suggesting the picture they viewed of themselves sleeping in their beds was reconstructed from memory.

I haven’t been able to locate the studies mentioned here, but I’ll add them to this post when I do.

Test your knowledge about sex in the Bible

May 22, 2011 • 6:35 am

So you think you’re one of those atheists who knows more about faith than the faithful? In today’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof has a seven-question quiz on what the Bible says about sex. Check out what the scripture purportedly teaches us about sodomy, homosexuality, and divorce.

Kristof’s point is that the Bible is inconsistent on these issues, undercutting “ideologues” who base their morality on scripture.  But as informed atheists, we already knew that.

Catholics make stuff up. II. The Assumption

May 22, 2011 • 5:53 am

Yesterday we showed that Catholic “truth,” as embodied in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, was simply a fabric of wishful thinking and non-objective theology (a redundancy).  Today we finish off Mary Month by showing the same for the dogma of the Assumption.

The Assumption—the Catholic “truth” that Mary was assumed bodily into Heaven—was proclaimed an official dogma of the Church by Pope Pius XII in his Munificentissimus Deus on November 1, 1950.  This was announced ex cathedra, so it’s an irrefutable truth coming directly from God.  The Pope said:

 For which reason, after we have poured forth prayers of supplication again and again to God, and have invoked the light of the Spirit of Truth, for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.

It’s not clear from the above whether Mary actually died before she was vacuumed up; the usual assumption is that she did.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Benedict XIV gave this dogma extra weight by proclaiming it a “probable opinion, which to deny were impious and blasphemous” (De Festis B.V.M., I, viii, 18). (Catholics have an official definition of “probable”, which is pretty funny.)  At any rate, we know that you can go to hell for unconfessed blasphemy, so asserting that Mary rotted in the ground like the rest of us will, according to the Church, cause you to fry eternally.

Now the Bible says exactly nothing about Mary’s death or fate. As the Catholic Encyclopedia states, “Regarding the day, year, and manner of Our Lady’s death, nothing certain is known.”  The doctrine of the Assumption was made up centuries after the supposed death of Jesus.  As usual, this fabrication rested on dubious interpretation of the Bible, Church “tradition” (i.e., stuff that Church fathers made up), and “reason” (i.e., theological “logic”).

In his ex cathedra statement, Pius XII mentions scripture only fleetingly:

Moreover, the scholastic Doctors have recognized the Assumption of the Virgin Mother of God as something signified, not only in various figures of the Old Testament, but also in that woman clothed with the sun whom John the Apostle contemplated on the Island of Patmos.(24) Similarly they have given special attention to these words of the New Testament: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women,”(25) since they saw, in the mystery of the Assumption, the fulfillment of that most perfect grace granted to the Blessed Virgin and the special blessing that countered the curse of Eve.

Catholic theologians have also relied on dubious interpretations of the Psalms and Revelation as evidence for the Assumption. One website explains:

Catholics find the assumption of Mary prophesied in Psalm 132:7-8:

“We will go into his tabernacles: we will worship at his footstool. Arise, O LORD, into thy rest; thou, and the ark of thy strength.”

Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant (see Revelation 11:19-12:1). The Lord ascended into Heaven and also brought His ark, just as King David took up residence in Jerusalem and escorted the ark to the same place.

Not much evidence there, right?  Instead, Pope Pius, in the Munificentissimus, relied heavily on the teachings of church fathers like St. John Damascene.  But all of these appeared centuries after the “fact”. Here’s the traditional “evidence” summarized in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

The belief in the corporeal assumption of Mary is founded on the apocryphal treatise De Obitu S. Dominae, bearing the name of St. John, which belongs however to the fourth or fifth century. It is also found in the book De Transitu Virginis, falsely ascribed to St. Melito of Sardis, and in a spurious letter attributed to St. Denis the Areopagite. If we consult genuine writings in the East, it is mentioned in the sermons of St. Andrew of Crete, St. John Damascene, St. Modestus of Jerusalem and others. In the West, St. Gregory of Tours (De gloria mart., I, iv) mentions it first. The sermons of St. Jerome and St. Augustine for this feast, however, are spurious. St. John of Damascus (P.G., I, 96) thus formulates the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem:

“St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened, upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven.”

Of course, these statements don’t constitute independent evidence in the scientific sense.  The doctrine probably arose once, and then subsequent Church fathers and theologians simply repeated it, with the Vatican taking each repeat as further strength for the hypothesis.  It’s as if every time a scientific discovery was cited or referenced by another scientist, that discovery gained additional credibility!

Finally, to Pope Pius, Mary’s assumption must be true simply because it makes sense:

Among the scholastic theologians there have not been lacking those who, wishing to inquire more profoundly into divinely revealed truths and desirous of showing the harmony that exists between what is termed the theological demonstration and the Catholic faith, have always considered it worthy of note that this privilege of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption is in wonderful accord with those divine truths given us in Holy Scripture.

When they go on to explain this point, they adduce various proofs to throw light on this privilege of Mary. As the first element of these demonstrations, they insist upon the fact that, out of filial love for his mother, Jesus Christ has willed that she be assumed into heaven. They base the strength of their proofs on the incomparable dignity of her divine motherhood and of all those prerogatives which follow from it. These include her exalted holiness, entirely surpassing the sanctity of all men and of the angels, the intimate union of Mary with her Son, and the affection of preeminent love which the Son has for his most worthy Mother.

That’s about all the “evidence” for a bedrock doctrine of Catholic faith.  In fact, it’s considered such a solid truth that if you deny it or scoff at it, you’ll go to hell!  It’s amazing to me that such life or death matters (or rather, such afterlife and after-death matters) should require so little support.  But then what do I know—I’m a secular Jewish scientist.

And let’s not hear any nonsense about this all being metaphorical, not taken literally by the faithful.  Many Catholics do believe in the reality of the Assumption.  To see one of them, go here, and have a gander at this justification:

Jesus would no doubt protect his mother from the terrible persecutions that followed [his crucifixion]. You will notice that there is no record of Mary’s death or where she went after the day of Pentecost, though we do know that she went home to live with St. John after Our Lord’s death right? We know that St. John was the last of the apostles to die and that at one point he was miraculously saved by God when being boiled in oil for his faith…yet he never mentions Mary in his letters but there’s just no way that he wouldn’t have known her fate…that just doesn’t make any sense.

I think that the NT [New Testament] is so silent about the Blessed Virgin because they all agreed to protect her. Can you imagine the PR blitz that would’ve occurred if the Jews or Romans could have found and tortured and killed the mother of this Jesus? Whew!

Ah, the power of faith!

I got letters

May 21, 2011 • 11:05 am

All I can say is that I didn’t make a penny, and that O.J. is now where he belongs.

I worked on many DNA-based cases in the 1990s; my expertise involved making sure that the prosecution used DNA evidence properly in its population-genetic calculations.  The state often got the calculations—the “match probabilities”— completely wrong, biasing the data against the defendant.   (A “match probability” must be calculated when the defendant’s DNA matches other DNA-based forensic evidence, like blood or semen at the crime scene.  It involves comparing the defendant’s genotype with that of a “random” sample of the population, calculating the probability that the defendant-forensic match could have occurred just by chance. This involves principles that are common in evolutionary genetics.)

I ensured that these calculations were correct and, if I had to, took the stand to explain to judges and juries how match probabilities should be calculated. Try telling a jury of regular people, who barely know what DNA is, how to calculate Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium! That was a tough job.

My philosophy here was to make sure that my field was not corrupted by zealous prosecutors trying to secure convictions based on faulty calculations.  Everyone deserves a fair trial, even rich and odious people like O.J.  Almost all the cases I worked on, however, involved poor defendants who could not afford lawyers, and were represented by public defenders who were completely baffled by statistics.  I took money in only the first case I dealt with, here in Illinois, and then decided that my testimony would look less “tainted” were I to work for free. So I did.  But that tactic, of course, was also attacked by prosecutors: they would ask me, when I was on the stand, “Why aren‘t you taking money, Dr. Coyne? Are you on some kind of crusade or something?”

I have always thought that the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my professional life was to get on the stand in a murder trial, trying to deal with prosecutors who were more interested in convictions than truth, and who were determined to destroy my testimony any way they could.  It’s nerve-wracking, for you know that somebody’s life is at stake.  Next to that, a big symposium talk or a grant proposal is a piece of cake!  Fortunately, I didn’t have to testify in the O.J. case.

People ask me how I could work for O.J., who seemed pretty obviously guilty.  My answer is that I wasn’t concerned with his innocence or guilt, but with whether DNA data were presented properly to the jury.  And of course everyone, rich or poor, deserves that kind of expertise.  I worked for free on that case, too, though I could have made a pile.

Have pity on the poor defendants who can’t afford experts!  One thing you quickly learn from this kind of experience is that there is different “justice” for the rich and poor.

Catholics make stuff up. I. The immaculate conception

May 21, 2011 • 8:58 am

May is the month when the Virgin Mary is especially celebrated by Catholics. Our own celebration will involve a brief examination of two aspects of Catholic doctrine about Mary: her Immaculate Conception and her bodily assumption into heaven.  Both of these claims, which have become part of Catholic dogma, rest not on scripture but on theology: on the Church’s agreement, though logic parsing and “interpretation” of scripture, that these things happened even though there’s no direct evidence for them in the Bible.  Doctrines like this show, more than anything else, that essential elements of Catholic belief are not only ludicrous, but man-made and based on “evidence” that wouldn’t convince anyone not already blinded by faith.

Since atheists know more about religion than the faithful themselves, most of us probably realize that the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception does not refer, as commonly thought, to the divinity of Jesus at birth. Instead, it refers to Mary having been born, uniquely among humans after Adam and Eve, without the stain of sin.

Mary’s sinlessness, however, is not mentioned in the New Testament. It appears to have arisen about 1000 A.D., and then became a tradition among Catholics.  It did not, however, become official Catholic “dogma” (a word that refers to truths that are revealed by God) until December 8, 1854, when Pope Pius IX, in his statement Ineffabilis Deus, declared Mary’s purity.  Of course here the Pope was speaking ex cathedra (‘from the chair’) which means that the Pope’s statement could not be in error (in other words, as Archie Bunker used to say, “The Pope is inflammable.”) Pius declared:

Wherefore, in humility and fasting, we unceasingly offered our private prayers as well as the public prayers of the Church to God the Father through his Son, that he would deign to direct and strengthen our mind by the power of the Holy Spirit. In like manner did we implore the help of the entire heavenly host as we ardently invoked the Paraclete. Accordingly, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for the honor of the Holy and undivided Trinity, for the glory and adornment of the Virgin Mother of God, for the exaltation of the Catholic Faith, and for the furtherance of the Catholic religion, by the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own: “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.”

So Mary’s purity from birth is taken as a rock-solid spiritual “truth” by the Catholic church. What’s the evidence for it? Very little.  There are three sources: scripture, tradition, and “reason”.

SCRIPTURE. On the scripture side, the the Catholic Encyclopedia admits this: “No direct or categorical and stringent proof of the dogma can be brought forward from Scripture.”  Nevertheless, some Biblical verses, if examined with half-closed eyes, the ardor of faith, and perhaps a chalice of communion wine, are said to point to the Immaculate Conception.  Some quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Luke:  “The salutation of the angel Gabriel — chaire kecharitomene, Hail, full of grace (Luke 1:28) indicates a unique abundance of grace, a supernatural, godlike state of soul, which finds its explanation only in the Immaculate Conception of Mary. But the term kecharitomene (full of grace) serves only as an illustration, not as a proof of the dogma.”

And check out this tortuous passage, a prime specimen of theological interpretation:

Genesis: “But the first scriptural passage which contains the promise of the redemption, mentions also the Mother of the Redeemer. The sentence against the first parents was accompanied by the Earliest Gospel (Proto-evangelium), which put enmity between the serpent and the woman: “and I will put enmity between thee and the woman and her seed; she (he) shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for her (his) heel” (Genesis 3:15). The translation “she” of the Vulgate is interpretative; it originated after the fourth century, and cannot be defended critically. The conqueror from the seed of the woman, who should crush the serpent’s head, is Christ; the woman at enmity with the serpent is Mary. God puts enmity between her and Satan in the same manner and measure, as there is enmity between Christ and the seed of the serpent. Mary was ever to be in that exalted state of soul which the serpent had destroyed in man, i.e. in sanctifying grace. Only the continual union of Mary with grace explains sufficiently the enmity between her and Satan. The Proto-evangelium, therefore, in the original text contains a direct promise of the Redeemer, and in conjunction therewith the manifestation of the masterpiece of His Redemption, the perfect preservation of His virginal Mother from original sin.”

Other parts of scripture have also been interpreted as supporting this doctrine, including the part of the Song of Solomon that says this: “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.”  Of course, there’s no evidence at all that the woman in this passage is the Virgin Mary.  Although the song could be (as I think it is) a rather salacious love poem, theologians prefer an allegorical interpretation.  But the woman could also be—and has been interpreted as being—the children of Israel, the Church itself, or even the Messiah.

TRADITION:   The Catholic Encyclopedia and Pius’s pronouncement cite a number of “traditional” sources for Mary’s spotlessness, including various theologians who called her “immaculate”, church fathers (e.g., Tertullian) who compared Eve (created without sin) to the Virgin Mary, and so on.  These are, of course, simply glosses on or interpretations of scripture, with no basis more substantial than wishful thinking.

“REASON”:  Here’s one example of why “logical” doesn’t belong in “theological”—a specimen of Catholic reasoning that supports the Immaculate conception.  From the Catholic Encyclopedia again:

There is an incongruity in the supposition that the flesh, from which the flesh of the Son of God was to be formed, should ever have belonged to one who was the slave of that arch-enemy, whose power He came on earth to destroy. Hence the axiom of Pseudo-Anselmus (Eadmer) developed by Duns Scotus, Decuit, potuit, ergo fecit, it was becoming that the Mother of the Redeemer should have been free from the power of sin and from the first moment of her existence; God could give her this privilege, therefore He gave it to her.

In other words, Mary must have been born without sin because otherwise she couldn’t have whelped Jesus.  I guess Jesus was born without sin, too (I don’t know my Bible well enough to say that with certainty), but is “spotlessness” transmitted through the mitochondrial DNA? And if it is, why weren’t Mary’s own parents, and other ancestors, “spotless” as well?  They were all, presumably, sinful descendants of Adam and Eve.

This whole enterprise underscores the profound difference between scientific truth and religious “truth.” Catholics take the Immaculate Conception as something that in indubitably true—the Pope has told them so. And it’s not a provisional declaration, as are scientific truths, but an absolute, unchangeable truth.  But the evidence behind this dogma is ludicrously thin. And almost none of it comes from the prime source of Christian “truth”: the Bible.  And yet the Catholics do adduce evidence: they don’t just say that Mary’s purity is a revelation from God, but rely on scripture, tradition, and “reason.”  Sadly, these are no better than revelation itself, for all three sources, interpreted differently, could equally well produce opposite conclusions.

It’s stuff like this that makes me despise the entire enterprise of theology.  How can one say, after reading this nauseating exegesis, that science and faith are both equally valid ways of finding truth?  In contrast, Biblical scholarship is (or should be) scientific, in that it seeks empirical verification of its claims about how the Bible came to be.

Do note that Catholicism is a “mainstream” faith, one that supposedly accepts the truth of science (including evolution).  Yet its own “truths” are palpable nonsense.